Moroccan Jews Research Articles

A Moroccan Jew’s journey into Anglican Christianity

This study outlines John Xeres’ journey from a traditional Jewish upbringing in Safi, a Moroccan Atlantic coastal city, to Anglican Christianity in England, in the early eighteenth century. Through a close reading of his book An Address to the Jews (London, 1710) we will follow his Sephardic origins; the advanced Jewish education he received in Safi; his encounters with Christian merchants there; the religious doubts plaguing him over the years; his travels to Spain and Portugal; and his ultimate journey to London, where he had extended conversations (possibly with David Nieto) and eventually converted under Peter Allix’s guidance. Xeres’ case challenges the current academic scholarship on conversion to Christianity in the early modern period. Furthermore, it expands the framing of the intellectual history of Moroccan Jews to a broader intellectual scene that crossed the Mediterranean, as well as exposing heterodox views in their midst.

Selkea! Memories of Eating Non-Kosher Food among the Spanish–Moroccan Jewish Diaspora in Israel

Drawing on life-story interviews and ethnography conducted in Israel from 2009 to 2023, this article examines how members of the Spanish-speaking Moroccan–Jewish diaspora in Israel recalled their habits of eating non-kosher food in Morocco. We explore how these memories emerged in response to commonplace discourses that depict Moroccan Jews as a distinctly religious-traditional ethnic group, untouched by European secular influences, and dichotomous to modern secular cultures in Israel. Contrary to this image, members of the community whom we interviewed highlighted a Jewish Moroccan life that was deeply connected to Spanish colonialism and the broader Hispanic and Sephardi worlds. We focus specifically on the concept of selkear, a Haketia (Judeo-Spanish) term meaning to let something go, make an exception, or turn a blind eye. Our analysis of our participants’ memories provides a nuanced understanding of Jewish religiosity in the context of colonialism and of how Mizrahi–Sephardi immigrants in Israel reclaimed their Judaism. Highlighting the practice of eating non-kosher food is thus a strategy used to challenge dominant notions of rigid religious commitment within the Sephardi diaspora and their interpretation in Israel.

Moroccan Secondary School Teachers’ Perspectives Towards Jewish Cultural Elements During the Gaza Conflict: A Descriptive Analysis

This study explores the attitudes and perceptions of Moroccan secondary school teachers towards Jewish cultural elements during the Gaza Conflict, offering a descriptive analysis to elucidate their perspectives within the broader socio-political context. By exploring their viewpoints, this research has aimed to contribute to a deeper understanding of the complexities surrounding cultural integration and sensitivity within the educational landscape of Morocco, particularly in light of the ongoing conflict in Gaza. The participants of this study were 50 secondary school teachers from the Casablanca-Settat region, who primarily teach social studies subjects including Arabic, English, French, Islamic education, history and geography. Structured questionnaires were the primary technique of data collection. A quantitative approach was adopted, and the data were analysed using SPSS statistical methods. The study's results show a diverse range of perspectives, with 60% exhibiting favourable views and 30% reflecting negative sentiments. Teachers are observed to have a level of awareness regarding the historical contributions of Moroccan Jews. However, it is crucial to implement targeted interventions for the 16% who are less familiar with this topic. These findings emphasize the importance of adopting comprehensive educational strategies to address knowledge gaps and promote cultural empathy, particularly in the context of ongoing tensions.

Chgouri music and third-generation Israeli-Moroccan Jews

ABSTRACT Using a sociocultural analytical approach, this article investigates the historical background, evolution, and contemporary relevance of Chgouri music for third-generation Moroccan Jews living in Israel. By examining the interplay between music, identity, and societal position, the article seeks to shed light on the multifaceted impact of Chgouri on the community’s cultural landscape and broader social dynamics. This investigation exposes the intricate intersections of Chgouri within the community's cultural narrative, offering a scholarly examination of its resonances. Through meticulous analysis, the study discerns the nuanced harmonies that reverberate in the cultural tapestry, providing an academic lens into the profound heritage and socio-cultural implications for third-generation Moroccan Jews in israel.

