Jews under Islam in early modern Morocco in travel chronicles

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses the relationship between the ideological and legal structures that discriminated against Jews in early modern Morocco and its reflection in social practices. The study shows that there is not always a parallel between ideological-legal inequality and social relationships, as social practices can be influenced by other ideological frameworks. However, there were a few areas where there was a more marked no-trespassing line. This project compares contemporary chronicles by different authors with diverse cultural-religious backgrounds and personal-political agendas.

KEYWORDS:

• Jews
• Islam
• early modern Morocco
• dhimmi
• spatial segregation
• conversion
• mixed marriage and sexual relations
• descent

Introduction

Due to its early colonization of Algeria in the 1830s, France was very interested in building a colonial library to better control their new colonial subjects and exploit the resources of the colonized lands. That encyclopaedic task featured the participation of travellers and adventurers, colonial administrators and servicemen, historians and ethnologists. Their intensive production of information about North Africa continued for over a century, from the middle of the nineteenth century up to the Second World War. In French Algeria, this literature contributed to the debate over granting French citizenship to the Jews there. However, in Morocco, the Jewish population was placed in the category of ‘indigenous’. The colonial powers enforced a new legal framework that transformed the old status of protected non-Muslim subjects, the dhimmis, ¹ into that of perpetual subjects of the Sultan in the modern sense (that is under a civil, not religious, definition of sociopolitical membership, which would grant the status of full citizen to Jews in modern Morocco). ² The Spaniards, in turn, while copying the French with regard to how to rule over the Moroccan subjects in the Spanish Protectorate zone, also developed a literature that emphasized the cultural proximity of Muslims (Morisco and Andalusi descendants) ³ and, especially, Jews (Sephardim) to the Spanish culture and language. However, like its French counterpart, Spanish literature was not free of anti-Semitic tropes. ⁴

After 1917, when the Balfour Declaration announced the support of the British government for a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, tensions between Muslims and Jews increased in the Middle East and North Africa. This was further fuelled by Nazi propaganda in the 1930s and the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. However, the mass migration of the Jews from the region took place during the decolonization of the Maghreb in the 1950s and 1960s. North African Jewish scholars, like Algerian born André Chouraqui (Aïn Témouchent 1917-Jerusalem 2007) and Moroccan Haim Zafrani (Essaouira 1922-Paris 2004), who grew up in French colonial Algeria and Morocco, later wrote about the history of the Jews of North Africa. While Chouraqui, an active Zionist who later migrated to Israel and became an Israeli citizen, emphasized the massive emigration of North African Jews after decolonization, Zafrani developed most of his career between Morocco and France, kept his Moroccan citizenship and highlighted Moroccan Jewish culture and Muslim/Jewish relations and cultural symbiosis in Morocco. However, as during colonial times, the history of the Jews of the Maghreb was a marginal subject in mainstream historiography, mainly of interest to scholars of Jewish and North African background drawn to the history of the Jews of the Muslim world. ⁵

Most of these studies approach the issue of anti-Semitism either to argue that anti-Semitism is inherent to Islam and present in its foundational texts or to sustain that anti-Semitism is not inherent to Islam, although they note the impact of the creation of the State of Israel on the rise of anti-Semitism in the Middle East. ⁶ Bernard Lewis holds that anti-Jewish Muslim persecutions in the Middle Ages cannot be equated to anti-Semitism, as it responded to the political developments of the time, particularly in the context of the conflict between Christian Europe and the Muslim world. According to this thesis, Muslim actions against the Jews corresponded to a political rationale devoid of the ‘irrational’ fear of the Jews in Medieval Christian Europe. Lewis, like Norman Stillman, however, also draws attention to the fact that the presence of anti-Semitism nevertheless predates the widespread influence of Nazi propaganda throughout North Africa and the Middle East in the 1930s, and would have penetrated the Middle East with European colonialism in the nineteenth century. In parallel, Muslim resentment towards non-Muslim colonizers eventually also affected subjects with consular protection, particularly Greek Orthodox Christians and Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, but later Jews as well. ⁷ A new collection overseen by Michel Abitbol – also a historian of Jewish Moroccan background – on the history of relations between Jews and Muslims in Muslim countries, entitled Shared History, aims to overcome the controversy between the thesis that the experience of Jews in Muslim societies was marked by abuse and persecution, and the opposing thesis that speaks of a golden age of tolerance and coexistence in Muslim countries abruptly interrupted by colonization and Zionism. ⁸

The projection of these nineteenth and twenty-century prejudices, stereotypes and developments regarding Jewish/Muslim relations onto the previous centuries is not helped by the lack of historiographical sources for the Jews of the western Maghreb before the nineteenth century. ⁹ Instead, it indicates the scant importance given to North African Jews by both the Muslim elites of the south and the Christian elites from the north of the Mediterranean in the early modern era. Early histories of the Jews of the Maghreb are essentially the result of travel literature and chronicles from the sixteenth and seventeenth century, in addition to rabbinic literature. From the eighteen to the nineteenth century, travel writings helped to build a stereotypical view of the Jews of North Africa informed by European anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim clichés. According to these narratives, Jews lived miserably, under constant fear, oppression and violence from Muslim rulers and neighbours, narratives that merge with the topic of ‘exile and redemption’ in the writings of the rabbis. ¹⁰

Objectives and methodology

This paper does not attempt to draw a complete picture of all aspects of Muslim/Jewish relations in Muslim lands before the advent of European colonization. The objective is more thematically specific and socially, ethnographically and geographically restricted. ¹¹ I am not a historian, have never studied a period prior to the nineteenth century before, and my knowledge of the Maghreb comes from my expertise in Spain and the Sephardim in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly in the north of Morocco, which became the Spanish Protectorate in 1912. However, I am working on a project regarding the impact of the penetration of modern anti-Semitism in Spanish colonial Morocco on Muslim/Jewish relations, and I could not find any in-depth studies that covered the anthropological issues I want to approach to compare between pre-colonial and colonial Spanish Morocco with the goal of at least partially overcoming the projection of nineteenth and twentieth-century literature onto Jewish/Muslim relations in Morocco during the previous centuries. This article, then, aims to identify the sociopolitical classification systems prevailing in early modern Morocco and the impact of normative and ideological systems of inequality and discrimination regarding social practices. It approaches the adscription of sociopolitical identity, the possibility of changes in group membership, spatial segregation, ‘mixed’ marriages, sexual relationships and the sociopolitical adscription of the offspring of such unions, and conversions.

I have avoided the use of concepts and conceptions such as ‘anti-Semitism’, in order to explore the local ideas, prejudices and conceptions regarding Jews operating in the early modern western Maghreb. Recent scholarship points to the Western origins of racism – establishing anti-Semitism as a form of racism against the Jews with medieval roots – and has distinguished it from other forms of prejudice and discrimination on a religious or social basis. Benjamin Isaac, Joseph Ziegler and Miriam Eliav-Feldon hold that the definition of racism (including anti-Semitism) should comprise any systematic attempt to rationalize the division of human beings into groups based on presumed inborn characteristics, whether physical or psychological, that would pass unaltered from one generation to the next. The authors mention a switch in the European Middle Ages from the concept of the Jews based on secundum theologian to one based on secundum naturam, which was already imbued with scientific thought. They observe that beginning in the medieval era, the body increasingly appears in the sources as a marker of typical group characteristics. ¹² Geraldine Heng shows how racial thinking, law and social practices existed in medieval Europe before a recognizable vocabulary of race emerged. In this context, the Jews were soon conceptualized as an internal racialized other. This proto-racial thinking, which seems to have originated in medieval England and France, also reached the Christian kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula in the fourteenth century. After 1492, it contributed to the racialization of Jewish converts and Moriscos. ¹³ Despite the fact that Lewis and others point out that the Quran expresses no racial or colour prejudices, ¹⁴ this does not mean that the early European forms of ‘proto-racism’ and ‘proto-antisemitism’ could not have reached the Muslim world as well. In the western part of North Africa, relations between the south Mediterranean Muslim lands and the Iberian Peninsula had always been very intense due to the proximity of their shores. The question is whether European ideas, particularly the earliest forms of anti-Semitism, had any impact on the Muslim imaginary about Jews and on Muslim/Jewish relations.

Due to the lack of other ethnographic primary sources, for this study I am cautiously using the travel chronicles written by travellers from al-Andalus and, later, southern Spain, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For the study of the dominant sociopolitical classification systems in early modern Morocco the normative framework has been more fully studied and is better known thanks to the availability of Arabic and Hebrew legal sources. However, for the precolonial period, sources containing ethnographic information and archival documents are scarcer. Therefore, travel accounts are one of the few materials available to find ethnographic data on Jewish/Muslim relations in the western Maghreb for the early modern centuries. ¹⁵

Social and cultural anthropologists have long used travel accounts as ethnographic material, despite Claude Levi-Strauss’ declamation against travel accounts perplexed by their popularity and mistrustful of their intentions. Indeed, he claimed that travel literature preserved the illusion of something that no longer existed. Nevertheless, Levi-Strauss was himself a sort of travel writer and, like other travel writers, he learnt about different cultures in remarkable depth. As Joan-Pau Rubiés observes, many travel writers not only developed an insight into the peoples they described, but also a linguistic expertise that allowed them to act as cultural translators. Some have made important contributions to the writing of ethnography and the global circulation of knowledge. They often built narratives that combined direct observation and historical speculation with wider rhetorical aims. Therefore, without ignoring their ideological ethnocentric agendas and cultural biases, this literature also contains valuable ethnographic material built upon first-hand observation and cultural interaction. ¹⁶

This article features some of the Andalusian and Iberian travel chronicles available from the sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries, like the well-known Della descrittione dell’Africa et delle cose notabli che ivi sono by Hassan al-Wazzan aka Leo Africanus, and the chronicle of Luis del Mármol, Descripción general de África, sus guerras y vicisitudes, desde la fundación del mahometismo hasta el año 1571, as well as the less familiar chronicles of the Franciscan brothers. ¹⁷ Despite the common Iberian origins of the writers, ¹⁸ the authors are quite distinct due to their different religious backgrounds. The contrast of their descriptions makes it possible to look at the subject from different angles. The first author is the well-known Muslim traveller born in Granada and educated in Fez, Hassan al-Wazzan (also referred to by his Christian name and nickname, Leo Africanus, Granada c. 1494-Tunis c. 1554) ¹⁹ and the second, the Spanish historian Luis del Mármol (Granada 1524-Vélez-Málaga 1600). Although Mármol has been accused of having copied al-Wazzan – which is true – his work nevertheless adds further contextual information. More importantly, however, his ethnographic viewpoint is that of a descendant of Jews converted to Catholicism in early modern Spain. ²⁰ The final source comprises the chronicles of the Franciscan friars from the Baetic Franciscan province in the south of Spain, in charge of keeping the faith of the Christian captives in the kingdoms of Marrakech and Fez. ²¹ These three sources provide a triangulation whose points of convergence and divergence shed new light not so much on the historical facts, which are sometimes incorrect, as on social practices and relationships.

