American Jewish History

In 1974, Maurice Elmaleh arrived in Montreal from Morocco and a year later started working at the Centre Hillel Francophone with "a good number" of other recently immigrated Moroccan Jews. The Centre Hillel Francophone had been founded in 1972 to regroup Montreal's Francophone Jewish students at the Université de Montréal and became, like many other student groups in the politically charged atmosphere of the 1960s and 1970s, a locus for radical streams of discussion and activism. Regarding his experience at the center in the 1970s, Elmaleh wrote in 2009:

There was the Kippur War, the Greater Israel Movement was gaining speed with the development of colonies in the occupied territories, the election of the Parti Québécois with an overwhelming majority. […] It was in this context that we had to define our Sephardi identity, reckon with our integration in Canada and particularly in Quebec. A parallel challenge, in no way lesser, is and will continue to be our solidarity with Israel, all while denouncing the social and economic situation of Israelis of Moroccan origin who suffer profound discrimination in that country. This without counting all the debates about Peace with the Palestinians¹

Elmaleh's associations raise a number of important questions connecting several categories of belonging—national, transnational, ethnic, colonial, and personal. Elmaleh's experience cut across all of these categories, but the relationships between them are at first unclear. How did the election of the Parti Québécois, a nationalist, separatist party in Canada's Francophone province, Quebec, relate to wars in which Israel was implicated abroad, to Israel's negotiation with Palestinians, or to discrimination against Moroccan Jews in Israel? How did any of these relate to Moroccan Jews' struggle to integrate in Canada, and why "particularly Quebec"? Finally, what did any of these have to do with [End Page 659] "defining" Sephardi identity in Montreal? Looking at the interconnectivity between local and global developments that affected Moroccan Jews on the move, this article will seek to offer answers to these questions and provide a new perspective on a diaspora in the making.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Canada became a major hub for Moroccan Jewish immigration during a moment characterized by global decolonization, nationalism, and the subsequent movements to reaffirm ethnic identities. Moroccan Jews in Canada, as in France and South America, wrestled with the boundaries of their postcolonial identities. Some adopted the moniker "Sephardi" to describe themselves, while many Moroccans in Israel were labeled by academics and state officials, or came to identify, as "Edoth Ha-Mizrah" and later "Mizrahim," literally translated as "Communities of the East" and "Easterners," respectively. In the Canadian province of Quebec, as in France, French became a crucial marker of Moroccan Jews' Sephardi identity² The atmosphere of Quebecois nationalism and decolonial agitation, along with the broader Montreal Jewish community's entanglements with Canada's colonial and linguistic legacy, however, shaped the particularities of this case³ Elsewhere, Moroccan Jewish diaspora communities that identified themselves as "Sephardi" adhered to their own regional influences; these include, among other cases, the long-lasting Spanish colonial discourse that imagined Judeo-Spanish speaking Jews as a part of the Spanish diaspora, as well as those seeking to repudiate the negative implications of being labelled "Eastern" in Israel⁴

The field of Moroccan Jewish history has recently received scholarly attention from researchers seeking to problematize accounts of Moroccan Jews' emigration by focusing on the construction of diasporic networks [End Page 660] and identities⁵ Approximately ten thousand North African Jews migrated to Canada by 1980, the vast majority of them Moroccans⁶ While several studies have detailed important aspects of Moroccan Jewish identity construction in Quebec, these have often stressed the local context⁷ Similarly, works that focus on the Israeli context tend to do so in isolation despite the importance of transnational diaspora networks in constructing systems of belonging.

The social sciences in Israel, like the wider field of critical postcolonial theory, tends to privilege universal models. These models have often sought to situate Mizrahi identities and struggles in the context...