Les Juifs de Mogador (Essaouira)

Essaouira (Mogador) was founded in the eighteenth century by Sultan Mohammed III, who established there Jewish merchants, the Tujjar al-Sultan, as the kingdom's commercial agents open to the Atlantic. These prosperous traders maintained commercial links with Europe, the Sahara, and beyond, and the city became a great center of Moroccan Judaism, endowed with numerous synagogues, schools including those of the Alliance israélite universelle, and an active rabbinical life. The community, long one of the most significant in the country proportionally, mingled indigenous families with descendants of Iberian exiles. During the twentieth century, it gradually emptied toward Casablanca, France, and Israel.

Sources & resources

• Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World — Brill
• Encyclopaedia Judaica — 2e éd., Keter/Macmillan