• 4 All translations from Arabic, Moroccan Arabic, and French into English are my own. Many of the docu (...)

Shim‘ūn Levy [SL]: “Because, I’m sorry, but the story of Israel is a story of colonization. And therefore, there’s a whole ideology that goes with it…”4

Shira Ohayon [SO]: “Can I speak to you in Arabic?”

SL: “With pleasure”

SO: “I speak with an Egyptian accent, but do you think that Jews could really return to Morocco?”

SL: “In the current circumstances, I do not think so…. But, politically, I believe that the time has come for all Israelis, of Moroccan or Polish descent, to understand that their politics now do not have a way out… This narrow nationalist discourse, which comes from Nazism, I mean it is a response to Nazism. I fear that Jews who suffered under Nazis appear in front of other peoples like [Nazis]. This is the problem of today. Ultimately, we’re the ones who are your victims [hennā daḥāya diyālkum]…

SO: “Ours?”

SL: “Yours. The Israelis”

SO: “But tell us how… the problem is that… in Israel, we struggle for this culture, this history of coexistence in Morocco between Jews and Arabs to be more, to appear more in Israel… But, the problem is we are also the victims of Zionists…”

SL: “Excuse me, my dear… you are not victims of Zionism…”

SO: “Of course, this isn’t…”

• 5 I maintain the translation—“destruction of…the spirit of Judaism”—that was used in Wazana’s documen (...)

SL: “You are not victims of Zionism, don’t exaggerate… that’s a load of hot air [mā tazīdūsh… hadhī hadra khāwiya]… You are living in circumstances that Zionism developed in its European formation. In other words, the time has passed for this type of talk… Now, what are the two possibilities?… either Israelis come to an understanding with their neighbors and open the way for their integration in the culture [and] economy, meaning they no longer appear like opponents and instead appear like an additional contribution, a positive contribution, and this is hard… or the other route is to go with tanks into Lebanon or Jordan or I don’t know where… That would be the destruction of Judaism [qadā’ ‘alā al-yahūdiyya] generally speaking and… the spirit of Judaism5…”

3Levy’s comment about the “destruction of Judaism” echoes what a fellow Moroccan Jew, Edmond Amran El-Maleh described as the “poison” of Zionism for Jewish communities in Morocco: “Zionist propaganda…uprooted Moroccan Jews from their country, from villages and cities, and threw them into the furnace of battle [in Palestine]” (El Maleh, 2021, 135). Wazana’s choice to frame Levy’s prediction about the destruction of “the spirit of Judaism” if Israel’s settler colonial project continues with an image of a Jewish cemetery in Morocco suggests that she recognized these sites would become ever more contested spaces.

4For viewers familiar with Arabic, the deracinating effects of Zionism were clear from the moment Ohayon requested they speak in Arabic. Despite being a Moroccan Jew, she mostly speaks in Egyptian Arabic, meanwhile Levy—a professor of Spanish and expert in multiple Moroccan languages—seamlessly transitions from French into Classical and Moroccan Arabic. Levy’s short interjections in Moroccan Arabic convey certain points to Ohayon with particular clarity, like when he says “we [Moroccan Jews] are the ones who are your [Israelis’] victims [hennā daḥāya diyālkum]” and firmly rejects her argument that Mizrahim in Israel are victims of Zionism: “don’t exaggerate… that’s a load of hot air [mā tazīdūsh… hadhī hadra khāwiya].”

5The tension produced by Ohayon and Levy’s differing objectives—her focus on educating the Israeli Jewish public on interfaith histories and his race to preserve Moroccan Jewish heritage in Morocco—is indicative of how we got to this moment. While Jewish cemeteries in Morocco have been restored such that they may be better cared for now than ever before, they are simultaneously being emptied of bodies through ever more frequent exhumations. Some of these exhumed Moroccan Jewish bodies are subsequently being reburied in historic Palestine, where Palestinians have been systematically violated by the Israeli State since its founding through ethnic cleansing, mass displacement, and the desecration of Palestinian cemeteries (Belli, 2022; Eghbariah, 2024; El-Haj, 2002; Khalidi, 2020). The violation of Palestinian bodies in life and death has perhaps never been starker than during the ongoing genocide that began in 2023.

