Moroccan Jewry Meets Global Jewry; The Moroccan Delegation at the World Jewish Congress of 1944

• In Event: The Joint Distribution Committee and the Jewish Communities of North Africa: A Burgeoning Field of New Research

Abstract

During the war years of 1939-1945, and with the help and guidance of international donor agencies such as the AJDC, the Moroccan Jewish community for the first time developed international networks that allowed it to respond forcefully to challenges such as the mass influx of European refugees, deteriorating economic conditions, and prejudicial race laws that threatened to undermine its economic and social well-being. In this presentation, I will show how Moroccan Jewish intellectuals, in coordination with their new global partners, took the lead in countering those threats by deploying new concepts of individual freedom and human rights outside the framework of statist solutions encrusted in a dying French colonialism. A key moment for airing these new ideas was the WJC War Emergency Conference held in Atlantic City in November, 1944, when the Moroccan delegation took a leading role in calling for a rehabilitation of communities of the "Arab East. " Together with their new American allies, Moroccan Jewish leaders set forth a programmatic agenda for relief, education, and ultimately, exodus based on a consciousness of the dignity of the individual. In this paper, I argue that the rapid evolution in Moroccan Jewish thinking would not have been possible without an exposure to global discourses of equality and self-determination that matured during the war years in documents such as the Atlantic Charter and in the post-war Declaration of Human Rights. The papers of Hélène Cazès Benatar at the USHMM (RG 68.115), the AJDC archives in New York and Jerusalem, the French Protectorate archives at Nantes (CADN), and the archives of the CJDC in Paris provide documentary evidence to substantiate these claims.

Author

• Susan Gilson Miller