Moroccan Jews: nostalgia and echoes of national memory ‘Tinghir – Jerusalem: Les Echoes du Mellah’ as a case study

ABSTRACT The Jewish past has always represented a distinct chapter in Morocco’s history; an embodiment of a historic component of Moroccan society. ‘Tinghir – Jerusalem: Les Echoes du Mellah’ (2013): a documentary by Moroccan director Kamal Hachkar, excavates history through places and testimonies of Jews who left Morocco towards ‘Israel’ and Muslims still living in Tinghir in an attempt to investigate the factors that shaped Moroccan Jews’ migration. Going back and forth diverse oral narrations about lived experiences, Moroccan Muslims and Jews recall their memories of good neighbourliness and coexistence during the 1950s and 1960s before the exodus. Memories clash and a new generation that did not witness anything about the history of Jews in Morocco except the Jewish cemetery; emerges, and although the perceptions regarding the Jews’ departure diverge, the common feelings of belonging, intense nostalgia and diaspora of the soul appears to be shared.

CLDN1 Arg81His founder variant causes ichthyosis, leukocyte vacuoles, alopecia, and sclerosing cholangitis (ILVASC) syndrome in Moroccan Jews.

Neonatal ichthyosis and sclerosing cholangitis syndrome (NISCH), also known as ichthyosis, leukocyte vacuoles, alopecia, and sclerosing cholangitis (ILVASC), is an extremely rare disease of autosomal recessive inheritance, resulting from loss of function of the tight junction protein claudin-1. Its clinical presentation is highly variable, and is characterized by liver and ectodermal involvement. Although most ILVASC cases described to date were attributed to homozygous truncating variants in CLDN1, a single missense variant CLDN1 p.Arg81His, associated with isolated skin ichthyosis phenotype, has been recently reported in a family of Moroccan Jewish descent. We now describe seven patients with ILVASC, originating from four non consanguineous families of North African Jewish ancestry (including one previously reported family), harboring CLDN1 p.Arg81His variant, and broaden the phenotypic spectrum attributed to this variant to include teeth, hair, and liver/bile duct involvement, characteristic of ILVASC. Furthermore, we provide additional evidence for pathogenicity of the CLDN1 p.Arg81His variant by transmission electron microscopy of the affected skin, revealing distorted tight junction architecture, and show through haplotype analysis in the vicinity of the CLDN1 gene, that this variant represents a founder variant in Jews of Moroccan descent with an estimated carrier frequency of 1:220.

The Moroccan “Yizkor Book”: Holocaust Memory, Intra-Jewish Marginalization, and Communal Empowerment in Israel

The writing of “Yizkor books” (Yizker bikher, רעכיב רוכזי)—memorial books for European Jewish communities that were destroyed in the Holocaust—has developed and expanded as the remnants of these lost communities scattered around the globe in the post-war era. The motives for writing comparable books among non-European Jewish communities—which experienced different circumstances of dispersal but were still influenced by Holocaust memory—and the way these books nourished the intentional creation of immigrant communities, are understudied. This article focuses on the related genre of what we define as community-oriented autobiographical memoirs penned by Moroccan Jews who migrated to Israel in the 1950s. Within these books, we trace patterns of narration and memory construction utilized by Moroccan leaders in an effort to cope with the stereotyping and exclusion of their communities from mainstream culture by the Ashkenazi-European elite in Israel. We explore how these narratives by Moroccan immigrants were, on the one hand, inspired by commonplace Israeli Holocaust memories depicting the traumatic annihilation of Jewish life in Morocco, and, on the other hand, accounts of Moroccan marginality in Israel.