In addition to the different cultural and religious backgrounds of the chroniclers, the experience of the Franciscan friars and Luis del Mármol in Morocco was very different from the personal experience of Hassan al-Wazzan, whose description of his travels through the north of Africa are full of positive personal anecdotes. In addition, as a captive in the service of Pope Medici, he enjoyed a privileged situation. For his part, the Franciscan chroniclers from the middle of the sixteenth century coincided with the latter years of the Wattasid dynasty, which failed to protect the kingdom from foreign incursions and the Portuguese increasing presence on Morocco’s coast and lost the kingdom to the Saadis from the south. Later, in the early eighteenth century, Francisco de San Juan del Puerto describes the situation of the Jews in Morocco as a semi-slavery, subjected to strong economic exactions and violence by the black soldiers of the Sultan. Again, it is necessary to contextualize, since it refers to the reign of the Alawite Moulay Ismail (1672–1727), who began to create a unified state in the face of opposition from local tribes. Moulay Ismail also submitted to heavy tributes to Muslims, and ordered to execute a Muslim jurist for criticizing as non-Islamic the obligatory conscription in the army of free black Muslims. ²² Moreover, as noted above, beginning in the late seventeenth century there was a shift in European narratives regarding the Jews of North Africa, which became more clearly infused with anti-Semitism. ²³ The growing presence of (racialized) anti-Semitism in Europe could also have influenced the way Francisco de San Juan described the situation of the Jews of Morocco in the early eighteenth century. All these different types of chroniclers will explain for the differences and focus of their narratives, as well as meaningful silences.

Brief introduction to the historical context and to the Jews of the Muslim West

The expansion of Islam throughout North Africa was met by Jewish communities that were so ancient that they had lost all memory of their origins and resorted to legends and biblical myths to explain themselves. The first archaeological remains from the Jewish presence in northwest Africa were found in the Roman city of Volubilis, in Mauretania Tingitana, north of Meknes, and date back to the second century C.E. ²⁴ According to Ibn Khaldun, on the eve of the Muslim conquest, ‘some of the Berbers professed Judaism’, and he names several Berber tribes that converted to Judaism prior to the Arab conquest. ²⁵ In his description, these were Judaized Berbers rather than Berberized Jews. However, according to al-Wazzan’s informants, the populations of the Atlas and the Sus, ‘some there affirm that the first inhabitants of this town came by natural descent from King David’. ²⁶ Genetic studies, however, point to the possible Berber origins of the ancestors of the descendants of the Jews of the Atlas and southern Morocco. ²⁷

The Jewish population in western North Africa was not only ancient and numerous, growing even further with the arrival of the exiles from the Christian kingdoms of medieval Iberia, but was also distributed across the whole region. Jewish populations could be found in imperial metropolises such as Meknes, Fez and Marrakech; the dynamic port cities of the Atlantic coast, like Safi and Tangier; and the most remote rural villages in the Atlas Mountains: ‘In the same mountain great multitudes of Jews exercising handicrafts, do inhabit’. ²⁸ The chroniclers of the time also mention the presence of a Karaite community in the High Atlas that ‘are considered heretics by the other Jews’. ²⁹ Despite the fact that many of these populations disappeared with the arrival of Islam, Luis del Mármol, who was following al-Wazzan’s description of the city of Teitdeuer in the western High Atlas, noted that: ‘Some African writers say that the builders of this city were Jews from the tribe of Judah, and that they built it when the Africans had the law of Moses, and that they remained in it, until the Mohammedan Arabs came to Africa, and they made them leave it’. ³⁰

In the middle of the eleventh century, nomadic Saharan Berbers, the Almoravids, launched a religious and military crusade to impose a rigorous Maliki orthodoxy throughout the western Maghreb and al-Andalus. With the Berber dynasties of the Almoravids and Almohads, and its later institutionalization by the Marinid kingdom of Fez, Malikism became the uncontested doctrine of the Muslim west. Although Muslim tolerance would explain the Jewish demographic importance in the precolonial western Maghreb observed by travellers and chroniclers from different times and places, ³¹ this tolerance was interrupted during the Almohad period (1147–1269), during which time the dhimma was completely rejected and the Jews were forced to become Muslims or suffer persecution. The Almoravids (1040–1147) had already developed a similar policy against Christian dhimmis, continued by the Almohads, which led to the practical disappearance of Christian dhimmis in western Maghreb. However, that policy must be understood in the context of the border conflict between medieval al-Andalus and Christian Iberia, and the fact that Christian dhimmis had the option to migrate to Christian Europe. According to Lewis, the increase of Muslim intolerance towards the Christians dhimmis in North Africa was a pragmatic response to external military threats. ³² As a result, from the mid-twelfth century, Jews were the only religious minority in western North Africa, despite the increasing presence of Christians living in small littoral enclaves gained during the military advance of the European Christian kingdoms, notably Portugal and Spain in the northwest Maghreb, and the increasing number of Christian captives, as well. Moreover, several treaties signed between the Muslim and Christian rulers favoured the very limited establishment of Christian religious institutions to attend to the spiritual needs of the captives and the Christian merchants in Muslim courts. This was particularly true of the Franciscan institutions, which opened in Marrakech beginning in the mid-thirteenth century. ³³

The primary sources analysed here cover a period that extends through the 1500s and 1600s, the late Wattasid dynasty, Saadian rule and the early Alawite dynasty. The Wattasid years were marked by the impact of the gradual Castilian, Aragonese and Portuguese conquest of the Muslim lands of al-Andalus and several coastal enclaves in western North Africa. ³⁴ In 1492, sailing under the Spanish flag, Christopher Columbus landed in America, and in Granada the last Muslim king on Iberian soil surrendered. This initiated a century of increasing Spanish hegemony overseas and in Europe, after the alliance of the Spanish throne with the House of Habsburg, only challenged by Portugal. The king of Portugal quickly claimed large parts of South America, in addition to the outpost he already controlled on the Maghrebi Atlantic coast for maritime routes to India. ³⁵ Moreover, the religious persecutions that characterized late medieval Iberia, the conquest of Granada by the Catholic Monarchs, and the expulsion of the Jews in 1492 caused thousands of Muslims and Jews to flee to North Africa. The western Maghreb was one of the areas preferred by the exiles, not only because of its proximity to the Iberian Peninsula, but also because many had commercial, social and family networks there. ³⁶ Those exiled Iberian Jews – known as megorashim or ‘immigrants’ by North African Jews, as opposed to the toshavim or ‘autochthons’ – would later be known as Sephardic and Portuguese Jews (Sephardim if they descended from the Castilian and Aragonese Jews who settled in the Muslim lands around the Mediterranean basin, and Portuguese if they descended from Jews from the Kingdom of Portugal, particularly those who migrated to northwest Europe and later to the Dutch West Indies). According to Daniel J. Schroeter, Mercedes Garcia-Arenal, Jane S. Gerber and others, the pre-eminence of polyglot Sephardic Jews acting as agents of the sovereigns was a characteristic of many Mediterranean ports, and went back to the times when Muslims, Christians and Jews coexisted between Europe and North Africa in the Muslim west. ³⁷

Around this time, the Saadians also began to expand from the southern lands of today’s Morocco. They claimed to be a Sharifian family, that is, descendants of the Prophet Muhammad. Beginning in the sixteenth century, the territory was already fragmented between the Saadians and their vassal emirates to the south, a series of emirates and independent tribes to the east, Portuguese enclaves to the west, around coastal fortifications, and the Wattasid sultanate in the north. The emergence and expansion of a new Muslim empire, which spread from the Mediterranean east through southern Europe and North Africa, complicated the picture. The Ottomans had taken Constantinople in 1453 and, from there, pushed northwards towards Vienna and southwards to Damascus, reaching Cairo in 1517 and Algiers in 1529. ³⁸

The fall of al-Andalus, the conflict with the Portuguese, the Saadian advance and the expansion of the Ottoman Empire through North Africa contributed to the collapse of the Wattasid sultanate of Fez. In addition to the political downfall, these years also witnessed the end of the former cultural and intellectual splendour of the medieval Muslim west and the revival of the Sufi movement and the zawiyas. ³⁹ A new political alternative emerged from the alliance between the zawiyas, sharifism and jihad, ⁴⁰ which the Saadians capitalized on. ⁴¹ Saadian military campaigns recovered the land conquered by the Portuguese, who were reduced to their coastal fortresses, and also defeated the Wattasid sultanate. The Saadian reign over the entire territory of Morocco began in 1554, with the end of this ruling dynasty occurring in 1659 with the ascension of another Sharifian family, the Alawites. ⁴²

The Dhimma and the Jews of Western Maghreb in the 1500s and 1600s

The legal status of the Jews in early modern Morocco was derived from Islamic law, which, like its counterpart in canon law, divided and hierarchized society between ‘believers’ and ‘non-believers’. ⁴³ The tension between the universalist ethos in Islam and the need to govern in contexts characterized by religious diversity was resolved through a ‘protection contract’ (aqd al-dhimma). This contract was based on the first peace treaties with the inhabitants of the conquered lands in the Arabian Peninsula at the time of Muhammad. These treaties only established that Christians and Jews should pay a fee – the jizya – to remain in the conquered territories as proof of submission. In exchange, the Muslims would guarantee their safety and that of their properties. ⁴⁴

While the need to define the legal status of non-believers was already specified in the peace treaties that Muhammad dictated for the non-Muslims of the Arabian Peninsula, the evolution of the rules was initially strictly linked to the demographic consequences of the conquest. The needs of governance and the strategies of the new rulers guided the policies of the first Muslim regimes, more than ideological purity and spiritual separation. In this context, the capitulation treaties granted protection to non-believers and their property in exchange for their submission to the new rulers and the payment of the jizya. Ahmed Oulddali has termed the early legal status of non-Muslims within the Islamic polity as ‘primitive dhimma’. ⁴⁵ Later, the rights and duties of non-Muslims were defined in many different forms by the Muslim jurists of the eighth and ninth centuries. Likewise, the different legal schools (madhhabs) within Islam contributed to the variable nature of the content of the dhimma. Moreover, individual jurists in all the madhhabs developed their own interpretations, often in a dialectical dialogue with their opponents. ⁴⁶ According to some of them, the aim of the dhimma was not to humiliate non-believers, but to ensure law, order and authority. Other jurists, however, considered that the objective of the jizya was to encourage the conversion of non-believers to Islam, thus demeaning and degrading them. ⁴⁷ According to the Shafii jurist of the tenth-eleventh century Abu al-Hasan Ali Ibn Muhammad Ibn Habib al-Mawardi (972–1058), who made a compilation of the preceding jurisprudence, among the obligations of the dhimmis included not being able to attack or delegitimize the Quran, nor insult the Prophet. Nor could a non-believer divert a Muslim from his law, nor cause him or his property any harm. It was forbidden to have sex with a Muslim or to marry her. The dhimmis could not prevent their relatives from converting to Islam, but they could not teach their children the Quran. ⁴⁸

