Between May 1948 and late 1951, about 350,000 Jews from Arab countries joined a similar number of Jews from Europe and the Americas who immigrated to Israel. Together, these migrations more than doubled the Jewish population of pre-state Palestine. The pace of that migration and the proportional population growth during those two and a half years were unprecedented, on a global scale, even when compared to the peak of migration to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.Footnote 1
Against that backdrop, between 1948 and 1956, of the entire population of about 250,000 Jews in Morocco in 1948, 98,243 left for Israel, according to the Jewish Agency records. Later, between 1957 and mid-1961, 17,994 Jews risked their lives immigrating to Israel under clandestine conditions due to a strict emigration ban by Morocco. That turn of events was followed by Operation Yakhin, an Israeli-directed mission between November 1961 and December 1964, with the express goal of evacuating Moroccan Jews to Israel. During Operation Yakhin, 89,742, or 54.6 percent, of the remaining Moroccan Jews moved to Israel. Footnote 2
Focusing on the extraordinary pace of immigration to Israel and nationalist motivation for immigration to Israel, scholars often overlook the diverse factors that drove entire communities to migrate, such as interregional differences within countries of origin and contrasting individual preferences. For instance, during the momentous Israeli-led Operation Yakhin, only 17.9 percent of the Jewish population in Tangier migrated to Israel. From neighboring Tetouan—the second largest city in northern Morocco—only 20.5 percent left for Israel. These relatively low percentages from major urban areas in northern Morocco contrast with the 77.2 percent of Jews who left Marrakech and the 54.5 percent who left Casablanca during Operation Yakhin.Footnote 3 To be sure, by 1972, the Jewish population in northern Morocco had sharply declined from about 12,000 in 1961 to 4,000 that year; 3,625 people, or 30.4 percent of the Jewish population in 1961, had left for Israel.Footnote 4
In this article I explore the evolution of the particular emigration history of Jews from northern Morocco.Footnote 5 Drawing on a combination of official, communal and personal records, I seek to answer questions rarely addressed by scholars of Jewish migration from Arab countries: why did the majority of Jews in northern areas remain in Morocco or emigrate to countries other than Israel, whereas most Jews elsewhere in the country went to Israel? And why did other Jewish inhabitants of northern Morocco emigrate to Israel, even though their family and friends chose otherwise? I also seek to understand what drove more Jews from the north to immigrate to Israel only after the Israeli state's mass immigration missions had ended in December 1964.
In recent decades scholars have looked at gaps between official migration policies and the actual evolution of social migration patterns.Footnote 6 Scholars focusing on global migration have also explored country regional differences in migration preferences, as in the case of northern Morocco.Footnote 7 More to the point I wish to make here, a growing multidisciplinary literature began to analyze individual migrants—including those subject to forced migration—not as socially and culturally isolated monogenic players programmed to move, nor as powerless subjects of colonial world hierarchies, but rather as individuals who actively shaped their migratory experience through social agency. A new body of literature has begun to explore the macro-level factors associated with migration, such as bilateral relations and global political and economic conditions, as they interact with micro-level factors like immigrants' interpersonal ties.Footnote 8 This theoretical perspective may help us decenter the role of Israel, Morocco, and other regional and colonial powers—as well as the Arab-Israeli conflict—as the primary lens through which many scholars have analyzed these mass migrations.
In what follows, I explain the relatively slow and reduced process of Jewish immigration from northern Morocco to Israel through a network perspective that anchors the analysis in current migration literature. I argue that the reduced number of immigrants to Israel from northern Morocco from the late 1940s through the 1960s was not simply the consequence of Israeli or Moroccan emigration and immigration policies, nor of a sociocultural propensity to reject Zionism, as some scholars of Jewish migration surmise.Footnote 9 Networks, which often took shape in response to government immigration policies, served as containers for dynamic interpersonal interactions through which individuals adapted to the shifting local context of migration and shaped the attributes of their migratory decisions “from the bottom up.” My analysis goes beyond regionally rooted events. As I showcase, immigration to Israel was influenced by the broader global context of post-1945 migrations, particularly to Latin America and more specifically Venezuela, where Jews from northern Morocco settled as part of a non-governmentally sponsored migration. Amid this process, the course of an individual's migratory experience was often unpredictable.