Morocco Reimagined

Abstract This article rereads the works of Carlos de Nesry and Abraham Serfaty, two important Jewish intellectuals from Morocco, to conceptualize their theorization of state and society in post-1956 Morocco. The article argues that Moroccan Jews’ striving for an inclusive citizenship in and belonging to the independent nation took several forms, but the most salient of which were the two embodied in the work of de Nesry and Serfaty. Although there is a robust literature on Moroccan Jews, these theorizations have not received the scholarly examination they deserve nor have they been put in dialogue with each other to tease out their significance for the situation of Jews in the Moroccan context. This article is an attempt to bring attention to the implications of a locally produced Jewish political theory for the larger Moroccan nation. By examining de Nesry’s and Serfaty’s writing against the background of political repression and increasing authoritarianism, I show how Jewish intellectuals navigated their place in a fast-changing post-independence country, furnishing ideas and projects that could have created a different Morocco.

Dear Palestine: A Social History of the 1948 War by Shay Hazkani

Reviewed by: Dear Palestine: A Social History of the 1948 War by Shay Hazkani Abigail Jacobson Shay Hazkani. Dear Palestine: A Social History of the 1948 War. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2021. 352 pp. In this fascinating and engaging book, Shay Hazkani takes the readers on a unique journey into the history of the 1948 War. Much has been written on the history of this war, which was probably the most significant and dramatic turning point in this history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, yet Hazkani’s book offers an unusual contribution to this scholarship. Based on hundreds of personal letters, diaries, army magazines, radio broadcasts, and pamphlets of Jewish and Arab soldiers who fought in the war, either in the ranks of the Israel Defense Forces or the Arab League’s Volunteer Army (ALA), Dear Palestine examines the ways ordinary soldiers experienced the war and their role in it. The book follows the preparation and indoctrination in the early stages of the war, and carefully analyzes the soldiers’ contemplations regarding the meanings and implications of the war and the violence they experienced and were part of. Moreover, and maybe most importantly, this rich account, based on the untapped corpus of soldiers’ letters, challenges and questions the Arab/Jew binary that is so prevalent in the historiography of the Arab-Israeli conflict in general, and of the 1948 War in particular. In fact, the soldiers’ accounts during the war show that these nationalist categories are much more complex, diverse, and full [End Page 215] of internal contradictions than usually thought. In this, Hazkani’s book is part of a growing scholarship that follows the relational history approach to the study of the relations between Jews and Arabs, and that complicates these identities. Part of the important contribution of the book to the historical accounts of the war in particular, and the historiography of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in general, lies in the corpus of sources used by Hazkani, and the reflective way he incorporates them. As such, in the introduction, conclusion, as well in several points throughout the book, Hazkani critically discusses the sources he uses, their methodological limitations and advantages, and uses this sensitive and unique corpus in a smart and reflective way. Each of the book’s five chapters examines a separate stage in the journeys that Jewish and Arab volunteers who fought in 1948 went through. The first chapter focuses on the mobilization process of Jewish and Arab soldiers as they were conscripted, or volunteered, to take arms and join the war efforts in Palestine. Carefully scrutinizing the different groups and the processes that brought them to the front line, Hazkani exposes the different meaning of “fighting for Palestine” for various groups. Those include, for example, Moroccan Jews, Holocaust survivors, American Jews, as well as Lebanese, Syrian, Jordanian, and Egyptian Arabs of different ethnoreligious backgrounds. The second chapter continues to the next stage of these soldiers’ journeys, namely the propaganda, indoctrination, and preparations that the IDF and ALA utilized. The chapter follows the training of the soldiers, the use of propaganda mechanisms, and the depictions of the enemy. The comparison between the ALA’s and IDF’s propaganda and indoctrination mechanisms is fascinating and reveals many internal frictions and tensions within these two forces. The third chapter discusses the motivations and reasons that brought the Arab and Jewish recruits to fight in Palestine. Through a careful analysis of soldiers’ letters and accounts, Hazkani points to the ways in which different ideologies, such as Pan-Arabism, Pan-Islam, nationalism, and anticolonial struggle, all mixed together in soldiers’ identities and motivations to fight. He reveals how Moroccan Jewish volunteers were gradually exposed to racism and discrimination from their fellow Ashkenazic soldiers and how their experience was radically different from that of the Ashkenazic volunteers who came from the United States, for example. The experience of Moroccan soldiers complicates the national Zionist narrative regarding the role of the Zionist movement in saving Moroccan Jews and incorporating them into the Zionist and later Israeli “melting pot.” These very intimate reflections and contemplations are discussed further in chapter 4, which focuses on the actual experience of war and violence on the...

