The mellah מלאח

From Arabic al-mallāḥ (ملاح), "salt, saline ground." In Fes it was at first simply the name of a district of Fes el-Jdid—earlier called Ḥimṣ—after a saline spring or a salt store. The name carried no pejorative sense at origin.

The dates by city: Fes—conventionally 1438, more probably gradual, in the mid-fifteenth century; Marrakesh—decreed 1557–58, construction complete about 1562–63, under the Saʿdi Mawlāy ʿAbdallāh al-Ghālib, beside the royal kasbah; Meknes—1682, under the Alaouite Mawlāy Ismāʿīl, beside the imperial kasbah; Rabat, Salé, Tetouan and Essaouira—1807–08, under Mawlāy Sulaymān.

Four things distinguish it from the Venetian ghetto. Location: the mellah was placed hard against the residence of the sultan or governor, inside or abutting the fortified royal enclosure; the European ghetto was placed at the urban margin. Moroccan placement encodes not expulsion from the centre but fiscal and physical proximity to the sovereign. Function: protection at once—the sultan's Jews were his fiscal property and were sheltered from the urban crowd, which is why the mellah was the first thing sacked whenever authority weakened—and administrative legibility: assessment of the jizya, and the availability of translators, mint-masters and tujjār al-sulṭān, the royal merchants. Self-government: Jews built, financed and governed the quarter themselves—courts, ḥevrot, slaughter, schools, cemetery—under a leadership (nagid, shaykh al-yahūd) recognised by the state. Legal frame: dhimma is a contract with reciprocal obligations, not the Christian theology of Jewish witness-servitude out of which the ghetto of 1516 came.

The counterweight must be stated. Emily Gottreich insists the mellah was also an instrument of control and of spatial subordination, and that by the nineteenth century the mellahs of Fes and Marrakesh were catastrophically overcrowded: the quarter's boundary stood still while its population multiplied—hence the vertical, dense, unsanitary fabric that so struck European visitors.

Two common claims are wrong. 1438 for Fes is not a dated decree but a scholarly convention: in the mid-fourteenth century Jews lived in Fes el-Bali, by the end of the sixteenth they were firmly in the mellah of Fes el-Jdid, and between those points the record is thin; Hicham Rguig holds that the transfer went in stages across the Marinid period, Susan Gilson Miller that the mellah's urban fabric developed progressively from the founding of Fes el-Jdid in 1276. And "mellah" does not mean "the place where Jews salted the heads of the executed for display on the gates": that corvée is attested for later periods, but the toponym is prior and independent of it. Finally, far from all Moroccan Jews lived in mellahs: mellahization was an urban phenomenon, and the Jews of the Atlas, the Sous, the Draʿa, the Tafilalt and the Rif lived in qṣur and villages among Berber neighbours under the personal protection of local qaids—an entirely different social order.