Since S. D. Goitein’s seminal work on A Mediterranean Society, Maghrebi Jews from the medieval period onward have been closely associated with highly integrated trade networks across the Mediterranean basin. More recently, scholarship has focused on the emigration of Maghrebi Jews to Israel in the wake of the state’s creation. In recent years, however, research has broadened its scope to consider these communities’ connections to another space—the transatlantic world—ties that long remained beyond sustained scholarly attention. Particular emphasis has been placed on the Hispanophone Jewish populations of northern Morocco and their links with Latin America. The remarkable and still little-known trajectory of the Venezuelan film director Margot Benacerraf (1926–2024), a major figure in Latin American cinema, offers a compelling case study of Moroccan Jewish migration to South America and of the complex mechanisms that shaped it. Hers is a story that still awaits full recognition.
Margot Benacerraf’s life and trajectory merit attention not only for what they reveal about the structures and patterns of Moroccan Jewish emigration to South America, but also for her paradoxical invisibility within the Latin American cultural canon and the aura of mystery that continues to surround her. The daughter of affluent Sephardi immigrants from Tetouan who arrived in Venezuela in the early twentieth century, she moved freely within avant-garde and international bohemian circles, befriending such luminaries as Luis Buñuel, Gabriel Garcia Marques, and Pablo Picasso, among others.
She directed two highly idiosyncratic documentary films: Reverón (1953), a twenty-three-minute feature explores the Venezuela painter Armando Reverón, whose works are now held in major museums worldwide. Her second film, Araya (1959), a ninety-minute scripted documentary, chronicles twenty-four hours in the lives of salt gatherers and fishermen on Venezuela’s Araya peninsula. Both films received widespread critical acclaim and are regarded as landmark works of Latin American cinema. Araya, a film of mesmerizing cinematographic beauty, shared the International Critics award at Cannes in 1959 with Hiroshima, mon amour, Alain Resnais’s benchmark film of French Nouvelle Vague cinema.
Yet despite the international accolades garnered for her work, Benacerraf has remained critically neglected. One probable explanation for that neglect lies in the problematic reception of Araya, whose “anomalous inclusion-exclusion status—its inclusion in a transnational canon, and its persistent exclusion from national and continental film histories” has complicated its legacy.[2] My purpose is likewise to explore Benacerraf’s position as the daughter of Sephardi immigrants—at once an insider and an outsider within Venezuela’s culture.
In this essay, I reexamine Margot Benacerraf’s life, work, and legacy within the broader framework of Moroccan Jewish emigration. I also approach this story from a personal vantage point: although my immediate family did not emigrate, much of my extended family—aunts, uncles, and cousins-- left Tangier for Caracas in the 1950s and 1960s, establishing themselves in the wholesale trade of hardware, small electrical goods, and beauty supplies. Each summer, I traveled with my mother to Caracas, moving between family gatherings and what felt like an anthropological immersion into a Moroccan Jewish community whose members felt at once close and uncannily foreign. Lastly, I will also speculate on the reasons of Benacerraf’s marginalization. Following film scholar Julianne Burton-Carvajal, I argue that gender and class privilege played significant roles, but so too the complexities of Benacerraf’s diasporic identity.
The name Benacerraf derives from the Arabic “ben” (son) and “serraf”, or money changer. According to the philologist Abraham Laredo, the family name appears in its Spanish form (Cambiador) in fifteenth-century Castille. To escape persecution during the Spanish Inquisition, the Benacerrafs left Spain for Tetouan, where a large community of Jewish exiles sought refuge, keeping their Spanish language alive and maintaining their customs.
Margot’s father Fortunato was born in Tetouan around 1885 into a family of nine children. By the late nineteenth century, Morocco was beset by an economic crisis and severe external debt, prompting many impoverished Jewish families to send their young men to Latin America. “Hacer la América”, as the pursuit of fortune in the New World was known, was not new. Jewish emigration to South America had begun in the early nineteenth-century when Moroccan Jews traveled to Brazil and Ecuador to work as river peddlers on the Amazon. Fortunato likely embarked for Venezuela shortly after his bar-mitzvah, at the age when young men traditionally undertook transatlantic voyages. He arrived in Carúpano, on Venezuela’s Caribbean coast, where one of his uncles had invited him to join him, in 1900. Known for its rum, Carúpano was also highly prized for its cocoa and coffee and offered promising commercial prospects. Trading in these commodities proved auspicious for the young Benacerraf and his brother Moisses.