6Levy’s warning suggests that without an end to Zionism’s settler colonial project both Ohayon’s and Levy’s work may be for naught given that “the spirit of Judaism” will be destroyed. As will be elucidated in this article, for many Moroccans the spirit of Moroccan Judaism rests upon the existence of Moroccan Jewish cemeteries, filled with the bodies of Moroccan Jews in Morocco. Long before Moroccan state-funded restoration in the 2000s, Jewish cemeteries were an essential piece of the country’s landscape, preserved thanks to interfaith practices, with Muslims serving as principal caretakers and participating regularly in spiritual pilgrimages to saintly gravesites. Thus, when one focuses on the movements traversing Moroccan Jewish cemeteries over the last few decades, a serious incompatibility appears between how Moroccan (Jewish and Muslim) belonging in Morocco has been preserved and the settler colonial relationship to Palestine that Zionism imposes.

7Specifically, I argue that the removal of Jewish bodies from their resting place in Morocco for reburial in occupied Palestine/Israel disrupts historic, celebrated, interfaith practices for cultivating Jewish and Muslim belonging in Morocco through shared custodianship of the dead. Furthermore, I contend that what Meriam Belli has described as the State of Israel’s “ethno-necrocratic order,” which reinforces “the supremacy of Jewish bodies and afterlives over non-Jewish ones” through the appropriation of land in Palestine, extends to other places, like Morocco (Belli, 2022, 624). In other words, exhumations of deceased Jews from countries like Morocco for reburial in historic Palestine contribute to Israel’s implementation of a Jewish supremacist ethno-necrocratic order while simultaneously deracinating Jews from their historic homelands. Moreover, the significant investment in restoration of Moroccan Jewish cemeteries, despite this practice of exhumation, draws attention to inequalities across the Moroccan funerary landscape, what we might call a Moroccan ethno-necrocratic order. Recent research on cemetery maintenance in Morocco has found that, on a national level, Jewish and Christian cemeteries generally had “great security and care” compared to neighboring Muslim funerary sites characterized by “neglect… pollution and vandalism” (Hilāl et al., 2023, 98). Similarly, others have highlighted that Black African migrants are frequently interred as “Muslims by default” and “collectively grouped… relegated to the periphery of the cemetery, lack proper registration and may only be marked by small stones” (Sonneveld & Alami Merrouni, 2025, 1012‑1013). Relatedly, there are claims that segregated burials for Black Moroccans may have existed in a few limited historical cases (Bouhchichi & Berrada, 2016; Zafrani, 1998).

8Drawing from fieldwork conducted between 2015 and 2025, the article begins by describing several exhumations at Moroccan Jewish cemeteries over the past few decades, using data from interviews conducted with cemetery caretakers, participant observation at these sites, and literary as well as documentary films about these spaces. I also analyze secondary literature on the topic of Jewish reburials in historic Palestine over the last century. I then provide an overview of the role that cemeteries have played in Moroccan Jewish heritage preservation over the last 40 years, referencing extensive archival material from the papers of the late Shim‘ūn Levy, widely considered to be the father of Moroccan Jewish heritage preservation. Finally, I examine recent burials of Moroccan Jews in Morocco through analysis of informational material on Moroccan Jewish funerary practices produced by Moroccan heritage workers, international media coverage, and films that have documented these burials.

