The Incredible Odyssey of the Spanish-Speaking Jews of Northern Morocco

A leading specialist in the history of North African Jewry, Israeli historian and researcher Aviad Moreno—professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and the University of Florida—offers a masterful exploration of the unique journey of the Spanish-speaking Jewish communities of northern Morocco.
His remarkable and deeply researched volume, Entwined Homelands, Empowered Diasporas : Hispanic Moroccan Jews and Their Globalizing Community (Indiana University Press), sheds new light on a chapter of Jewish history that remains little known yet profoundly influential.
Moreno’s family itself hails from Tangier, placing him in direct continuity with the world he studies.
The 30,000 Hispanic Sephardim of northern Morocco—whose descendants today live across six continents—have played a decisive role in reshaping the diasporic identity of Moroccan Jews. Their linguistic, cultural, and migratory trajectories reveal a transnational legacy that continues to resonate far beyond the Mediterranean basin.
This extraordinary work of scholarship and remembrance earned Aviad Moreno a prestigious literary distinction from the National Jewish Book Awards, a testament to the book’s originality and importance.
Aviad Moreno speaks with La Voix sépharade about the heritage, migrations, and enduring vitality of this global Sephardi community.

What motivated you to undertake this extensive research and investigation about the Hispanic Moroccan Jews native to the cities of northern Morocco ?

Growing up in Be’er Sheva in the 1980s, I was surrounded by Moroccan Jewish classmates—nearly 70 percent of the students at my school were from North African backgrounds. Yet my own family’s story about Moroccan migration didn’t quite fit in. My father’s side had emigrated from northern Morocco to Venezuela as early as the 19th century. I was vaguely aware that we had relatives in Spain, the U.S., and Canada, but it wasn’t until I was about nine years old—when we traveled to visit family in Venezuela and the United States—that I truly grasped how different our story was. These relatives struck me at the time as distinctly Moroccan and intriguingly “exotic”; their Hispanic identity didn’t match the image I had of Moroccan Jews in Israel. That mix of Hispanic Moroccan-ness didn’t align with the conventional categories of identity I grew up with in Israel.
But the more I listened to family stories, the more I realized we weren’t as unique as I once thought.

Later, as a student in the Department of Middle East Studies, I began to uncover how many Jewish migration paths from the MENA region defied the generic (and state-centered) narrative of mass immigration from Muslim lands to Israel. These weren’t just stories of epic “return” or dramatic rescue missions orchestrated by the Israeli state. Many Jews left their MENA countries as early as the 19th century. Others left for Canada or France and only from those countries did they eventually arrive in Israel; still others moved to Israel and later resettled in places like Canada or Latin America.
As I delved deeper into academic research, I discovered that the transnational journeys of Spanish-speaking Moroccan Jews—shaped by layered cultural affiliations and multiple diasporas—had received surprisingly little attention. Their experiences didn’t quite fit even within the most complex academic frameworks that described North African migration through the lens of French colonialism or Arab-Jewish relations.

As I began presenting my story in academic lectures, I came to realize just how fortunate I was to have a family history that not only held academic significance but also sparked genuine curiosity among scholars far beyond the bounds of Middle East or Jewish studies—and that motivated me to continue my research.

How many members of the Jewish Hispanic community of Morocco live today in Israel ?

Precise figures on migration from northern Morocco to Israel remain elusive—even for first-generation migrants—due to the complexity of migration routes and inconsistent documentation. Official statistics, whether from the Jewish Agency or Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, typically recorded the last region or country of departure rather than cultural or ethnic origin. Think, for example, of those from northern Moroccan towns who passed through Casablanca, or lived for years in Spain, France, or Canada before reaching Israel. What about those who intermarried, raising children with only partial northern Moroccan heritage ? By the third generation, ethnic or geographic origins are rarely documented at all.