Fortunato’s trajectory, however, was marked by both success and considerable challenges. A bon vivant who fell in love with Carúpano’s beaches and lush scenery—he was even rumored to have founded its famed carnival-, he also felt the emotional strain that came with exile. Suffering from depression, his brother Moisses who was his business partner, returned to sea to visit his family, and disappeared, probably by suicide. In 1918, grieving yet ambitious, Fortunato moved to Caracas to join Hermanos Benacerraf, his brothers’ import business in textiles from France and England. This move coincided with a period of authoritarian rule under Juan Vicente Gómez (1908-1935), who exercised control over local caudillos. It also concurred with the emergence of a nascent prosperity in Venezuela, fueled by the discovery of oil. Within this shifting economic landscape, the Benacerraf business flourished. In 1923, ready to marry, Fortunato returned to Tetouan in search of a suitable wife, as was the custom among his peers. He wed Sete Coriat, the beautiful young daughter of a patrician Jewish family whose father was the city’s Spanish consul. The couple settled in Caracas, where their three children, Moisses, Margot, and Henrique, were born.
Born in 1926, Margot Benacerraf’s life spans nearly the entire twentieth century, mirroring Venezuela’s turbulent political transformations. Just as Margot lived through alternating cycles of democracy and dictatorship, punctuated by dramatic coup d’états—she also played a formative role in shaping Venezuela’s cinematic culture. As a film director in the fifties in a country where film culture was virtually nonexistent, she pioneered Latin American cinema. Her work would later inspire major figures of Brazil’s socially conscious Cinema Novo, including Glauber Rocha and Nelson Pereira dos Santos. In the 1960s, as director of the governmental National Institute of Venezuelan Culture and Fine Arts (INCIBA), a de facto Ministry of Culture, Margot Benacerraf further played a formative role in shaping her country’s cultural policy.
Growing up in Caracas in a large Spanish colonial house she named “La Casa de los Tres Patios”, Margot belonged to a close-knit Sephardi clan. The Benacerrafs were industrious, intellectually accomplished, and highly adaptable. Among her cousins was Baruj Benacerraf (1920-2011), who would be awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1980, and his brother Paul (1930-2025), later dean of the Philosophy Department at Princeton University. Yet unlike her parents who showed little interest in intellectual or artistic pursuits, Margot developed an early passion for art and literature.
Her Venezuelan identity was deeply felt. In 1944, while still in high school at the Liceo Andrés Bello in Caracas, she won an essay contest on the topic of Latin American unity, centered on the the Pan-American ideal of the Libertador, the title referring to Simon Bolivar. Bolivar was the Venezuelan military and political leader who helped liberate much of South America from Spanish rule. Much later, while working at UNESCO in Mexico, she would remark that it was there she realized how profoundly Latin American she felt.
At the same time, this strong identification coexisted with a degree of distance from the social expectations of her milieu. Caracas in the 1930s and 1940s, enriched by a booming oil economy, offered considerable pleasures to a rising merchant bourgeoisie. Alegria Bendelac, a contemporary of Margot, whose family also emigrated from Tetouan, describes in her memoir Mosaïques her family’s daily lives in the milieu of Caracas’ affluent merchants: their comfortable homes on a single floor with patios in full bloom, the well-oiled interactions with peers from the same ethnic origin and social class, a lifestyle enlivened by a busy social calendar, and a large retinue of drivers, cooks, housemaids, chambermaids and nannies attending to their every need. In this upwardly mobile milieu, Margot’s father Fortunato was well integrated into both the business world and traditional Venezuelan society, the only Jew admitted to the exclusive Venezuelan country clubs. Yet Margot showed little interest in this lifestyle, nor in the prospects of a conventional marriage with a man from her community. Hoping to secure a favorable match for their daughter, Margot’s parents took her back to Tetouan in 1947, following the same course Fortunato had once taken. But instead of searching for a husband (she would never marry), she went about town taking photographs (she got into some trouble for that). “Women of my generation”, Margot noted in an interview, “finished sixth grade and then married. Getting a high school degree was hardly the norm, and to seek a university diploma was simply unthinkable.”[3] Her trajectory thus marked an early form of social and gender transgression.
