In Search of Jewish Farmers: Jews, Agriculture, and the Land in Rural Morocco · 155from the young. Khaklai emphasized that for the villages it would be
impossible to apply the selective quota system.^48 He traveled again with
the director-general of the aliyah department in Jerusalem, Yitṣhak Rafael,
and a representative from the Ministry of Health, Dr. A. Matan, to deter-
mine the suitability of the different communities for aliyah.^49
What facilitated the emigration of a large sector of Moroccan Jews was
an ideological shift in Israel in this period, a coming to terms with the
mass immigration of newcomers who did not have the same training
and indoctrination in the Zionist youth culture of the elite ḥaluṣim. This
paved the way for the plan that unfolded in 1954 of settling non-elite im-
migrants in uninhabited regions of the Negev and border regions of the
country and directly affected the effort to move rural Moroccan Jews to
Israel.^50
The most important Zionist recruiter in the Atlas Mountains prior to
Moroccan independence was Yehuda Grinker, who took advantage of the
mounting tensions arising from the liberation struggle.^51 Inspired by the
labor ideology of returning to the soil, and hearing rumors about Jewish
farmers in the Atlas Mountains after his arrival in Morocco, Grinker was
determined to discover Jewish farmers, cattlemen, and sheep herders
wherever he went. Departing from Marrakesh and Demnat to the remote
surrounding villages in the mountains on several excursions, Grinker
“discovered” Jews everywhere working the soil. Arriving in Ait Arba
on Simhat Torah in October 1954, Grinker writes: “How could I not be
deeply impressed by these strong men, their livelihoods connected to na-
ture and to land?”^52 Following the seleqṣeya regulations, Grinker began to
register families for aliyah. He was told of some twenty-six villages where
Jews worked the land. News of his mission spread among the High At-
las communities, who were interested in emigration. Grinker traveled to
various Jewish communities in the High Atlas. “The more I traveled in
these villages and became closely acquainted with their Jews, I became
more and more convinced that these Jews represented the best and most
fitting human material for immigrant settlements.”^53 Grinker was deter-
mined to sign up and facilitate the emigration of the Atlas Jews, despite
the obstacles of the quota policy. He rang alarm bells of the imminent
danger that the Atlas Jews faced and militated against the seleqṣeya regu-
lations and in favor of their emergency emigration.
In light of Grinker’s alarmist pronouncements about the risk of mas-
sacres, it is difficult to say if Grinker knowingly exaggerated the extent of