THE STATE OF RESEARCH, RESEARCHING THE STATE
The network perspective utilized in this article has been neglected by current historiography on Jewish emigration from Muslim countries. In the early years of Israel's statehood, Jewish migration from Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) countries to Israel was an essential theme of investigation among social scientists and anthropologists of Israeli society who have examined post-immigration aspects of ethnic formation, assimilation, and segregation.Footnote 10 Only in the early 1980s did Israeli historians Dvora HaKohen and Tom Segev begin to focus in depth on emigration factors. Drawing on Israeli archives, these scholars exposed predicaments, challenges and patterns of discrimination that had been downplayed by the Zionist myth; the myth of a predictable return of distressed Middle Eastern Jews to their ancestral homeland by way of heroic salvation operations undertaken by Israel. Unlike HaKohen, Segev concluded that Israel manipulated the Jewish inhabitants of Arab countries for its own political ends.Footnote 11 In the 1980s, Palestinian historian Abbas Shiblak and cultural theorist Ella Shohat revived the claim earlier raised by Arab nationalists. As they argued, these emigrations reflected a methodical undertaking on the part of the Eurocentric state of Israel to uproot Middle Eastern Jews from their environments and impose on them the (foreign) ideology of Zionism.Footnote 12 Since then, a multifaceted body of scholarship continues to disrupt the Zionist myth of return, even as it also continues to center the role of the Israeli state in organizing these large immigration projects.Footnote 13
The 1980s witnessed the emergence of scholarship that began to shift the focal point away from the Israel, focusing on the role played by Arab states in precipitating Jewish emigration by restricting the life chances of Jewish minorities and, in Iraq, Libya, and Egypt, directly expelling them. Many scholars have overtly instrumentalized these political incidents to counter the Palestinian narrative of post-1948 exile, often for Zionist purposes. By contrast, Abbas Shiblak ascribed blame to the Iraqi government for mismanaging the events that eventually led to the mass emigration of Iraqi Jews to Palestine. Instability for Iraqi Jews, fueled by the appearance of Zionism, resulted also from Iraqi political rivalries, he argued. Footnote 14 Similarly, Moroccan historian Jamaa Baida explained the incidents that led to the emigration of Moroccan Jews with reference to struggles among local nationalist movements, which in concert with Morocco's pan-Arabist international politics produced a sense of instability among Jews who had always felt integrated into the nation.Footnote 15 Recent works have focused on the way Morocco's government and civil society have retrospectively depicted Jewish emigration for internal political and social purposes.Footnote 16 Nonetheless, Moroccan historians, like other historians throughout the Arab world, tend to avoid the topic of post-1948 Jewish emigration altogether, as it is considered a painful wound.Footnote 17
Since the late 1980s, a number of studies have added complexity to existing analyses of the geopolitical factors implicated in Jewish emigration, with a focus on British, French, Italian, and Spanish colonial interests. They also examine the role played by international Jewish organizations, including the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) and the American Joint Distribution Committee (JDC).Footnote 18
As the millennium drew to a close, scholars began to pay more attention to the social stratification and identity factors that shaped migration patterns in the context of colonization and decolonization. A major emphasis was placed on alternative migration paths to the West.Footnote 19 Already in the 1980s, several studies attempted to understand Jewish emigration from Muslim lands to Europe and the Americas as a social and cultural reaction to European influence in the 19th century, nearly a hundred years before the establishment of Israel.Footnote 20 Much of this scholarly effort focused on northern Morocco, a wellspring of Jewish international migration at the time.Footnote 21 Nevertheless, that scholarship tends to cover only the period before the onset of post-1948 migration to Israel. Footnote 22
All in all, post-1948 immigration to Israel has not been the object of comparative analysis, nor has scholarship on the topic explored immigrant preferences in a more globalized context.Footnote 23 The contrast between the paucity of accounts of pre- and post-1948 Jewish migrations from MENA countries to the West and the vast literature on post-1948 immigration to Israel arises from perceptions of the latter as a sui generis migration. Jewish immigration to Israel is seen as methodologically unrelated to the broader study of global migration, as evidenced, for example, by the ongoing debate over the applicability of categories of analysis such as aliyah, a Zionist term for Jewish immigration to Israel widely used to semantically mark its uniqueness. This debate regarding general and unifying definitions of migration to Israel downplays the diverse personal factors involved in migration, mirroring the ongoing focus on the geopolitical contexts of mass emigration from Arab lands to Israel.Footnote 24
The body of literature on Jewish migration from Arab lands took shape against the backdrop of new perceptions regarding the causes of population movement. Until the 1970s, most scholars explored migration motivations through the lens of cost-benefit calculations that encourage individuals to move from underdeveloped regions to more modernized parts of the world.Footnote 25 The idea of cost-benefit analysis came to feature in scholarship on Jewish emigration from Arab countries to the West as an alternative to the ideological considerations of aliyah, or to viewing migration westward as simply the privilege of higher socioeconomic strata.
In the 1970s, scholars began to see global migration as a product of inequalities between receiving and sending regions and the related exploitation of cheap labor. This scholarship switched focus from the deliberate movement of individuals seeking to improve their life chances to a more structural consideration of uneven political hierarchies (i.e., between East and West, receiving and sending regions) as the primary cause of migration.Footnote 26 The critical writing on Jewish emigration from Arab countries as a process of uprooting spearheaded by Israel associated with Tom Segev, Ella Shohat, and others can be understood in the context of this scholarly reorientation.
In the 1990s, scholars began to apply the concept of mesostructures to migration studies.Footnote 27 This concept was first employed by sociologists to capture environments of social interaction that serve as “intermediary regions” between the microstructures of society, such as individual biographies, and macrostructures like the nation-state. Mesostructures represent a stage of evolution of interpersonal networks in which they expand and eventually come to form larger containers for social interaction.Footnote 28 Networks, in this view, do not directly provide migrants with knowledge or financial or moral support but rather impart cumulative experiences that shape individuals’ decisions over the course of the migratory experience.Footnote 29
Despite these scholarly shifts, just as the literature on Jewish migration from the MENA region has not kept pace with the broader migration scholarship, global migration scholarship on modern Morocco has left the Jewish factor untouched. The vast scholarship on global Moroccan migration conceives Jewish migration, especially to Israel, as exceptional and thus excludes it from the frame of analysis, even though Moroccan Jews in Israel represent one of the largest concentrations of diasporic Moroccans in the world.Footnote 30
MIGRATION FROM MOROCCO, UNDERSTANDING THE STATE'S ROLE
My perspective moves beyond the typical macro-level focus on Israel's and Morocco's immigration and emigration policies as the major (even sole) mode of analyzing post-1948 migration motivations. Yet the role of the state was indeed significant. The first organized initiatives to launch illegal, clandestine operations of evacuation from Morocco were undertaken in 1947 by the Mosad le-ʻAliyah Bet, an Israeli secret service branch known today as the Mossad. On 7 March 1949, an agreement was signed by Alphonse Juin, resident-general of the French authority in Morocco, and Jacques Gershoni, a representative of the Jewish Agency for Israel. According to the agreement, the colonial administration in Morocco would no longer interfere with Jewish emigration, as it previously had in an effort to temper local tensions between Jews and Muslims in the country. From that date, the Jewish Agency was free to supervise and organize Jewish migration from Morocco according to a set of strict criteria. The agreement gave birth to Kadima (“forward” in Hebrew), an agency established by the government of Israel specifically to support Jewish immigration from Morocco.
