Marrakesh מָרָאכֶּש
Morocco's southern capital and the largest mellah in the country—right beside the royal kasbah. And the city from which 77 per cent of the Jews left under Operation Yachin.
Marrakesh was taken by the Almohads in 1147, a year after Fes, and it was there, at the royal court, that the whole Almohad policy of abolishing the dhimma was framed.
The mellah of Marrakesh was established by decree in 1557–58 under the Saʿdi sultan Mawlāy ʿAbdallāh al-Ghālib, and construction was complete about 1562–63. It adjoins the royal kasbah and the El Badi palace, and it is the largest mellah in Morocco. Here what Emily Gottreich describes is especially visible: the quarter's boundary stood still while its population multiplied, and by the nineteenth century the mellah was catastrophically overcrowded—hence the vertical building and the density that so struck European visitors. She also documents that even the rule forbidding leather shoes outside the mellah was applied inconsistently in Marrakesh.
In December 1863 Sir Moses Montefiore's mission passed through Marrakesh: he reached it from Tangier and obtained an audience with Sultan Muḥammad IV, securing the release of the prisoners in the Safi affair.
Marrakesh is worth remembering as the far end of one graph. Under Operation Yachin the departure rates by city were: Tangier 17.9%, Casablanca 54.5%, Marrakesh 77.2%. The gradient tracks class and Alliance schooling exactly—the francophone bourgeoisie of Tangier and Casablanca left for France and Canada, and left more slowly; the mellah of Marrakesh left almost entirely, and almost entirely for Israel.
On the timeline
Related
Sources
Documents of the period
- M. Montefiore, Diaries, ed. L. Loewe, 1890 — the mission of 1863–64 at first hand
Scholarship
- E. Gottreich, The Mellah of Marrakesh — the monograph on precisely this quarter
- M. M. Laskier, North African Jewry in the Twentieth Century — the departure rates by city under Operation Yachin
Basis: documents and evidence.