Oulad Mansour (Awlād Manṣūr), in the rural hinterland of southern Morocco, is a small cluster of tiny villages situated off the Marrakech-Demnat road. It is part of Sidi Youssef Ben Ali province, in the municipality of Ouhat Sidi Brahim. Until the early twentieth century it was a pastoral community.
As in many other villages in Morocco, the Jews lived in a separate Jewish neighborhood called the mallāḥ (mellah). In Oulad Mansour, the mellah was an amalgam of houses in the village of Ksar Tessaout, named after the nearby Oued Tessaout, which empties into Oued Oum er-Rabia.
The origins of th…