Despite this shift, a major obstacle continued to impede immigration to Israel. The official immigration policy adopted by Israeli policymakers after November 1951, designed to cope with absorption difficulties, required that 80 percent of all immigrants to Israel be under the age of thirty-five. Immigrants above this age were required to be financially supported by a male breadwinner between eighteen and thirty-five years of age, to prioritize more productive and healthier immigrants.Footnote 31 Only in the summer of 1954 did Israeli policymakers begin to change this policy. They worked to forge an arrangement that would rescue (as they saw it) the Jewish minority in Morocco in light of the local struggle for Moroccan independence that became increasingly violent at the time.Footnote 32 That struggle resulted in the massacre of seven Jews in the town of Petitjean on 3 August 1954, followed by anti-French riots in the summer of 1955 after the exile of Sultan Muhamad V to Madagascar. The number of immigrants to Israel increased from 2,996 in 1953 to 8,171 in 1954 and then soared to 24,994 in 1955 and 36,301 in 1956 as independence approached.Footnote 33 In 1955, the Mossad founded Hamisgeret (“the framework” in Hebrew), an organization responsible for recruiting and training agents to undertake secret emigration operations in Morocco.Footnote 34
Although most of Morocco came under French rule between 1912 and 1956, most of the country's northern region was placed under a Spanish protectorate. As direct diplomatic relations between Franco's Spain and the State of Israel were premature in the early 1950s, fake passports issued to Jews who wanted to leave became more widespread in the north than in the French protectorate zone, where the Juin-Gershoni agreement was officially in force. Spanish-Israeli relations experienced ups and downs throughout the decade.Footnote 35
On 2 March 1956, the French protectorate in Morocco came to an end, followed by the termination of the Spanish protectorate on 7 April. Later that year, in October, the international zone of Tangier was integrated into the new monarchy.Footnote 36 Following independence and reunification, nationalist aspirations resulted in a ban on the emigration of Jewish Moroccan citizens. Liberal circles within the Moroccan leadership feared that if Jews left the country the nation's economy might suffer. Pan-Arabists in the nationalist Moroccan Istiqlal Party, for their part, feared the possible contributions of Moroccan immigrants to the State of Israel at a time when Israel was at war with its Arab neighbors.Footnote 37 From December 1923 on, Tangier was governed simultaneously by several Western powers and a local mandoub, a representative of the (French-appointed) Sultan. Israeli officials attempted to take advantage of Tangier's international status in the months before the city's official return to Morocco in October 1956. During June and July 1956, several hundred Jews were evacuated from Tangier to Israel each month. After October, the route was changed to pass through neighboring Ceuta, a Spanish enclave inside Moroccan territory.Footnote 38 The Spanish secret services helped the Mossad evacuate Jews through Ceuta and Melilla to Iberian shores, from where many continued to Israel.Footnote 39
On 10 January 1961, a major turning point occurred when a ship originally named Pisces (and commonly known as Egoz in Hebrew) smuggling illegal migrants sank along the northern shores of Morocco and all forty-four people on board drowned. This unfortunate incident sparked a sequence of events that led local Jewish leaders, Israel, and world Jewish organizations to pressure the Moroccan government to lift the 1956 emigration ban on its Jewish citizens. In May 1961, Abd-el-Kader Benjelloun and Moulay Ali Alaoui, representatives of the recently crowned King Hassan II, and Alex Gatmon, the top envoy of Israel's clandestine migration organization, held secret negotiations in Europe. By July they reached an agreement according to which the Jewish humanitarian association, Hebrew Immigration Aid Society (HIAS), would open offices in Morocco and Israel would organize emigration operations under its auspices. In return, Morocco would receive a down payment of $500,000 and indemnities of $100 per capita for the first 50,000 Jews choosing to depart, and $250 per capita thereafter. The implementation of this agreement, between late 1961 and the end of 1964, came to be known as Operation Yakhin. The events generated a local nationalist discourse in the Moroccan press accusing King Hassan II of “selling” the Jews of Morocco to Israel.Footnote 40
NATIONAL INSTITUTIONS AND THEIR LOCALIZED INFLUENCE
After the Second World War, in light of the demographic catastrophe in Europe, a few of the major world Jewish bodies operating in Morocco—among them the AIU and the American Jewish JDC—began to orient their philanthropic and educational activities toward encouraging Jews in Asia and Africa to emigrate to Israel. The JDC collaborated with Israelʼs Mosad le-ʻAliyah Bet and the Jewish Agency.Footnote 41 In 1949 the Jewish Agency opened an Aliyah Office in Tangier, serving Jews throughout northern Morocco. From there, many immigrants were transferred to an aliyah camp operated by the Israeli-directed Kadima secret migration organization in Casablanca.Footnote 42
In the eyes of aliyah agents, Tangier offered a particularly desirable pool of potential immigrants to Israel due to its exceptionally high rate of educated and healthy people relative to the rest of Morocco's major urban centers, as reported in 1949 by the city's JDC office.Footnote 43 The organization's appreciation of local Moroccan society evolved as its personnel interacted with potential immigrants. In 1949, the JDC office in Tangier spent 48,466 Spanish pesetas, out of a total budget of 175,811 pesetas allocated to emigration, on “other emigrations,” mostly students traveling to Europe for educational purposes. The balance shifted the following year, with 232,177 pesetas allocated to immigration to Israel and only 8,121 dedicated to “other emigrations.”Footnote 44 The local Zionist framework generated discussions regarding the benefits of immigration to Israel among local Jews. For instance, José Anidjar, a seventeen-year-old adolescent, wrote to thank the Aliyah Office in Tangier for easing his absorption in Beer Sheva, Israel. He wrote that in that city he had met with fellow Tangier natives, who were making a good living as construction workers. The office's representatives presented Anidjar's letter as proof of their success and declared in their own records that his dispatch was one of the factors that had increased their motivation to raise the monthly budget for professional training courses that year.Footnote 45