Nonetheless, some records shed light. We know that between 1961 and 1972 alone, at least 3,625 individuals from the former Spanish Protectorate—towns such as Tangier, Tetouan, Asilah, Larache, Ksar el-Kebir, and Ouezzane—used Jewish Agency services to immigrate to Israel. A glimpse into the number of those who actively chose to identify as Spanish Moroccans in Israel comes from MABAT (a Hebrew acronym for “Reunion of Tangier’s Natives”), a central organization for Jews from Spanish Morocco. Active in the 1980s and early 1990s, MABAT recorded 769 registered members across more than 70 cities.

What best characterizes this Spanish-speaking community ?

The Jews of northern Morocco, like other Moroccan Jews, trace their roots to the Iberian Peninsula, from which they were expelled at the end of the 15th century. But unlike many other Moroccan Jews, they retained a centuries-long connection to Spain—not only culturally, but linguistically. They traditionally spoke Haketia, a Judeo-Spanish dialect that fuses medieval Castilian, Hebrew, and Moroccan Arabic. It emerged following the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 and served for centuries as the mother tongue of Jews living in the northern coastal towns of Morocco—its vast vocabulary and etymology overwhelmingly Spanish.

The colonial encounter between Spain and these Jews was unique: for once, the colonizers and the colonized shared a native tongue. This linguistic affinity shaped a very distinct experience.

In the 19th century, the Jews of northern Morocco emerged as trailblazers in the broader history of Moroccan emigration. As they settled in the Canary Islands, Latin America, and the Caribbean, they were often the sole representatives of Morocco—migrating without Muslim compatriots. This differed sharply from other migration patterns from the Middle East and North Africa to Latin America, which included a wide variety of ethnoreligious groups such as Druze, Armenians, Maronites, and both Sunni and Shiite Muslims.
The migration of northern Moroccan Jews thus resembled aliyah in the sense that it relied on exclusively Jewish networks from Morocco, yet it unfolded entirely outside the Zionist framework and took shape in distinct Latin American contexts. This makes their story particularly intriguing and unique.

Overall, what sets the Hispanic Moroccan Jewish community apart is its remarkable blend of Spanish, Jewish, and North African influences—both ancient and modern—most vividly reflected in Haketia.

My book is one of the first to explore these migrations through the lens of Spanish colonialism and postcolonial experience—rather than through the more familiar narratives tied to French or British influence in North Africa. It invites readers to see Moroccan Jewish migration histories not only through French, Canadian, or Israeli contexts, but as a rich transatlantic journey that crisscrossed empires, languages, and continents.

The cover of your book features a photo of members of your family in Tangier. Can you explain this picture ? In what year was it taken ?

The photograph shows my grandparents in Tangier, standing beside my infant father and his aunt. As a child growing up in Israel, I believed they were dressed in traditional Moroccan attire—a snapshot of our family’s “authentic” past. But while researching for this book, I discovered that the photo was actually taken in the late 1950s in a souvenir shop near the Alhambra Palace in Spain. My family had simply been tourists, passing through on their way from Morocco to Venezuela.

That revelation became a powerful metaphor for my research. It prompted me to ask: could what we often assume to be Moroccan Jewish tradition today actually carry a completely different meaning in its original context? Does our current understanding of “tradition” genuinely reflect the lived realities of most Moroccan Jews in the past? In the book, I attempt to address these questions in various regional and historical settings.

What kind of relationship did the Hispanic Moroccan Jews have with Zionism ?

It’s a very complex story. While many accounts of North African Jewish history portray Zionism as a force that challenged diasporic attachments and led to immigration to Israel, the experience of Hispanic Moroccan Jews suggests otherwise. From as early as 1900, Zionist movements like Shivat Zion in Tetouan and Havaad HaTziyoni in Tangier emerged as some of the first in Morocco. Led by figures such as Rabbi Yehuda León Jalfón, these movements were inspired by modern European Zionism but were also shaped by a distinctly Hispanic lens—one that often saw Spain, alongside Zion, as a lost Jewish homeland.

For example, as I explore in Chapter 4 of the book, Rabbi Jalfón was also a key supporter of the Philo-Sephardi movement—an intellectual and cultural initiative based in Spain that sought to revive the country’s historical ties with Sephardi Jews and reframe Spain as an ancestral homeland for their descendants. This is evident in a series of 89 letters Jalfón exchanged with Manuel Ortega, a prominent advocate of the movement and editor of the Philo-Sephardi bulletin La Revista de la Raza. The movement envisioned a symbolic “reunion” between Spain and Sephardi Jews as a moral and historical response to the 1492 Alhambra Decree.

