Moroccan Jews in France and Canada

In this volume are gathered articles published by Yolande Cohen and her team, offering for the first time a global perspective on Moroccan Jews’ post-colonial migrations to France and Canada. Having herself migrated from Morocco to Montreal, Cohen is uniquely attuned to the difficulties of living through such a massive exile. Why did members of the Jewish community leave Morocco? When did this migration happen? And how can we analyze their journey?

Cohen explores the many vivid memories of departures that she encountered when collecting oral histories of migrants both in France and in Quebec. She notes the deep attachment some of them have to their King and to Morocco, making this an exception in the Arab Muslim world. The main disruptive forces in the displacement of these populations were French colonialism and its emancipatory promises and Zionism, both messianic and modern.

After the establishment of the State of Israel and the subsequent Israel-Arab wars, most of them joined in the mass exodus of Jews from Arab lands, leaving their countries for Israel. With the demise of the French colonial empire and the decolonization process, a minority of westernized Jews went to France and to Canada, with the help of transnational Jewish organizations.

In Montreal, a city with a strong multi-ethnic Jewish community, those migrants understood the crucial aspect of French language as an essential factor of integration. Yet, analyzing their trajectories and the words they used to represent their exile, allows us to understand the underlying traumas.

Yolande Cohen (Author) Yolande Cohen is full professor of Contemporary History at the Université du Québec à Montréal and fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Knight of Québec Ordre national, and of France Légion d’honneur, she has received an Honorific Doctorate from Université de Montréal and ACFAS André Laurendeau 2024 prize for human sciences, arts and letters. Fervent adept of oral history, she has shown the multiple facets of women’s and gender history in France and Canada and developed a unique historical perspective of Moroccan Jews’ complex migrations patterns in the post-Shoah period.