Meknes מִכְּנָאס

Meknes was the capital under the Alaouite sultan Mawlāy Ismāʿīl (r. 1672–1727), and the mellah was established here in 1682—a new quarter on the south-western side, beside the imperial kasbah. Some sources give 1679; the discrepancy is small and worth noting.

Meknes is a city of rabbinic families. Around 1705 the family of Rabbi Chaim ibn Attar, the future author of Or ha-Chaim, fled here from persecution—he was then nine; and so Meknes is often given as his birthplace, though he was born in Salé. Here the Berdugo family worked—Rabbi Raphael Berdugo and his Mishpatim Yesharim, a principal source for the Moroccan courts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and here the Toledano family, from which came Rabbi Jacob Moses Toledano, compiler of the chronicle of Moroccan sages Ner ha-Maʿarav (1911).

The Meknes beit din, with that of Fes, is the chief support of the body of responsa through which the social life of Moroccan Jewry is known at all: property in the mellah, tenancy, ḥazakah—the right in rented premises—matrimonial property on the Castilian model, communal taxation. Without those responsa the mellah could be discussed only from outside, from consular dispatches and travellers' notes.