During her university studies in literature and philosophy at the Central University of Venezuela, she forged strong ties with Spanish Republicanos in exile—intellectuals and workers displaced by Franco’s victory, with connections to socialism, communism, and anarchism. Many had found new homes in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and Caracas, profoundly shaping the cultural lives of these cities. Intellectuals from the left such as José Bergamín, Juan David Garcia Bacca, Eugenio Imaz contributed to a vibrant intellectual climate in Caracas, deeply influencing Margot’s worldview. They assumed endowed chairs at the School of Philosophy and Letters, which had been founded not long before by the Venezuelan writer Mariano Picón Salas (1901-1965). A close ally of social democrat and future president Rómulo Betancourt (1959-1964), Picón Salas was himself a renowned Venezuelan historian, journalist, and literary critic, with whom Margot would develop an enduring friendship. Although never formally aligned with a party, Benacerraf developed a consistently left-leaning political sensibility shaped by progressive postwar movements emphasizing human dignity. Like Picón Salas, she advocated for culture and education as foremost agents of social change. In a telling anecdote, when Benacerraf joined Raul Leóni’s democratic government in 1964 to lead the country’s cultural policy, she personally undertook an expedition to Venezuela’s most remote areas south of the Orinoco River on a bongo (a dugout canoe) carrying a projector, sound system, films, and slide shows. Beyond its cultural objective, the mission also served a civic purpose, encompassing efforts to educate the local populations in sanitation and disease prevention. A strong proponent of civilian and democratic governance, Margot believed in a social democracy and opposed authoritarianism and military intervention in politics. She would later be deeply antagonistic to Hugo Chávez (1999-2002 and 2002-2013) and to chavismo, whose authoritarian streak she detested.
Her subsequent training in New York and Paris further consolidated this orientation while also redirecting it toward film. In New York, she studied drama at the New School, where several refugees from the Hollywood McCarthy purges taught evening classes. Dalton Trumbo, the famed screenwriter, was one of them. Benacerraf’s own teacher and mentor was Erwin Piscator, a German émigré who had escaped Nazism in 1933. It is under the influence of Piscator that Margot came to see film as a medium capable of articulating a social and philosophical vision.
Visiting relatives in Paris in the summer of 1949, she decided to apply to the prestigious Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques (IDHEC) and was one of the few applicants accepted that year, and one of only three women. Immersed in the French capital’s foremost intellectual trends of the post-war years, she led the stimulating life of a Left Bank intellectual, debating social equity, anti-colonial struggle, secularism, and the furthering of democracy. She would split her time between Paris and Caracas until 1965, maintaining her commitment to both France and Venezuela.
So why France?
Her attachment to France reflected a broader pattern among Moroccan Jews educated through the Alliance Israelite Universelle, whose schools fostered deep cultural affinities with France. The AIU was a Paris-based Jewish organization whose chief purpose was to come to the rescue of Maghrebi and Middle Eastern Jewry deemed to have fallen behind socially, intellectually, and culturally in their Muslim settings. It owed as much to the Enlightenment ideals of the Jewish Haskalah as it did to French colonialism and was responsible for educating scores of Jewish youths in a network of schools which extended from Morocco to Iran. The first one was founded in Tetouan in 1862. Exposed to the lure of French culture at the turn of the twentieth century, several of Margot’s relatives married French women. Their families were from Tetouan but had emigrated at the end of the nineteenth century to nearby Oran, Algeria, by then a French colony. France, as well as Spain, whose influence in the North of Morocco also expanded with the Hispano-Moroccan war (1860-1862) vied for influence in the hearts and minds of the Jews from Northern Morocco. Both cultures shaped their multi-faceted, diasporic personality, even after emigration. Margot explained this conundrum in the following way: “Spain gave me the keys to feel. France gave me the keys to live. Spain is passion, emotion. France is clarity and order.”[4]
As for Morocco, it occupied a quiet yet unmistakable place in her heart—less spoken of, perhaps, but deeply felt. Margot would return to Morocco to visit her father’s grave—a practice Moroccan Jews call “zorear”, a hybrid word with an Arabic root (“zor” means to visit), and a Spanish suffix (The custom of “zorear” is still widely popular among Moroccan Jews in the diaspora, who regularly return to Morocco to pay their respects to their deceased relatives). In Tangier where her father was laid to rest, Margot befriended Rachel Muyal, the Jewish director of the famed Librairie des Colonnes and a key figure in the city’s intellectual life. For Margot, Morocco was the wellspring of familial ties and inherited traditions, of flavors and rituals gathered around the table, of melodies and prayers at synagogue shaped in the Tetouani rite. In essence, it formed the bedrock of a Sephardi identity, rooted deeply and carried across the generations.
