Jewish Radicals of Morocco: Case Study for a New Historiography

Abstract

The confluence of Jews and Communism has long been noted by scholars. However, most historiography has treated European contexts, with the addition of some work on the Americas and the Yishuv, but neglected the broader Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Works that do purport to survey and compare the phenomenon across contexts have typically given the MENA short shrift. Further, most discussion of leftist Jewish politics halts after World War II, just when the story is gaining momentum in the MENA, particularly within anticolonial movements. In this article, I draw on Hannah Arendt's work on the so-called conscious pariah to bridge historiographies and link leftist Jews in the MENA, the Americas, and Europe. Using archival sources, newspapers, oral histories, and novels, I present Jewish involvement in the Parti Communist Marocain as a case study to examine the complications of Jewish involvement in leftist politics in concentric geographic, temporal, and historiographic circles. In so doing, I seek to complicate the story of Jewish attraction to internationalism and universalism and the reconciliation of Jewish affiliations and identities with the nation-state and the colonial.