Oujda and Jerada
Two towns on the Algerian border—the corridor of clandestine departure. Five were killed at Oujda, nearly forty at Jerada; the next year eighteen thousand left Morocco.
The setting: Israeli independence on 14–15 May 1948 and the Arab-Israeli war; Muhammad V's address to his subjects, recalling the sultanate's tradition of protecting Jews and warning against Zionist activity. Oujda and Jerada sit on the Algerian border and were the corridor of clandestine departure: emigration from Morocco itself was prohibited, while Algeria was legally France.
7 June 1948, Oujda: five Jews and one Frenchman killed in about three hours before the military intervened (JewishGen's named list gives four for Oujda). 8 June, Jerada: thirty-nine killed by one count, forty by the named list; here it was far worse than at Oujda.
The totals in circulation are 42, 43, 44 and 47. The most defensible statement: a named list of forty-three victims exists—transcribed by Rabbi Eliahou Marciano from the memorial volume Va-Yikatz Shelomo, which contains the funeral orations in which the dead were enumerated by name—while published totals range from 42 to 47. The named list should be the anchor.
The judicial outcome: a French military court convicted thirty-five people—two death sentences, two life terms, thirty-one lesser sentences.
The communal outcome: eighteen thousand left Morocco the following year; and between 1948 and 1956, of some two hundred and fifty thousand Moroccan Jews, about a hundred and ten thousand left.
One correction, and it is about causation. The riots of 1948 were not the cause of the exodus—they were a trigger and an accelerant. The real causes are structural: the francisation of the community by the Alliance schools; the collapse of the protective colonial order at independence in 1956; the Arabisation and Arab League orientation of independent Morocco; and, finally, the 1956 emigration ban itself, which turned a gradual departure into a pent-up rush. And it must be remembered that the departure came mostly after 1956: the largest fall—from 162,420 in early 1961 to fifty or sixty thousand by 1967—occurred in peacetime, under Hassan II and with the state's consent.
How we know
Sources
Acharonim and later rabbinic literature
- Va-Yikatz Shelomo — the funeral orations of 1948 — the only source preserving the victims' names
Documents of the period
- The French military tribunal records, 1948 — thirty-five convicted, two death sentences
Scholarship
- G. Bensoussan, Juifs en pays arabes — the exodus from the Arab countries in general
Basis: documents and evidence.
People and places
Fez · The mellah · Marrakesh · Alliance Israélite Universelle