The Mellah of Marrakesh: Jewish and Muslim Space in Morocco's Red City

Epilogue: H

Epilogue m1y al-Sal1m 132 The area of Marrakesh once known as themellah is today called m1y al-Sal1m, its name a nostalgic (or perhaps even ironic) nod to the more positive aspects of the complex sets of interactions once carried out within its walls. Jews have all but disappeared from the mellah, and indeed from the city as a whole. At the time of this writing, approximately two hundred Jews remain in Marrakesh, most of them old, with only one or two families still residing in the mellah itself. (The rest live in the newer quarters of the city.) Four Jewish businesses continue to operate in the mellah or on its periphery: a spice shop, two textile merchants (the owner of one also serves as a rabbi), and a stationer. On Derb al-Tijara, the Corcos home reveals the demise of this community with particular poignancy. The former residence of one of the most powerful men in the city’s history, described by the Tharaud brothers in 1920 as being “full of children,”1 now sits empty. The lively sounds of piano-playing, humming sewing machines, and chickens being slaughtered for Shabbat have long since been silenced. When I first visited the mellah in the mid-1990s, the Corcos home functioned as a home for the aged, and the only sounds to be heard came from two severely senile Jews, but now they too have died. A portrait of Yeshouªa Corcos hangs in a corner room on the second floor, but the house itself is uninhabited. The Jews of Marrakesh slowly began leaving the mellah in the decades fol- lowing the establishment of the French Protectorate in 1912, first for the new European parts of the city, known as Gueliz, then for Morocco’s coastal cities, particularly Casablanca, and eventually for foreign lands. The reasons that they left are many and overlapping. The few Zionist officials who came to Marrakesh in the 1920s and 1930s did their best to entice the local Jews to go to Palestine,2 but Zionist feeling was weak in Morocco during the Protectorate period, at least partly due to the countervailing influence of the A.I.U., whose assimilationist doctrine was antithetical to Jewish nationalism. Epilogue 133 Figure e.1. Yeshouªa Corcos. Photograph by the author. (French governmental policy in Morocco was likewise opposed to Zionism.) Thus Jews who could afford to do so often emigrated to France or elsewhere in Europe, and eventually to distant cities like Montreal, Buenos Aires, Los Angeles, and New York. For many decades an almost constant flow of Jewish immigrants to Marrakesh from the countryside compensated for this exodus , with the mellah registering its first decrease in population only in the 1940s.3 But the trend became irreversible with the general instability and political unrest surrounding the independence movement, and by 1960 only ten thousand Jews remained in Marrakesh.4 Jews had been made equal citizens of the Moroccan state in 1956, but the Middle Eastern wars of 1967 and 1973 convinced the majority of Moroccan Jews that life in their native land had become untenable, resulting in mass emigration—at this point mostly to Israel—and the closing of most of the country’s Jewish institutions for good. A 1980 census determined that just 1,820 Jews lived in Marrakesh.5 A decade later, the only Jews left were “a handful of the old and sick, waiting for their end.”6 Although Muslims have all but replaced Jews in the mellah, if one looks closely enough, a multitude of signs recalling the ebb and flow of the latter ’s four-hundred-year habitation of this space are still visible. Multistory houses attest to a difficult history of overcrowding; because of the perimeter walls, the only direction to expand was upward, despite Islamic religious the mellah of marrakesh 134 Figure e.2. Jewish spice merchant in the mellah, 2004. Photograph by the author. Epilogue 135 Figure e.3. Jewish cloth merchant in the mellah, 2004. Photograph by the author. Figure e.4. Jewish resident of the mellah, 2004. Photograph by the author. injunctions to the contrary.7 The faded image of a khamsa, scorpion, or serpent on the door of a home recalls the tenacity of traditional religious expression in defiance of the numerous attempts by the A...