Moroccan Jewish shoemaking under European colonialism (1912-39)

This article presents the micro-history of Jewish shoemakers in urban and rural Morocco under the French Protectorate. Whereas in pre-1912 Morocco Jewish shoemakers were an active element within the spaces of the sūq , in post-1912 Morocco the traditional arrangements which enabled this integration were challenged by both the indigenous societies (the Muslim and Jewish populations) and the French local government. The struggle of the Jewish shoemakers to preserve their livelihood in the notoriously difficult times of European colonialism after 1912 involved a constant dialogue with (1) Jewish community leaders and Jewish entrepreneurs, (2) Muslim craftsmen and customers, (3) the French Protectorate government. This widespread discourse fluctuated between conflict and harmony, expressing the relative power of the Jewish shoemakers, which was a product of economic, cultural and political realities.

"Our Cruel Polish Brothers": Moroccan Jews between Casablanca and Wadi Salib, 1956–59

Abstract: This article reconsiders three years in the lives of Jews in Morocco and their families who chose to immigrate to Israel. Relying on private correspondence between Moroccan Jews in Israel and in Morocco that was secretly intercepted by the Israeli intelligence apparatus, I argue that Moroccan Jews in Israel underwent a major process of radicalization between Moroccan independence in 1956 and the Moroccan uprising in Israel in 1959, known as the Wadi Salib revolt. In the Moroccan-Israeli case, Moroccan Jews introduced race into the Israeli discourse, and sought to leverage this discourse for a redistribution of resources, primarily among Jews. This radicalization initially developed against the backdrop of the Moroccan struggle for independence against French colonialism; however, other anticolonial and antiracist struggles of the 1950s were also influential. Thus, the prevailing assessment of the Wadi Salib revolt solely as "an Israeli event" diminishes the longer trajectories of Moroccan radicalization.

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

"Our Cruel Polish Brothers": Moroccan Jews between Casablanca and Wadi Salib, 1956–59

"Our Cruel Polish Brothers": Moroccan Jews between Casablanca and Wadi Salib, 1956–59

The potential of artistic practice in facilitating the collective narration of historical events

ABSTRACT Using two of my performance pieces as case studies, this paper analyses the use of oral testimony and listening in contemporary performance to activate a narrative reaction from the public. Describing how unique spaces of participatory art for activating individual and collective remembering among witnesses and listeners were created, it highlights the potentialities of artistic practice in dealing with memorialisation issues and expanding the authorship of a narrative and the group of people it represents. Furthermore, it contributes to the understanding of memory-making as a dialogic process. In the first case study, Un lavoro per Camporovere (2014), the public listening to a sound installation – comprised of interviews – brings together the two halves of a village divided by Nazi arson in 1944 and helps the citizens to create a new collective narration of the event. In the second intervention, the collective performance Mellah (2017), the creation of a safe, symbolic and dedicated space favours the telling of the unshared memories of Moroccan Jews who migrated to Paris. This paper illustrates in both examples, the role that public reaction and stories play in making heritage as always in a state of becoming.

Yahrzeit … Haya Bar-Itzhak (1946–2020)

