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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

see ZionismDaniel Schroeter

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

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…

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…

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…

1. Until 1912Origins of the Jews of MoroccoMorocco (Ar. al-Maghrib) is a country in the northwestern part of Africa, along the Mediterranean coast to the north, and stretching along the Atlantic Ocean to the west. The origins of Jewish settlement in al-Maghrib al-Aqṣā (Ar. far west, far Maghreb), as the westernmost country of North Africa was called by Arab geographers, is unknown. The Jewish communities of Morocco traced their roots back to ancient Israel; legends recount that the first Jews arrived e…