Entwined Homelands, Empowered Diasporas: Hispanic Moroccan Jews and Their Globalizing Community

Entwined Homelands, Empowered Diasporas explores how the 30,000 Jews in northern Morocco developed a sense of kinship with modern Spain, medieval Sepharad, and the broader Hispanophone world that was unlike anything experienced elsewhere. The Hispanic Moroccan Jewish diaspora, as this group is often called by its scholars and its community leaders, also became one of the most mobile and globally dispersed North African groups in the twentieth century, with major hubs in Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Spain, Israel, Canada, France, and the US, among others.

Drawing on an array of communal sources from across this diaspora, Aviad Moreno explores how narratives of ancestry in Spain, Israel, Morocco, and several Latin American countries interconnected the diaspora, empowering its hubs across the globe throughout the twentieth century and beyond.

By investigating these mechanisms of diaspora formation in a small community that once shared the same space in Morocco, Entwined Homelands, Empowered Diasporas challenges national accounts of the broader Jewish diasporas and adds complexity to the annals of multilayered ethnic communities on the move.

Aviad Moreno is a faculty member at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He is the coeditor (with Noah Gerber, Esther Meir-Glizenstein, and Ofer Shiff) of The Long History of the Mizrahim and the author of Europe from Morocco.