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Agadir (Agādīr; Berber, Agadir n'Ighir) is a city on the southern Moroccan Atlantic coast near the mouth of the Sous river valley, at the base of the western flank of the High Atlas mountain range. Derived from the Semitic root g-d-r (“wall”), “Agadir” is a frequent place name in the Sous region, connoting a fortified structure or collective granary. Probably an inhabited site in antiquity, Agadir’s recorded construction dates from 1505 when a Portuguese nobleman built a castle there, to protect a fishing fleet. The king of Portugal acquired the site in…

see Antebi (Antibi) Family (also Community Leaders)Daniel SchroeterBibliography,

see SousDaniel Schroeter

From the early Islamic period until the mid-twentieth century, Jews were scattered among the Muslim Berber-speaking populations of the Maghreb: in rural Morocco, especially in the Atlas Mountains and the south, Kabylia and Mzab in Algeria, Jerba in Tunisia, and the Jebel Nafusa in Libya. While contemporary evidence is lacking, it is likely that some Berbers converted to Judaism in late antiquity, before the expansion of Islam in the Maghreb. The idea that the Jews who lived in these regions were themselves part of the indigenous Berber population …

see Dra’aDaniel Schroeter

Born in Marrakesh in the 1760s, Meʾir ben Abraham Cohen Macnin (Maqnīn; Mor. Ar. goldfinch) settled in Essaouira (Mogador) in the 1770s or early 1780s. He soon rose to prominence in the port as a merchant and key intermediary for the governor of Essaouira. In the winter of 1799 to 1800, he set sail for England during an outbreak of bubonic plague, leaving behind his wife whom he had recently married. This was the beginning of a long sojourn in London, during which Macnin joined the elite Spanish and Portuguese Jews’ Congregation, also known as the Bevis Marks Synagogue, eve…

see Algeria;Morocco; Libya; TunisiaDaniel Schroeter

See Anti-Judaism/Antisemitism/Anti-ZionismDaniel Schroeter

The city of Casablanca ([al-]Dār al-Bayḍāʾ, Sp. and Ar. white house), Morocco’s principal seaport, was home to the largest Jewish community in the Maghreb in the twentieth century. Situated on the central Atlantic coast, it was known as Anfā in the Middle Ages. During the decline of the Marinid dynasty, its relative autonomy made it a safe haven for corsairs. The Portuguese destroyed the town in 1468 or 1469, and it was only rebuilt in the latter half of the eighteenth century by Sultan Sīdī Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh, who renamed it al-Dār al-Bayḍāʾ. Grain was its principal expor…

see Conseil des Communautés Israélites du Maroc (CCIM)Daniel Schroeter

see Ben Nāʾīm FamilyDaniel Schroeter

Nahum Slouschz(ca.1872-1966), Hebraicist and explorer, was the first to write in-depth studies on the history, ethnography and archeology of the Jewish communities of North Africa. He was born near Vilna, grew up in Odessa, and became actively involved in Zionism and the Hebrew renaissance movement on which he wrote extensively. He spent time in Palestine in the 1890s, returned to Russia, and then went to study classical and French literature in Geneva.  He continued his studies in Semitics and …

The town of Iligh, located in the district of Tazeroualt (Tāzarwālt) in the Anti-Atlas Mountains in the southwestern Sous region of Morocco, rose to importance when Būdamī‘a (d. 1659), the great-grandson of the venerated saint ( murābiṭ) and sharīf Sīdī Aḥmad ū-Mūsā (Sī Ḥmad ū-Mūsā) made it his capital in the 1620s. ‘Alī Būdamī‘a exploited the weakness of the Saʿdian dynasty after the death of Sultan Aḥmad al-Manṣūr to build a base of political power. He accomplished this largely through his control of trade in the western Sahara which was conducted by Jews from nearby Ifrane,…

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…