Entwined Home­lands, Empow­ered Dias­po­ras explores how the 30,000 Jews in north­ern Moroc­co devel­oped a sense of kin­ship with mod­ern Spain, medieval Sepharad, and the broad­er His­panophone world that was unlike any­thing expe­ri­enced else­where. The His­pan­ic Moroc­can Jew­ish dias­po­ra, as this group is often called by its schol­ars and its com­mu­ni­ty lead­ers, also became one of the most mobile and glob­al­ly dis­persed North African groups in the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, with major hubs in Venezuela, Argenti­na, Brazil, Peru, Spain, Israel, Cana­da, France, and the US, among oth­ers.

Draw­ing on an array of com­mu­nal sources from across this dias­po­ra, Avi­ad Moreno explores how nar­ra­tives of ances­try in Spain, Israel, Moroc­co, and sev­er­al Latin Amer­i­can coun­tries inter­con­nect­ed the dias­po­ra, empow­er­ing its hubs across the globe through­out the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry and beyond.

By inves­ti­gat­ing these mech­a­nisms of dias­po­ra for­ma­tion in a small com­mu­ni­ty that once shared the same space in Moroc­co, Entwined Home­lands, Empow­ered Dias­po­ras chal­lenges nation­al accounts of the broad­er Jew­ish dias­po­ras and adds com­plex­i­ty to the annals of mul­ti­lay­ered eth­nic com­mu­ni­ties on the move.