Revisiting Morocco from Israel and Argentina: Contrasting Narratives About the "Trip Back" Among Jewish Immigrants from Northern Morocco

Introduction

And now Muslim Moroccans are foreign to themselves, the exile was created in their country because Morocco without Jews is a Morocco in exile.

The epigraph comes from the novel Gates to Tangier by the Moroccan-Israeli poet, Moís Benarroch.¹ He immigrated to Israel from the city of Tetouan in northern Morocco in 1972. The novel tells the story of four siblings who went on a "trip back": from Israel to their former hometowns in northern Morocco, fulfilling the terms of their father's will. The above quote expresses the deep estrangement felt by these Jewish homecomers,² when faced with what they construed as a rupture between present-day Morocco and its Jewish past. These homecomers did not manage to find a "home" in their former hometowns. They perceived the Muslim inhabitants of Morocco, following the mass emigration of Jews, as "exiles in their own country." The characters in this novel interpret the absence of Jews in Morocco as a historical shift that has turned the country into an unrecognizable place, both for them as Jews who left and for those Muslim Moroccans who stayed behind.³

When first-generation immigrants speak about their visits to their former homeland they often go through an identitary experience that involves an evaluation of their pre-migration past vis-à-vis their post-migration present. Most often this comparison is supported by various narratives that have been created in the process of defining their new ethnic identities in their new places of residence. In other words, the "little journey" of the visit home is conducted within the context of the "big journey" of immigration. When speaking about their trip back to their homeland, homecomers also tend to rationalize their trip—i.e., what happened, how it happened, why it happened the way it did—based on their broader experience of migration and integration into their new country. The social value that their place of origin has in their post-migration lives plays a central role in narratives about the re-encounter with their past.

The "trip back" to Morocco among Jewish Moroccan-born Israelis is not a new topic of research. Our perspective, however, adds to this story by going beyond the trip back per se, and focusing rather on narratives about the trip back to Morocco. Our research was gathered through interviews with (northern) Moroccan Jews who immigrated to Israel and Argentina between the 1950s and the late 1970s.

As will be shown in our analysis, there is a difference between the way these first-generation immigrants narrated and reflected upon their experiences during their trip back per se, and how they narrated and reflected upon their trip back in a formal interview setting, held mostly in their new country of residence.⁴ The questions that have oriented this work were: Is there a fundamental difference between the contents of the narratives expressed by our interviewees (when in their new homes in Argentina and Israel) in relation to their trips back to Morocco? Since we found this was the case, we then posed the next question: Is there a relationship between those differences and the social value of being Moroccan in the post-migration scenarios, i.e., in their new homes in Israel and Argentina? The aim of this paper is to show the nature and evolution of that relationship.

We approach the "trip back" as a topic that is used as part of a wider strategy of self-representation in each setting. The trip back to Morocco as a topic within autobiographical narratives might trigger stories rich in evocative and colorful images of a re-encountered past in one's homeland, where traces of one's own childhood are uncovered. On the other hand, as we saw in Benarroch's novel, the trip back might also trigger narratives of alienation, disappointment, and a general feeling of discomfort or even fear.⁵ We aim to show the differences, in both content and form, between Israeli and Argentine narratives and their dependence...