Yahrzeit … Haya Bar-Itzhak (1946–2020) Simon J. Bronner (bio) Haya Bar-Itzhak was a driving force behind this journal and a shaper of the global study of Jewish folklore and ethnology. In her teaching, writing, and editing, she brought into relief the long lineage of work in periodicals devoted to Jewish folklore beginning in the nineteenth century (Bar-Itzhak 2010, 16–26) and inspired the editors of Jewish Folklore and Ethnology (JFE) with a vision for a journal that would go beyond an audience of Jews to become indispensable for all folklorists and ethnologists. The JFE editors, indeed all who care about understanding tradition, lost a friend and mentor when she died at her home in Haifa, Israel, on October 25, 2020. An organizer par excellence, one of her last projects was bringing together fieldwork-oriented scholars from around the world in 2013 to forge connections in a conference around the Talmudic directive to "Go out and see what the people do" (BT Eruvin 14B) as a folkloristic rallying cry. The conference occurred the same year that her Encyclopedia of Jewish Folklore and Traditions in two volumes was published, which she took over from Raphael Patai. And now the editors of Jewish Folklore and Ethnology find themselves similarly continuing a trajectory from her to a new generation of scholars and readers. With health issues mounting for Haya, the book based on the "Going to the People" conference came out in [End Page 210] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Haya Bar-Itzhak, August 2007. Photograph by Simon J. Bronner. 2016 under the editorship of Jeffrey Veidlinger, but Haya's influence on the work is clearly evident, as it is on every page of this volume of the journal and many more in several languages across several continents. Haya was born in Berlin, Germany, on August 17, 1946 to Polish Holocaust survivors. After emigration to Israel, she received her bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Haifa and finished her PhD in 1987 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem with a dissertation on "The 'Saints' Legend' as a Genre in Jewish Folk Literature" under the supervision of renowned folklore [End Page 211] professor Dov Noy. She returned to the University of Haifa as a professor and in 1992, became chair of the Department of Hebrew and Comparative Literature and in 1994, head of folklore studies and the Israel Folktale Archives. A peripatetic teacher and scholar who attracted admiring students and colleagues wherever she went, she held visiting professorships at Indiana University, University of Michigan, Penn State University, University of Pennsylvania, and the University of California–Berkeley. In addition, she was a fellow of the Simon Dubnow Institute in Leipzig, Germany. She received numerous grants and awards for her work from organizations such as the Koret Foundation, Lucius N. Littauer Foundation, Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, S. O. Sidore Foundation, and the Council for Higher Education of Israel. She had broad interests in folklore that spanned Eastern Europe, northern Africa, Israel, and North America, and having taken on the Encyclopedia of Jewish Folklore and Traditions, in many ways her parting gift—and challenge—to the field, her scope of work extended to the far-flung corners of the world. She maintained specialties in folk narrative, particularly legend and women's culture from ancient times to the present. Her research and publications in English, Hebrew, German, Polish, and Yiddish earned her renown globally for a conceptualization of ethnopoetics informed by the Jewish experience. Her authored books in English include Jewish Poland—Legends of Origin (2001), Israeli Folk Narratives: Settlement, Immigration, Ethnicity (2005), and with Aliza Shenhar, Jewish Moroccan Folk Narratives from Israel (1993). Her edited books include Encyclopedia of Jewish Folklore and Traditions, 2 volumes (2013), Pioneers of Jewish Ethnography and Folkloristics in Eastern Europe (2010), and with Idit Pintel-Ginsberg, The Power of a Tale: Stories from the Israel Folktale Archives (2019). In Hebrew, she edited Folklore and Ideology: Studies Dedicated to Prof. Aliza Shenhar (2014), Legends of Poland: Ethnopoetics and Legendary Chronicles (1996), and with Aliza Shenhar, Folktales from Beth-She'an (1981) and Folktales from Shlomi (1983). She also was the editor of...

Jewish Folktales from Morocco: Tales of Seha the Sage and Seha the Clown

Jewish Folktales from Morocco: Tales of Seha the Sage and Seha the Clown

Expanding the dimensions of Moroccan (Jewish) migration: postcolonial perspectives from Venezuela