Under Spanish colonial rule in northern Morocco during the 1920s, this entanglement of Spanish and Sephardi identities also served pragmatic purposes. It made Zionist activities more palatable to the Spanish colonial authorities—who, unlike their French counterparts, were less inclined to view Zionism as politically subversive when framed within a shared Hispanic framework.

As I also demonstrate in Chapter 4, the rise of Zionism in northern Morocco coincided with the expansion of Hispanic Moroccan diasporic networks—particularly to Latin America and to the newly forming hub of northern Moroccan Jews in Casablanca. The first Zionist newspapers in Spanish and Portuguese were established by members of this diaspora. In Casablanca, Moroccan Zionism was established most prominently by Jews from Spanish Morocco such as S. D. Lévy and Yaacov Raphaël Benacerraf. Lévy, an AIU graduate and former principal of the AIU school in Casablanca, became one of the city’s earliest and most influential Zionist organizers. Together with Benacerraf, a wealthy tea merchant and émigré from northern Morocco, Lévy founded the first Zionist group in Casablanca. Their efforts culminated in Lévy’s election as president of the Jewish National Fund and the Magen David Association in 1927, and later as president of the Moroccan branch of the French Zionist Federation.

While many northern Moroccan Jews supported Zionist goals and facilitated aliyah to Israel, the migration patterns of the majority were much more diverse. Fewer than a third chose to settle in Israel ; many others moved to Venezuela, Spain, France, or North America. Still, this complex Zionist orientation endured well into the post-1948 period.
Even in Israel and among those who made aliyah, organizations like MABAT used Zionist symbols—such as planting forests or supporting the Jewish National Fund—not as a rejection of diaspora, but as a continuation of long-standing communal philanthropy. As I show in Chapter 8, Israel was seen as one node among many—part of a broader network that also included cities like Madrid, Caracas, and Montreal.

To summarize, for Hispanic Moroccan Jews, Zionism was not about negating exile, but about empowering diaspora with additional layers of national identity well into the 21st century. Many community leaders continually saw Zionism as a tool for community building that could even align with their strong Moroccan identities.

Was the Hispanic Moroccan Jewish community also part of what was called in the 1970s and 1980s the “Second Israel” ? Did it suffer ethnic discrimination like the non-Hispanic Sephardim from Morocco ?

Yes, members of the Hispanic Moroccan Jewish community also faced discrimination and social marginalization, especially in the early decades of Israeli statehood. They were often stereotyped as belonging to the so-called “backward” communities of the East. In response, some members of the community sought to distinguish themselves from the broader Middle Eastern—and particularly Moroccan—population in Israel by emphasizing their Spanish roots and cultural uniqueness. Many came from middle-class backgrounds and viewed their diasporic connections to Spain (in addition to their modern French identities) as assets that could contribute positively to Israeli society—if only they were treated as equals, similar to immigrants from Western countries.

Their story is not entirely unique. It reflects broader strategies adopted by middle-class Middle Eastern and North African Jews who sought to empower their communities and gain recognition from the Israeli establishment. What is distinctive in this case is the way Hispanic Moroccan Jews drew on both modern and historical Spanish identities to resist being subsumed under the generic “Mizrahi” category. Rather than framing their identity solely in terms of their origins in Muslim-majority countries, they emphasized an ongoing diasporic narrative—one that connected them to Spain, Latin America, France, and beyond, alongside their Moroccan origins.

What were your major discoveries during your research on Spanish-speaking Jews native to the localities of northern Morocco, particularly those of Tangier ?