Throughout her life, however, Margot Benacerraf remained a tireless advocate of Venezuelan culture, despite the obstacles she encountered. Her career was a combination of chance, vision, and remarkable daring. While still a student at the IDHEC, she returned to Venezuela in 1951 and embarked on her first cinematographic project, a film about the painter Armando Reverón. Reverón was an eccentric, marginal artist prone to schizophrenic crises, who lived in the seaside resort of Macuto, about three hours by car from Caracas. Known then as El Loco de Macuto (The Madman from Macuto), he did not enjoy the fame he has today, but early on Margot was fascinated by him. Moving to Macuto where he lived with his companion Juanita, to film him on a two-person crew was an audacious venture for a woman, even more so for one from Margot’s social class. “For being Sephardi transplanted to a very provincial society” she dismissed her parents, who opposed the project, as “doubly close-minded”. Neither gender boundaries nor social propriety constrained the strong-willed Benacerraf.
Reverón (1952) is not a conventional documentary, but a carefully orchestrated film with every detail prepared in advance as though it were fiction: sound was mixed and incorporated afterwards, and the sequences were filmed to match the cycles of light in a 24-hour time span. Benacerraf would accommodate spontaneous occurrences only if fitting within her narrative line -- she regarded film as a medium for developing an essay around a central idea. The result is a highly coherent elucidation of the artist’s pictorial development and of his evolution as a painter. It is also a disturbing exploration of the connections between creativity and madness. Reverón won first prize at the First International Festival of Art films in Caracas in 1952 and was featured to great acclaim at the Berlin Film Festival in 1953. In a characteristic episode of misogyny in the male-dominated culture of the time, the festival organizer mistakenly summoned “Herr” Benacerraf to the podium.
Her second film, Araya, completed in 1959, also constitutes a tribute to Venezuela; yet unlike Reverón, it shifts the focus from culture to landscape, and from individual subjectivity to collective labor. The project originated in Benacerraf’s initial idea to film three short works on everyday life in Venezuela—a triptych structured around the mountains, the plains, and the seacoast. While she quickly identified settings for the first two, she sought to avoid the clichés associated with Caribbean coastal imagery. The discovery of a photographic spread on the salt pyramids of the remote Araya peninsula proved auspicious. Struck by the unfamiliar beauty of a place that seemed to exist outside conventional representations, she abandoned the triptych in order to devote herself entirely to Araya. With its gigantic castle dating from the 1500s when the Spaniards first arrived there, Araya has a rich history as a major salt-mining site during the Spanish and Dutch colonial era, when salt was a common currency, more prized than gold (the word “salary” comes from salt). Benacerraf was drawn not only to the stark deserts of Araya regularly punctuated by their ascending salt peaks, but also to the demure dignity of its inhabitants. The routines of these salt-miners and fishermen remained unchanged for centuries. From the outset, she conceived of the site—“so terrible yet so authentic”—as a metaphor for Latin America itself.
If Araya appears at first glance as an ethnographic document, it is in fact structured as an essay-film organized around a central question: how would mechanization and modernization transform communities whose practices had remained largely unchanged for centuries? At the same time, the film anticipates a broader historical rupture. As Benacerraf was filming, Venezuela stood on the threshold of a profound economic transformation: the rise of oil as “black gold,” destined to supplant salt as the organizing resource of the national economy. In this sense, Araya does not merely document a vanishing world; it registers, with striking prescience, the transition toward the petrostate that would define Venezuela from the 1960s onward. The country would henceforth become known as “Venezuela Saudita,” a pun on Saudi Arabia, one of the largest producers of oil in the world.
