Search

see ʿAyyāsh FamilyDaniel Schroeter

Essaouira (Cl. Ar. al-Ṣuwayra; Mor. Ar. Ṣwīra; Port. Mogador), a city located on the southwestern Atlantic coast of Morocco, was the most important seaport of Morocco from the last decades of the eighteenth to the end of the nineteenth century. It was home to one the largest Jewish communities in Morocco in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 1. Jewish Merchants in the Town’s Early Development Jews were closely connected to the early development of Essaouira, which was founded in 1764 by Sultan Sīdī Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh as the port for the southern capital of Marrakesh…

see Atlas MountainsDaniel Schroeter

see Tata RegionDaniel Schroeter

There have been Jewish communities in various parts of the mostly Berber regions of the Atlas Mountains in the Islamic Maghreb since ancient times. The Atlas range includes mountain chains and massifs in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia that extend along the Saharan fault from the southwestern Moroccan Atlantic coast to the southeastern Tunisian Mediterranean coast, including the Rif and Tell Atlas, which border the Mediterranean. In Morocco, Jews were most widely distributed in the southern chains of the High At…

The Corcos family of merchants, entrepreneurs, and community leaders attained great prominence in Morocco from the eighteenth through the twentieth century. Originally from Spain and Portugal, the family settled in Morocco and Italy after the expulsion in 1492. The Moroccan branch of the family first established itself in Fez, but family members also settled in Tetouan, and Safi. It was in Marrakesh, the capital, that the Corcos family rose to prominence in the eighteenth century. Members of the family also …

Born in 1772, Judah Benoliel was a wealthy Jewish merchant from a Tetouani family who served as the Moroccan consul general in the British colony of Gibraltar in the 1820s and 1830s under the Alawid (ʿAlawī) sultans Mawlāy Sulaymān and Mawlāy ‘Abd al-Raḥmān. Morocco maintained only a few permanent consulates in foreign countries before the twentieth century, but Gibraltar, a key entrepôt for commerce in the western Mediterranean, was strategically a crucial center for Moroccan financial and political dealings wit…

Located in the Anti-Atlas Mountains in the southwestern Sous region, the town of Ifrane (from Berb. ifri, cave), called Oufrane by Jews, was, according to Moroccan Jewish tradition, home to the oldest continuously existing Jewish community in Morocco. Legend recounted that its origin ultimately went back to escapees from Jerusalem after the destruction of the First Temple in 586 B.C.E.  Over the years their descendants moved across Egypt and North Africa in search of a home. They eventually settled in Wadi Oufrane in…

see SousDaniel Schroeter

see SousDaniel Schroeter

see MoroccoDaniel Schroeter

see Grana (Livornese), Tunis, TunisiaDaniel Schroeter

The École Normale Hébraïque (ENH) was founded inCasablanca in 1946 by the Alliance Israélite Universelle to train teachers in modern Hebrew and Jewish Studies. It was part of an effort to modernize the Jewish and Hebrew curriculum in Morocco, as well as to replace the more traditionalist rabbi-teachers who taught Hebrew and Jewish Studies in the Alliance schools, and to serve as a testing ground for the organization’s post–World War II program of reform. Its founders were Jules Braunschvig, the vice-president of the Alliance, Isaac Rouche, a rabbi from Oran and supporter of the AIU, and Re…

see Dra’aDaniel Schroeter

Situated in Northwest Africa on the Mediterranean coast, Algeria (Ar. al-Jazā’ir) borders Morocco to the west, Tunisia and Libya to the east, and Niger, Mali, and Mauritania to the south. The name Algeria is relatively late; during the Middle Ages, much of the region that would later be called Algeria was designated simply as al-Maghrib al-Awsaṭ (the Central Maghreb) by Arab geographers. Jews have lived in the region since antiquity, with the earliest evidence dating from the late Roman period. Little is known of the Jewish communities at the time of the Arab conquest in t…

Zarzis is a town on the coast of southeastern Tunisia, about 50 kilometers (32 miles) south of Jerba and close to the Libyan border. A Jewish community was established in Zarzis in 1883 after French settlers began developing olive oil production in the town and region during the French protectorate (1881–1956). Nearly the entire Jewish community was made up of Jerban Jews from Hara Kebira who, seeking opportunities in the colonial economy, formed a network of satellite communities together with other towns in the region (Ben Gardane, Medenine, Matmata). The large synagogue, modeled on…

The Renacimento de Israel (Renaissance of Israel) was a bimonthly Spanish-language review published in Tangier but printed in Algeciras, Spain. The paper described itself on its masthead as Defensor de los intereses politicos y nacionales de la colectividad Israelite de Marruecos (Defender of the political and national interests of the Jewish collectivity in Morocco).  It was founded in 1924 by Asher Perl (known as “Rabbi Asher”), who was born in Poland around 1868 or 1869, lived in Palestine for time, and settled in Algeciras after traveling widely in N…

See TunisDaniel Schroeter

Agadir (Berb. Agadīr, fortified enclosure) is a seaport on the Atlantic coast of southwestern Morocco near the mouth of the Sous River. Founded as a fortified post by a Portuguese nobleman in 1505, and acquired by the Portuguese crown in 1513, Santa Cruz do Cabo de Guer was renamed Agadir when it was conquered by the Saʿdi dynasty in 1541. The town became Morocco’s principal southern seaport, and much of the country’s trade with Europe, especially Amsterdam, was conducted by Jews who settled there. The Dutch relied on Jewish merchants in Agadir for ostrich feathers, indigo, wax, gu…

see Atlas MountainsDaniel Schroeter