A journalist and man of letters in Tangier, Pinhas Assayag used the nom de plume Veritas. An enthusiastic Hispanophile, he wrote for or collaborated in the periodicals La Patria, El Imparcial, El Liberal of Madrid, and other Spanish journals. Manuel Ortegacalled him “one of the most cultured Tangerian Hebrews of the modern era” (Los hebreos, p. 221). Assayag was a friend of Angel Pulido Fernández, who actively campaigned for Spanish recognition of Sephardi Jews in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 

Assayag was vice president of the first governing Junta (executive co…