The Jews of Morocco and the ‘Catastrophe’ That Did Not Occur
In retrospect, the history of relations between Israel, independent Morocco, and its Jewish community could be framed under the sign of a “catastrophe that did not occur.” No collective disaster comparable to those feared by alarmist observers ever materialized. It was not an actual traumatic event, but rather an anxious anticipation of the future that prompted the mass departure of Moroccan Jews. Those who predicted a dire fate were eventually compelled—sometimes reluctantly—to acknowledge that the kingdom’s independence had in no way immediately undermined the security or rights of Jews. It even inaugurated, in the words of Israeli emissaries present at the time, a period described as a “golden age of Moroccan Jewry.”
Among the educated Jewish elite, euphoria prevailed during the early years of independence. Prospects for social mobility, economic integration, and participation in state-building fostered genuine optimism. This dynamism, however, was soon compromised by the strategic missteps of Israeli policy, which contributed to the erosion of this momentum and brought to an end the cultural and economic flourishing the community had enjoyed. Moroccan Jews took some consolation in the fact that, although Israeli intervention curtailed their short-term social mobility, it offered them a sense of security and the promise of a better future within a new national framework.
The history of the Jewish community in independent Morocco was thus permeated by a structural anxiety rooted in political uncertainty. The future of the Moroccan regime, as well as the legal and factual status of Jews, remained unclear. Should Jews claim specific rights as a distinct minority, or should they fully integrate into the emerging Moroccan society—embracing its language, culture, and political parties—potentially to the point of complete assimilation? The first option attracted few adherents, as many of its potential supporters had already emigrated to Israel. The second was favored in the short term, but it soon became evident that the model of integration associated with Western European Jewry was scarcely transferable to a postcolonial Arab-Muslim monarchy.
In the absence of a clear alternative, Moroccan Jews developed a configuration of multiple loyalties. Their civic and political loyalty was directed toward Morocco—their historical homeland, where their ancestors had lived long before the Muslim conquest—its language, its society, and its sovereign. At the same time, they maintained an unequivocal Jewish identity, rooted in religion but also in ethno-cultural belonging, accompanied by a discreet emotional attachment to Israel and admiration for its achievements. To these two registers was added an attachment to the substratum of French culture—its language and history—perceived as a form of symbolic and social capital ensuring individual advancement. This triptych of allegiances profoundly distinguishes the experience of Moroccan Jews from the classical model of the “eternal people” upheld by Jewish historiography.
The history of Jews in independent Morocco is marked by three structuring categories: clandestinity, silence, and oblivion. Clandestinity refers to the activities of Israeli emissaries in an Arab country; silence was an indispensable condition for maintaining secret contacts with Moroccan authorities; oblivion befell a community uprooted from its geo-cultural anchorage and gradually integrated into a new language and a new mythic space in Israel. Within this climate of concealment, crucial decisions and dramatic events often unfolded without the community’s knowledge and without the full awareness of its leaders. They likewise remained unknown to Moroccan Jews who had settled in Israel. Writing the history of this period therefore entails a fragmentary process of illumination in a field where the actors themselves sought to obscure their very existence.
With emigration to Israel, a rigorist form of religiosity (hithardut) emerged among segments of Moroccan Jewry. A retrospective reinterpretation took hold, attributing the alleged estrangement of Jews from religion to the deleterious effects of the secular education provided by the Alliance Israélite Universelle. Yet prior to the waves of emigration, Moroccan Judaism was primarily an embodied way of life, grounded in family and communal traditions. Religion as an ideologized worldview and identity marker—and, in its wake, Zionism—emerged in Morocco as a consequence of the secularization induced by French culture, not as its antidote. The evidence lies in the fact that Jews from Tangier and Tetouan, exposed to French education as early as 1860, were precisely those who founded most of the religious and Zionist institutions in Casablanca. The critical study of traditional Hebrew texts truly developed only under the impetus of this modern Jewish cultural milieu.
The dominant Israeli narrative has traditionally attributed immigration waves to Zionist motivations. As in many national narratives, founding myths occupy a more decisive place than verifiable realities, perhaps as a condition of their symbolic efficacy. Historical analysis shows, however, that the proportion of migrants driven by an explicit Zionist ideology was exceedingly limited. The closure of the United States to Jewish immigration in 1923 was one of the determining factors behind the major migratory waves from Eastern and Central Europe. As for the immigration of Jews from Muslim countries, the narrative was recalibrated: it was not labeled “Zionist,” a prestigious term, but rather “messianic immigration.” This messianic characterization appears less an empirical description than a compensatory label bestowed upon migrants relegated to the margins of the pioneering pantheon.
In the course of my research, I examined several hundred documents related to this immigration. I found no occurrence of this designation—neither among the migrants themselves nor in the writings of the emissaries. The interpretive key emerged only in correspondence between the head of the emissaries, Shlomo Yehezkeli, who had already returned to Israel, and his colleagues still in Morocco. He candidly acknowledges that living conditions and salaries in Morocco constituted a powerful attraction for many emissaries, some of whom sought to extend their stay.
In a letter addressed to Yehudit Friedman, Yehezkeli warns her of the psychological shock of returning: “The transition is too abrupt and sudden. Here, you are merely an ordinary and practically insignificant citizen; your work is quickly forgotten, and it confers no prestige […] A slight bitterness seeps into our hearts […] The only source of moral satisfaction remains our memories and the bond with our colleagues, all animated by the same feeling […] Each of us, during our activity in this enterprise, felt like ‘a messiah.’ An exceptional messiah or an ordinary one, but a messiah nonetheless. And this feeling was justified, because the people he dealt with perceived him as such. And even if they did not perceive him in that way, he saw himself in this remarkable position. He had to see himself thus, otherwise he would not have carried out his work with the same self-denial, the same courage, and the same quasi-sacred fervor […] There is no serious and devoted emissary in whom there does not reside a sense of being a ‘redeemer’ and of reinforcing a work of redemption […]
For most of us, the sense of mission was transformed into a sense of messianity: not only a profound consciousness of duty, but the certainty of participating in a historic enterprise of salvation, with each of us clearly seeing himself, to varying degrees, as a kind of messiah.”
This correspondence reveals that “messianity” was less that of the migrants than that of the emissaries themselves. Moroccan Jews did not emigrate for messianic reasons, but out of fear of living under an uncertain political future in an Arab-Muslim state. If there was messianity, therefore, it was that of the Israeli emissaries.