In the context of the emergence of such a social infrastructure new local discourses took shape, both encouraging and challenging Jews in northern Morocco who considered immigration to Israel. In 1949, 379 Jews returned to Morocco from Israel.Footnote 46 The JDC documented one case of a teenager from Tangier who had been disappointed with his absorption in Israel. He tried to escape the kibbutz he was placed in by sailing to Lebanon on a stolen vessel. His father (who had stayed in Morocco) employed diplomatic channels to avoid punishment of his son by the Israeli authorities and bring him back home to Tangier.Footnote 47
Between January 1949 and December 1953, 2,466 Jewish immigrants returned to Morocco. Between 1951 and 1953, the number of immigrants to Israel steadily decreased nationwide, and in 1953, despite a quota of 18,000 immigrants for that year set by Israeli authorities, only 3,013 immigrated.Footnote 48 These data may reflect the fact that once transnational migration networks between Morocco and Israel had been established, negative information about life in Israel also flowed back to Morocco. Israel's emissaries became aware of the broad negative impact of this discourse, fed by Israel's absorption policies that at the time separated families according to age and income criteria. They struggled to influence the nature of the information flow by encouraging emigration by members of the more prosperous middle class. This idea was reflected in a report issued in 1954 by the Development Cooperation for Israel (later known as Israel Bond), a broker-dealer company established in 1951 by the State of Israel.
This is to recommend to you Mr. Aaron Elbaz and his wife who are visiting Israel with the intention maybe to settle. They belong to the leading families of Tangier and their home is open to all delegates from Israel and elsewhere …. Their experience in Israel will be of great importance for the future development of the community of Tangier. If people like them will come back from Israel with a good message the overall attitude will change and we could have not only aliyah of the poor people but could attract the children of the wealthiest families which would be a great asset for the new state.Footnote 49
The difficulty of recruiting immigrants to Israel did not necessarily reflect local indifference toward the Zionist project. Zionism became an additional part of the multifaceted and dynamic lives of local Jews at the time. The list of donations to the Magbit, a Zionist world fundraising foundation, recorded significant sums donated by individuals from Tangier, including some donors who were affiliated with the Casino Israelíta, a Jewish social club that was associated with the wealthy elite of Tangier.Footnote 50 Tangier's branch of the French Zionist Federation, a local bastion of proactive Zionist activity, mentioned the Lycée Français as an institution from which potential immigrants to Israel could be recruited. The school was well-attended by Jews and non-Jews alike.Footnote 51 The non-Jewish newspaper El Día, widely read in Tetouan, referred to a few Zionist-oriented activities organized by the JDC in 1954, but without mentioning Zionism. One article on 4 November 1954 was titled, “Los Israelítas de Marruecos.”
In May 1955, by which time the local Aliyah Office had been forced to shut down by the Tangier International Zone administration, an exhibition of Jewish books, including books in the Hebrew language, took place in the elitist Casino Israelíta. A report by the Department of Education and Culture in Exile, affiliated with the Jewish Agency, described how the organizers could “barely shut the doors of the hall,” as it was utterly packed with curious people. Throughout the event, numerous new subscriptions to the Tangier branch of the Zionist Federation were added to its rosters. Radio Tangier, a popular local (non-Jewish) radio station, promoted the event, and even España, the prominent non-Jewish daily commonly read by the Spanish-speaking population of northern Morocco, sent reporters to cover the events, again without mentioning Zionism.Footnote 52
The growing weight of the institutions that promoted Zionism did not necessarily exert a direct causal impact on immigration to Israel. In fact, alongside Casablanca, northern Morocco became the epicenter of an emerging elite within Jewish society who promoted full incorporation of Jews into the Moroccan nation-state. Abraham Laredo, the president of Tangier's Jewish community council in 1956, was also among the most enthusiastic activists in Al-Wifaq, an association of Muslims and Jews founded on the eve of Moroccan independence that worked to promote coexistence among the religious groups.Footnote 53
Zionism was incorporated into local Jewish culture in a way that ironically strengthened the durability of the Jewish presence. An instructive example is a set of reports from 1954 according to which some 60 percent of those who enrolled in the JDC's Association for Professional Training in Tangier came from neighboring towns rather than from Tangier itself.Footnote 54 In other words, Zionist-oriented Jewish institutions appealed to Jewish migrants within Morocco, particularly in the context of similar immigrant-absorbing infrastructures in Tangier created by European labor migrants.Footnote 55
Moreover, the need to sustain Jewish institutions in Morocco forestalled emigration on the part of the more devoted communal activists, even some local Zionist advocates. For instance, in 1942, at the age of seventeen, Aquiba Beharoch left Tetouan in order to study medicine in Spain. He returned to Tangier in 1950, where he served as director of a maternity ward at the local Jewish hospital, Hospital Benchimol.Footnote 56 Aquiba was a Zionist activist, the chair of the Zionist Federation branch in Tangier in 1950. Between 1956 and 1957, Aquiba's siblings left for Venezuela, but he decided to stay. In 1963 he served as the vice president of Tangier's Jewish Community Council.Footnote 57
As mentioned earlier, northern Morocco was home to about 4,000 Jews, the third largest concentration of Jews in the country after Casablanca and Rabat.Footnote 58 Like those who left, the Jews who remained in northern Morocco did not base their decisions to stay on any single factor, such as avoiding immigration to Israel for ideological or identity-related reasons, nor were those decisions the simple consequence of Israeli, Moroccan, or other state emigration or immigration policies.
