Moroccans in Venezuela: The Making of a New Transatlantic Sephardi Diaspora

Drora Arussy in conversation with Dr. Aviad Moreno (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev; University of Florida), author ofthe award-winning Entwined Homelands, Empowered Diasporas: Hispanic Moroccan Jews and Their Globalizing Community (Indiana University Press, 2024)

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Why Venezuela? While most Moroccan Jews left for Israel in the mid-twentieth century, many from northern Morocco, long under Spanish rule, went instead to Venezuela, building one of the largest Moroccan Jewish communities in the Americas. Like Israel, Venezuela drew Moroccan Jews and virtually no other Moroccans. Unlike Israel, it did so without an embassy, a state agreement or any national ingathering, and as one destination in a wider movement out of the Mediterranean: Spaniards, Italians and Portuguese arriving alongside Lebanese and Syrians — Christian, Muslim, Druze and Jewish alike — who settled…