But unlike Reverón which is an unsettling piece of artwork, Araya has a hypnotic sway achieved through its formal strategies. Filming the rhythmic repetition of the subsistence rituals by the peninsula’s inhabitants, Benacerraf conceived of her style as “poetic realism”. Shot in black and white and deliberately stripped of sociological specificity, the film privileges archetypal structures of human labor over the contingencies of historical context. It thus functions as a “self-consciously poetical social document”,[5] a hybrid form that oscillates between ethnography and abstraction. Benacerraf herself resisted overt symbolism—she famously criticized Bergman for his excess—preferring instead to rely on the intrinsic expressive power of images. Focusing on three families, the Salazars, the Ortizes, and the Peredas, Benacerraf followed their work routines in a 24-hour cycle. Their stories are carefully fictionalized to serve the quasi-biblical mode of the film. The inhabitants of Araya are rendered through a visual language that borders on the elemental, their bodies marked “by salt and sun’, their gazes “dry and shiny like salt”. In this austere environment, the four classical elements -- salt, water, air, and fire are active forces shaping human existence. Chronicling their daily struggles, Benacerraf admires the workers of Araya, even loves them, for “these people turn the very elements that made their existence so difficult into the very means of their existence”.[6] Yet, through the narration, she also emphasizes the deep relationship between the extraction of salt and capitalism. The film constructs a world in which labor appears as both timeless and precarious.
It is precisely here that Araya departs from the dominant cinematic paradigms of its time. While Italian neorealism from the late forties and early fifties sought to capture the immediacy of social reality, Benacerraf’s approach abstracts and stylizes it, producing a form that is at once more distanced and more universalizing. Her “fictionalized documentary” does not simply record reality. Rather, it reconfigures it into a cinematic meditation on time, labor, and survival. If there is a politics to Araya, it resides not in explicit ideological statements but in this very tension between documentation and poetic construction.
This tension, however, helps explain the film’s fraught reception in Venezuela. While international critics, particularly in Europe, celebrated Araya as an “authentic” expression of national cinema, in Venezuela, Araya occupied an ambiguous cultural position, which mitigated Benacerraf’s standing as a foundational figure of Latin American Cinema. A number of factors are involved. When the film was first shown in Venezuela in 1977, some critics formed within a Marxist, anti-imperialist framework challenged Araya’s status as a genuinely Venezuelan and Latin American work, viewing its aesthetic distance as a form of ideological detachment. Admittedly, Araya had a complex post-production history. Due to the inadequate methods used by Venezuelan labs at the time, the film’s footage had to be sent to Paris. In addition, the voice-over had to be in French for Cannes. Finally, further delays were occasioned by political instability in Venezuela as the dictator Perez Jiménez was about to be overthrown at the time of editing. Finally, when the film came out in Europe, Spanish and Latin American buyers, deeming Araya too ‘intellectual” for the Venezuelan public, were conspicuously absent. Eighteen years passed before Araya would be screened in Venezuela. Ironically, the film gained legendary status.
The abnormal inclusion-exclusion status of the film is complicated by Benacerraf’s gender and social class. The challenges Benacerraf encountered in the Venezuela of the 1950s as a woman in a film industry still struggling to gain a foothold are difficult to imagine today, yet I hope to have conveyed some of them. As for social class, the Benacerraf’s became wealthy bankers, the co-owners of Banco Union, which grew as the largest bank in Venezuela until it was sold in 1998. It partly accounts for why certain commentors regarded Araya as ideologically conservative (in 1977 for example, the Venezuelan critic Alfredo Roffé deemed it “practically the filmic manifesto of the defenders of the status quo”).
Lastly and perhaps more difficult to pin down, Benacerraf’s diasporic identity constituted another factor at play. “I spent the greater part of my life going to-and-fro”, she confided to Gil Arroyo in a book interview.[7] She was a cosmopolitan figure who belonged to a cohort of Sephardi immigrants, particularly Moroccan, partaking in multiple cultures. Moving effortlessly between Caracas, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Madrid, Paris, Tetouan, Tangier, and New York, she did not fit neatly into nationalist narratives. Thus, for a Marxist and anti-imperialist tradition attentive to an emerging national genealogy free of foreign dependency, Benacerraf occupied an ambiguous position: not entirely Venezuelan or perhaps not Venezuelan enough.
