Mohammed Ben Youssef, later King Mohammed V, is venerated by many Moroccan Jews for his role in protecting his Jewish subjects and in mitigating the impact of the anti-Jewish laws during the Vichy period. The sultan’s protection of the Jews during Vichy has also in recent years been officially promoted as a symbol of the tolerance and pluralism of Moroccan society and its rulers. The posthumous glorification of Mohammed V, especially the benevolent role he supposedly played during Vichy, has shaped much of the thinking about Morocco during the war years. The debate has often centered on what actions, if any, the sultan took on behalf of the Jews, either publically or secretly, without analyzing the significance of the sultan’s actions during this period in Moroccan history. Based on an examination of the French protectorate and Moroccan archives located at the USHMM, I propose a different interpretation that distances itself from the debate of Mohammed V’s philo-Semitic benevolence, and instead analyzes the position of the sultan in the larger context of late colonialism and emerging nationalism in Morocco. In the nationalist narrative of the independence movement in Morocco, the Vichy period is practically ignored, especially since the sultan had to a large extent severed the ties that he had begun to develop with the incipient nationalist movement with the arrest and exile of a number of its leaders in 1937 and his subsequent obsequiousness to the French Residency during this period. I argue instead that Mohammed Ben Youssef’s actions, real or imagined, towards the Jews during Vichy, already discussed by French Protectorate authorities and Jewish leaders after the allied landing, reveal how the sultan was positioning himself as a national leader by asserting his credentials as protector of all Moroccan subjects, including the Jews, while at the same time, demonstrate that he was reliant on the Residency for remaining as symbolic ruler of the country. In light of the positioning of some of the Moroccan nationalists, some of whom had found refuge in the northern Spanish zone, the sultan was both outmaneuvering the anti-Semitic nationalist opposition, and Spain's racist claim as protectors of the Jews. Jews were therefore of exceptional value for the monarchy's legitimation and continuity, and ultimately, in the king's ability to both coopt the nationalist parties, and to reduce their influence in the years after independence.