ABSTRACT Analyses of the migrations from Morocco in the second half of the twentieth century tend to view them as part of a larger pattern of South-to-North postcolonial circular migration, while Jewish Moroccan migration is deemed an exceptional national phenomenon, unrelated to the study of these global developments. Yet, Jewish migration from northern Morocco to Venezuela was characterised and influenced by a number of sub-regional, ethno-religious, linguistic, and even racial peculiarities, whose analyses may broaden our perspective on the global dynamics of Moroccan postcolonial migration: for example, the status of northern Morocco and Venezuela as a hub for Spanish settlers, Venezuela’s post-1945 open-door policy toward European immigration, and the Judeo-Spanish backgrounds of immigrants from Morocco. In the absence of bilateral migration agreements between Morocco and Venezuela, examining Moroccan Jewish migration to the latter can also shed light on the prominent role of informal networks in shaping global migration from North Africa, and explain why Muslim Moroccans did not immigrate to Venezuela even as many were migrating elsewhere. A focus on grassroots histories of this sort may help advance the scholarship beyond the narratives of mass minority departure, labour migration, and integration that usually treat Morocco and other countries of emigration as homogeneous national units.

The Sultan’s Communists: Moroccan Jews and the Politics of Belonging. By Alma Rachel Heckman

The Sultan’s Communists: Moroccan Jews and the Politics of Belonging. By Alma Rachel Heckman

Moroccan Torah Scrolls: Theorizing a Diasporic Afterlife

Torah scrolls are more than ritual objects; when used in a congregation, they take on semi-human characteristics and are given special agency. For Sephardic communities, some scrolls bear witness to the history of migration and trade that has uprooted them over five centuries. This article examines Torah scrolls originating in Morocco or used today by Moroccan communities, arguing that they take on a different meaning for the community depending on whether they are used, displayed, or guarded. We consider the difference in social meaning between chanting from a scroll and venerating it, and how Moroccan Jewry is impacted by efforts in Morocco, Israel, and the diaspora to ascribe ownership of the Torah via networks of patrimony and belonging. Offering an ethnographically informed analysis of Torah scrolls in London, Essaouira, and Tel Aviv, this article demonstrates that Torah scrolls serve as productive members of the communities that own them when they facilitate a thorough understanding of the migration networks that create communities.

Clinical, Biochemical, and Molecular Characterization of Neonatal-Onset Dubin-Johnson Syndrome in a Large Case Series From the Arabs.

Background: There are only a few case reports and small case series on neonatal-onset Dubin–Johnson syndrome (DJS), particularly from Far-East Asia, Iranian and Moroccan Jews, and Europe.Objectives: In this first study from the Arabs and the largest series reported to date, we characterized the clinical, laboratory, and molecular features and outcome of gene-confirmed neonatal-onset DJS.Methods: We reviewed our database of 533 cases of neonatal cholestasis that presented to our center during the period from 2008 to 2019. We identified neonates with a disease-causing mutation in ABCC2 gene.Results: Twenty-eight neonates with DJS were diagnosed (5.3%). All of the 28 were full-term, well looking neonates without hepatosplenomegaly, with cholestasis, and normal liver synthetic function since the 1 week of life that resolved within 3–6 months of age, followed by a benign course punctuated by recurrent episodes of jaundice in 43% during a median follow up period of 9.25 (range 2.5–14 years). Alanine aminotransferase levels were within normal range in 26 patients (92%) and mildly elevated in two patients. ALT levels were significantly lower in neonates with DJS than in other cases with neonatal cholestasis from other causes (p < 0.001). The median urinary coproporphyrin I% was 88% (IQ1–IQ3 = 84.2–92.7%). We identified four homozygous variants in the ABCC2 gene (from 22 unrelated families), one splicing variant (c.3258+1G>A; p.?), and three were missense variants; two of which were novel missense variants [c.1594G>A (p.Glu532Lys) and c.2439G>C (p.Lys813Asn)]. The p.Gly758Val mutation has occurred in 23 patients (from 19 unrelated families).Conclusions: Our study suggests that normal ALT-cholestasis in a well-looking neonate should trigger evaluation for DJS. The p.Gly758Val variant in ABCC2 is the most predominant mutation among Arabs with “founder effects.” Identification of the predominant ABCC2 variant in any population is likely to facilitate rapid molecular analysis by future targeting of that specific mutation.