The Sultan's Communists: Moroccan Jews and the politics of belonging: by Alma Rachel Heckman, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2020, 344 pp., $65 (hardcover), ISBN 978-1-503-61380-5.

Instead, Moroccan Communist Jews are portrayed as disconnected from the wider Moroccan left in Morocco, which strikes us as the wrong way to value and elevate and shine light on the contribution of Moroccan Jews 'the formation of Moroccan national identity politics ... and Middle Eastern and North African Studies' (Introduction). Abraham Serfaty, Edmond Amran El Maleh, or Sion Assidon, are all names that resonate powerfully in the historiography of modern Morocco. The author describes compellingly in the first two chapters how Moroccan Jewish communists navigated between the tripartite pull of transnational communist solidarity, growing Zionist appeal, and the imperative of taking part in the national movement for independence, all the while swatting away French republicanism. [Extracted from the article]