Exhumations at Moroccan Jewish cemeteries

10As an anti-Zionist Jew who is not Moroccan but was drawn to Morocco because of Moroccan Jewish resistance to European colonialism, I myself took part in mythologizing the region’s cemeteries. Guided by anti-Zionist Moroccan Jewish writing, like El Maleh’s essay “Le dernier juif d’Asilah,” I saw these spaces as a counterpoint to Zionism’s claim of primary or exclusive Jewish belonging in historic Palestine. One section of El Maleh’s essay, which recounts the last person buried in Asilah’s Jewish cemetery in 1966, explicitly states why Moroccan Jewish burial in Morocco counters colonial, Zionist deracination:

The last Jew of Asilah. Never will another Jew die within this whiteness. Not another will be born among the glory of this light. Nahon! With him, a destiny was fulfilled. Others, perhaps, died in this city after him, but their death was stolen from this land of their birth. Buried elsewhere so as not to say that they had lived there (El Maleh, 1980, 6).

11El Maleh’s description of the burial of Moroccan Jewish dead after Nahon outside Morocco as a form of robbery reflects an understanding of the continuation of Moroccan Judaism—and Moroccan Jewish belonging to Morocco—as fundamentally linked to the burial of Moroccan Jews in Morocco.

12When I asked Khaled for more details about exhumations at the cemetery he preserves, he shared that the majority of those removing bodies came from Israel and that they took the remains of their ancestors. Since I had heard about increased security concerns during conversations with caretakers in larger cities, particularly stories of people trying to practice magic at cemeteries, I dismissed Khaled’s observations. It was not until 2023 that I was forced to reconsider when a heritage worker with deep connections to institutional Jewish life mentioned to me that soon there will be “Jewish cemeteries without the dead [mi‘ārāt bilā ’amwāt]” in Morocco.

14The increased rate and openness with which exhumations are occurring has caught the attention of community members and heritage workers. Prominent documentaries on Moroccan Jewish life have included scenes detailing the practice. In Simon Bitton’s “Ziyara” (2020), Leila, the caretaker of Meknes’ Jewish cemetery, reveals the growing phenomenon and its effect on Moroccans who remain in Morocco:

Perhaps they didn’t want to keep coming and going a lot, maybe they have circumstances [ẓurūf]…God only knows. I don’t know what they have, the poor souls [msākin]. May God help them… In front of me, they have taken around 12. I was present. Everyone was present. Everyone knows, the government [makhzen], everything [is done by] law… They bring a box, like this, and they take out those bones… I saw them. They take out the bones, quickly… this is the head, legs, these are the hands…. They gather them in a cloth bag and then they put it in the box and then they pray with the Rabbi. It is not random. No! With their rabbi, they bring those things and when they take them, you see misery here. I won’t lie to you… We feel sadness here… We don’t laugh or talk, nothing… Just silent. They take care of their stuff and finish. We don’t talk at all. Nothing. We help them if they want us to help them and that’s it. I swear, we don’t talk. We don’t talk. Nothing…. Misery.

15The next scene is an image of several rows of graves with what appears to be a cemented over section that may have once been the site of graves. Jewish cemeteries across Morocco have sections like this.

16It is fair to assume that many—if not most—are taking bodies to historic Palestine for multiple reasons. Firstly, there are well-documented cases of Moroccan Jewish reburials in historic Palestine. Secondly, recent changes to Moroccan administrative procedures—in the wake of the Abraham Accords—that clarify the procedure for exhumations also suggest this connection. Thirdly, and perhaps most persuasively, scholarship on Jewish burial over the last century in occupied Palestine/Israel, particularly the work of Doron Bar and Alex Weingrod, has indicated that Zionism—specifically “the new perspective of Zionist time and space and the need to ‘sanctify’ the land and define the Zionist Israeli territory”—has led to the exhumation of Jewish bodies across the world and their reburial in historic Palestine (Bar, 2020, 2016, 15; Weingrod, 2006).

