THE MIGRATIONS OF MOROCCAN JEWS TO MONTREAL: MEMORY, (ORAL) HISTORY AND HISTORICAL NARRATIVE

Among the masses of migrant populations driven to leave their countries against the backdrop of European decolonialization, North African Jews occupy a special place. Within several competing versions of the history of Moroccan Jews, recent historiographical debates reveal the political and memorial importance that this history represents for its various participants. Because the boundaries of memory are unstable, this article aims at understanding the interactions between memory and history. It outlines, first, the historical and historiographical context and presents the results of two oral history surveys, one conducted in the 1980s (N?=?27 in 1984–1986), the other more recently (N?=?15 in 2009–2010), and which draw upon a collection of life stories of men and women who left Morocco and went to Montreal in the 1980s and 1990s. It presents their answers to the questions of the circumstances under which these migrations took place and their memories of them today. These stories could then be transcribed and transmitted within a narrative that embodies both its historical meaning and their memory of it. Within this coping system, which denies the trauma associated with their departure en masse from Morocco, the interviewees hope to be considered as full members of the Sephardi diaspora and as Quebec citizens.