Historiographical Archetypes and the Jews of Morocco

The Zionist epic took shape around a succession of structuring concepts that profoundly molded the Jewish national narrative. Twentieth-century Jewish communities were described according to a homogeneous historiographical prototype that subordinated their historical trajectories to a pre-established interpretive framework. A repertoire of notions—emancipation, assimilation, antisemitism, Zionism—thus functioned as an almost exclusive grid of interpretation, determining the stages of Jewish communal history while postulating a binary opposition between, on the one hand, assimilation into the surrounding society and, on the other, the preservation of an ethno-Jewish identity deemed inseparable from Zionism. Inherited from the works of Heinrich Graetz, Simon Dubnow, and Ben-Zion Dinur, these historiographical models continue to dominate Israeli academia, particularly within departments of Jewish history that remain institutionally separate from departments of general history.

The interpretive schemes devised to conceptualize the fate of an “eternal people” in the modern era prove largely inadequate for apprehending the situation of Jews in Muslim-majority countries, and even in certain regions of Eastern Europe, where identity configurations were most often tripolar rather than binary. The twentieth-century Moroccan Jewish community evolved within a field of tensions among three poles: a specific Jewish identity, a cultural formation largely shaped by France, and political and social integration within Moroccan society. The arbitration among these poles initially manifested itself in an alignment with France and its culture, before giving way to a brief and fragile identification with the independent Moroccan state. Political uncertainty and fears of an unstable future, however, led a substantial portion of the community to opt for emigration from Morocco. Israeli emissaries then sealed the fate of this community on the basis of an erroneous diagnosis: convinced of the imminence of danger, they came to view themselves as invested with a mission of “rescue,” regardless of the human and social costs involved.

To these biases must be added the inability of many historians to free themselves from a terminology inherited from colonial discourse. Thus, the history of independent states is labeled “postcolonial,” while their past prior to imperial conquest is relegated to the status of the “precolonial.” Colonialism thereby becomes both the chronological point of departure and the analytical standpoint, as if the writing of history were inscribed in an implicit nostalgia for the colonizer. This gaze designates the French colonist settled in Morocco as a “Moroccan,” while reducing the indigenous inhabitant to the category of “Arab.” Long after the disappearance of the colonial order, some continue to employ paternalistic notions such as “natives,” or invoke “multiculturalism” as an ideological screen intended to promote an impoverished ethnic folklore at the expense of genuine cultural and intellectual engagement.

Israeli leaders formulated their policy toward Jewish diaspora communities on the basis of a fundamental axiom: antisemitism was assumed to be universal, timeless, and inevitable, such that any Jewish collectivity outside Israel was destined, sooner or later, for destruction. The State of Israel was therefore obliged to anticipate this presumed fate by transferring these populations to its territory. After the Shoah, North African Jewry appeared as the principal Jewish demographic reservoir on a global scale. For Jewish orthodoxy, these communities were expected to ensure the continuity of Judaism in the face of the specter of assimilation. From the standpoint of the state, they constituted an indispensable source of labor for consolidating Jewish presence, in order to resolve what was then termed the “demographic question.” The solemn proclamation of independence was not sufficient: it was widely understood that a state could not endure over time with a Jewish population limited to 600,000 persons.

The national narrative thus crystallized around the idea that, without rescuing the Jews of the diaspora from the antisemitic threat, Israel would fail in the very justification of its existence—an existence that, in its early years, remained profoundly uncertain. It is within this ideological framework that one must understand the determination of Israeli leaders to organize the transfer of Moroccan Jews, at the cost of considerable risks and demonstrable human sacrifices. Although the implementation of this policy gradually revealed a reality at odds with the dominant ideology, the intensity of commitment and the moral pressure exerted on the emissaries prevented them from reconsidering their presuppositions; their conduct responded more to the expectations projected onto them than to a clear-eyed assessment of conditions on the ground.

The Tangier-born writer Carlos de Nesry forcefully underscored the specificity of the history of Moroccan Jews in relation to that of the “eternal people”: “It is a mistake to think that Morocco was, for Jews who supported Moroccanization, what France was for the Jews of France or England for the Jews of England. To assert this would be to yield to a misleading interpolation.” The representative of the World Jewish Congress, Alexander Easterman, likewise insisted on this fundamental distinction. In his view, the history of the Jewish diaspora in Eastern Europe is dominated by the figure of the marginalized Jew, condemned to wandering and to a perpetual search for refuge and livelihood. In Morocco, by contrast, the situation was the reverse: “Moroccans were attached with all their strength to the Jews of their country, both politically and economically.” Opposed to this reading, the Minister of Foreign Affairs Golda Meir inscribed the shipwreck of the immigrant vessel Egoz within the continuity of the trials inflicted upon the Jews, interpreting it as yet another episode in the millennial struggle against antisemitism in pursuit of immigration to Israel. Moshe Sharett shared this vision, seeing in the tragedy a new page in Jewish martyrology: “I believe that, in the entire martyrology of our immigration to date, there has been no chapter comparable to that of the current immigration from Morocco.”