THE COMMUNITY'S TRANSREGIONAL MIGRATION
Fundamental to understanding the evolution of immigration to Israel from a network perspective is the fact that migration from northern Morocco did not begin with the establishment of Israel. The era preceding and following Morocco's independence in March 1956 witnessed the (re)emergence of vibrant Moroccan Jewish communities in Europe, South America, and North America; in all these places, the combined number of Jewish migrants from northern Morocco and their offspring was estimated in the tens of thousands by the early 1990s.Footnote 59
The diversity of migration destinations created a web of migration networks with multiple characteristics. Spain and Venezuela were among the major destinations in the mid-20th century, when immigration to Israel began. Many northern Moroccan Jews had spent time in nearby Spain as visitors. Luz, a northern Morocco Jewish periodical, noted that Spain was a preferred destination for honeymooners, for instance.Footnote 60 By the 1960s, a few thousand Moroccan Jews—most from middle-income families—were estimated to be living in Spain, comprising some 65 percent of the country's total Jewish population. Although Spain did not automatically offer nationality to citizens of the protectorate, these populations were among the foreigners who gained easiest access as a result of residency in the Spanish territories of Ceuta and Melilla (before the protectorate) or through ad hoc letters of naturalization that Spain granted individuals who served its interests.Footnote 61
Although Jews and Muslims migrated at the same time, several factors distinguished Moroccan Jewish immigration to Spain. Forty percent of Moroccan Muslim immigrants in Madrid registered as laborers, whereas Moroccan Jews dominated the field of administration, a field their Muslim counterparts rarely entered. Conversely, the field of nonprofessional petits commerçants and artisans was dominated by Moroccan Muslims, with hardly any Jews. Difference in the ages of immigrants was also in evidence: whereas the vast majority of Muslims were in their thirties, the Jewish migrant population was more trans-generational. Spain attracted those Jews and non-Jews who held Spanish citizenship, but, perhaps more to the point I wish to raise here, it attracted many Jews who had non-Jewish acquaintances, mostly Christian Spanish returnees from Morocco following its independence. The Jewish communal infrastructure in Spain was underdeveloped immediately following Morocco's independence.Footnote 62
Jewish immigration from northern Morocco to Latin America, however, started in the 19th century, and by the mid-20th century it had left a mark on Jewish cultural life in northern Morocco. One example was a novel, Indianos Tetouaníes, part of a trilogy, El Indiano, al Kadi y la Luna, published in Tetouan in 1951 by Isaac Benarroch Pinto.Footnote 63 Born in Tetouan around the 1920s, Benarroch was the son of a returning migrant from Venezuela. Benarroch immigrated to Venezuela at a later date, as indicated by a letter (dated 26 October, 1949) he received from the publisher of his novel in Tetouan. In the novel, he recounts an enthralling story of a young man from the lower classes of Tetouan's Jewish society who emigrated to Argentina in 1867 with the aim of alleviating his family's economic burden. His success overseas changed the economic destiny of his family, enabling his father to quit his job as a tinsmith and “live as the father of a rich trader from overseas.”Footnote 64 Another example comes from Abraham Pinto, who had returned to Tangier from the rubber trade in northern Brazil (probably around the beginning of the 1900s). Pinto agreed, at the age of eighty-three, to share his adventures with his closest family members. These memories were written down by Pinto's nephews in Tangier on 12 November 1945.Footnote 65
Pinto's and Benarroch's nostalgic records reflect a cultural accounting of migration to Latin America as it was gaining renewed momentum in the mid-20th century. According to Juan Bautista Vilar, in 1946 Argentina became the most popular destination among northern Moroccan Jews, and in 1950 Venezuela became even more popular.Footnote 66 In 1950 the per capita income in Argentina, Uruguay, and Venezuela was higher than that in Spain. That same year, Venezuela led Latin America in per capita income, with an average annual rate of $7,462 (in constant 1990 dollars), as compared to only $2,387 in Spain and $4,987 in Argentina. In fact, between 1951 and 1959, some 131,995 Spanish nationals immigrated to Venezuela. They constituted the largest ethnic group among a population of 318,959 immigrants who entered the country over that period.Footnote 67
Unlike the Moroccan immigration to Spain, very few Moroccan Muslims joined the waves of emigration from northern Morocco to Latin America. In that respect, migration from northern Morocco to Latin America evolved somewhat similarly to Jewish migration to Israel. Unlike Moroccan emigration to Israel, however, the emigration of Jews from northern Morocco to Venezuela was not facilitated by bilateral agreements and joint planning between governments. There were no noticeable governmental bodies, or even NGOs, that organized migration between the two countries.Footnote 68
Kinship and ethnic networks and not specific state programs drove the migration of northern Moroccan Jews to Venezuela. El Mundo Israelíta (The Israelite World), the Jewish periodical published by Moroccan émigrés to Venezuela, indicated the existence of ties between the Jewish communities in northern Morocco and Venezuela. In 1949 it congratulated new arrivals from Tangier and Tetouan in its social section.Footnote 69El Mundo Israelíta also published the first chapters of the aforementioned Indianos Tetouaníes by Isaac Benarroch Pinto and other related reports on Jewish life in northern Morocco.Footnote 70
In 1956, Moroccan immigrants in Caracas laid the cornerstone for a new Great Synagogue, Tiferet Israel, a reconstruction of the El Conde synagogue founded in the 1930s by a group of northern Moroccan immigrants. El Conde was demolished by Venezuelan authorities in 1954 in the course of constructing a new avenue in Caracas, but subsequent waves of immigration led to its rebuilding. El Mundo Israelíta reported on the event on its front page.Footnote 71 Newcomers in Venezuela were introduced to Jewish Moroccan institutions through interpersonal networks, and the cumulative effect of those networks served to draw Jews with ethnic orientation from northern Morocco to Venezuela. For instance, when Isaac Sananes arrived in Caracas from Tetouan in 1960, his relative, Moisés Sananes, who edited El Mundo Israelíta, offered to advertise Isaac's circumcision services through this platform.Footnote 72 Isaac did not simply use this interpersonal network to find a job, but as a circumciser performing the Jewish birth ritual, his economic fate relied on the development of a wider network of Jewish immigrants who demanded that service.