17During my fieldwork in Morocco as well as through personal experiences, I have found that the reasons for investing the thousands of dollars required for exhumation and reburial range from earthly justifications, like wanting to have family gravesites close-by in historic Palestine, to a common (mis)conception that reburial in the Holy Land is a well-established Jewish ritual. Quite to the contrary, rabbinic writing since at least Late Antiquity has broadly agreed that the deceased should not be disturbed, claiming that exhumation “defiles the dead person, violates his dignity, and troubles the souls of those who have died” (Bar, 2016, 14-15; Garibova, 2020; Polak, 2001; Ydit, s.d.). In addition to centuries-old rabbinic agreement on respecting a person’s final resting place, there is no archaeological evidence that systematic exhumation and reburial of Jewish bodies in the Holy Land ever occurred before the establishment of the State of Israel. Even in recent years, controversy has erupted regarding the excavation of medieval Jewish burial sites in Europe, leading to reburial of these excavated bodies in nearby, functioning Jewish cemeteries—not in historic Palestine (Ayaso Martínez, 2022; Colomer, 2013).

19Yoram Bilu investigates the Agadir case further in his ethnography The Saints’ Impresarios. Rabbi Hayyim Pinto was one of the religious functionaries who participated in the smuggling of the bones of his own family line out of Agadir. Bilu notes that Moroccan authorities at the time of his fieldwork (up until the early 2000s) were reticent to allow Moroccan bodies—namely Jews—to be removed from their burial place in Morocco (Bilu, 2009, 51). Today, the prevalence of news articles from major publications in Morocco and Israel explicitly recognizing this practice and, in some cases associating it directly with the Abraham Accords, suggests that circumstances have changed since its signing. For example, in 2021, Benny Gantz wrote an op-ed thanking the King of Morocco, Muhammad VI, for providing his private plane to transport Rabbi Avraham Elhadad—a rabbi for the Jewish community of Sarcelles who was born in Tangier—to Israel after his unexpected death during a visit to Morocco in 2021: “Upon learning of this horrific incident, His Majesty King Mohammad VI contacted the family and chartered a private plane to repatriate Rabbi Elhadad for burial in Israel” (Gross, 2021). While it is unclear if Rabbi Elhadad had been temporarily buried in Morocco and then exhumed and reburied in historic Palestine, a very clear case of exhumation and reburial took place that same year. Seven Jews—one a non-Moroccan Lubavitch Rabbi living in Morocco for decades—who had died at the beginning of the COVID pandemic in 2020 were reburied in historic Palestine (Middle East Eye, 2023). These bodies were sent to historic Palestine in one of the direct flights between Tel Aviv and Marrakesh that began following the Abraham Accords (Hanau, 2021).

20Consequences of the Abraham Accords—signed in December 2020 between the U.S., Israel, and Morocco—have extended well beyond the reburial of Moroccan Jewish bodies in historic Palestine. The most deadly outcomes include: joint training of the Moroccan military with Israel’s Golani Brigade, which has been accused war crimes in Gaza (Uddin, 2025); plans to build Israeli weapons-manufacturing factories in Morocco in addition to Morocco’s purchasing of weapons from Israel, becoming its third largest supplier (Middle East Monitor, 2025); and the authorization of U.S.-Israeli military “overflight” in Moroccan air space, which has been used repeatedly during the Israeli genocide in Palestine (Bouziane & Stoolman, 2025). More specific to the issue of reburial, after the Abraham Accords, Moroccan law regarding exhumation of bodies was updated, “simplifying the procedures and administrative actions” (Yabiladi, 2022).

Cemeteries and the instrumentalization of Jewish heritage

23Jewish cemeteries have been a focus of heritage preservation in Morocco for over 40 years. These spaces were and are still under the custodianship of institutions of Jewish life in Morocco, like the Conseil de Communautés Israélites du Maroc (CCIM). By the time Jewish heritage preservation took root in the 1980s, cemeteries in areas that no longer had Jewish residents were largely falling into disrepair—similar to the situation of Muslim cemeteries.

