Book Review: Between Morocco, Argentina and Israel by Marina Laura Tomasotti
This book is the result of the thesis that I carried down while I was studying Master’s in Cultural Diversity in the National University of Tres de Febrero under the direction of Director Susana Brauner to whom I want to especially thank her for the support during those years.
I worked together with the publishers in conversion of my Master’s thesis for what it had a general descent, for what today it is a book, with the precise objective of transmitting new documented knowledge to scholars, researchers, students, analysts, experts and to everyone who is interested in this topic in which there was a certain thematic gap at an academic level such as Sephardic migration from Muslim- majority countries.
With this book, I tried to put some light on the little-discussed topic in the current bibliography: the Jewish migration from Morocco to Argentina during 1860-1986.
This research is centred on the few studied groups and formed a part of the Sephardi Jews.
Although this work is centred on the analysis of the Argentine case, that is, Moroccan-Jewish in Argentina, the originality of this work lies in the fact that it generated a “triad of analysis”, tackling the problem in a perspective compared in three different geographic spaces: Morocco, Argentina and Israel.
• In the first part of the book has analysed the Jews of Morocco prior to their emigration, their lifestyles and their process of living together in a Muslim majority area.
• Later, in the second instance, it has been written that these Moroccan Jews landed Argentina from the cities like Tétouan and Tangier, their new forms of association, economic development and the new identity as well as the forms of integration of the distinct generations in the different travelled migratory stages.
• In the third part of the work, it has been analysed the entry of the Moroccan Jews in the state of Israel, highlighting the difficulties that they should have faced coming from the Arabic and Muslim world and establishing comparative variables with Argentina, demonstrating despite having the same origin these groups were developing in different ways, incident which corroborate that the identities were dynamic and they were influenced and changed by the different factors.
The work emphasizes on the forms in which they were perceived like other Non-European, also known as “Orientals” or “exotics” in both the societies.
Latin America was one of the most important regions for receiving of the dominated diaspora of Sephardi, that is, the descendants of those who had been expelled from the Iberian Peninsula, in 1492 from Spain and in 1497 from Portugal. The Moroccans were the first Sephardi Jew to reach Argentina in 1860 in the search for better economic, working and social opportunities because of the war.
The Moroccan Jews represent a triple minority: a minority group within the Sephardi, in their turn the Sephardi is the minority within the Jews and Jews, in their turn, resulted to be a minority within the Argentine society. This sums to the fourth category: they are a minority among those who came from Arabic countries.
Today, the phenomenon of migration is a big issue which the world is facing now due to the political, economic and social reasons in the country of their origin and it is important to understand the plurality of the integration forms that they can experiment migratory currents in the different contexts and historical times.
For this reason, I consider that it is important to present in the 44th International Feria of Books considering and believing that this material can be used by academicians, scholars, researchers or students for developing lines of future research in subject related to the immigration and cultures and the process of integrating between the migrants and the recipient country.
Thank you very much for all and I hope that you all enjoy this book.