Gonzalo Benaim-Pinto, a descendant of immigrants from Tetouan and the president of the Asociación Israelíta de Venezuela (AIV), the central communal organization of Sephardic Jews in that country, established in 1930 primarily by Moroccan immigrants, petitioned to ease the entrance of Moroccan Jews to Venezuela in the late 1960s.Footnote 73 Jacobo Serruya, an immigrant from Tetouan, offered to institutionalize this sort of migration-facilitating network. He suggested that the AIV set up a listing of job vacancies for Moroccan immigrants.Footnote 74 By 1990, 1,456 Moroccan natives were residents of Venezuela. Among them, the largest group consisted of 389 immigrants between the ages of fifty and fifty-nine. Of the 851 employed Moroccan natives in Venezuela, 357 occupied the field of commerce, 202 were industrial manufacturers, and 157 were involved in “communal services,” marking their propensity toward ethnic segregation through professional networks. Footnote 75
In Venezuela, a hub for Jewish migration from Eastern Europe and other Middle Eastern countries, Moroccan Jews settled more smoothly than Moroccan Muslims might have, also due to their shared cultural background with Jewish immigrants from other parts of the world, who began to organize themselves in new communal frameworks. A fascinating case of such a Jewish melting pot outside of Israel was the local Jewish school opened in 1946 with the Hebrew name Herzl-Bialik (also known as Moral y Luces in Spanish, meaning “morals and enlightenment”). As the Hebrew name implied, the common ground unifying the Jewish community in Venezuela beginning in the 1940s was broadly based on a shared Zionist orientation, reflected through the establishment of new institutions. B'nai B'rith and the local branch of the Zionist Federation in Caracas became key fixtures in local Jewish communal life.Footnote 76
THE FORMATIVE YEARS OF ALIYAH NETWORKS
As mentioned in the introduction, mesostructures are the frameworks within which individuals understand and grapple with the constraints of their broader social environment, and through which those environments are jointly reproduced. The theory of cumulative causation further illuminates how the analysis of mesostructures can enhance the study of migration. Once emigration has begun, the theory goes, its causes are cumulative, with each decision and act of migration altering the social context within which subsequent migration decisions are understood and made. By imparting cumulative experiences that shape individuals’ decisions over the course of the migratory experience, they gradually transform migration into an acceptable, and predictable, form of behavior with cultural value; in other words, they create a migration culture.Footnote 77 The multiplicity of migration choices that slowed the development of immigration from northern Morocco to Israel calls out for such an analysis.
Immigration to Venezuela, like other typical Jewish migration destinations in the mid-20th century, shaped the social progression of immigration to Israel by influencing networking patterns, as illustrated by the following personal accounts. Yaacov was fifteen years old when he immigrated to Israel from Tetouan in 1950. His father was a Hebrew teacher who brought home his students’ homework and established a reading room that he furnished with written material on Israel and Zionism in Spanish, French, and Hebrew. Yaacov spent time in this reading room, where he learned to read Hebrew. In this way, Yaacov became more attuned to references to Israel when he encountered them.
By 1950, the personal networks linking Yaacov to the evolving immigration program organized by the Israeli state had expanded significantly. Two of his first cousins, sons of his father's sister, who once lived nearby, left for Tangier to apply to emigrate at the recently established Aliyah Office operated by the Jewish Agency.Footnote 78 The following year, three of Yaacov's other cousins applied there. As additional institutions devoted to Jewish migration to Israel emerged, Yaacovʼs parents likely became more approving of the idea of their son joining his cousins in Tangier. These events coincided with yet another change in Yaacov's migration network. Until 1948, Yaacov had an aunt and an uncle in Buenos Aires (who sent him magazines that fueled his imagination about life in that country). However, in 1948 they returned to Tetouan due to financial difficulties they experienced in Argentina.Footnote 79
Alberto was a distant relative of Yaacov's who in 1950 played a key role in his immigration process. Alberto and Yaacov strengthened their kinship when they met at the Aliyah Office in Tangier. Alberto was the secretary of the new branch of the French Zionist Federation in Tangier established by a local group of Zionist activists in that city. He also worked as a Hebrew teacher for the local AIU School, and was particularly active in BAHAD (the Hebrew acronym for Brit Halutsim Datiyim, or the Alliance of Religious Pioneers), a Zionist youth movement that constituted a religiously oriented alternative to Tangier's more secular youth movements.