27Boum has argued that the Moroccan State’s increased involvement in supporting tourism in the 1990s and 2000s, in part, through the creation of museums dedicated to Jewish history and restoration of Jewish sites, has been central to “the branding of Moroccan ‘convivencia’” (Boum, 2020, 209). Kosansky made a similar argument a few years prior in his work focused on the increased participation of Moroccan Jews who were living outside Morocco in the celebration of hillulot in the 1980s and 1990s: “The transnational revitalization of Jewish pilgrimage in Morocco reflects a strategic refashioning of the hillulah as a political showcase of liberal pluralism and as a multifaceted juncture of economic revenue” (Kosansky, 2002, 390). This branding of interfaith convivencia has been mobilized to present Morocco as “a site of moderate Islam” (Boum, 2020, 209) and, I argue, a partner in the U.S.-led campaign for normalization with the State of Israel across the Muslim world.

28Perhaps the most emblematic triangulation of U.S., Israeli, and Moroccan policy objectives in Moroccan Jewish heritage work today are organizations like Bayt Dakira and the Association Mimouna. The Association Mimouna, which started as a club at Al-Akhawayn University in 2007, was part of a trend in the 2000s of greater involvement in heritage work by actors outside the immediate purview of Moroccan Jewish institutional life. Today, it collaborates with the U.S. State Department and the American Sephardi Federation. While continuing to focus on university life in Morocco—helping establish a degree in “Moroccan Judaism Tourism”—it has expanded its scope, deepening ties between the U.S., Israel, and Morocco through the establishment of “leadership” programs, participation in promoting “Holocaust Education,” and organization of workshops for artisans on making Judaica.

29Bayt Dakira, housed in the restored Slat Attia synagogue of Essaouira, is a research center, functioning synagogue, and “space of memory” that opened almost simultaneously with the signing of the Abraham Accords in 2020. Its founder, André Azoulay, has served as advisor to the Moroccan monarchy and has been involved in projects that instrumentalize Moroccan pluralism for diplomatic and economic aims, like the Association Essaouira-Mogador. Bayt Dakira’s permanent exhibit largely highlights social, economic, and diplomatic elites from the city’s Jewish communities and its programming is geared toward bringing together Israeli, Euro-American, and Moroccan politicians and academics.

…the Arab-Israeli conflict in the Middle East had negative repercussions such as the anti-Jewish riots of 1948 in Oujda and Djerrada and their many victims. These bloody events were taken advantage of by the colonial administration to destroy the mining unions, imprison their leaders… But Independence brought the Jews full citizenship, from the first speech of Mohamed V. Until 1956, departures for Israel concerned mainly the disadvantaged classes, the perpetually poor and also direct or indirect victims of the economic changes induced by colonization… The colonial administration allowed Zionist activity that “rid” it of a part of the Jewish population, and which created a tension, muted and sometimes violent, between Jews and Muslims.

31Levy’s successor, Zhor Rehihil, has carried on that push to make the diversity of Jewish perspectives and experiences of colonialism visible through interviews she conducted as part of the national radio program on Moroccan Judaism that she hosted, entitled “Nāss el-Mellāḥ,” and her participation in the documentary work of vocal Moroccan Jewish critics of Israel like Simone Bitton.

32Today, over 150 Jewish cemeteries across Morocco have been fully renovated, many with full-time security, completely new infrastructure, and ever greater accessibility. Asilah’s cemetery, which was renovated alongside one of the medina’s synagogues and the community’s old farrān and hammām in 2022, is an example of the disparities across Morocco’s heritage landscape, as the city’s Muslim cemetery is located nearby and remains in disrepair. The inauguration of many renovated Jewish cemeteries has been the subject of extensive fanfare—with national and international coverage.

34This discourse of supposed Moroccan exceptionalism has accompanied much state-sponsored heritage work over the last two decades and is frequently combined with an unambiguous political strategy, perhaps no more clearly encapsulated than by André Azoulay being awarded in September 2023 the Israeli “Presidential Medal of Honor” by Isaac Herzog, who has served as Israeli president throughout the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Azoulay, standing in occupied Jerusalem, lays out this instrumentalization of Moroccan Jewish heritage: “I leave even more convinced than ever to make prevail what… my Moroccan Judaism… has taught me about the world… our world needs a compass and I have the immodesty to think that this compass can be Moroccan.”

