Samuel-Daniel Levy

Samuel-Daniel Lévy (4 December 1874, Tetuan–1970, Casablanca) was a businessman, organizer, and leading advocate of Zionism in Morocco. He held British citizenship.

Biography Levy was born to a Sephardic family in Tetuan in 1874 and studied at that city's school of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU). director of the school in Tetuan, to attend the École Normale israélite Orientale, a teachers’ training school in Paris founded by the Alliance Israélite Universelle. and a program to systematically diagnose tuberculosis. He also established a number of Zionist and Jewish philanthropic associations and local branches of foreign associations, including Société Maghen David, ORT Moroc and OSE Maroc.

Zionism Samuel-Daniel Lévy is considered the leading advocate of Zionism in Morocco. He was committed to Zionism early on, already a member of several Zionist cells by 1913. He established Zionist branches in all of the main cities in Morocco and propagated Theodor Herzl's ideology through a network of synagogues, through cultural associations (especially the Société Maghen David ), and through publications (especially L'Avenir Illustré). He facilitated collecting the Zionist shekel and helped fundraise for the Jewish National Fund and Keren Hayesod. He also organized visits from rabbis and lectures from speakers from Palestine and other places. He visited Palestine in 1935 and returned with renewed commitment to Zionism. He was further inspired by the election of the pro-Zionist Léon Blum as Prime Minister of France in 1936.

Views The historian Mohammed Kenbib notes that "he took tremendous pride in the contribution of Jews, and especially of Sephardic Jews, to world civilization." In a speech to the AIU alumni association in Tangier in 1896, Lévy told the audience that Jewish intellectual superiority was a source of jealousy for Christians and Muslims.

At the 1944 World Zionist Congress in Atlantic City, New Jersey, he expressed gratitude to France for its .

On his Zionism, Kenbib notes that "Lévy felt that the Jewish dimension of Moroccan history represented an uninterrupted pattern of oppression, marginalization, and suffering, and that the Arabs had to be expelled by force from the Holy Land."