Alberto was among the local Jews of Tangier who were greatly influenced by the post-1948 delegitimization of Zionist activities in Morocco. At the time, much of his daily routine revolved around contacts with potential immigrants to Israel from across northern Morocco. Yet Alberto was a Venezuelan national whose father and siblings had already lived in that country for several years. In 1951 Alberto used his Venezuelan passport to exit Morocco and visit Israel as a tourist. In April, 1952 his first son was born. In the same year he registered him as a Venezuelan citizen at the Venezuelan Consulate in Tangier.Footnote 80 With the help of a few relatives there, Alberto found a job as a Hebrew teacher at the aforementioned Herzl-Bialik school in Caracas. In other words, the outcome of Alberto's migration process as a Zionist activist was not predictable. In the Jewish migration hub of Caracas, he reestablished his Zionism-oriented career, encouraging Jews who stayed in Morocco to sustain immigration to Israel, as revealed by his correspondence with Reuben Benoliel, his former student at the AIU and a member of the BAHAD movement in Tangier.
In a letter dispatched sometime between late 1954 and 1955, Alberto informs Reuben about his new job as a Hebrew teacher at Caracas's Herzl-Bialik school. Reuben's response, dated 20 April 1955, shows the devoted aliyah agent and BAHAD member using his Zionist connection with Alberto to ask about an employment opportunity at the school in Venezuela. Reuben eventually immigrated to Israel in 1962, following a group visit to the country in 1954 (see Figure 1). The tour was guided by the aforementioned Yaacov from Tetouan, whom Alberto had introduced to the BAHAD movement in 1949.Footnote 81 Reuben wrote his first letter to Alberto following his 1954 trip on 16 September 1954, praising Yaacov as a talented tour guide in Israel. He received a response dated 2 November 1954 (see Figure 2).Footnote 82
Members of BAHAD meeting with David Ben-Gurion during their group trip to Israel, 1954. Reuben Benoliel is in the second row, second from the right; in front of him is Yaacov Bentolila (both men are wearing sunglasses).
A letter in Hebrew dated 2 November 1954 sent by Alberto Moreno (Caracas) to Reuben Benoliel (Tangier) following Reuben's 1954 trip to Israel.
At the time, Alberto also corresponded with other friends and family members. One of them was Rebecca, a young woman from Tetouan who was a member of the BAHAD movement prior to her emigration to Venezuela in 1956.Footnote 83 She was the cousin of Alberto's new wife. Her eventual arrival in Venezuela was, among other factors, an outcome of her changing interpersonal networks, indirectly influenced by Alberto's marriage to her cousin.
THE FULLER INCORPORATION OF ISRAEL INTO THE WEB
Understanding variation in individual migration outcomes requires an analysis of the interplay between micro and macro political and nationalist factors, particularly as the small northern Moroccan Jewish network began to change during the 1960s. Consider the following illustration.
Alegría lived in Tangier until age thirty-five, when she emigrated to the United States with her husband and young daughters. Her mother had joined Alegríaʼs sister in Israel a few months before that.Footnote 84 Viewed through the lens of a simple migration networks theory, the fact that Alegría's husband had found a job in the United States expanded her household migration opportunities. Her migration was, at face value, unrelated to the ongoing effort by Israel to evacuate Moroccan Jews. Nevertheless, Alegría's networks were tied to a much wider Jewish emigration web that was influenced directly and indirectly by Israel's policies on immigration.
In 1943, as a fifteen-year-old girl, she wrote in her personal diary after coming across a few Zionist publications in her aunt's house: “I have just read a fantastic book, Quand Israel Rentre Chez Soi [When Israel Comes Home]…. Thanks to this book, I know where I should apply my efforts… before all I must learn Hebrew…. Maybe a Jewish nation will rise, a country.”Footnote 85 By the late 1940s, when the Zionist activities that brought about the first waves of immigration to Israel from Tangier had just begun to evolve, the influence of the ideas favoring immigration to Israel that circulated through Alegría's social networks had grown weaker. In her memoir, she wrote, “[A few years later, as I became older,] instead of attending Hebrew classes and Zionist meetings, I let my sisters go by themselves, so I could meet my sweetheart….”Footnote 86
Nonetheless, the personal circumstances leading to Alegría's emigration to the United States in 1963 influenced, albeit indirectly, the success of Operation Yakhin. By leaving Morocco with her entire household and moving to the US, Alegría helped undermine the delicate balance of the Jewish web in Tangier by contributing to the decrease of the Jewish population of Tangier that influenced the entire community.
Claire was a ten-year-old Jewish girl who lived close to Alegría in Tangier. Claire immigrated to Israel, accompanied by her sister, in October 1964, ten months after Alegría had left Morocco for the United States with her husband and young daughters. By pulling her children out of the local Jewish school when she emigrated, Alegría, who was not necessarily familiar with Claire, indirectly influenced the decision of Claire's parents to leave. In the broader context, between 1961 and 1963, 153 Jewish children between the ages of three and ten left Tangier and its outskirts for Israel. Each of these migration decisions influenced the subsequent one, contributing to a feedback loop in which decisions to migrate to Israel, as to other locations, were interconnected.
Altogether, in 1962, 693 migrants traveling from northern Morocco to Israel were recorded. In 1971, that figure was 113, almost six times smaller. However, together with those that had preceded them over the prior decade, the 113 departures had a stronger impact on potential immigrants than the 693 in 1962. During the 1960s and early 1970s, the immigrant population in Israel had expanded to encompass at least 3,625 people documented to have utilized the services of the Jewish Agency in northern Morocco to facilitate their move to Israel.