The contested significance of intentional burial in Morocco for Moroccan Jews

37Much like Jewish heritage, the burial of Moroccan Jews living outside Morocco in their homeland has been mobilized to reflect a range of political ideologies from neoliberal multiculturalism to militant anti-colonialism. Edmond Amran El Maleh, for example, has been the object of diverse Jewish heritage preservation projects in the years since his death in 2010 (Bouziane & Stoolman, 2025). In 2023, the Archives du Maroc organized an extensive homage to the writer, highlighting, in a section entitled “Ses œuvres au cœur de l’identité plurielle,” his main argument that the tragedy of mass Jewish exodus from Morocco and Israel’s anti-Palestinian violence are intimately intertwined. The exhibit also detailed multiple public denunciations of Zionism and the State of Israel that El Maleh made alongside other anti-colonial Moroccans of Jewish descent like Sion Assidon and Abraham Serfaty. Meanwhile, at Essaouira’s Bayt Al-Dakira, a short video from his funeral and burial in the city’s local cemetery—with Azoulay in attendance—figures prominently on the first floor, without any mention of El Maleh’s political commitments. Most recently, Simone Bitton released the film “Les Mille et Uns Jours du Hajj Edmond,” in which she centers his critique of Israel, with the trailer featuring the following observation: “What concerned Edmond most was not Palestine but Morocco. He could not forgive Israel for destroying the Moroccan Jewish identity in his country” (Bitton, 2024).

39In vain, I have been searching for the graves of a small Black Jewish community that once existed in Essaouira, which Moroccan historian Haim Zafrani mentions in his oeuvre covering 2000 years of Moroccan Jewish history (Zafrani, 1998). The cemetery’s caretaker has tried to help me locate a few gravestones—with my only finding aid being first names like “Mbaraka” and “Ghalya” that were frequently used for enslaved Black women in Moroccan (Muslim and Jewish) homes. Zafrani mentioned that the conversion of these enslaved women to Judaism, and the fact that they sometimes bore children as a result of sexual assault by their enslavers, occassionally leading to intra-communal friction (as in the case of Muslim communities)—particularly when deciding where they should be buried. Each year more gravestones on the older side of the mi‘āra (not where El Maleh is buried) are refurbished and their engravings reemerge, bringing me hope that I might one day locate some of these individuals whose burials Zafrani took the time to record.

40Whereas El Maleh’s burial in Essaouira was the subject of intensive media coverage, the burial of another revolutionary leftist, anti-Zionist Moroccan Jew, Abraham Serfaty, in Casablanca’s main Jewish cemetery in the same year did not garner similar levels of media attention The circumstances were slightly different—while both Serfaty and El Maleh had returned to live in Morocco almost a decade prior to their deaths, Serfaty’s choice to live his last years and die in Morocco was particularly significant, especially considering the fact that Serfaty, unlike El Maleh, had been forced into exile twice—even having his citizenship revoked—and yet yearned to return to Morocco (Slyomovics, 2016).

41In her documentary “Ziyara,” Simone Bitton interviewed Serfaty’s comrade, Fouad Abdelmoumin, who had also been imprisoned during the Years of Lead, in the Casablanca cemetery where Serfaty is buried. The interview begins with her asking if it had some meaning for Abdelmoumin that Serfaty was Jewish: “…it was the affirmation of us overcoming closed identities of archaic affiliations to religious references. The fact that he was Jewish, for us, was to assert that we all belong to the human race, that we have the same rights, the same duties, and the same struggles.” After sharing his experience being a political prisoner with Serfaty, she asks him “Are there any political prisoners in Morocco today?” His response is “Unfortunately, a lot!” Nonetheless, the interview ends on an optimistic note:

