Pèlerins-voyageurs en patrie diasporique : les retours des juifs au Maroc

Abstract

By examining the impossibility of reviving “cultural intimacy” with the former spaces of the Diaspora, the analysis of the roots voyages of Israelis born in Morocco reveals the multiple tensions that cut across this form of mobility. The gaps separating Israeli visitors from Jews still living in Morocco, on the one hand, and Muslim Moroccans, on the other, are so many indications of the inaccessibility of the past. In more general terms, these gaps indicate a rupture between the “homeland” and the “Diaspora”. The categories “Moroccan Israelis”, “Moroccan Jews”, “Moroccan Muslims” and the relations between them are more complex than is suggested by merely contrasting them. The frontiers of cultural intimacy are not fixed; nor are they defined by the official agents (in general, bureaucrats) who claim to represent the nation state. The hope of reviving cultural intimacy with Morocco nevertheless sheds light on the distance that has grown up between travelers and this space. It follows that efforts to give form to nostalgia are doomed to failure. In the most profound sense, “roots travel” is impossible.