The different interpretations of the Muslim jurists seem somehow to parallel how modern scholarship on Muslim/non-Muslim relations interprets the meaning of the dhimma. Bat Ye’or, the pseudonym of Gisele Littman, has written extensively and popularized the term ‘dhimmitude’. This author, whose maiden name is Orebi, was a Jew of Egyptian origin born in 1933 who had to leave her country precipitously in 1955, like many Jews from Egypt, becoming stateless in the process. She was unable to prove her Egyptian citizenship due to the hostility of the Egyptian government in the context of the conflict between Israel and the members of the Arab League, and became a victim of the measures taken by that Egyptian government to restrict the participation of foreigners and stateless persons in the economic and professional spheres. This circumstance led her to dedicate her life to the study of religious minorities under Islam which, according to the term ‘dhimmitude’, she described as a status of subjection, discrimination, violence, forced conversion and slavery. However, her thesis has largely been critically received by academic specialists in this field. ⁴⁹ Others have seen the status of dhimmi as a privileged situation by virtue of which Jews, Christians and other religious minorities benefited from the ‘right of hospitality’ in early Islam. ⁵⁰ In any case, most scholars agree that the status of the Jews under Islam was one of subordination. ⁵¹

In North Africa, the western Maghreb and al-Andalus, the most widespread Muslim school of law, as previously noted, was the Maliki madhhab, the most formalist of the four Sunni juridical schools. This school, founded in the late eighth century by Imam Malik ibn Anas (Medina 711–795), was introduced in the Muslim west in the ninth century by a circle of scholars in Kairouan, an important centre for Sunni Islamic scholarship and Quranic learning in the Maghreb. On the question of religious minorities, Maliki jurisprudence was more intolerant than any other Sunni school. It prohibited the carrying of weapons and horseback riding, and obliged dhimmis to dress in dark clothing to distinguish them from the ‘true believers’. However, according to Daniel Rivet, here again, the gap widens between prescription and application, depending on specific historical and political developments. ⁵² Even the jizya, as al-Wazzan noted, was not imposed throughout Morocco, at least not before the Saadian political unification. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, for example, in the city of Tednest in the southwest Atlas, the hundred Jewish families that lived there did not pay any annual fee or tribute. As al-Wazzan observed: ‘There are in this city about a hundred families of Jews, who pay no yearly tribute at all, but only bestow each of them some gratuities upon this or that nobleman, whom they think to favour them most’. ⁵³ If they wanted to construct a new public building or infrastructure, they gathered in assembly and decided together how much each of them was going to contribute according to their wealth. ⁵⁴ Nevertheless, Mármol, who was held captive in Fez and travelled through several cities in western North Africa, presents a very different situation regarding the jizya in the city of Tednest (despite partially copying al-Wazzan’s work): ‘In the neighbourhood of this city there are more than two hundred houses of Jews who live by their law, and pay the lord or sheikh of it, ordinary tribute, a ducat per head each year. And besides this, they are very annoyed by the neighbours because, having to do some distribution, a Jew pays as much as ten of the richest Moors’. ⁵⁵ They may both be right, as the fluctuations in the political situation of those years might have also involved changes for the Jews between the visits of al-Wazzan and Mármol.

Neither did some Jews who were inventors in another city in the area, Teyeut, pay the jizya, according to al-Wazzan. These Jewish inventors only paid a small gratuity to the city’s leaders. ⁵⁶ In this case, the importance of clientelist loyalties and patronage clearly transcended religious boundaries, revealing the significance of other social balances and power relations. However, in Fez, both Hassan al-Wazzan and Luis del Mármol described a more pronounced situation of submission for the Jews who were ‘had in great contempt by all men, neither are any of them permitted to wear shoes, but they make them certain socks of sea-rushes. On their heads they wear a black dulipan [turban], and if any will go in a cap, he must fasten a red cloth thereunto’. ⁵⁷ Moreover, of the annual jizya, they were forced to pay a yearly tax to the king of Fez: ‘They pay unto the king of Fez monthly four hundred ducats’. ⁵⁸ Equally, in Saadian Marrakech, the Jews paid the jizya and other tributes: ‘all Jews pay a ducat per head in addition to the other incomes’. ⁵⁹

The Muslims of Morocco also paid an annual tribute to the ruler to whom they were subject. For example, in al-Wazzan’s time, in Tagodast, in the former province of Hascora or Escura in the region of Marrakech, ‘the towns-men pay certain yearly tribute unto the Arabians’. ⁶⁰ These ‘Arabians’ were the Saadian leaders who began to gain control over the region with the decline of the Marinids, as Mármol also observed: ‘they used to live in freedom after the power of the Marinids declined, but now they are vassals of the Sharifians’. ⁶¹

During periods of political instability, wars and conflicts, the fiscal pressure could intensify to pay for military expenses or pay the victor. Both Muslims and Jews faced these extraordinary expenses. For instance, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, during the rule of the second monarch of the Wattasid dynasty of Fez, al-Wazzan witnessed the surrender of the city of Tefsa, at the foot of the Atlas, to the Wattasids. The capitulation did not only lead to an increase in the annual taxes paid by Muslims and Jews, but also to the payment of a large sum of money to free the hostages and avoid the devastation of the city. The notables in the city forced to pay the ransom were both Muslims and Jews. Although if the story is credited, it is possible that the Jews in the city were put under more pressure than the Muslims and forced to pay a much higher amount. Al-Wazzan justified this with somewhat suspicious arguments, saying that a single Jew was richer than all the rest of the hostages put together. Furthermore, he added, the Jews would have favoured the enemies of the sovereign of Fez: ‘And his riches were the cause, why the King of Fez exacted fifty thousand ducats from the Jews, for that they were said to favour his enemies. I myself bare him company, that went in the King’s name to receive the said sum of the Jews’. ⁶² Likewise, during the reign of the second Alawite sultan, Moulay Ismail (1672–1727), who did not have a tribal base like many of his predecessors, an army of ‘blacks’ was formed to subdue their opponents and unify the country. This was a controversial decision that was opposed by prestigious Muslim jurists, who were against the forced compulsory conscription of the free black Muslims of Morocco into the army as if they were slaves. Muslims and Jews were subjected to heavy taxes to maintain the army and the unity of the country. ⁶³ With the political unification of the country under the Saadians and the Alawites, the jizya ended up being imposed across the entire unified territory under the authority of the Sharifian sultans. In the words of Fray San Juan del Puerto, this was enacted by a law ‘established to allow them in the kingdom; the Jews pay five escudos per head a year’. ⁶⁴

Despite their submission as dhimmis and the payment of the jizya, the Jews were not slaves or captives, and their dhimmi status did not forbid them from buying, selling or owning slaves and captives, for the dhimma said nothing about that, except if the slave was a Muslim. According to Gillian Lee Weiss, the Jews had the best reputation regarding the treatment of their slaves and the Moriscos the worst. Moreover, the fate of a slave depended fundamentally on the work they had to perform and the treatment they received from their owner. Renegades would treat the captives and slaves with more benevolence if they were from the same country, or, on the contrary, be the most brutal and ruthless: ‘Some of these, when we least expect it, tend to become Moors, and with the sin they commit, they become worse than the nation’s own Moors’. ⁶⁵

In Badis – a rock north of Morocco in the Mediterranean known as a pirate refuge dependent on a Berber emirate vassal of the Wattasids ⁶⁶ – al-Wazzan noticed a large street ‘inhabited with Jews, wherein dwell sundry vintners that sell excellent wines’. ⁶⁷ Speaking about another region north of Fez, he said that there was an ‘abundance of vines also yielding very sweet grapes, whereof the Jews (being five hundred families) make excellent wine, such as I think all Africa scarce afford better’. ⁶⁸ Viticulture had been practiced in this region since at least the Roman Empire. The Jews were able to manufacture and sell wine for their own consumption because Islamic law allowed them to keep their customs regarding food and drink. More surprisingly, according to al-Wazzan they also sold this wine to the fishermen and pirates in the area, who were very fond of it.

Wine was also consumed in the imperial capital of Saadian Morocco a century later. Fray Matías de San Francisco observed that Christian captives obtained some small income from the production and sale of wine to the Muslims: ‘the poor Christian captives provide for themselves making some wine, and selling it to the Moors’. ⁶⁹ The friar also wrote that ‘for the Moor it is a sin to drink wine, but this sin, he says, is small […] but making wine themselves is for them a great sin, and they have great punishments for it, if it were known, and therefore the captive Christians do it, and sell it to the Moors’. ⁷⁰ This activity, though, involved some risk, since they were sometimes accused of being responsible, for example, for some natural disaster due to the great sin involved in the making of wine. As noted by Fray Matías: ‘the poor Christians also suffer great persecution, because if it does not rain on time or the storms are bad or some adverse thing happens to the Moors and the kingdom, they fall back on this as a crutch, saying it is the sins of the Christians who live there and make this wine, which they consider a great sin, and not because it is so great to drink it; it is the cause of evil’. ⁷¹ The Jews were also victims of wine-related Muslim rage, and accusations regarding wine production and drinking were often found in Muslim texts as the preamble to an anti-Jewish attack. ⁷²

Spatial segregation

The primitive dhimma of the time of Muhammad and the first caliphs did not establish the obligatory nature of the residential segregation of the dhimmis. The rapid expansion of Islam would soon incorporate the Sassanian Persian Empire to the east, and northern Africa and almost the entire Iberian Peninsula to the west. The settlements inhabited solely by dhimmis were fundamentally a product of the process of conquest and the preference of the Muslims to create and live in their own cities. Non-Muslims were not subject to a strict norm of mandatory spatial exclusion. ⁷³ In al-Andalus, suburban neighbourhoods appeared where the Mozarabic Christians and Iberian Jews settled after the Islamic conquest. However, the residential concentration of Jews, Christians and Muslims in certain areas primarily corresponded to their preference for living near their places of worship and businesses. With the Christian advance, Muslims and Jews living outside the morerías and juderías were gradually pressured to move to them. ⁷⁴

In the western Maghreb, there is no evidence of the existence of neighbourhoods where the Jews had to reside compulsorily until well into the fifteenth century. For example in Tlemcen, a city in northwest Algeria, al-Wazzan wrote that the Jews lived in a part of the city where lawyers, notaries, professors and students also resided: ‘The south part of the city is inhabited by Jews, lawyers and notaries; here are also very many students and professors of diverse arts, which have maintenance allowed them out of the fine forenamed colleges’. ⁷⁵ Of Teceut, a Berber city in the region of Sus in the south, Mármol said that ‘among them there are more than two hundred houses of Jewish merchants and officials’. ⁷⁶ Mármol did not indicate if these houses were together or in a specific area of the city, as he usually did when that was the case. Additionally, at the time of the Portuguese conquest at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Spanish chronicler said that the city of Azamor had ‘more than five thousand populated houses, and among them four hundred houses of Jewish dealers who lived in their law’. ⁷⁷