One of the key discoveries of my research is that what might appear as a simple nostalgic attempt by a local community to revive a fading past and recollect lost worlds is in fact a much more dynamic, complex, and globalized process. The Spanish-speaking Jews from Tangier and other northern Moroccan cities have built new communal identities through border-crossing narratives that connect Spain, South and North America, Israel, Morocco, and beyond. Their nostalgic narratives were actively produced, circulated, and reinterpreted in real time across multiple interconnected diasporic hubs. In cities like Caracas, Montreal, Tel Aviv, or Madrid, leaders developed sister organizations that worked together not only to preserve heritage but also to strategically position the community within broader narratives of Sephardi revival in local Jewish and national contexts.

What I found most striking is how the community mobilized a mythical sense of multiple homelands—Sepharad, Morocco, and the Land of Israel—to make that powerful cohesion work across time and space. While conventional views treat diasporas as tied to one homeland, the Hispanic Moroccan Jewish experience shows how reconnecting to two mythological homelands—Zion and Spain—and maintaining ties to multiple modern homelands can become a source of empowerment among dispersed individuals, not fragmentation.

Haketia is one of the most important linguistic and identity particularities of the Hispanic Moroccan Jewish community. What remains today of this Judeo-language? Is it still transmitted in Israel ?

Many community members in Tangier and Tetouan began transitioning to modern Spanish already in the early 20th century. While this shift enhanced their integration into the broader Hispanophone world, it also accelerated the decline of Haketia as a functional language. Yet, far from disappearing, Haketia began a new life—as a symbol of authenticity, nostalgia, and pride. Today, while Haketia is no longer spoken as a living daily language, its legacy persists across the global diaspora as a symbol of cohesion—directly connected to my response to the previous question.

In Chapter 2, I trace the origins of this process of global diffusion by examining the early collaborations between community leaders and academics who sought to preserve Haketia already in the early 20th century. I recount, for example, the story of Zarita Nahón, a native of Tangier and one of the first Moroccans to graduate from Columbia University, where she studied under Franz Boas, the father of American anthropology. Returning to Tangier in 1929, Nahón conducted pioneering ethnographic fieldwork, documenting Judeo-Spanish ballads and oral traditions that she had first encountered from her own mother. Her work not only preserved these endangered cultural expressions but also marked one of the earliest efforts to frame Haketia as a vital component of Jewish heritage in Morocco—before mass migration had even begun.

In Chapters 6 and 8, as well as in the epilogue, I discuss how cultural leaders in Israel, Spain, Brazil, Venezuela, Canada, and elsewhere began reclaiming the dialect through publications, festivals, and educational programs in the late 20^th century and well into the 21^st.

To address your question : in Israel of the late 1970s and 1980s, the organization MABAT played a pivotal role in reviving interest in Haketia, encouraging immigrants to document memories, songs, and recipes in the dialect. Scholars such as Prof. Yaakov Bentolila and Gladys Pimienta helped frame Haketia as a marker of distinct Hispanic Moroccan identity, even though many community members had not spoken it fluently in Morocco and sometimes considered it archaic. Institutions such as the Gaon Center and the National Authority for Ladino have since continued these efforts, hosting events, producing publications, and integrating Haketia into academic and cultural programming. Haketia persists as a form of cultural heritage—preserved, performed, and reinvented through transnational networks and academic initiatives in Israel and beyond.

The 2015 Spanish citizenship law, enacted as an act of “historical reconciliation” with descendants of Sephardi Jews, played a significant role in reviving interest in Haketia within the Hispanic Moroccan Jewish diaspora. While the law did not distinguish between different Sephardi origins, it encouraged applicants to demonstrate cultural continuity—often through proficiency in Spanish, Ladino, or Haketia. In Israel, academic institutions like the Gaon Center and the Salti Center, which had long championed Ladino studies, became key resources for applicants seeking to prove their heritage.

What is the main legacy of this community ?

The main legacy of the Hispanic Moroccan Jewish community lies in its ability to maintain a layered and transnational identity. They remind us that Jewish history is not linear or confined to a single homeland, but composed of multiple connections—cultural, linguistic, and emotional—that span continents. Their story challenges simplistic distinctions between Sephardi and Mizrahi, East and West, diaspora and homeland. Through their institutions, literature, language, and everyday practices, they have built bridges across time and geography. In doing so, they have preserved a rich heritage that continues to resonate today.