After Araya, Benacerraf ceased making film, likely due to lack of institutional support and of private investment for auteur or documentary film. Instead, she turned to cultural institution-building. In 1964, she responded to the call of her close friends Mariano Picón Salas and Miguel Otero Silva. Otero Silva (1908-1985) was a prominent politician from the left, former member of the Communist party of Venezuela, and journalist who founded the newspaper El Nacional. Both he and Picón Salas were part of the new democratic consolidation under President Raúl Leoni (1964-1969). At their request, Margot left Paris to lead the newly founded INCIBA (National Institute of Culture and Fine Arts), launching important initiatives such as the Amazonas Federal Pilot Plan. Populated with isolated communities with no awareness of their Venezuelan identity, the part of the country south of the Orinoco River had been culturally neglected. The Amazonas Pilot Plan was in effect “a civic mission, a work of cultural promotion, and a means of advancing national unification.”[8]
Other later projects Benacerraf undertook were her key advocacies for film culture. It included the founding of a National Cinematheque (1966). Modeled after the legendary Cinemathèque in Paris, the Cinemateca Margot Benacerraf bolstered cine-club culture with an emphasis on Latin American films.
A wonderfully strange episode captures Benacerraf’s deep enmeshment in Latin America’s cultural and intellectual fabric, as well as her proximity to what would come to be known as “magical realism.” After Araya, she collaborated with her friend Gabriel García Márquez on a script for the film Eréndira, which preceded his 1972 novella The Incredible and Sad tale of Innocent Eréndira and her Heartless Grandmother. Although the collaboration ultimately failed (the film was directed by Ruy Guerra), a striking scene witnessed by Benacerraf during the filming of Araya found its way into the script. One day, President Perez Jiménez arrived unannounced to Araya on his yacht, accompanied by a lavish retinue that included his concubines. In a gesture at once theatrical and surreal, he proceeded to stage a collective Roman Catholic wedding for the couples in his entourage and even asked Margot to film it (she regretfully declined as she was afraid to run out of film stock). The episode seems almost too implausible to be true—yet it was precisely this convergence of the real and the extraordinary that defined the imaginative terrain Benacerraf shared with García Márquez.
Recent scholarship has illuminated how Maghrebi Jews of Northern Morocco at the turn of the 20th century articulated a richly layered, multifaceted, and multidimensional model of identity.[9] Furthermore, these studies have also shown how the migration of these populations resulted in complex global networks, in uninterrupted dialogue with their homeland.[10] Fortunato Benacerraf’s life –culminating in his burial in Morocco after decades in Venezuela—embodies this circular trajectory. Margot inherited and transformed that layered identity. Drawing upon Spanish and French cultural affinities instilled in her from childhood, she fashioned a complex and capacious selfhood. This inheritance enabled her to move fluidly across cultural worlds, shaping her into a singularly original—if at times misunderstood--national figure in Venezuela.
Select Bibliography:
Alegria Bendelac, Mosaïques: une enfance juive à Tanger (1930-1945), Wallada: 1992.
Julianne Burton-Carvajal:
-An Interview with Margot Benacerraf: Reverón, Araya, and the Institutionalization of Cinema in Venezuela, Benacerraf, Schwartzman, Calderón, and Burton-Carvajal ed., Journal of Film and Video, Fall 1992 and Winter 1993, Vol. 44, no ¾, pp.51-75.
-Araya across Time and Space, in Visible Nations, Latin America Cinema and Video, Chon Noriega ed. University of Minnesota Press: 2000.
Diego Gil Arroyo: Sal de ayer: memorias de Margot Benacerraf, Caracas: Planeta Venezolana, 2019.
S.D. Goitein: A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Commnunities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967-1993.
Aviad Moreno, Entwined homelands, Empowered diasporas, Hispanic Moroccan Jews and their Globalizing Community, Indiana university Press: 2024.
Susan Gilson Miller, Moise Nahon and the Invention of the Modern Maghrebi Jew, in French Mediterraneans, Patricia Lorcin and Todd Shepard ed., University of Nebraska Press: 2016.