The first segregated Jewish neighbourhood in the Muslim west was created in the imperial capital city of Fez in 1438, during the reign of the last sultan of the Marinid dynasty. Fez had received a major flow of Jews migrating from the Christian kingdoms of medieval Iberia, fleeing the persecutions and killings of 1391. That important influx modified the demographic composition of the city. The newcomers resisted assimilation into the local Jewish communities and kept their identity and Iberian customs. Some controversies arose between the locals and the newcomers over interpretations of the halakha, local customs, and ritual and liturgical practices. ⁷⁸ Tensions also arose with their Muslim neighbours, and this was one of the reasons that the Marinid monarch created a separate Jewish neighbourhood in Fez to protect the Jews from recurrent episodes of violence and looting. The excuse for Muslim looting in the old Jewish quarter was the accusation of pouring wine in a mosque. ⁷⁹ However, as noted above, this is probably a legend that has little to do with reality, as with the creation of the new enclosed Jewish quarter a century later in Marrakech, were legend says that Muslim violence was precipitated by an attack on a Muslim woman by a Jew. In Fez, wine producers, goldsmiths and merchants – professions where Jews were overrepresented – were considered people of dubious morality and came under popular opprobrium, posing a particular risk for the Jewish community as a whole. ⁸⁰

Building the new Jewish quarter and protecting the sultan did not come free, however, as the sultan doubled the yearly jizya paid by the Jews of Fez: ‘The Jews indeed first dwelt in old Fez, but upon the death of a certain king they were all robbed by the Moors: whereupon king Adusadid caused them to remove into new Fez, and by that means doubled their yearly tribute’. ⁸¹ Mármol’s description of the king’s relocation of the Jews of Fez also highlights the motivation of protection: ‘there is now [there] the Jewry that was once in Fez the Old, and because when some king died the Moors would then run to plunder the houses of the Jews, King Abu Said moved there on condition that they pay him the doubled tribute […] and most of them are those who were driven from Spain in the days of the Catholic kings’. ⁸²

This new Jewish quarter of Fez, near the royal palace and under the protection of the sultan, was conspicuous, wrote Mármol, in a place where a Christian neighbourhood had once stood: ‘There used to be also in Fez the New a neighbourhood where many free Christians lived, and others that even though they were captives for being officials, the king treated very well and let them be there with their wives and children, and there are still many in this way in Fez, and in Morocco’. ⁸³ Al-Wazzan’s description is somewhat similar. He said that the new Jewish quarter in Fez was in the ‘part of the city which the king’s attendants or guard once possessed’. ⁸⁴ According to Mármol, the royal guard was made up of ‘foreign people’. ⁸⁵ The foreign royal guard were probably Christian mercenaries from the Crowns of Castile and Aragon who, with the permission of their rulers, served the Marinid monarchs. The Marinids required the assistance of the Christian mercenaries at a time when they were weakened by the loss of control over the southern emirates and threatened by the neighbouring kingdom of Tlemcen. ⁸⁶ Furthermore, the prison-neighbourhood where most of the Christian captives serving in the Casbah, the Muslim citadel, lived (termed the sajena by the Franciscan chroniclers) was segregated from the rest of the city and located next to the royal palace in both Fez and Marrakech. ⁸⁷

The new Jewish quarter of Fez was known as the mellah, which is the Arabic word for salt, because it was either in an old salt mine or a place where salting took place. This started a trend that was very unevenly replicated in other Moroccan cities during the following centuries. However, neither al-Wazzan, nor Mármol nor the Franciscan chroniclers used the concept of mellah. If there was a Jewish residential concentration, it would be referred to by the city area or a street. The Spanish chroniclers also used the word judería generously to refer to the Jewish quarter. For example, regarding Teculet, in the then province of Heha in the south of the country, Mármol wrote that ‘On one side of the city there is a judería’. ⁸⁸ The fact that it was ‘on one side’ could indicate that it was a new settlement, which is likely, since the city was assaulted by the Portuguese and abandoned by its inhabitants in the early sixteenth century, shortly after the visit of al-Wazzan who did not mention the presence of any Jews there. Mármol also placed the area where the Jews of the city of Tagaost lived on ‘one side’: ‘On one side of it is a neighbourhood of Jews’. ⁸⁹ As for Teculet, al-Wazzan does not mention the existence of Jews in that city either, so it is possible that the Jewish settlement was established there at a later time, hence its location, ⁹⁰ although he did mention the existence of Jews in Hadequis, also in the Heha (or Hea in al-Wazzan’s work), though he did not indicate where they resided. Mármol again used the word judería when referring to Hadequis, not with regard to either an area adjacent to the city or even a quarter within it, but for part of a neighbourhood: ‘In a neighbourhood of the city there is a judería in which there are more than one hundred and fifty houses of Jewish merchants and officers who live in their law’. ⁹¹ Moreover, in Mármol’s description, the judería appears as part of the urban scenery, together with its squares and markets: ‘they have their squares, and very well distributed stores, and a Jewish quarter where there are many houses of Jewish merchants and officials’. ⁹² The Franciscan fathers in their chronicles also used the word judería. In an account about his trip to Morocco and captivity, Fray Matías de San Francisco described the first Jewish neighbourhood in Morocco he saw in Azamor on the Atlantic coast as: ‘quite a town, which is the Jewry of Jews’. ⁹³ The friar added that the Jewish quarter had a leader, a prominent Jew appointed by the qaid, the Muslim governor of the city. ⁹⁴

A second Jewish quarter of this type, next to the royal palace and enclosed or walled, would not be created until more than a century and a half later in another imperial city, Marrakech, where the Saadians had established their capital. ⁹⁵ Unlike the constitution of the mellah of Fez, Jews in Marrakech did not have an option. The community was compelled to leave their homes and reside in the mellah. Although by the late seventeenth-early eighteenth century, many Moroccan cities had segregated and enclosed Jewish neighbourhoods in obeyance to the rulers, this was not a widespread policy throughout the kingdom and not all Moroccan towns necessarily had a mellah. ⁹⁶ With respect to the ‘mellahization’ of the Jews of Marrakech, Mármol, who was there before the creation of the mellah, did indeed note that this was a decision made by the sultans without the community having a choice: ‘In the middle of the city there used to be the Jewish quarter in a neighbourhood where there were more than three thousand houses, and a few years ago Moulay Abdala ordered it moved from there and put it in another neighbourhood that is next to the door of Bab Ahmet, stuck to the very city wall, so that the Jews were not among the Moors’. ⁹⁷

The creation of the mellah of Marrakech, according to Emily Gottreich, responded to the urgent need of the new Saadi rulers to affirm their rule. Even if they successfully fought the Portuguese and won over large sectors of the population, the Saadis nevertheless faced the opposition of the ulama (Muslim clerics) who did not recognize their legitimacy as the new rulers. They also had to contend with the stigma of their southern and rural origins, and their claim to sharifism was in question. Therefore, one of the strategies of the new Sultan of the Saadi dynasty, Mawlay al-Ghalib, and his successors to consolidate his power was to develop the city’s urban splendour by building mosques and monuments, which involved relocating the Jews and creating the second mellah in Morocco. The magnificence of the new capital of Magreb-el-Acsa was compared by some travellers to that of Paris. ⁹⁸ Other towns created separated enclosed neighbourhoods during the following century although, as seen in the cases of Fez and Marrakech, this corresponded to specific local and political developments and not a general policy of ‘mellahization’ – as implicit in the concept of ‘Islamic city’ proposed by colonial, particularly French, orientalism – and even less of ‘ghettoization’. ⁹⁹ Despite the fact that some specialists in the history of the Jews in the Muslim world refer to the mellahs of Morocco as ghettos, ¹⁰⁰ or consider words like judería, mellah, and ghetto equivalent, ¹⁰¹ many other more specific and more recent scholarship on the mellahs of Morocco disagree with that equation or simply do not use the word ghetto at all. ¹⁰²

In his Misión Historial published in 1708, Fray Francisco de San Juan del Puerto wrote about the situation of the separated Jewish quarters: ‘They have the Moors in all cities, public Jewish quarters, and so populous; the smaller ones have more than a thousand Jews, some reaching eight thousand. These Jewish quarters have their doors, attended by Moorish guards, who close them without letting [the Jews] go out at night, forcing them to pay something for everything that goes in’. ¹⁰³

Another common characteristic of the Jewish quarters in Fez and Marrakech, mimicked by other cities, was that the Jewish mellah and the Christian captives’ quarters were next to the royal palace. As noted first by al-Wazzan and, somewhat later, by the Franciscan friars: ‘the King’s Palace and its houses are very close to the sajena, which they call of the Christians’. ¹⁰⁴ With regard to the city of Marrakech, the Franciscan chroniclers also described how some captive Christians, who enjoyed a somewhat more privileged situation than their companions in captivity, did not live in the sajena, but had their houses in the Jewish neighbourhood. For example, the head of the Christian captives during the visit of Fray Juan de Prado, sometime around 1630, lived in the Jewish quarter. The Franciscan chronicler also wrote that, in addition to the sajena where ‘most of the Christian captives live, and they have their dwelling, there are neighbourhoods of them elsewhere, as in the King’s citadel itself, and in the Jewish quarter’. ¹⁰⁵ Indeed, the sultan ordered Fray Juan de Prado and his companions to stay in the Marrakech mellah in the house of the arraez, the head of the captive Christians: ‘we went with the arraez to his house, who lived in the Jewish quarter’. ¹⁰⁶ According to Gottreich, this was common with foreign non-Muslims, ¹⁰⁷ as other European travellers in pre-colonial Morocco had already observed. On the contrary, in his travels, al-Wazzan always stayed in the houses of Muslims. ¹⁰⁸

Loyal subjects or ‘traitors’?

