From Morocco to Canada and the United States: Jewish Migrants in Post-Colonial Perspective

• In Event: Storied Journeys: Recovering Agency in Narratives of MENA Jewish Migration

Abstract

For migrants whose histories are part of charged historical and geo-political conflicts, the question of whether their departures were “forced” or “chosen” can be a thorny one. Jewish out-migration from the Muslim world after 1948 provides one such example. These departures have generally been understood through a political framework as a direct consequence of decolonization, Arab nationalism and the creation of the state of Israel. My forthcoming book, Crossing Borders, Shifting Identities: Oral Histories of Jewish Migration from the Muslim World to Canada, France and the United States, draws on seventy interviews with Jewish migrants from across the Middle East and North Africa to demonstrate the limits of politicized meta-narratives in explaining their departures. This emigratory wave, my evidence suggests, is best understood within the framework of a global phenomenon of accelerated, post-colonial international migration that began in the decades following WWII. Political pressure points combined with long range economic, cultural, and educational forces simultaneously pushed and pulled Jewish populations from their ancestral homes in the Muslim world towards Israel, Europe, the Americas and beyond over the course of several decades. More often than not, these individuals exercised considerably agency in making emigration choices. In this paper, I will explore these questions through a presentation of the emigration narratives of my interviewees from Morocco who resettled in Los Angeles and Montreal between the late 1940s and the mid-1970s. In analyzing the ways in which they narrate their departures, I will pay particular attention to how their framings have been shaped through the lens of the particularities of the social, cultural and political contexts of the United States and Canada (and in particular Montreal/Quebec) respectively. I will also consider the role of widely circulating, transnational meta-narratives emanating from Israel and elsewhere in influencing how these individuals make sense of their individual and collective past.

Author

• Nadia Malinovich, Université de Picardie/ EPHE (Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes)