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Ruben Tajouri was a central figure in the development of the Alliance Israelite Universelle system in Morocco. Born in Libya in 1895 and educated at the Ecole Normale Israélite Orientale in Paris, he began his career in 1918 as a …

Jacques Pinto, also called “Jack,” was born in 1896 into one of the wealthiest Sephardi families in Tangier. His father, Moses Pinto, had made a substantial fortune in South America together with his paternal uncles Samuel and Ḥayyim, and had returned to Tangier just two years before his birth. Jacques followed the same path, growing the …

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In 1864 Sir Moses Montefiore, the chairman of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, visited Morocco and met with Sultan Sīdī Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān. On February 5, 1864, at his request, the sultan issued a royal decree (Cl. Ar. ẓahīr; Mor. Ar. ḍahīr; Fr. dahir) reminding his governors and pashas of the rights enjoyed by Jews dwelling in his dominion. In his capacity as commander of the faithful (Ar.…

Jacob (Ya’cub) Ohana (1846–1899) belonged to a well-known and powerful Jewish family in Meknes, as did his wife, Hannah née Oliel (1840–1920). A wealthy merchant, he acted as Tujjār al-Sultān (Ar. merchant of the sultan, i.e., royal merchant), a status he maintained despite the dismantling of the royal monopolies in accordance with the provisions of the Anglo-Moroccan treaty of 1856. Sultan Mawlāy al-Ḥasan (d. 1894) and Grand Vizier Bā Aḥmad (d. 1900) granted him a number of privileges and immunities. Among these were collecting taxes in the markets (Ar. mustafād) and at the gates o…

Mardochée Naggiar, also known as Mordechai (Murdikhay) Ibn al-Najjar, was one of the few Jewish scholars from a Muslim land who actively contributed to the European orientalist scholarship of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Born in Tunisia, he lived in Paris from the last years of the eighteenth century until 1812, during which time he made his as…

The Fez riots in April 1912 broke out in protest against the French imposition of the protectorate regime in Morocco. They erupted in Fez, then the Moroccan capital, on Wednesday, April 17, 1912. Since each of the involved groups had its own historiographic perspective on the event, it is not surprising that Moroccan Jews referred to the violent riots that engulfed them as “the Pillage” (Mor. Jud.-Ar. trītl), whereas Muslim nationalists have dubbed them “the Fez Uprising” (Ar. intifāḍat Fās), and French colonial historians speak of “Fez’s Bloody Days” (Fr. les journées sanglantes de Fès)…

As in other parts of the Arab-Muslim world, the creation of the State of Israel, the first Arab-Israeli War (1948), and the military confrontation that broke after the nationalization of the Suez Canal (1956) had a tremendous impact on relations between Jews and Muslims in Morocco and precipitated a mass emigration of Moroccan Jews to Israel. Al-Wifāq (Ar. agreement, entente), founded in 1956, was an organization that sought to counter this trend by convincing the country’s Jews that they could play an active part in …

Joshua (Ichoua, Yechoua, Josué) ben Ḥayyim Corcos (1832–1929) belonged to an important Moroccan Jewish family whose members who had been royal merchants (Ar. tujjār al-sulṭān ) for at least two centuries and remained closely connected to the palace and the highest officials after the dismant…

The anti-Jewish riots in the eastern Moroccan towns of Oujda and Jerrada in 1948 occurred in a region that still had not recovered from the devastating 1945 famine, in the context of the tense relationship with France arising after Sultan Sidi Mohammed Ben Youssef's speech in Tangier (1947) calling for an end to the protectorate. Equally important were the deteriorating political situation in the Middle East, the United Nations partition for Palestine, and the clandestine Jewish emigration to the newly declared State of Israel. A steadily increasing number of Moroccan …

Yomtob Sémach(1869–1940) was one of the most influential educators of the Alliance Israelite Universelle(AIU) system in Bulgaria, the Ottoman Empire, and Morocco over a period spanning fifty years. He was born in Yambol, Bulgaria, in 1869 into a wealthy merchant family originally from Edirne (Adrianople) and was educated at the local AIU schools and then at the École Normale Israélite Orientale in Paris. He began his teaching career at an AIU school in Sousse, Tunisia, in 1891, but returned to Bulgaria two years later following the death of his father, and was appointed f…

1. Ottoman Empire“Protégé” is the imprecise term often found in Western diplomatic sources from the seventeenth century onwards to designate non-Muslim individuals who had an official connection to a European embassy or consulate in the Ottoman Empire that entitled them to some of the pri…