Abraham Serfaty: Moroccan Jew and Conscious Pariah

The confluence of Jews and Communism has long been noted by scholars. However, most historiography has treated European contexts, with the addition of some work on the Americas and the Yishuv, but neglected the broader Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Works that do purport to survey and compare the phenomenon across contexts have typically given the MENA short shrift. Further, most discussion of leftist Jewish politics halts after World War II, just when the story is gaining momentum in the MENA, particularly within anticolonial movements. In this article, I draw on Hannah Arendt's work on the so-called conscious pariah to bridge historiographies and link leftist Jews in the MENA, the Americas, and Europe. Using archival sources, newspapers, oral histories, and novels, I present Jewish involvement in the Parti Communist Marocain as a case study to examine the complications of Jewish involvement in leftist politics in concentric geographic, temporal, and historiographic circles. In so doing, I seek to complicate the story of Jewish attraction to internationalism and universalism and the reconciliation of Jewish affiliations and identities with the nation-state and the colonial.

In the late nineteenth century, the Moroccan government’s concern for its image abroad ushered in a new approach to understanding Jews’ rights. Although the sultans never abandoned the dhimma contract in favor of religious egalitarianism, government officials increasingly adopted a new language of equality to describe how Jewish subjects should be treated. This language of equality borrowed vocabulary from Western notions of tolerance, but did not fundamentally conflict with Islamic ideals of justice. Mawlāy Ḥasan (reigned 1873-1894) refused to declare that Jews and Muslims were equal, but he increasingly insisted that Jews and Muslims must be treated equally before the law. Jews tread a similarly fine line, between pushing the envelope of their legal rights as dhimmīs and affirming their status as the personal protégés of the sultan. Through an examination of correspondence among Moroccan government officials, Jews, and foreign diplomats, this article locates the shifting relationship between the state and its Jewish subjects in the language which the Makhzan used to define justice.

British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 2024

The research on Arab Jewishness in the Middle East has developed in recent years across the disciplines of cultural and intellectual history and cultural studies. In this article, I present a unique Arab Jewishness, as expressed in North-African Jewish communities during the colonial period, through the case of Elie Malka, ethnographer, interpreter, legal expert and lexicographer from Morocco. The article discusses Malka's overall endeavour and shows the centrality of Arabic language and culture in it. Malka conducted linguistic, ethnographic and legal studies, translated Latin-language texts into Arabic and Judeo-Arabic and vice versa, edited French-Arabic dictionaries, and taught Arabic to certain Jewish community sectors. I posit that Malka's Arab Jewishness was unlike the Arab Jewishness that developed organically in the Middle East, but rather constituted a mutation within the general colonial mutation that evolved in North Africa. https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/BIJMG9V2SKDRNXEPZEKP/full?target=10.1080/13530194.2022.2151416

South Atlantic Quarterly, 2008

This essay uses Fouzi El-Asmar's To Be an Arab in Israel as a point of departure to examine the plight of Israel's Palestinian Arab citizens since 1948, while also exploring the inherent contradictions within the logic and political economy of Zionism that situate Palestinians as a persistent and disturbing reminder of Israel's settler colonial aspirations. By taking inventory of the various ontological crises attending what it means to be a Palestinian living in Israel, as well as the historical vectors informing Zionism's various attempts to prevent the development of Palestinian civil society, Abraham argues that there are clear analogues between Palestinian and Jewish suffering. After completing a theoretical survey of the arguments informing defenses of, and apologies for, Israel's occupation of the West Bank and destruction of Gaza, Abraham turns to the ways in which the Holocaust has been used to shore up connections between Zionist and Jewish history. Fin...

The Journal of North African Studies, 2010

Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies , 2023

The writing of “Yizkor books” (Yizker bikher, יזכור ביכער)—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.

This course invites students to explore the debates around the term " Arab Jews. " A cultural, historical, and historiographical designation, the term encompasses a range of experiences for Arabic-speaking Jews. These Jews lived in diverse cultural worlds across the Middle East and North Africa, where they developed deep and enduring relationships with non-Jews, and were instrumental in shaping local, regional and national cultures and politics. Their identities and histories, which vary according to their place of origin, are presented, assessed, and debated in scholarly articles and monographs, political statements, personal testimonies and memoirs, poetry and fiction, music and cinema, as well as on websites and in blogs. This surge in research, which has become a prominent subfield of Jewish studies and Middle Eastern studies, is the result of regional changes on the one hand, and growing interest in the history and culture of the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa on the other. By engaging with the term " Arab Jews " in its various incarnations, the course offers new perspectives on questions of Zionism and nationalism, colonialism and geography, religion and secularization, as well as historiography and memory.

Anthropological Quarterly, 2020

This article closely observes various survival strategies employed by the tiny Jewish minority in Casablanca aimed at fortifying their notion of predictability; i.e., the ability to foresee how interactions with the vast Muslim majority will unfold. Predictability is essential in the face of the imminent demise of the Jewish community. Jews' main strategy to achieve this goal is to constitute spaces of encounter where they believe that they can conceal intimate and embarrassing cultural knowledge from Muslims. Jews seem to establish the boundaries of their "cultural intimacy" through the exclusion of Muslims. Ironically, the assumption of predictability is confirmed by the cooperation of Muslims-a cooperation that ipso facto includes Muslims within the realm of Jewish cultural intimacy. Moreover, the behaviors involved in excluding Muslims are part of the intimate and embarrassing cultural knowledge (often seen as dangerous) that is to be concealed from Muslims. Hence, embarrassingly, Jews rely on Muslims' consenting assistance in order to separate themselves from Muslims. Muslims thus participate in the efforts of their own exclusion from Jewish spheres.

This article is an analytical overview of the history of Moroccan Jewry, from pre-Islamic times to the present day, exploring the themes of myth, memory and political interests in the multi-faceted, continuous interactions between the community and Moroccan society as a whole. In referring to seminal developments in Moroccan political history, it analyses the different ways in which the Jews of Morocco experienced them as an integral part of the larger societal mosaic. This survey of the 2,000-year Jewish presence in Morocco employs a variety of classical and modern sources in order to locate the place of Moroccan Jews within the ebbs and flows of Moroccan dynastic history, particularly following the establishment of the first Islamic dynasty in the eighth century, C.E. It also engages with current historiographical debates on the subject matter. Overall, it provides clarity and order to the subject of Jewish–Muslim inter-communal relations in Morocco over the longue durée, a matter too often shrouded in myths and half-truths.