This study by André Levy, an anthropologist at Ben-Gurion University, both grows out of and constitutes a journey. It features stations at which the reader is asked to stop, consider the scene, and think. It reveals aspects of life in Morocco (which had been the author's home until the age of five) while it also considers the lives of Jewish people there, the metropolis of Casablanca, dilemmas of Israeli society, and the discipline of anthropology.

The itinerary in the volume is not linear. It begins with the author's trip to Morocco after beginning anthropology studies, then Chapter Two returns to the late nineteenth century and to the writings of Yizhak Ben Yais Halevi, a resident of Essaouira, Morocco, who was influenced both by growing European economic and cultural penetration and the Hebrew haskalah – enlightenment – movement originating in central Europe more than a century earlier. Like Levy, Halevi was a keen observer of his society. Endowed with a critical perspective and wide-ranging interests, he supplied detailed accounts of many subjects while pointing to larger questions that they raised.

The themes in the book may first appear to be scattered, but for those committed to the journey they steadily gain coherence. The book's integration emerges from the experiences of approximately half a million people who, in the second half of the twentieth century, emigrated from the Middle East and North Africa to Israel, while large numbers of Jews also left the region for other lands. In the mid-twentieth century, Morocco was home to a quarter of a million Jews, which was then the largest concentration of Jewish peoples in the larger Middle East and North African region. In the 1980s, Moroccan King Hassan II invited Israelis who were born in Morocco to come back and visit. This provided the occasion for Levy's first anthropological trip to the country. Some of his experiences evolved into central lines of inquiry of which this review provides only a glimpse.

Jewish life in Morocco has long had its inner tensions and incongruities. Some merchants thrived economically and even benefited from aspects of colonial rule, but their political vulnerability as a minority remained. Jews were intimately familiar with and attached to their surroundings, but simultaneously alienated from major cultural features and symbols like knowledge of literary Arabic. For those emigrating in the 1950 and 1960s, their visit back in the late 1980s was charged with strong yet amorphous expectations. Their warm nostalgia for home was jarred by the dominant Arab presence they encountered in their former neighborhoods. With some irony, one man who participated on the trip declared to Levy: ‘What did I think I was going to find here – Chinese?’ (174). For many participants in the trip that combined tourism, pilgrimage, and a search for roots, they ended up discovering how Israeli they had become.

Levy delves into what an earlier generation of Israeli anthropologists labeled ‘the predicament of homecoming’.Footnote ² Levy's elaboration turns to broad questions arising from research on ‘homelands’ and ‘diasporas’. The story of Jews from Morocco shows the inadequacy of what he designates as a ‘solar system model’, a simple image based on a clear dichotomy between lands of dispersion and a longed-for home country. For centuries, it was obvious to Jews in Morocco (as elsewhere) that they resided in the Jewish diaspora, but recent emigration and experiences in Israel made this status more complex. In 1990–1, when less than five thousand Jews resided in Morocco, Levy met a local Jewish woman who assumed that he was passing through the country to acquire papers to obtain a French passport. When Levy explained his intention was instead to continue living in Israel, his interlocutor remarked, ‘That is not a good thing … a man should live in Morocco and die and be buried in Israel’ (147). This comment reflects the view held by many Moroccan Jews that while the Land of Israel was sacred, life was more comfortable in Morocco, which had become a second ‘homeland’ for many Jews who had left it.

Levy's discussion relates to others who have questioned the centrality of Israel – a new political entity – within Jewish life, and more broadly to critical reflections on the nation-state. But the value of this probing study mainly lies not in the theoretical thrusts to which it turns but in the rich ethnography and the dogged insistence on its value as counterpoint to conceptual neatness. In many other considerations of homeland and diaspora, ‘theory’ lies comfortably with ideology, but this study insists upon presenting the complexity that challenged the ethnographer. With all the ambivalent rootedness of Jews in Morocco, ‘the unfolding of Moroccan nationalism did not allow a place for a definition of Jews as a cultural group’ (153). Yet, physical emigration did not leave in its wake clear-cut binaries. Levy shows how dichotomous categories – modern vs static, sacred vs secular, those within vs those without – all need to be interrogated in light of his illuminating findings in the field.