Twelve Centuries of Jewish History in the Mellah of Fez
The city of Fez is considered one of the most important centers where Jews gather in Morocco. In this tour, we will be discovering the new city, the Mellah, with Luxury Fes Tours Agency Team.
Since the establishment of the city in the nineteenth century, it has been and still the home of an active Jewish community associated with the names of many famous Jewish scholars. The most famous of them, Rabbi Musa bin Maimon, who wrote several religious and philosophical works in Arabic. Musa bin Maimon arrived at the city of Fez as a refugee from the Iberian Peninsula in the middle of the twelfth century and settled there for several years, like other scholars who settled in the city and influenced religiously and spiritually the city's life.
The city of Fez is famous for Mellah, the first Jewish neighborhood in Morocco. Up to the end of the thirteenth century, Jews, Christians, and Muslims coexist in Fez El-Bali, the ancient city now. In 1276, the Marinids founded the “New Fez”, the modern city, and since the new neighborhood was built in the place of the old salt market, it was called the Mellah (the name Mellah derives from the term salt). At that time, the majority of the settlers in the new neighborhood were Jews, so the term Mellah became a synonym and a name for all Jewish neighborhoods that were constructed in the following centuries in various Moroccan cities.
The Mellah witnessed historic events in Fez, wherein 1942 a large number of the displaced Jewish refugees from the Iberian Peninsula arrived in the city with their different religious and linguistic loads, something that created tensions with the native Arabic-speaking Fez population. In the second half of the seventeenth century, the Mellah witnessed a tremendous growth in the number of its inhabitants, when about 1,300 families were expelled from the town of Zawia Ait Ishaq, by Moulay Rachid, and they were therefore abandoned to the city of Fez. The result was a crowded population in the narrow and already crowded neighborhoods and streets of the Mellah, which resulted in the construction of a new number of homes. And now surrounded by Jewelry sellers.
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