A Man of Three Worlds: Samuel Pallache, a Moroccan Jew in Catholic and Protestant Europe

Chapter 2: Jews in Morocco

CHAPTER 2 Jews in Morocco All that we know for certain of Samuel Pallache’s background and early years is that the Pallache family was of Spanish origin and that Samuel lived in the city of Fez during the late sixteenth century.1 It therefore seems logical to start this chapter with an outline of the history of Fez, placing particular emphasis on the fluctuating fortunes of its Jewish community after 1492. fez and marrakech: historical background Fez was one of the most important cities in the Islamic west during the medieval period, and it seems to have had a large number of Jewish inhabitants from the moment of its first foundation. Both the city and its Jewish minority flourished from the thirteenth century on with the rise to power of the Marinid dynasty, which made Fez the capital of its kingdom and employed Jewish servants and administrators at court. However, problems frequently occurred. As in medieval Christian Spain, public animosity toward Jews tended to vary in proportion to the degree of protection and favorable treatment they received from the monarchy. For this reason, in the mid fifteenth century, the Marinid sultan Abd al-Haqq ibn Abu Sa’id took the step of removing the entire Jewish population of Fez to the new palatine city the dynasty had built for itself on the outskirts of the capital, where the Jews could be protected from the constant danger of popular revolts against them. In this new city, known as Fas al-Jadid (New Fez), the sultan established what was the first Jewish quarter in North Africa, in an area known as the Mellah. The Mellah of Fez remained a densely populated and renowned center of Jewish life for the next 150 years, the word “Mellah” becoming a synonym for a Jewish quarter throughout the whole of Morocco. According to the traveler Luis del Mármol, who visited Fez in the middle of the sixteenth century, the Mellah then had some ten thousand householders, or a total population of between forty and fifty thousand individuals. Most of these inhabitants were of Spanish origin. Spanish Jews had been taking refuge in Fez ever since the persecutions of the late fourteenth century. Large numbers of them went there immediately after the Expulsion of 1492, but they are also known to have fled to Fez even before that date. Andrés Bernáldez, a late fifteenth-century Spanish chronicler, specifically states that Jews left Spain in droves prior to 1492, and that “many of them passed to the lands of the Moors, either here or there [i.e., either in the Nasrid kingdom of Granada or Moroccan territory in North Africa], to be the Jews that they were: and others went to Portugal and others to Rome.”2 Similar routes were taken in 1492. Options were limited: there were very few places in Europe where Jews were allowed to live as such—in practice, only Portugal and certain Italian cities, such as Venice—and this was the main reason why most Jews preferred to move to Islamic areas. But Jews had other reasons for resettling in Islamic rather than Christian territories. For one thing, their integration into Islamic society was made much easier by the general application of the so-called dhimma pact. This was a protective statute that allowed non-Muslims to keep their own religions and customs and to uphold their own community leaders. Under the terms of the pact, Jewish communities were granted a certain degree of independence, though always within a general framework of submission and subjection. The dhimma statute resembled laws that had governed Jewish and Mudejar rights in the Christian kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula during the medieval period. As we shall see, the term dhimmi is consistently used in Moroccan Arabic records to describe Samuel and Joseph Pallache. There was also another factor underlying the decision of so many Jews to migrate to North Africa rather than to a European country that might have tolerated them. It was not just that Islamic lands offered opportunities for the free practice of Jewish religion; in addition, Jews tended to be influenced by the notions they harbored about Islam’s role as the triumphant enemy of Christianity. The persecutions endured by Jews in the 22 a man of three worlds Iberian Peninsula, especially after 1391, had fueled them with messianic and apocalyptic hopes of wreaking some sort...