But their absorption, as I said, was very difficult.
There are various explanations to this
kind of difficulty-ridden absorption,
one of which is the fact that Moroccan Jewery
was a sort of a transitional society,
already on the move from a very traditional pole to modernization.
There were rapid changes, social changes, which
tore the traditional fabric of Jewish traditional society.
So they were caught in a vulnerable moment.
The more educated, the richer, preferred France or other French-speaking countries.
The poorer, the more traditional, came to Israel.
Since they were exposed to modernization, the level of their
expectations in the new country was quite high and unrealistic.
So this is one major factor.
Another factor is the, how should I put it?
The unfortunate encounter between the policy
of dispersing the population in the young
Israeli state, and the mass immigration
from Morocco in the mid-50s mainly.
There were other waves later.
But the point is that when the new moshavim and the new Ayarat Pitu'ah,
development towns, were created in the periphery,
in the poor areas of Israel, Moroccan Jews were there,
as someone called it, reluctant pioneers.
They were resourceless, they couldn't resist it, and
they were assigned pioneering jobs that the veterans after
the War of Independence were not ready to fulfill.
So, in the few minutes that I still have,
I would like to make a link between this poor situation,
in which Moroccan Jews were located in very economically
weak development towns in the periphery of Israel,
quite far removed from the Jewish center.
With educational system which is clearly inferior
to the educational opportunities in the center,
with a negative immigration turnout, in which the more educated and
the young and more resourceful, the young people,
are leaving, and the weak population stays.
So these problems of development towns are with us even today.
But what I would like to emphasize or highlight here
is an aspect of this history of development towns,
which is, in a way, so obvious, that it is not mentioned or marked.
And this is the simple, but very profound,
sentiments of attachment to one's home place.
50% of the population in these development towns stayed.
And they married there, and they had their children and grandchildren there.
So growing sentiments of localism have been created
throughout the years in spite of the difficulties,
and maybe, paradoxically, because of the difficulties.
This is our halutsiyut, this is our pioneering kind of period,
and we overcame the difficulties.
And we became to love the place where we live.
How can we articulate this feelings of localism, of attachment, to the place?
Moroccan Jews have looked for
symbols to express their attachment to the place,
to express their becoming more Israelized, so to speak.
And they choose symbols from the cultural toolkit which they had.
Namely, not the socialist Zionist ideas which created the moshav or
the kibbutz, this was quite foreign to them, but they used the emblem,
the idiom of saint worship, which was so central to them.
And, indeed, this was the focus of my research from the 80s on.