The rulers certainly had an interest in protecting the Jews in the two imperial cities for the important services they rendered to the court, and for the same reason, proximity to the palace also facilitated the provision of those services. In addition to crafting precious metal pieces for the Muslim elites, Jews served as administrators for the royal family and notables in the city, who also lived next to the royal palace. As Mármol observed ‘the richest are those who administer the hacienda of the sons of the king and of the qaids, because these people seek Jews who benefit them and have an account with their incomes, because they are well with them’. ¹⁰⁹

The court administrators for the sultans of Morocco, were in turn deeply involved in networks and contacts with several European countries and, although their first duty was to the sultans of Morocco, they had their own agendas and strategies. One of the best-known examples from the early modern period is that of the Pallache family. The Pallaches descended from Iberian Jews expelled from Spain who had settled in Fez at the end of the fifteenth century. The brothers Samuel and Joseph Pallache would later settle in Amsterdam, but two of Joseph’s sons, Moses and Joshua, served in Saadian Morocco, Moses in Marrakech and Joshua in the port city of Safi, as part of the family’s strategy. Joshua was a tax collector at the service of the sultan in the Atlantic port, while Moses served as counsellor and interpreter for the Saadian ruler in Marrakech during the first half of the seventeenth century. ¹¹⁰ Fray Matías de San Francisco described Moses Pallache in these terms: ‘he was a great satrap Jew, a bachelor, and understood, he knew his game, and this Jew knows five or six languages and is an interpreter for the king and great counsellor of his’. ¹¹¹ Pallache served no fewer than four sultans of Morocco between 1618 and 1650, the year of his death. However, Matías de San Francisco wrote that the feared Moulay al-Walid was alleged to have said to them, in relation to the friars’ refusal to accept Pallache as interpreter: ‘Well, then don’t, don’t call a Jew, that if you Christians are not good with the Jews, we Moors are worse and we cannot see them and we hate them more than you’. ¹¹²

Moses Pallache went far beyond the translation of the language, he also interpreted sociocultural meanings. The following anecdote, if true, is very illustrative in this regard. Moses Pallache, acting as counsellor to the king, responded to his desire to punish the exalted preacher Fray Juan de Prado by advising him: ‘do not kill him, by killing him you do not avenge, before I tell you really […] that you give him, what he wants […] know that these come seeking death, with great wishes: because with it then in all the land of Christians, they make them statues, and put them on altars’. ¹¹³ It is difficult to know whether these words or similar ones were indeed spoken by Pallache. However, it is likely that he was familiar with the cultural meaning and importance of martyrdom in Hispanic Christianity and the passion it evoked in some Catholics. In the opinion of the clergyman, Pallache did not wish them any good, and was behind the tortures that the sultan ordered against them. ¹¹⁴

Nevertheless, it would not be unreasonable to think that Pallache tried, in fact, to protect the friars and prevent them from being killed, relegating them instead to the lesser evil of captivity and torture, not so much for reasons of humanity, but because of the familiar strategies of navigation between several European and Maghreb courts. Protecting Spanish Catholic priests was a point in favour of the Pallaches in terms of their interests with the Spanish kingdom. In fact, both Moses and his brother Joshua had been in contact with the Spanish authorities and shown an interest in converting to Catholicism, but without doing so. According to García-Arenal and Gerard Albert Wiegers, that decision corresponded to the family’s positioning strategy. The different members of the Pallache family also travelled to several European and North African courts, and the French ambassador in Madrid in the early seventeenth century wrote that the Pallaches deceived the French and others for their own benefit. The brothers said that they were acting behind the backs of their father and uncle, but then again offered information to the Europeans that was only known to their uncle, Samuel Pallache. ¹¹⁵

This second hypothesis is more coherent with the fact that Moses Pallache helped oversee a new embassy under the auspices of the Duke of Medina Sidonia, with letters from Philip IV to Moulay al-Walid’s successor, Mohammed esh-Sheikh es-Seghir. The mission of the new embassy, headed by Fray Francisco de la Concepción, was to reach an agreement with the sultan for the creation of a Franciscan convent in Marrakech. Fray Ginés de Ocaña, who had also accompanied the martyr Fray Juan de Prado and Fray Matías de San Francisco on their trip and captivity during the reign of Moulay al-Walid, presented a very different image to that of Fray Matías of Pallache: ‘Mosen Piliache [sic], a very practical man and curial in all the languages, and in particular in our Spanish, which he spoke perfectly, and French, English, Dutch and Arabica, in all of which he seems to be naturalized’. ¹¹⁶ According to Fray Ginés, Pallache ensured that the entire protocol related to this embassy worked smoothly. ¹¹⁷ For example, the friars were worried because in his letters, Philip IV was on familiar terms with the king of Morocco, but according to Fray Ginés, ‘the Jew made things easier for our Father, telling him that as he had to interpret it, he would arrange it well, as in fact happened’. ¹¹⁸ Finally, the Franciscans obtained permission to fund their convent, with Pallache translating and acting as public notary for the royal document authorizing the creation of the convent and the commercial patent for Spanish merchants. ¹¹⁹

This apparent ambiguity was also found in border areas. As stated by al-Wazzan, the Jews would have facilitated the conquest of Azamor by the Portuguese, and Robert Brown, the editor of the re-edition of al-Wazzan’s chronicle in 1896, added: ‘Leo is quite correct in accusing the Jews of treachery’. ¹²⁰ However, this strong word was not used by al-Wazzan himself, who wrote: ‘But before the Christians gave any assault, the Jews (which shortly after compounded with the king of Portugal, to yield the city to him, on condition that they should sustain no injury) with a general consent, opened the gates unto them and so the Christians obtained the city, and the people went to dwell, part of them to Sale, and part to Fez’. ¹²¹ Brown does not mention Mármol either, which confirms the version of al-Wazzan: ‘a Jew of those who were thrown out of Spain […] he made a sign from a tower on the wall to the Christians […] and told them to give him safe way, because he would go out and talk to the Duke […] and kneeling before him he asked for mercy for the lives, and for the properties, for him and for all the Jews who lived there, in gratitude for the good news he brought him, and told him how the Moors had abandoned the city’. ¹²² Nor does Brown mention that both al-Wazzan and Mármol had first explained the siege of the city, the reinforcement of the Christians who besieged it, the death of its governor and the shock that all this caused the people who tried to flee the city. ¹²³ Moreover, fluctuations in the political loyalties of local Muslims from the sultans to the king of Portugal and vice versa had been common on the Atlantic coast since the first Portuguese conquests. Mármol also mentioned the weapons lent by the Jews to the Portuguese in the successful defence of the fortress of Safi around 1510. In the words of the Portuguese governor Nuño Fernández de Ataíde: ‘he commanded the Jews who lived there to take up arms, whose captains were Isaque ben Zamarro and Ismail, and having made some provisions and repairs for the defence, waited for the enemy assault’. ¹²⁴ However, on other occasions, the Portuguese took precautions against both the Muslims and Jews in the area to prevent them from disrupting their military plans. For example, the same governor of Safi retained the Muslim and Jewish merchants who brought their merchandise to the city so that they could not reveal their plan to carry out an attack on the people in the area. ¹²⁵

Spiritual concerns were an area where a sort of accusation of ‘betrayal’ also emerged. For example, in Azamor, the future martyr of the Church, Fray Juan de Prado, maintained impassioned religious discussions in Spanish with the Muslims and Jews of the town. Fray Matías de San Francisco recalled those theological misunderstandings: ‘that coming to see us in the house, a great number of Moors and Jews, many of them knowing our language, as it is very true that many know it, so Moors, as Jews, disputed with them about their bad beliefs, and about the truth of the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ, and telling them so clearly about their damned sects of Muhammad and the blindness of the Jews’. ¹²⁶ With his Catholic, anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish vehemence, the friar was able to irritate Muslims and Jews alike, putting not only himself at risk, but also the two Franciscan brothers accompanying him on his trip: ‘so Moors, as Jews, always gave us this occasion, with their questions and impertinence, and with their blindness, which seems to them that we go wrong, and as they [are] in their land and with freedom, they speak and they wanted to bring us down, and despise in the truth of our holy Catholic faith’. ¹²⁷ However, if the Muslims and Jews had reason to be angry with the Catholic friar to the point that they wanted to kill him, as written by Fray Matías, who was with Fray Juan on this trip, the Muslims in Morocco had no reason to kill the Jews, because, as they told Fray Juan, if ‘they really understood that the Jews had killed Christ, our Lord, at one point they would not leave alive big or small all those Jews who live among them’. ¹²⁸

Crossing cultural-religious and sociopolitical boundaries

In this context, conversion to Islam had not only spiritual, but also sociopolitical implications. Muslim jurists, however, diverged with respect to the question of whether converts lost their dhimmi status and stopped paying the jizya or not. Their view depended on whether they thought the jizya was a payment for the right of residence in Muslim lands or a payment for the right to remain unfaithful, but subject, to Islam. According to the Maliki juridical school, the Quranic concept of submission justifies that the jizya cannot be applied to a dhimmi who has converted to Islam in any case. ¹²⁹

Conversions could be voluntary, but forced conversions also took place, as during the Almohad period. However, the first biography of Almohad leader Ibn Tumart by the Almohad chronicler al-Baydaq (1150) shows the mahdi ¹³⁰ advocating that a convert Jew should be treated as a Muslim, regardless of any doubts about his faith. As stated by the chronicler, Ibn Tumart would have been shocked to see a Muslim funeral refused to a Jew converted to Islam in the city of Tunis. The message against any discrimination towards the converts is evident and would have corresponded to the needs arising after the forced conversion of Jews and remaining Christians decreed by Abd al-Mu’min, Ibn Tumart’s successor, which resulted in the true faith of these forced converts being called into question. ¹³¹

In the later chronicles studied here, the conversion of Christian captives appears more frequently than that of Jews, although some Jews continued to convert. For example, Luis del Mármol mentions a certain Gazi Muça, who he defines as ‘a renegade Moor of a Jew’. ¹³² On the other hand, the apostasy of a Muslim was much less common, as it was severely punished. If it occurred, it did so outside the Muslim kingdoms and the conversion was to Christianity, usually in the Spanish and Portuguese city-fortresses on the Maghreb coast. ¹³³ The most famous case in this period was that of Don Felipe of Africa, ‘Prince of Fez and Morocco’, also known as Moulay al-Sheik (1565–1621), a Saadian prince exiled in Spain and converted to Christianity. ¹³⁴

Conversion in Saadian Morocco was also closely related to the legitimization of sexual relations, marriage and, above all, the status and honour of the father and his offspring. All Sunni and Shia legal schools agreed that interreligious marriages were acceptable between a Muslim man and a Jewish or Christian woman, if the offspring of the marriage were raised as Muslims: ‘Lawful to you are the chaste women from the believers and the chaste women from those who were given the book before you’. ¹³⁵ Men, moreover, could legitimately have sexual relationships with their slaves. ¹³⁶ However, despite the fact that normative Islam approved marriage to ‘women of the book’ and sexual intercourse with female slaves, in early modern Morocco, it was apparently highly dishonourable, particularly among the elites, to have a child with a slave or non-Muslim woman. Contemporary chronicles suggest that the wives and concubines of the sultans, many of them Christian captives, were induced or forced into conversion before the sultans married or had sexual intercourse with them. ¹³⁷ So said Fray Matías, that ‘if there is a female girl captive, and good looking […] then the kings or noble people want her for their maidens and for that they turn them into Moors by force’. ¹³⁸ There were several cases of sultans born to Christian captives, usually Spanish. For example, Ali ibn Yusuf (1083–1143), the second Almoravid ruler, was the son of a Christian captive ¹³⁹ ; the sultan of the Marinid dynasty, Abd-el-Hakk (1420–1465), was also the son of a Spanish captive; and the abovementioned Mohammed esh-Sheikh es-Seghir (1636–1655) was the son of a daughter of Spanish captives. His father put the girl in the harem as a child and forced her to convert in order to marry her when she reached puberty: ‘the king, father of the present king, and of the other two, who have reigned, killing each other, fell in love with this girl and put her in his house and dressed her by force as a Moor’. ¹⁴⁰ Not only captive girls but also captive boys placed at the service of the sultan and Muslim elites were induced or forced into conversion. According to Chouraqui, that was also occasionally the case for dhimmi boys and girls. The induced or forced conversion of children is something that both Franciscan chroniclers and Jewish sources suggest was especially painful for families and their communities. ¹⁴¹