The cumulative causation of migration to Israel by specific occupational groups changed the nature of the country's appeal among northern Morrocan Jews in such a way that those who had more to “lose” from immigrating to Israel in the early 1960s would nevertheless move there in the following years. Over the three years of Operation Yakhin, the majority of immigrants to Israel were artisans and traders, whereas only a small number of skilled workers with professional backgrounds came to Israel. This was in contrast to the number of clerks, which amounted to just nine between 1961 and 1964, but which by 1972 had increased to seventy-two. Eventually, northern Morocco produced the highest ratio of wage earners among immigrants to Israel in the entire country—1 for every 4.5 immigrants.Footnote 87 The population of immigrants to Israel from northern Morocco included the highest percentage of white-collar professionals (28.6%), whereas the national average was only 17.6 percent.Footnote 88 This population belonged to a wealthier economic class that scholars commonly associate with cost-effective emigration to the West, rather than with aliyah.
In 1968, Reina graduated from the American School of Tangier. At a time when she was beginning to think about her future in Morocco, some of her relatives moved to Gibraltar and two of her friends left for France to pursue higher education. Those friends would play a major role in Reina's decision to immigrate to Israel that year. During their visit to Tangier in the summer of 1968, they mentioned the Oded movement, a group established in 1963 by North African Jewish students in France who wished to continue their postsecondary studies in Israel. Hoping to attract educated immigrants, the Jewish Agency offered Oded members full stipends as long as they committed to staying in Israel for at least five years after graduating. By January 1967, 250 students had emigrated to Israel in that manner.Footnote 89 In 1968, Reina and her younger sister contacted the Jewish Agency about emigrating as part of the Oded group, doing so over the objections of their parents, who would end up joining them in Israel several years later.Footnote 90
The fact that migrants were drawn to Israel by individual occupational ties and opportunities, rather than migrating as part of a household, resulted in the separation of families, some of which were later reunified as migration evolved. During the decade between late 1961 and 1972, the ratio of unaccompanied immigrants to Israel from the northern region of Morocco was the highest in the country: 1 for every 3.45 persons left unified households, as compared to 1 for every 5.4 persons migrating within household units across Morocco.Footnote 91 In 1971, as immigration evolved, the ratio was 1 unaccompanied immigrant for every 1.08 households.
This local propensity reflected the evolving local migration culture. Northern Moroccan Jews were drawn toward Israel more than ever before, regardless of their economic background, age, or previous Zionist orientation. Interpersonal networks were crucial factors shaping local cultural and individual choices of migration. From this perspective, it is clear why the number of immigrants to Israel between 1965 and 1971, after the state-led Operation Yakhin ended, was more than double that of their number during the operation itself.Footnote 92
CONCLUSION
We do not seek to diminish the importance of these population displacements; on the contrary, they form a significant part of the region's history. But to focus exclusively upon them, at the expense of other modes and moments of movement, can lead us to construe the migrations of the Middle East's inhabitants as little more than trails of suffering, and relegate the region to a zone of perennial discord and disarray, outside the bounds of a broader history of global processes…. The Middle East, under this angle [global migration] is [rather] less a clear territorial package than a set of networks holding together, and held together by people and things, places and practices.Footnote 93
This passage by Andrew Arsan, John Karam, and Akram Khater, from their introduction to the first issue of Mahjar & Mashriq: Journal of Middle East Migration Studies, encapsulates the basic thesis I have attempted to demonstrate. This article has treated questions of variation in the evolution of migratory processes that are rarely addressed by the politically oriented, regionally rooted scholarship on post-1948 Jewish emigration from Arab lands. The latter treats such migrations as large-scale national “political displacements” stemming directly from the Arab-Israeli conflict and Israel's and Arab states’ policies, and renders them exceptional. I provide an alternative by shedding new light on the evolving interpersonal and institutional networks that shaped immigration to Israel from the bottom up, through the accumulation of unpredictable human interactions. These networks evolved across regional nation-states in the context of Israel's and Morocco's policies on Jewish migration.
After 1948, a new generation of Jews born in northern Morocco around the 1930s enjoyed an additional, ethnically exclusive migration option that was controlled by the state of Israel and the Moroccan government. Yet Israel, common destinations in Europe and the Americas, and specific areas in Morocco itself became interconnected nodes in a communal migration web that had already begun to evolve among the Jews of northern Morocco in the 19th century and dramatically changed as immigration to Israel commenced after 1948. The same social forces said to hasten migration to Israel can also be seen as hampering migration to Israel insofar as individuals were simultaneously networked to a variety of immigration destinations. An instructive example is migration to Venezuela, which became a major destination for Moroccan Jews, including Zionist activists.
Until the mid-1960s, migration networks to Israel from northern Morocco were still underdeveloped in social terms, yielding unstable migratory outcomes. Throughout the 1960s, as shown, the cumulative power of immigration to Israel would alter the appeal of Israel in the eyes of many Jews in northern Morocco and increase the number of migrants to Israel, as the global migration web of that community evolved.
In closing, although the case of northern Morocco certainly has unique characteristics, the local history described above exists within a broader context of Jewish and non-Jewish migration. This particular history draws our attention to the role of networks of varying complexity in setting the pace of immigration to Israel from different countries in the MENA region, as viewed against the backdrop of diverse state immigration policies. It thus challenges existing scholarship on Jewish migration to Israel by bringing it into conversation with current theories of global migration that are more prominent outside of Jewish and Middle Eastern studies. By focusing on individuals and the web of connections they forge across time and space, fresh theoretical thinking can dispense with the strict regional and disciplinary boundaries and the ideologically loaded dichotomies (e.g., Zionist/non-Zionist) that have previously shaped the study of migration to Israel from Arab Muslim countries.
