Aviad Moreno
Entwined Homelands, Empowered Diasporas
Hispanic Moroccan Jews and Their Globalizing Community
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2025, ISBN: 9780253069665
Reviewed by Jane S. Gerber1
Morocco housed the largest Jewish community in the Muslim world prior to the flight and emigration of the Jews from Muslim lands in the mid-twentieth century. Its 280,000 Jews were by no means homogeneous; the approximately 30,000 Jews residing in the northern Moroccan cities of Tangier and Tetouan, and the smaller Jewish communities of Arzila, Ceuta, Chechouen, Larache, Alcazar Quiver, and Melila formed a distinctive subgroup. They were descended from fifteenth century Sephardic exiles from Iberia, retaining somewhat separate identity partially through the retention of their historic language, known as Haketia, a combination of medieval Castilian, Hebrew, and Arabic. Their cultural and economic characteristics were shaped by the geography and the politics of the region.
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as a result of insecurity in Morocco, the Jews of northern Morocco began to migrate to many lands, eventually forming a new Moroccan Jewish diaspora in Gibraltar, the Azores, France, Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Canada, and Venezuela. New forms of cultural expression coalesced among the Jews of northern Morocco during this era of Spanish occupation (chapters 1 and 2) followed by the French Protectorate. Those Jews who remained in northern Morocco were sometimes cultivated by the colonial powers to advance their own colonial interests. Jewish multilingualism, especially possession of the Spanish language, became one of the hallmarks of the community’s identity wherever it resided. The Jews of northern Morocco created a panoply of cultural institutions under the Spanish; at the same time they enjoyed an enhanced sense of their medieval Andalusian roots and a developing pride in their particular language, Haketia.
The creation and maintenance of deep cultural connections with Spain forms a major theme of Moreno’s research agenda. Basing himself on primary sources, the Jewish press, oral interviews and memoirs, as well as his family’s personal experiences, Moreno paints a rich picture of cultural complexity. New Jewish identities were frequently expressed in changes from specifically Jewish given names such as Baruch, Abraham, and Moshe to Benito, Alberto, and Moises as Spanish theater productions, the establishment of a Cervantes Club, Spanish and French newspapers proliferated. The cultivation of nostalgia for medieval Andalusia by the Spaniards served as a means of promoting commercial and institutional ties with Spain that might compete with French colonial interests (p. 38). The revival of Haketia accompanied many of these activities simultaneously with the emergence of Haketia scholarship in academia in Spain and the US. More secular European lifestyles accompanied membership in the new cultural institutions forged in the nineteenth century. Moreno suggests that Moroccan modes of secularization provide interesting alternatives to our usual Western application of Ashkenazic models of assimilation to describe the influence of the West on the Middle Eastern Jewish community.
Moreno’s discussions are especially incisive on the role played by language in the identity of Moroccan Jews in their many Diasporas. Under the government of Francisco Franco in the 1920s and 1930s, the linguistic connections between the Jews and Spain and the influence of Spain in North Africa were officially (and cynically) emphasized. This official impulse to emphasize the Spanish origins of Morocco’s Jews survived various Iberian regime changes and the migration of the Jews from Morocco to Israel and Latin America.
Moreno doesn’t limit his discussions to the linguistic bonds of the transnational northern Moroccan Jewish community in chapter 4. Instead he creatively relates the ways in which Zionist thought evolved among the Moroccans and the ways that local challenges to Moroccan absorption in Israel helped reinforce the narrative of nostalgia for Spain and the bonds of its Diasporas. Paradoxically, the development and expansion of Zionism in Argentina and Brazil facilitated local Moroccan integration into the native Ashkenazic communities. Moreno is particularly intrigued by the ways in which Moroccan Jewish lives exhibited both global and local dimensions.
As an Israeli descendant of the Spanish-speaking Moroccan diaspora from Venezuela, Moreno is uniquely attuned to the nuances of the history, unique language, and identity of this multi-layered diaspora. His study, thus, produces significant insights on the dispersion of Moroccan Jewry, its transnational ties, and the intertwining of global and local forces in Jewish identity formation resulting from residence in the multiple “homelands” of Spain, Israel, Europe, Morocco, and the Americas. At the same time, his analysis of the northern Moroccan Jewish ties to Spain provides food for thought on the impetus for the re-immigration of Sephardim of Moroccan ancestry to Spain. His keen analyses remind the reader that divisions of East/ West and Sephardic/Ashkenazic are often simplistic; attachment to multiple geographic hubs has not only strengthened the bonds uniting the Moroccan Jewish Diasporas to each other but also deepened their bonds to Zion and differentiated them from their North African Jewish brethren.
1 Jane S. Gerber is Professor Emerita of History at the Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York.