Beneficiaries and Benefactors: the Refugee Crisis and Moroccan Safe Haven

• In Event: Critical Crossroads: Jewish Responses and Experiences during the Refugee Crises of the Twentieth Century

Abstract

The 1930s played an important role in the development of Moroccan Jewish political affinities as well as the development of a trans-national Jewish philanthropic consciousness. For the first time, Moroccan Jews served as benefactors rather than beneficiaries. This paper addresses the Jewish refugee crisis in Morocco prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. European Jewish refugees began streaming into Morocco from the middle of the 1930s onward; they came from a variety of backgrounds. In addition to European Jews seeking passage to the Americas, European Jews who had fought in the Spanish Civil War also sought safe haven in Morocco after Franco's forces proved victorious. This paper discusses the variety of Jewish refugees entering Morocco during the middle-late 1930s and the effect this demographic flux had on local Jewish communities and political developments (notably adherence to leftist movements as well as Zionism), as well as on Moroccan Jewish institutions. Through documents from the Moroccan French protectorate offices, the French Communist Party, the Jewish Agency, the Joint Distribution Committee, local newspapers, private papers, oral histories and memoires, this paper contributes an examination of a hitherto neglected sphere of the 1930s refugee crisis – Morocco. Historians have pursued work on Jewish refugees from Central and Eastern Europe in Western Europe and the Americas, but little has been done concerning the colonial holdings of Western European nations. The ports of Tangier and Casablanca welcomed many refugees – Jews and non-Jews alike. This paper argues that the refugees that disembarked in Morocco played a significant role in the development of Jewish political debates and activism from the 1930s onward. While Jews in Morocco (European and indigenous) would suffer acutely under the Vichy regime, the political realignment following a feeling of betrayal by France and its republican ideals in wartime, for Jews and for the Moroccan nationalist movement more broadly, has roots in the 1930s. In addition to these demographic and ideological fluctuations, Moroccan Jewish institutions were pulled ever more into the orbit of global Jewish philanthropic and aid networks, including those in the United States as well as Western Europe.

author

• Alma Rachel Heckman, University of California, Los Angeles