Remembering the Departure of Moroccan Jews

Abstract

Nakita S. Valerio, 2017 “Remembering the Departure of Moroccan Jews” Before the end of the Second World War, Morocco’s Jewish community numbered approximately 240,000 people and was one of the largest and oldest populations of Jews in the Arab-Muslim world. Between 1948 and 1968, the vast majority of the Jewish population left the country. As a narrative, the plotline of their departure seems straight-forward: a large group of people who came to see themselves as belonging to one another lived in Morocco and then, over a period of two decades, almost all of them left. It is the question of why they left which gives rise to a multiplicity of competing memories, expressed in three main theatres: the historiography, the testimonies of émigrés themselves, and popular performative media. The main question this thesis answers is how the causality of the departure of Moroccan Jews is remembered in these three domains, as well as how they reference and respond to one another, and why this is the case. This thesis shows that, across these domains, there are seven main narrative forms about the departure and that each of these forms is, most importantly, accompanied by a prelude and a post-script which inform the basic narrative of the cause of the departure in different ways. By examining who remembers what, according to the discursive, ideological environments in which these memories are formed, as well as what is diminished or silenced in each of these memories, this study contributes to a growing body of research on the effect of the contemporary moment on historical memory and popular commemoration.