Morocco’s Spanish-speaking Jewish minority illuminated in prizewinning book

When Dr. Aviad Moreno was growing up, he sensed that his family was somehow different from the other Israelis from Morocco who surrounded him in Beersheba.

“In the 1980s, Beersheba was a hub for North African immigrants,” Aviad told The Times of Israel in a video interview. “I was immersed in Moroccan traditions that I came to love and associate with my Israeli identity. Yet, my family’s migration story from Morocco was far more complex.”

Among others, Moreno noticed that his parents and grandparents migrated multiple times before reaching Israel, including to Venezuela and the US. His family attended an Ashkenazi synagogue instead of a Sephardi one. And his father’s first language was Spanish.

“The contrast between my family’s story and the Moroccan narratives I learned as an Israeli always fascinated me,” he said.

As he became older, Moreno started to realize that his family’s experience was not unique but was similar to that of others who belonged to a distinct group within Moroccan Jewry: a Spanish-speaking Jewish minority. This realization prompted him to begin exploring the history, traditions and identity of some 30,000 Jews in northern Morocco who developed a kinship with modern Spain, medieval Sepharad, and the broader Spanish-speaking world.

Moreno started his work as a community member and continued it as an academic at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev. His journey has culminated in the book “Entwined Homelands, Empowered Diasporas: Hispanic Moroccan Jews and Their Globalizing Community” (Indiana University Press), which won one of this year’s National Jewish Book Awards. The awards’ winners will be honored by the Jew­ish Book Coun­cil at their annual event on March 12.

“The Jews of northern Morocco trace their origins to the expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula in the late 15th century, but unlike other Jewish communities in Morocco, they maintained a deep cultural connection to Spain,” Moreno said.

Enter Franco

The profound cultural ties with Spain were reinforced by Haketia, a Judeo-Spanish dialect that the community spoke well into the 20th century. When, for several decades, northern Morocco was again controlled by Madrid, with its leadership trying to use the Spanish-speaking population, Jewish and not, as a political tool.

“Between 1912 and 1956, the region fell under Spanish control, creating a unique colonial encounter where the indigenous Jewish population shared a native language — Spanish — with their colonizers,” Moreno said. “This linguistic and cultural overlap led to a romanticized narrative of ‘reunion,’ with Spain often idealized as a revived Jewish fatherland by colonial authorities, intellectuals and Jewish leaders.”

While the ties between the Jewish community and the Spanish colonizers could be perceived as controversial, Moreno highlighted how “Jews were often a minority seeking protection and support from the most potent powers.”

“The situation is particularly nuanced in the case of Jews in northern Morocco – particularly during the Franco era,” Moreno said.

Francisco Franco ruled over Spain as a dictator from 1939 until he died in 1975.

“Many Jews sought cultural connections with modern Spain, sometimes crossing religious boundaries — for example by consuming non-kosher food or engaging in relationships with non-Jews, or, paradoxically, aligning with Franco’s regime — and they were by and large accepted,” Moreno said.

According to the researcher, Franco’s regime supported the narrative of Jewish Moroccans’ return to Sepharad, as it aligned with his vision of reconnecting with the Jewish community that had been expelled from Spain in the 15th century.

At the same time, Spanish-speaking Jews in Morocco became pioneers of Moroccan migration, already in the 19th century.

“They settled in places like the Canary Islands and South America, often as the sole representatives of the Moroccan diaspora,” Moreno said. “These migrations embedded new ‘Latin’ homelands into Sephardi mythology.”

One of Moreno’s goals in the book has been to highlight the complex identity of a community where, like in many other Jewish or migrant communities, multiple identities coexist or interact.

“The book’s cover actually illustrates this complexity,” the researcher said. “It features a photo I once believed showed my grandparents’ ‘authentic’ life in Morocco. But while working on my book, I discovered it was taken during a stopover in Spain en route to Venezuela. They visited the Alhambra Palace and posed in costumes from a souvenir shop.”

Located on a plateau overlooking Granada, Alhambra was the royal palace of the Muslim kingdom before its defeat by the Christian monarchs of Spain in 1492.

“Realizing that the picture was just a staged, touristic moment challenged my assumptions about tradition and authenticity in the Mizrahi context,” he noted, using the term employed in Israel to define Jews from Arab countries. “It inspired me to explore how Jewish Diasporic traditions were not only reinvented in Israel — something widely discussed in the academic literature — but also reshaped at their places of origin and along other pre-1948 migratory paths.”

The unifying force of soccer

Moreno’s book offers several glimpses into the life of Jews in Northern Morocco.

“The Jewish community in northern Morocco, like many others in the Middle East and beyond, tells a story of accelerated socio-economic mobility,” Moreno said. “This reshapes how people choose where to live, what to wear, and how to speak — driven by social, rather than purely rational or practical, considerations.”

Soccer represents a good example of how Spanish culture influenced the community’s life.

“European colonial powers, particularly Spain, brought with them certain cultural practices, including the organization of sports like soccer,” Moreno said.

In the 1930s, Jewish youth in northern Morocco started organizing into local football teams. Initially informal, these teams began to mirror the structure of European sports clubs while engaging in friendly matches with Muslim teams.

One of these teams, the Club Atlético de Tetuán football team, even competed in the prestigious top division of Spanish soccer in the 1951-1952 season, with Jews and Muslims playing together.

“Thus, the colonial influence of European sports culture, which might have been seen as a tool for control, ultimately became a medium for localized solidarity and even ethnoreligious comradery in northern Morocco,” Moreno noted.

Spain’s cultural influence went beyond soccer and included theaters, music, poetry, and newspapers.

In fact, in Moreno’s words, community newspapers and periodicals were “powerful tools for community building” – and they represent one of the primary sources the researcher used for his book.

Asked about the Spanish-speaking Moroccan community today, Moreno said it is “one of the most multi-layered and dispersed Jewish communities worldwide,” with people living in the four corners of the globe, including Israel, Latin America, North America, and Europe.

“Jewish history shows that a particular Jewish or ethnic identity does not disappear if people integrate into a society,” Moreno noted. “That is something that helps preserve a unique community in the context of integration.”

According to the researcher, there are at least 50,000 to 60,000 descendants of Spanish-speaking Moroccan Jews today, as well as many institutions devoted to studying and preserving their heritage in Spain, Israel, and Latin America.

“In Israel, Moroccan Jews are often perceived as an ethnic minority needing modernization, a group that fits the ‘Mizrahi’ label,” he said. “The challenge is to redefine their Moroccan identity through a lens that distances them from the ‘Mizrahi’ stereotype — by aligning it with a Jewish-Spanish heritage to demonstrate their contribution to the modern Jewish state.”

According to Moreno, Jewish migration, transnationalism and diaspora-homeland dynamics are far more complex than conventional models suggest.

“The Hispanic Moroccan Jewish diaspora presents connections to multiple homelands — pre-1492 Spain, modern Spain, Morocco, Latin America and Israel,” he said. “These homelands are not merely symbolic reference points but interconnected demographic hubs where active members generate and transmit shared narratives across time and space. This intricate network of homeland connections enables small, dispersed groups like Spanish Moroccan Jews, often minorities within minorities, to construct unified, global communities with deep, multifaceted roots.”