This complex issue mixed various normative frameworks and social practices: on the one hand, believer/non-believer status, and on the other, the free/slave condition. David S. Powers describes a complex, but illustrative, case of a Muslim notable who had a son with a slave owned by his daughter while the woman was still a slave. This prominent person did not recognize his son, since he would have been reproved by society because the mother was not his property. Consistent with Muslim jurisprudence, if he had recognized the child, it would have resulted in punishment for ‘fornication’. It would have also brought dishonour upon his family, because the son of a slave would be added to the father’s lineage. Moreover, in case of a claim, he would have had to compensate his daughter for her property and pay the slave’s market value. All this would have implied great dishonour for the Muslim notable and he therefore chose not to recognize that son. ¹⁴² On the contrary, this would not have been dishonourable if a dhimmi woman converted before giving birth, since her offspring would have followed the lineage and acquired the status of the father, as in the following case: ‘At length Idris deceasing without lawful issue, left one of his maids big with child, which had been turned from the Goth’s religion to the Moors. Being delivered of her son, they called him after his father’s name, Idris’. ¹⁴³

Non-Muslims could neither have sex nor marry Muslim women, regardless if they were freemen or slaves, dhimmis or foreigners, and the sexuality of Muslim women was strictly controlled. In this respect, Mármol explains the case of a Genoese merchant. The chronicler did not clarify if he was a Christian or a Jew, but considering that there was an important Jewish Genoese community at that time with commercial and family ties to the North African Jewries, it could have been a Jew. The Genoese man fell in love with the beautiful daughter of a Berber sheikh ¹⁴⁴ from Teceut, in the region of Sus. He converted and married her and, upon the death of the sheikh, successfully succeeded him in office: ‘the most courageous pagan who was in favour of the Sharifians, and who they trusted the most’. ¹⁴⁵

Conclusion

Comparing the three types of chronicles describing sixteenth- and seventeenth-century western North Africa is a fascinating endeavour. Hassan al-Wazzan (Leo Africanus) was a Muslim descendant of a wealthy Andalusi family, with an exquisite education, captive and convert to Christianity; Luis del Mármol was a Christian descendant of a Judeo-convert family aware of its Jewish origins, but trying to ascend in the hierarchical Castilian society of the time, with his own experience as a captive of the king of Fez (a much less pleasant captivity than that of al-Wazzan); and, finally, the Catholic friars, some more naive and passionate than educated and rational, explained what they saw in the Moroccan lands from their own experience and worldview. It is a captivating journey to travel with them to the past through their ethnographic narratives, seeing through their eyes, through their statements and silences that, whether openly or subtly, intentionally or inadvertently, probably say as much about themselves and their stereotypes and prejudices as about the societies they were describing. The historical and ethnographic value lies in the fact that those stereotypes and prejudices were not individual, but were part of the societies and the time to which they belonged. While each one of them individually was not necessarily representative of the way their sociocultural group saw the world, it is indicative that these ideas were present and shared, or at least, known, by those social groups and gave rise to complex, diverse and rich social practices with regard to relationships with the ‘Other’.

From this fragmented ethnographic information, a type of sociopolitical otherness emerges that is primarily religious, but also social and cultural. Islam clearly prescribed the place of non-Muslims in the Islamic political community. It was, then, a sociopolitical status that differentiated the dhimmi subjects of a Muslim ruler from the Muslim subjects. But that happened only after the ritual of submission; otherwise they faced expulsion or slavery. Non-Muslims only became a part of the Islamic political community as ‘protected’ people after accepting submission and paying the jizya. In the western Maghreb, the arrival of Islam conceptually separated populations that had a common cultural background and probably also formed part of the same political societies. Although more research is needed on pre-Islamic Jewish/non-Jewish relations in western North Africa, it seems that Islam could have created a conceptual sociopolitical separation between those who accepted Islam and those who did not. That set non-Muslims apart from the Islamic polity and only integrated them after the ritual of submission and protection, giving them an inferior status in relation to the Muslim subjects. However, other social divisions in the local cultural context were also present or appeared with the Arab and Muslim encounter, like tribal organization and the emerging distinction between Arabs and Berbers, or divisions between slaves, captives and non-Muslim foreigners.

Nevertheless, there was no separate neighbourhood for the Jews until the creation of the Fez mellah in 1438, and that was never a general policy throughout the country. There were, however, other less evident forms of residential segregation, which indicated a social divide between believers and non-believers. While Muslim travellers were hosted in Muslim homes, Jews and Christians, whether dhimmis, captives or travellers, shared residential space with the Jews in the Jewish quarters. Like the Christian captives’ sajena, Jewish neighbourhoods were liminal places where practices forbidden to the Muslims were allowed or tolerated, such as the production and sale of alcoholic beverages. Sexual segregation was also another obvious no-trespassing line, perhaps the strongest, as it had consequences for all its transgressors. There was a very robust religious dimension involved, but it was also linked to questions of honour and property, particularly among the elites.

It is not possible to say if the Christian stereotype of the Jew as ‘traitor’ existed in the social dynamics or imaginary of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Morocco. Even considering the changes made to the original text, al-Wazzan’s descriptions of ‘Jews’ were no less positive or negative than those of ‘Arabs’ or ‘Berbers’, the sociopolitical categories that he most often mentioned. That contrasted with the Christian anti-Jewish clichés found in the Franciscan sources and, moreover, the intense anti-Semitism in the marginal notes to al-Wazzan’s book edited by Robert Brown in the late nineteenth century.

Finally, despite the fact that this is only fragmented evidence, it all points in one direction: traditional Muslim anti-Jewish prejudice cannot be equated to traditional Christian prejudice, and even less to modern anti-Semitism. This does not intend to negate the existence of prejudice, but it must be understood on its own cultural, social, political and ideological terms.

Acknowledgements

The project that produced the research used in this study received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 745752. It also benefited from my research stay as a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish/non-Jewish Relations, University of Southampton. I would like to thank as well the two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of the manuscript and their many insightful, and sometimes challenging, comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maite Ojeda-Mata

Maite Ojeda-Mata is a Lecturer at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, University of Valencia. She has been postdoctoral researcher at the universities of Southampton, Pompeu Fabra, and Autònoma de Barcelona. She is interested on the historical-political conditions in which socio-political identities are defined and redefined, and is the author of Modern Spain and the Sephardim: Legitimizing Identities (Lexington Books, 2017).

Notes

1. To facilitate reading I am using the standard accepted transliteration of Arabic into English for this and other words and personal names.

2. Daniel J. Schroeter, “The Shifting Boundaries of Moroccan Jewish Identities,” Jewish Social Studies 15 (2008): 145–64.

3. While al-Andalus and Andalusi evoked Muslim Iberia in Spanish literature, the Moriscos were the Muslims forcibly converted to Christianity and their descendants in early modern Spain.

4. Ibid; Jessica Marglin, “La Modernité Juridique Au Maroc,” in La Bienvenue et l’adieu 1 (Casablanca: La Croisée des Chemins, 2012), 167–89; and Eloy Martín Corrales and Maite Ojeda Mata, “Spanish Bibliography on the Jews of Morocco,” Hespéris-Tamuda LI, no. 2 (2016): 103–17.

5. André Chouraqui, La Condition Juridique de l’Israélite Marocain (Paris: Presses du Livre Français, 1950); André Chouraqui, Between East and West: A History of the Jews of North Africa (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1968); André Chouraqui, Histoire Des Juifs En Afrique Du Nord (Paris: Editions du Rocher, 1998); Haim Zafrani, Les Juifs Du Maroc. Vie Sociale, Économique et Religieuse de La Fin Du 15è Siècle Au Début Du 20è Siècle. Etudes de Taqqanot et Responsa (Brussels: Geuthner, 1972); Haim Zafrani, Mille Ans de Vie Juive Au Maroc. Histoire et Culture, Religion et Magie (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 1983); Haim Zafrani, Los Judíos Del Occidente Musulmán: Al-Andalus y El Magreb, Colección El Magreb, vol. 13 (Madrid: Mapfre, 1994); and Colette Zytnicki, Les Juifs Du Maghreb. Naissance d’une Historiographie Coloniale (Paris: PUPS, 2011).

6. Claude Cahen, L’islam: Des Origines Au Début de l’Empire Ottoman (Paris: Bordas, 1970); Youssef Courbage and Philippe Fargues, Christians and Jews under Islam (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 1998); Shelomo Dov Goitein and Jacob Lassner, A Mediterranean Society: An Abridgment in One Volume (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); and Andrew G. Bostom, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History (New York: Prometheus Books, 2008).

7. Mark R. Cohen, “Foreword to the Princeton Classics Edition,” in The Jews of Islam (Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 2014), xvii–xx; Norman A. Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2003). Bernard Lewis, The Jews of Islam, 2014th ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984); Bernard Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice (New York; London: W.W. Norton, 1999); Matthias Küntzel, Djihad et Haine Des Juifs: Le Lien Troublant Entre Islamisme et Nazisme à La Racine Du Terrorisme International (Paris: Editions du Toucan, 2015); and Michel Abitbol and Abdou Filali-Ansary, “Preface,” in Juifs et Musulmans Au Maroc: Des Origines à Nos Jours, ed. Mohamed Kenbib (Paris: Tallandier, 2016), 7–9.

8. Ibid., 7–9.

9. With the remarkable of exception of Abd ar-Raḥman ibn Muḥammad ibn Khaldun al-Ḥaḍrami, better known as Ibn Khaldun, the great North African Arab historian of the fourteenth century.

10. Zytnicki, Les Juifs Du Maghreb. Naissance d’une Historiographie Coloniale.

11. Bernard S. Cohn, “An Anthropologist among the Hitorians: A Field Study,” in An Anthropologist among the Hitorians, 1987, 1–16.

12. M. Eliav-Feldon, B. Isaac, and J. Ziegler, “Introduction,” in The Origins of Racism in the West, ed. Benjamin Isaac, Joseph Ziegler, and Miriam Eliav-Feldon (Cambridge, New York, etc.: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 1–31; and Peter Biller, “Proto-Racial Thought in Medieval Science,” in The Origins of Racism in the West, ed. Benjamin H. Isaac, Joseph Ziegler, and Miriam Eliav-Feldon (Cambridge, New York, etc.: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 157–80. See also, Laura Gaffuri, “Perceptions of the ‘Other’ in Medieval Preaching: Anthropological-Historical Reflections,” in Praching and New Worlds: Sermons as Mirrors of Realms near and Far, ed. Timothy J. Johnson, Katherine Wrisley Shelby, and John D. Young (New York and London: Routledge, 2019), 15–27.

13. Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge, New York, etc.: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 55; and Barbara Fuchs, “The Spanish Race,” in Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance, ed. Margaret Rich Greer, Walter Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan (Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 88–98.

14. Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 21.

15. John Victor Tolan et al., Religious Minorities in Christian, Jewish and Muslim Law (5th-15th Centuries) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017); and Zytnicki, Les Juifs Du Maghreb. Naissance d’une Historiographie Coloniale.

16. Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (New York: Atheneum, 1972 [1955]), 39 quoted in Caroline B. Brettell, “Introduction: Travel Literature, Ethnography, and Ethnohistory,” Ethnohistory 33, no. 2 (1986): 127; and Joan-Pau Rubiés, “Ethnography and Cultural Translation in the Early Modern Missions,” Studies in Church History 53 (2017): 272–310.

17. Giovan Lioni Africano, Della Descrittione Dell’Africa et Delle Cose Notabili Che Qivi Sono, ed. Ramusio (Venetia: Gli Heredi Lucantonio Giunti, 1550); and Luis del Mármol Carvajal, Descripción General Del África, sus guerras y vicisitudes, desde la fundación del mahometismo hasta el año 1571 (Granada: Rene Rabut, 1573). Emily Gottreich in The Mellah of Marrakesh (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), also briefly mentions the chronicle of Fray Francisco de San Juan del Puerto.

18. Although this is not the only travel literature of the time available, I was interested primarily in Iberian sources due to the objective of comparing pre-colonial and colonial conceptions of the Jews in what will become in 1912 the Spanish Protectorate of Morocco. As one of the anonymous reviewer noticed, other similar sources were collected by Henry de Castries in Les sources inédites de l’histoire du Maroc (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1905–1926), as ambassadors reports. However, Al-Wazzan, Mármol and the Franciscan friars moreover of their Iberian origins have in common their long stay in Western Maghreb.

19. Born al-Hassan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Fasi, this author was known by many different names during his lifetime and according to his circumstances. While he is often referred to as ‘Leo Africanus’ or merely ‘Leo’ in English language accounts of his life, I prefer to use his Arab name, ‘al-Wazzan’, to underscore his identity as an Arab and Muslim.

20. Javier Castillo Fernández, “Los Mármol, Un Linaje de Origen Converso Al Servicio de La Monarquía Española (Siglos XV–XVIII),” Historia y Genealogía 4 (2014): 189–230.

21. Africano, Della Descrittione Dell’Africa et Delle Cose Notabili Che Qivi Sono; Mármol Carvajal, Descripción General Del África.Tomo III; Fr. Matías de San Francisco, Relación Del Viaje Espiritual y Prodigioso Que Hizo a Marruecos El Venerable Padre Fray Juan de Prado (Madrid: Francisco García Impresor del Reino, 1644); Ocaña, Epítome Del Viaje Que Hizo a Marruecos El Padre Fray Francisco de La Concepción (Sevilla: Imp. Simon Fajardo, 1646); and Francisco de San Juan del Puerto, Mision Historial En Marruecos (Sevilla: Francisco Garay, 1708).

22. San Francisco, Relación Del Viaje Espiritual y Prodigioso Que Hizo a Marruecos El Venerable Padre Fray Juan de Prado; San Juan del Puerto, Mision Historial En Marruecos; Richard Pennell, Morocco Since 1830: A History (London: Hurst and Company, 2000), 12; and Timothy Cleaveland, “Ahmad Baba Al-Timbukti and His Islamic Critique of Racial Slavery in the Magreb,” in The Southern Shores of the Mediterranean and Its Networks, ed. Patricia Lorcin (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 42–65.

23. Zytnicki, Les Juifs Du Maghreb. Naissance d’une Historiographie Coloniale.

24. Haim Zafrani, Mille Ans de Vie Juive Au Maroc. Histoire et Culture, Religion et Magie (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 1983), 11.

25. Ibn-Khaldoun, Histoire Des Berbères et Des Dynasties Musulmanes de l’Afrique Septentrionale, ed. M. Le baron de Slane (Alger: Imprimerie du gouvernement, 1834), 208.

26. Leo Africanus, The History and Description of Africa. Vol. II, ed. Robert Brown (London: Hakluyt Society, 1896), 239. Brown’s edition reproduces the original edition, including the spelling and terminology of that time. Where the outdated spelling may complicate comprehension of the text, I have updated individual words.

27. Ariel Rösler, Esther Leiberman, and Tirza Cohen, “High Frequency of Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia (Classic 11β-Hydroxylase Deficiency) among Jews from Morocco,” American Journal of Medical Genetics 42, no. 6 (1 April 1992): 827–34.

28. Africanus, The History and Description of Africa. Vol. II, 278.

29. Mármol Carvajal, Descripción General Del África.Tomo III, 39; and Africanus, The History and Description of Africa. Vol. II, 280.

30. Mármol Carvajal, Descripción General Del África.Tomo III, 11.

31. Chouraqui, Histoire Des Juifs En Afrique Du Nord, 116–17.

32. Mark R. Cohen, “Foreword to the Princeton Classics Edition,” in The Jews of Islam (Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 2014), xvii.

33. Africanus, The History and Description of Africa. Vol. II; San Juan del Puerto, Mision Historial En Marruecos; Georges Jehel and Philippe Racinet, La Ville Médiévale: De l’Occident Chrétien À l’Orient Musulman, Ve-XVe Siècle (Paris: Armand Colin, 1996); Aomar Boum, “Southern Moroccan Jewry between the Colonial Manufacture of Knowledge and the Postcolonial Historiographical Silence,” in Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2011), 73–92.

34. The Spaniards conquered Melilla (1497), Oran (1509), Algiers (1510), Alhucemas (1559) in Mediterranean North Africa, and later Larache (1610) on the Atlantic coast; and the Portuguese Ceuta (1415), Tangier (1471), Asilah (1471), Safi (1508), Mazagan (1513) on the Atlantic coast of the western Maghreb.

35. C. R. Pennell, Morocco: From Empire to Independence (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2003), 78.

36. Enrique Gozalbes Cravioto, “Notas Sobre Cazaza, Puerto de Fez y Fortaleza Española (1506–1533),” Al-Andalus Magreb 15 (2008): 135–55.

37. Nicole S. Serfaty, Les Courtisans Juifs Des Sultans Marocains, XIIIe-XVIIIe Siècles (Paris: Editions Bouchène, 1999); Daniel J. Schroeter, Merchants of Essaouira: Urban Society and Imperialism in Southwestern Morocco, 1844–1886, Cambridge Middle East Library (Cambridge: University Press, 1988), 18; Mercedes García-Arenal, “Introducción,” in Entre El Islam y Occidente: Los Judíos Magrebíes En La Edad Moderna (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2003), 5; Jane S. Gerber, The Jews of Spain: A History of the Sephardic Experience (New York: Free Press, 1994), x; Mercedes García-Arenal and Gerard Albert Wiegers, A Man of Three Worlds: Samuel Pallache, a Moroccan Jew in Catholic and Protestant Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 24. I introduce later the figure of a relative of Samuel Pallache at the service of the Sultan in Marrakech.

38. Pennell, Morocco: From Empire to Independence, 78.

39. Islamic religious brotherhood follower of a political and spiritual leader, a marabout.

40. The religious-legal definition of ‘jihad’ is exertion or struggle in the service of God, of which military action was only a small part. According to Amira K. Bennision, the term ‘jihad’ in sharifian Morocco was very vague and was used to legitimate the political aspirations of the new ruling dynasty, underlying both the structure and ideology of government in Sharifian pre-colonial Morocco (Amira K. Bennison, Jihad and Its Interpretations in Pre-Colonial Morocco: State-Society Relations during the French Conquest of Algeria (London, New York: Routledge, 2002)).

41. Alleged ancestry from the family of the Prophet Muhammad.

42. Ibid., 79; and Michel Abitbol, Histoire Du Maroc (Paris: Perrin, 2014), 232–34.

43. Tolan et al., Religious Minorities, 21.

44. This is attested by Arab historiography, although the oldest written sources date from the early ninth century, so this reconstruction and the sources must be taken with caution (Ahmed Oulddali, “Les Conditions de La Résidence Du Ḏimmī: Entre Règles Absolues et Relatives,” in Religious Minorities in Christian, Jewish and Muslim Law (5th-15th Centuries), ed. John Victor Tolan et al. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), 127–29.)

45. Oulddali, “Les Conditions de La Résidence Du Ḏimmī: Entre Règles Absolues et Relatives.”

46. Khaled Abou El Fadl, ‘Legal Debates on Muslim Minorities: Between Rejection and Accommodation,” The Journal of Religious Ethics 22, no. 1 (1994): 127–62; and Walter Edward Young, The Dialectical Forge Juridical Disputation and the Evolution of Islamic Law (Cham: Springer, 2017), 68.

47. Anver M. Emon, Religious Pluralism and Islamic Law: Dhimmis and Others in the Empire of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 34–46; Anver M. Emon, “The Legal Regulation of Minorities in Pre-Modern Islamic Law,” in Religious Minorities in Christian, Jewish and Muslim Law (5th – 15th Centuries), ed. John Victor Tolan et al. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), 58–68; and Oulddali, “Les Conditions de La Résidence Du Ḏimmī: Entre Règles Absolues et Relatives.”

48. Anver M. Emon, Religious Pluralism and Islamic Law: Dhimmis and Others in the Empire of Law, 34–46; Emon, “The Legal Regulation of Minorities in Pre-Modern Islamic Law,” 58–68; and Oulddali, “Les Conditions de La Résidence Du Ḏimmī: Entre Règles Absolues et Relatives.” I discuss the conversion, sexual relations and marriage a little further on, as they are relevant topics for understanding structural social positions and the possibility and mechanisms for identity change.

49. Bat Ye’or, The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians under Islam (Madison; Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1985); Bat Yeʼor, The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude: Seventh-Twentieth Century (Madison, Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011); and Emon, “The Legal Regulation of Minorities in Pre-Modern Islamic Law.”

50. Louis Gardet, Louis Gardet, L’Islam, Religion et Communauté (Paris: Desclée et Brouwer, 1967), 339.

51. Lewis, Jews Islam, 14.

52. Daniel Rivet, Histoire Du Maroc: De Moulay Idrîs À Mohammed VI (Paris: Fayard, 2012), 30.

53. Africanus, The History and Description of Africa. Vol. II, 231.

54. Ibid.

55. Mármol Carvajal, Descripción General Del África.Tomo III, 5.

56. Africanus, The History and Description of Africa. Vol. II, 231, 252.

57. Ibid., 477.

58. Ibid.

59. Mármol Carvajal, Descripción General Del África.Tomo III, 32.

60. Africanus, The History and Description of Africa. Vol. II, 301.

61. Mármol Carvajal, Descripción General Del África.Tomo III, 66.

62. Leo Africanus, The History and Description of Africa. Vol. II, 313–8.

63. Cleaveland, “Ahmad Baba Al-Timbukti and His Islamic Critique of Racial Slavery in the Magreb”; and Pennell, Morocco Since 1830: A History.

