The Zionist epic took shape around a succession of structuring concepts that profoundly molded the Jewish national narrative. Twentieth-century Jewish communities were described according to a homogeneous historiographical prototype that subordinated their historical trajectories to a pre-established interpretive framework. A repertoire of notions—emancipation, assimilation, antisemitism, Zionism—thus functioned as an almost exclusive grid of interpretation, determining the stages of Jewish communal history while postulating a binary opposition between, on the one hand, assimilation into the surrounding society and, on the other, the preservation of an ethno-Jewish identity deemed inseparable from Zionism. Inherited from the works of Heinrich Graetz, Simon Dubnow, and Ben-Zion Dinur, these historiographical models continue to dominate Israeli academia, particularly within departments of Jewish history that remain institutionally separate from departments of general history.

The interpretive schemes devised to conceptualize the fate of an “eternal people” in the modern era prove largely inadequate for apprehending the situation of Jews in Muslim-majority countries, and even in certain regions of Eastern Europe, where identity configurations were most often tripolar rather than binary. The twentieth-century Moroccan Jewish community evolved within a field of tensions among three poles: a specific Jewish identity, a cultural formation largely shaped by France, and political and social integration within Moroccan society. The arbitration among these poles initially........

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