What is the history of Moroccan Jewish communities?

The Jewish history of Morocco is far older and deeper than most visitors expect, and I think it is essential to understanding the country. Jewish communities here go back over two thousand years, to long before Islam arrived — there were Berber tribes who practised Judaism, and Jewish traders working the same caravan routes as everyone else.

The community grew dramatically after 1492, when Jews expelled from Spain, the Sephardim, found refuge in Morocco alongside their Muslim neighbours. They settled in the mellah, the Jewish quarter, which in Fes and Marrakech you can still walk through. Far from being only a place of confinement, the mellah was often near the royal palace for protection, and Jewish merchants, jewellers, tailors and diplomats became indispensable to the sultans.

In Essaouira the Jewish presence was so central that the community at times approached half the town’s population, handling much of Morocco’s overseas trade. Across the country Jewish and Muslim Moroccans shared music, cuisine, craft and even saints’ pilgrimages — a genuinely intertwined culture that I never want guests to flatten into a simple story.

After the founding of Israel in 1948 and through the following decades, the great majority emigrated, and a community that once numbered in the hundreds of thousands shrank to a few thousand. But the heritage is carefully kept: restored synagogues like Slat al-Azama in Marrakech, the museum in Casablanca, old cemeteries, and pilgrimage sites. I often build a half-day of Jewish heritage into a trip, because it shows a Morocco of coexistence that still quietly endures.