64. San Juan del Puerto, Mision Historial En Marruecos, 56.

65. San Francisco, Relación Del Viaje Espiritual y Prodigioso Que Hizo a Marruecos El Venerable Padre Fray Juan de Prado, 105; Andrew C. Hess, The Forgotten Frontier: A History of the Sixteenth Century Ibero-African Frontier (Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 1978), 175; and Weiss, Captives and Corsaires (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2014), 20.

66. John Wansbrough, “A Moroccan Amīr’s Commercial Treaty with Venice of the Year 913/1508,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 25, no. 3 (24 October 1962): 450.

67. Africanus, The History and Description of Africa. Vol. II, 518.

68. Ibid., 545.

69. San Francisco, Relación Del Viaje Espiritual y Prodigioso Que Hizo a Marruecos El Venerable Padre Fray Juan de Prado, 99.

70. Ibid., 74.

71. Ibid., 99.

72. Susan Gilson Miller, Attilio Petruccioli, and Mauro Bertagnin, “Inscribing Minority Space in the Islamic City,” The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 60, no. 3 (2001): 310–27.

73. Oulddali, “Les Conditions de La Résidence Du Ḏimmī: Entre Règles Absolues et Relatives.”

74. Janina M. Safran, Defining Boundaries in Al-Andalus: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Islamic Iberia (Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 2013), 1; Oulddali, “Les Conditions de La Résidence Du Ḏimmī: Entre Règles Absolues et Relatives”; and Marisa Bueno Sánchez, “Les Murs de La Foi: Les Frontières Identitaires Dans Les Quartiers Musulmans et Juifs de La Castille Médiévale,” in Religious Minorities in Christian, Jewish and Muslim Law (5th-15th Centuries), ed. John Victor Tolan et al. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), 233–57.

75. Africanus, The History and Description of Africa. Vol. II, 669.

76. Mármol Carvajal, Descripción General Del África.Tomo III, 17.

77. Ibid., 52. My emphasis.

78. Jane S. Gerber, Jewish Society in Fez 1450–1700: Studies in Communal and Economic Life (Leiden: Brill, 1980), 114.

79. Susan Gilson Miller, Attilio Petruccioli, and Mauro Bertagnin, “Inscribing Minority Space in the Islamic City,” The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 60, no. 3 (2001): 310–27; and Susan Weich-Shahak, “Me Vaya a Kapará: La Haketía En El Repertorio Musical Sefardí,” El Presente. Estudios Sobre La Cultura Sefardí 2 (2008): 291–300.

80. Gottreich, The Mellah of Marrakesh, 21; and Gerber, Jewish Society in Fez 1450–1700: Studies in Communal and Economic Life, 144.

81. Africanus, The History and Description of Africa. Vol. II, 477.

82. Mármol Carvajal, Descripción General Del África.Tomo III, 91.

83. Ibid., 92.

84. Africanus, The History and Description of Africa. Vol. II, 477.

85. Mármol Carvajal, Descripción General Del África.Tomo III, 91.

86. Maria Teresa Ferrer i Mallol, “Marruecos y La Corona Catalano-Aragonesa. Mercenarios Catalanes Al Servicio de Marruecos (1396–1410),” in Homenaje Al Profesor Eloy Benito Ruano, vol. 1 (Murcia: Universidad de Murcia, 2010), 251–71.

87. Simon O’Meara, Space and Muslim Urban Life: At the Limits of the Labyrinth of Fez (London; New York: Routledge, 2007), 6.

88. Mármol Carvajal, Descripción General Del África.Tomo III, 9.

89. Ibid., 22.

90. Africanus, The History and Description of Africa. Vol. II, 255.

91. Mármol Carvajal, Descripción General Del África.Tomo III, 9–10.

92. Ibid., 26.

93. San Francisco, Relación Del Viaje Espiritual y Prodigioso Que Hizo a Marruecos El Venerable Padre Fray Juan de Prado, 25.

94. Ibid.

95. Emily Gottreich, “On the Origins of the Mellah of Marrakesh,” Int. J. Middle East Stud 35 (2003): 287–305; and Gottreich, The Mellah of Marrakesh, 15.

96. George S. Colin, “Mellah,” in Brill’s First Encyclopaedia of Islam, 1913–1936. Vol 5 (E.J. Brill, 1987).

97. Mármol Carvajal, Descripción General Del África.Tomo III, 32.

98. Gottreich, The Mellah of Marrakesh, 21.

99. Emily Gottreich, “On the Origins of the Mellah of Marrakesh,” Int. J. Middle East Stud 35 (2003): 287–305; Ibid., 15–17; and Janet L. Abu-Lughod, “The Islamic City: Historic Myth, Islamic Essence, and Contemporary Relevance,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 19 (1987): 155–76.

100. Lewis, Jews Islam, 28, 36.

101. Gerber, Jewish Society in Fez 1450–1700: Studies in Communal and Economic Life.

102. See, for example: Shlomo A. Deshen, The Mellah Society: Jewish Community Life in Sherifian Morocco (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989); and Gottreich, The Mellah of Marrakesh.

103. San Juan del Puerto, Mision Historial En Marruecos, 56.

104. San Francisco, Relación Del Viaje Espiritual y Prodigioso Que Hizo a Marruecos El Venerable Padre Fray Juan de Prado, 30; and Africanus, The History and Description of Africa. Vol. II, 268.

105. San Francisco, Relación Del Viaje Espiritual y Prodigioso Que Hizo a Marruecos El Venerable Padre Fray Juan de Prado, 30.

106. Ibid., 29.

107. Gottreich, The Mellah of Marrakesh, 2.

108. Africanus, The History and Description of Africa. Vol. II, 357, Brown note 68.

109. Mármol Carvajal, Descripción General Del África.Tomo III, 32.

110. García-Arenal and Wiegers, A Man of Three Worlds: Samuel Pallache, a Moroccan Jew in Catholic and Protestant Europe, 12, 62. This figure has reminiscences with the Jewish tujjar-al-sultan, or ‘sultan’s Jews’, the privileged elite at the service of the sultans in the administrative, commercial and diplomatic arenas in eighteenth and nineteenth century Sharifian Morocco, see: Michel Abitbol, Les Commerçants Du Roi: Tujjār Al-Sultan: Une Élite Économique Judéo-Marocaine Au XIXe Siècle: Lettres Du Makhzen, Traduites et Annotées, 1998 (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1998); and Daniel J. Schroeter, The Sultan’s Jew: Morocco and the Sephardi World, Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002). For an study of the earlier role of Jews at the service of sultans in the Muslim world see Serfaty, Les Courtisans Juifs Des Sultans Marocains, XIIIe-XVIIIe Siècles. Like the Jewish tujjar-al-sultan, the Pallaches played a quite important role under the Alawite dynasty, although both the Pallaches and the later ‘sultan’s Jews’ were a very small minority within the Jewish community. Haim Zafrani mentions the Pallache family in the preface to the book by Serfaty, Les Courtisans Juifs Des Sultans Marocains, XIIIe-XVIIIe Siècles. Al-Wazzan mentions another of these privileged Jews with whom he made friends during his stay in Marrakech: ‘This Jew, in regard to many singular duties which he performed for his prince, found the king’s bounty and liberality extended unto him’ (Africanus, The History and Description of Africa. Vol. II, 268.)

111. San Francisco, Relación Del Viaje Espiritual y Prodigioso Que Hizo a Marruecos El Venerable Padre Fray Juan de Prado, 44.

112. Ibid.

113. Ibid., 61.

114. Ibid., 61–62.

115. Quoted in García-Arenal and Wiegers, A Man of Three Worlds: Samuel Pallache, a Moroccan Jew in Catholic and Protestant Europe, 61–63.

116. Ocaña, Epítome Del Viaje Que Hizo a Marruecos El Padre Fray Francisco de La Concepción, 14.

117. Ibid., 17.

118. Ibid., 15.

119. Ibid., 19–20. Relaciones de Marruecos con la Corona de Castilla, Cartas de Reyes, Archivo de Medina Sidonia. See also: Paloma Díaz Más, Los Sefardíes: Historia, Lengua y Cultura, Colección Aula Hispánica (Barcelona: Riopiedras Ediciones, 1986).

120. Africanus, The History and Description of Africa. Vol. II, 294, Brown nota 112.

121. Ibid., Brown note 112.

122. Mármol Carvajal, Descripción General Del África.Tomo III, 55.

123. Africanus, The History and Description of Africa. Vol. II, 294. Mármol Carvajal, Descripción General Del África.Tomo III, 55.

124. Ibid., 45.

125. Ibid., 46.

126. San Francisco, Relación Del Viaje Espiritual y Prodigioso Que Hizo a Marruecos El Venerable Padre Fray Juan de Prado, 25.

127. Ibid., 26.

128. Ibid., 55.

129. Géraldine Jenvrin, “La Ğizya Dans La ‘Loi Divine’,” in Religious Minorities in Christian, Jewish and Muslim Law (5th-15th Centuries), ed. John Victor Tolan et al. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), 187.

130. Spiritual and political leader popularly believed to be under divine guidance.

131. Quoted in Maribel Fierro, “El Mahdi Ibn Tumart: Más Allá de La Biografía ‘Oficial’,” in Política, Sociedad e Identidades En El Occidente Islámico (Siglos XI–XIV), ed. Miguel Ángel Manzano and Rachid El Hour (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 2016), 73–98.

132. Mármol Carvajal, Descripción General Del África.Tomo III, 16.

133. San Francisco, Relación Del Viaje Espiritual y Prodigioso Que Hizo a Marruecos El Venerable Padre Fray Juan de Prado, 108.

134. Jaime Oliver Asín, Vida de Don Felipe de África, Príncipe de Fez y Marruecos: 1566–1621 (Madrid; Granada: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1948).

135. Qur’an 5:5, Andrew Rippin, The Blackwell Companion to the Qur’an (Oxford, etc.: Blackwell, 2006), 306.

136. Simon Barton, Conquerors, Brides, and Concubines (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 14.

137. San Francisco, Relación Del Viaje Espiritual y Prodigioso Que Hizo a Marruecos El Venerable Padre Fray Juan de Prado, 32.

138. Ibid.

139. Roudh el-Kartas, Histoire Des Souverains Du Maghreb (Espagne et Maroc), ed. A Beaumier (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1860), 224.

140. San Francisco, Relación Del Viaje Espiritual y Prodigioso Que Hizo a Marruecos El Venerable Padre Fray Juan de Prado, 88.

141. Chouraqui, La Condition Juridique de l’Israélite Marocain, 152; San Francisco, Relación Del Viaje Espiritual y Prodigioso Que Hizo a Marruecos El Venerable Padre Fray Juan de Prado, 32.

142. David Stephan Powers, Law, Society, and Culture in the Maghrib, 1300–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 37.

143. Leo Africanus, The History and Description of Africa. Vol. II, 417.

144. The word sheikh is an honorific title in the Arab language often used to refer to the head of a tribe or a member of the Sultan’s family.

145. Mármol Carvajal, Descripción General Del África.Tomo III, 17.