Suchergebnisse

AbstractThe post-1948 mass migration of Jews from Arab Muslim countries to Israel is widely seen by scholars as a direct result of decolonization and rising nationalism across the Middle East and North Africa, coupled with the emigration and immigration policies of regional powers. In this article I draw on local histories of northern Morocco to critique the existing literature. I apply new methods to reconceptualize that migratory experience as shaped by social and cultural processes, albeit ones that interacted with nationalist state policies. I provide a multilayered macro- and microanalysis of the process of Jewish emigration from northern Morocco and point to the transregional, interpersonal, communal, and institutional networks that jointly shaped the dynamic character and pace of migration to Israel (and to Europe and the Americas) among local Jews.

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.

AbstractBetween 1948 and 1956, 36,302 Jews migrated from Turkey to Israel, forming the largest Turkish diaspora hub at that time. Drawing on the nine newspapers published by Turkish Jews in Israel in their vernacular, Ladino (Judeo‐Spanish), this article sheds light on the complex nature of the migrants' transnational affinity to the Turkish Republic and on how it coexisted with their Jewish nationalism. In addition to situating this development within the broader context of post‐WWII Turkish transnationalism, we also delineate their unique historic status as ethnic Jewish communities or millet. Examining the post‐Ottoman era, we show how they leveraged their political, commercial and leisure‐related ties with Turkey—deemed more developed in those terms than Israel—to empower themselves as an ethnic community and to facilitate their integration into the Jewish state. In so doing, this study bridges some of the gaps in the analyses of Muslim and non‐Muslim migrations, and it suggests that we rethink the languages used to explore Turkish transnationalism as well as its geographical borders and underlying characteristics.