Department of History

Dr. Alma Heckman, University of California-Santa Cruz will be giving a talk. This talk is part of the Mediterranean and North African Jewish History series  sponsored by the Alexander Grass Chair in Jewish Studies and the Isser and Rae Price Library of Judaica.

The moment of Moroccan independence in 1956 was optimistic for Jews.  The Istiqlal (“Independence” in Arabic) government with King Mohammed V at its head appointed a Jewish minister, and the Muslim-Jewish unity group, al-Wifaq (“Accord”), drew the support from all segments of society. Such movements, however, coincided with the 1956 Suez crisis. Following this conflict, pre-existing tensions of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism became increasingly conflated in the Moroccan public sphere, polarizing members of the Jewish community against one another in addition to the Jewish community vis-à-vis the majority Moroccan Muslim society. The ensuing mass migration of Moroccan Jews to Israel would ebb and flow in response to domestic and international events, as well as the intermittent legality of such migration. Many Jews remained, however. Of them, a handful were ardently committed to the Moroccan nationalist cause, and with it, a patriotic rejection of Zionism. These Jews were members of the Moroccan Communist Party (PCM) and were frequently at odds with both the dominant governmental forces as well as the wider Jewish community who, for the most part, supported Israel. This talk addresses Moroccan Jewish leftist attempts to reconcile Jewish and Moroccan identities within an increasingly murky Moroccan political context.