In the ongoing debate over how morally the leaders of the Zion­ist movement acted when facing the challenges of establishing the State of Israel, one of the most contentious issues has been the treatment of Jews from Islamic countries in the years leading up to, and just after, statehood.

Two extreme views have dominated the debate. The first, which we may call the “egalitarian” approach, is that the Zionist movement, the Jewish Agency, and later the State of Israel treated Sephardi Jewry in a manner that was altogether consistent with the ideals of egalitarianism and mutual respect. Zionism, the argument goes, was a unifying national movement, which taught that the diverse Jewish communities should be seen as parts of a greater whole—and which therefore placed Jewish solidarity among its highest aims. The clear social and economic disparities that emerged between Ashkenazim and Sephardim in Israel over the years resulted not from systematic discrimination, but rather from the great cultural and educational differences between new immigrants and veterans, and between Jews who arrived from Europe and those who came from Asia and North Africa. Adherents of this approach point to the educational and eco­nomic background of the Ashkenazi immigrants, which enabled them to integrate far more effectively into an Israeli society that was essentially modern and Western.

This view, which once dominated the social sciences in Israel, has fallen out of fashion in recent years, due in large part to the trend among Israeli scholars toward adopting a harshly critical attitude to Zionist history; though traces of it can still be found, the solidarity approach is clearly the odd man out in the academy today.

The competing view, which we may call the “exploitative” approach, sees Zionism as a colonialist enterprise in which contempt for Sephardic culture was inherent. This view draws a parallel between the sense of superiority the Zionists felt toward the local Arabs, who were treated like primitive natives, and their attitude toward the Jews from Arab lands. The absorption of Sephardim in Israel, the argument goes, was not a matter of national identification but one of economic exploitation: The country needed a labor force to facilitate its transition to an industrial economy in the 1950s, and Jews from Arab lands were brought to the country to serve this purpose. The inferior status of Sephardi Jews in Israel today is therefore the result of a deliberate effort by the Zionist movement to relegate them to the lower rungs of the societal ladder in Israel. This view, which found its first academic expression in Shlomo Swirsky’s 1981 book, Not Weak But Weakened,enjoyed great popularity during the 1980s and 1990s and emerged as the dominant view among sociologists in Israel.

The more radical expressions of this approach tend to be anti-Zionist in tone. A salient example is Ella Shohat’s tellingly titled essay “Zionism from the Viewpoint of Its Jewish Victims,” which appears in her new book, Forbidden Memories. There she accuses “European Zionism” of “a multidimensional (exploitative) scheme of enormous proportions aimed at destroying the self-confidence and annihilating the culture” of Sephardi Jews. Sammy Shalom Sheetrit, an outspoken proponent of this view, has asserted in The Ashkenazic Revolution Is Dead (1999) that Jews who immigrated to Israel from Islamic countries actually were worse off for the move, because “in truth, in no Arab or Eastern country did Sephardic Jews suffer personal humiliation and cultural oppression comparable to what they suffered, and continue to suffer, from their European brethren.”

It is the uncompromising nature of these two approaches that makes Yaron Tzur’s new book, A Torn Community: The Jews of Morocco and Nationalism, 1943-1954, a fresh and important contribution to the debate. Employing a wealth of sources, Tzur documents in detail the changes that took place within the Jewish community of Morocco during the middle of the twentieth century due to the influence of Zionism and other nationalist ideas. In sharp contrast to the highly politicized, one-dimensional discourse that has prevailed until now, Tzur employs elements of both approaches to offer a more balanced, and better reasoned, account. His book is therefore likely to have a major impact on the way we understand one of the most sensitive chapters in Israel’s history.

 

Three different national identities competed for the allegiance of Moroccan Jewry in the 1940s: Identification with the French-speaking world, Moroccan nationalism, and Zionism. In describing these movements, Tzur debunks the romantic myth of a “golden age” which the Jews in Muslim countries enjoyed in the years prior to their emigration to Israel, according to which life under Islam was characterized by cooperation and harmony between Jews and Muslims, which would have continued if not for the disruptive force of European-inspired Jewish nationalism. In fact, the truth was very different: Although Tzur is careful to avoid portraying the relationship between Muslims and Jews in Morocco in too harsh a light, it is clear from his account that relations were frequently tense and occasionally belligerent, stemming mostly from the different ways that Jewish and Islamic traditions viewed the status of the Jewish minority—a tension that was exacerbated by the spread of modern European ideas in the first half of the century.

In the eyes of the Muslims, the Jews were dhimmis,“protected peoples, obligated to complete submission to the Muslims.”When the Jews began to make substantive social and economic gains under French rule, the Muslim majority became increasingly incensed. Their resentment was further kindled by the growing support for Zionism among Moroccan Jewry, as well as news of violent clashes between Jews and Arabs in Palestine. The result was systematic incitement and assaults on Jews in Morocco, including rioting, such as the attacks on the towns of Ujdah and Jarrada in 1948, in which 41 Jews were murdered and many more injured, and homes and other property destroyed.

But it was not only the Muslims who viewed the Jewish minority in Morocco as living a separate historical existence: Traditional Jews living in that country considered their life there to be punishment for the sins of the Chosen People, and longed for the day God would redeem them “in an act that would prove their superiority over the gentiles.” Few Jews in Morocco felt any real loyalty to, or sense of common purpose with, their Muslim neighbors. In the eyes of the Jews, writes Tzur, “this was not the land of their own religious community, but of members of a separate, competing Muslim community. In their religious imagination, the Judean kingdom and the land of Israel aroused deeper longings, and touched more deeply on their own identity, than did their actual country of birth.”

Moreover, the penetration of modern Western culture into Morocco further divided Jews and Muslims. The Alliance Israelite Universelle educational network, which was established by French Jews and spread throughout North Africa from the second half of the nineteenth century and on, played a crucial role. The Alliance’s network in Morocco, which in the 1940s comprised 46 schools in 32 cities and towns, offered Jewish students a Western education and promoted Western values, while sharpening their feelings of alienation from Muslim society. “French Jewry embarked on a cultural enterprise that distanced Moroccan Jewish pupils from their traditional identity,” Tzur writes, “while the attitudes they cultivated in their students toward the majority society were in fact the opposite of those implied by the model [of integration] to which they themselves subscribed.” Indeed, whereas in Europe the Enlightenment had meant a lowering of barriers between Jews and the non-Jewish world, in Morocco the result was quite the reverse: Enlightenment ideas did not lead Jews to seek integration into Muslim society—which they perceived as backward—but rather to find a way to become a part of French civilization, which they saw as progressive.

The only significant exception to the trend separating Jews and Muslims in Morocco was the Moroccan nationalist movement, which emerged in the 1930s and stressed the idea of a unified nation that Arabs, Berbers, and Jews were to be partners in building. In this spirit, the Independence Party (al-astaqlal), founded in 1943, tried to win the support of Jews by offering a party platform that promised them complete equality, such that “they will no longer be Moroccan Jews, but simply Moroccans.” But the Islamic overtones of Moroccan nationalism, which centered on the figure of the sultan, along with its support of the Arab struggle against the Jews in Palestine, made it difficult for local Jews to find their home in this movement.