Abraham is an image and testimony of a very beautiful potential of ours, that we are far from having fully realized, but continues to feed our dream and pushes us to move forward and progress. It reminds us of that part of us that is Jewish, that is poorly recognized, and that we remember from time to time. When in a cemetery, it’s nostalgia, sometimes bitterness, but with a lot of love… Moroccan Judaism cannot be considered as something external. It is part of our collective heritage. The fact that we have been deprived, by this hemorrhaging of the Jewish community, is a wound to the body of Morocco, which has left us impoverished in terms of our diversity [alterité].

42Other examples of expatriate Jews being buried in Morocco have caught national and international attention, despite the relative anonymity of the dead, indicating that figures like Serfaty pose a challenge to triumphalist instrumentalization of Jewish burials in Morocco. Johana Devico Ohana, one of the members of Fes’ Jewish community (living abroad) is in charge of one of the city’s 200-year-old cemeteries and shared her father’s story in a video for the United Nations. After introducing herself, she talks about her childhood in Fes “we lived in harmony. We had no tension” (ONU Info, 2023). The video then reads in large text “Morocco’s Jewish and Muslim communities have lived in harmony as neighbors for over a millennium.” She recounts that her father, who was ill for many years and receiving treatment in France, would constantly demand of her: “You will promise me one thing: that if I ever pass when I am in France, bring me back to Fes.” The video ends with her saying, “he is in Fes. He is not far from us…I hope he rests in peace.”

43While Ohana’s testimony of burying her father in Morocco despite his living abroad certainly was politicized in its instrumentalization, much like El Maleh’s burial, as a symbol of Morocco’s millennium-old coexistence of faiths, I have encountered many more stories like hers, of parents requesting burial in Morocco. A close friend and anti-Zionist activist born and raised in New York, whose father left Morocco decades ago and has never returned, was surprised to learn that he, too, wishes to be buried in Morocco. This friend was pleased to hear his request, after years of being at odds with her father politically, particularly with regard to Zionism and its impacts on Morocco’s history. She has shared with me that she wonders if years of sharing anti-Zionist perspectives on Moroccan Jewish and other Arab Jewish histories—like Wazana’s film—had finally changed her father’s mind about his home country. I reassured her that this wish was attainable given the 2020 loosening of administrative hurdles to repatriation of Moroccan bodies from abroad for burial in the country. However, the reality has proven to be much more complicated than I expected, raising the question: which Moroccan Jews can still rest eternally in Morocco?

Concluding remarks and a call for further critical inquiry

44In this overview of happenings at Moroccan Jewish cemeteries over the last few decades, it appears that, for many Moroccan Jews, burial of saintly and non-saintly bodies in Morocco is important precisely because custodianship of the dead has connected Moroccan Jews to their place of birth and death for generations. I have argued that this widespread understanding of Moroccan Jewish belonging in Morocco extends beyond Moroccan Jews to Muslims, especially those that care for deceased Jews and Jewish heritage. Thus, exhumations of Moroccan Jews for reburial outside Morocco—particularly in historic Palestine—which appear to have increased over the last few decades, disrupt preservation of Moroccan Jewish belonging in Morocco through long-established, oft-celebrated, interfaith custodianship of the dead.

45Additional inquiry will need to address the entanglement of Israeli ethno-necropolitics in historic Palestine with burial and exhumation practices in Morocco as well as other homelands where Jews have lived throughout the world. This entanglement, especially in contexts like Morocco where Jewish heritage has been the focus of extensive preservation efforts, elucidates how the coloniality of Zionism’s relationship to Palestine fundamentally challenges millennial practices of Jewish belonging outside the Biblical Holy Land. Investigation of how Israeli ethno-necropolitics are exported outside the Levant also brings into relief other ethno-necropolitical orders, demonstrating the importance of afterlife rituals in understanding how belonging continues to be negotiated, even for the dead.