The Disorder of Belonging: The Place of Jews in Spain’s Colonial Project in Morocco - An Ethnographic Approach

This paper aims to analyze the impact of the different discourses that shaped Spain’s national identity from the second half of the nineteenth century until the second half of the twentieth century. More specifically, the paper grows from two different political commitments of Spain during that time: Philosephardism and the Africanismo (“Africanism”) and their impact on Spain’s colonial project in Morocco. These two commitments in turn involved a wide array of attitudes and categorizations of “the other” in the context of establishing Spain’s colonial presence in Morocco. The paper will show how these discourses shape Spanish-Moroccan Jews ambivalent attitudes towards Spain. The different and often contradictory discourses that shaped Spanish national identity will be analyzed from a narrative perspective by turning to the life stories of Spanish Moroccan Jews who recall their lives in Morocco from Israel. In other words, we will cross ethnographic material with anthropological, historical and sociological studies on the process of creation of a Spanish national identity between the nineteenth and the twentieth century. The paper is a case-study of Spanish answers to the “Sephardic other” narratives.