Morocco Reimagined

This article rereads the works of Carlos de Nesry and Abraham Serfaty, two important Jewish intellectuals from Morocco, to conceptualize their theorization of state and society in post-1956 Morocco. The article argues that Moroccan Jews’ striving for an inclusive citizenship in and belonging to the independent nation took several forms, but the most salient of which were the two embodied in the work of de Nesry and Serfaty. Although there is a robust literature on Moroccan Jews, these theorizations have not received the scholarly examination they deserve nor have they been put in dialogue with each other to tease out their significance for the situation of Jews in the Moroccan context. This article is an attempt to bring attention to the implications of a locally produced Jewish political theory for the larger Moroccan nation. By examining de Nesry’s and Serfaty’s writing against the background of political repression and increasing authoritarianism, I show how Jewish intellectuals navigated their place in a fast-changing post-independence country, furnishing ideas and projects that could have created a different Morocco.