issue 27 / n.1 (2025)
Author: Aviad Moreno
ABSTRACT This essay offers a new reading of narratives of Jewish migration from the MENA region drawing on the preface to Tumat Yesharim (Jerusalem, 1989), a biblical exegesis by Rabbi Gabriel Elgrabli (spelled Eli-Qrabli). A Moroccan-born adherent of the (Anti-Zionist) Lithuanian Haredi Musar movement, Elgrabli engaged deeply with a tradition that emphasized ethical self-discipline. Composed in Israel of the 1980s, his autobiographical narrative charts a spiritual journey from Meknes to Jerusalem—through Europe and the Americas—in contrast to the singular path to the Holy Land that is often affirmed. As I argue, Elgrabli’s writing resists both Zionist cartographies that privilege Israel as an endpoint and the inward-facing, self-isolating path to perfection that the Musar model promotes. Instead, his journey exemplifies a diasporic spirituality rooted in displacement, divine providence, and ethical calling—a cartography animated not by destination but by personal transformation and ability to become a moral compass for the Sephardi grassroots. By weaving together Sephardi memory, Musar discipline, and geographic multiplicity, Elgrabli offers a unique model of mental maps. His account challenges dominant narratives of origin and return, presenting instead a layered map of spiritual becoming—rather than homecoming.
issue 27 / n.1 (2025)
ABSTRACT
The article presents and analyzes the self-representing narrative strategies through which westernized Jewish immigrants from Tangier (Morocco) de-westernize their personal pre-migration colonial history in the context of the ethnic conflict in Israel. By so doing, the article challenges from a new perspective the general post-Zionist notion according to which ethnic revivals among Moroccan Jews in Israel came about in opposition to the European-oriented national narrative; a narrative that had distorted their authentic Mizraḥi culture and history, often in the form of de-Arabization. In an attempt to explain the motivations for de-westernization, the article further implies that not merely did the ethnic revival of Tangier’s natives not match the general post-Zionist notion, but moreover that it had often formed shape in the course of contrasting it. Only through de-westernized self-representations, could Tangier’s natives contest the general representation of Moroccans as Mizraḥim with the sense of “their own” Moroccan ethnic history.
issue 04 / November 2012
