Midelt

Before Midelt, there was Outat — or more precisely the Outat of the Aït Izdeg, Uṭaṭ n Ayt Izdiy in Tachelhit. This valley of the upper Moulouya, dotted with ksour, formed a scatter of fortified settlements held by pastoral and warrior tribes. During his passage through the valley in the early 1880s, Charles de Foucauld counted about a dozen ksour, the majority held by the Aït Izdeg, while others belonged to the Aït Hadiddou, such as the ksar of Berrem, and the ksour of Aït Ouafella and Tachiouine were in the hands of the Aït Ouafella, a former segment of the Aït Idrassen [Encyclopédie berbère].

Within these ksour lived Jewish families whose exact origins remain unknown, even to their own descendants. The historical study of the Jewish population of Outat runs up against the problem of sources: the indigenous Jews who were interviewed did not know under what circumstances their ancestors had come to settle in the ksour of Athmane Ou Moussa, Bouzmella, and Aït Ouafella [Dafina, Les Juifs de l'ancien Midelt (Outat)]. This loss of Memory of origins is characteristic of the rural Jewish communities of the Atlas, often described as indigenous or "Toshavim," whose presence may reach back to very ancient layers of settlement, predating Islamization, without any archive allowing the matter to be resolved.

The hypothesis of a Berber or Berberized Judaism, long debated by historians, finds here a concrete testing ground. Studies on ancient North African Judaism recall the difficulty of disentangling, in these mountain regions, what belongs to immemorial Jewish communities from what stems from later conversions or migrations [Iancu, Juifs et judaïsme en Afrique du Nord dans l'Antiquité et le haut Moyen-Âge, 1985]. In Outat, in any case, oral tradition preserved only one certainty: that of antiquity, not that of provenance.

A striking feature of this mountain Judaism was its deep integration into the surrounding tribal world. The same saints were venerated by both Jews and Muslims; the clothing, food, language, and physical appearance of one and the other were nearly identical, in the difficult conditions of existence found in the High Atlas or the more agreeable ones of the oases, with, despite this environment, a strong attachment to Jewish tradition and to study, particularly of kabbalistic texts [rol-benzaken, Un peu d'histoire des Juifs du Sud marocain]. This cultural proximity, in which the cult of saints crossed confessional boundaries, is one of the most remarkable hallmarks of Atlas Jewish life.

The economic life of the Jews of the ancient Outat followed the rhythm of the mountain seasons and the needs of the tribes. Far from the image of an exclusively trading population, local sources describe a real agrarian integration. The Jews of Outat, and especially those of the Aït Ouafella, were fellahs: they owned land which they farmed themselves or had farmed by khemmesses, workers who received one fifth of the agricultural yield [Dafina, Les Juifs de l'ancien Midelt (Outat)].

Alongside agriculture, crafts and peddling formed the backbone of Jewish activity. Others were blacksmiths, makers of stockings and sieves, potters, and above all itinerant merchants who criss-crossed the eastern High Atlas on donkey-back, these peddlers selling their goods on credit to the Zedguis who could not pay for them outright [Dafina, Les Juifs de l'ancien Midelt (Outat)]. Credit thus constituted an essential spring of Judeo-Berber relations, with its ambivalences: dependence on one side, indebtedness on the other, but also enduring bonds of trust. A locally gathered testimony illustrates this: Amina Ihray reports, from family papers entrusted to her, the case of a Zedgui who had to buy back the entire estate his father had mortgaged to Jewish peddlers [Échos de Midelt].

The sacred domain offers the finest illustration of this intersection between Jewish Memory and Muslim memory. The popular cults of the Jews of Outat displayed evident analogies with the maraboutic cults of the Aït Izdeg and the Aït Ouafella; at Taâkite there existed, until recent times, the burial site of a Jewish saint [Échos de Midelt]. This phenomenon of shared veneration, in which the tombs of Jewish saints could become pilgrimage sites also frequented by Muslims — and vice versa —, is one of the best-attested features of popular religiosity in southern Morocco. It bears witness to a piety directed toward the intercession of the righteous, the ziyara and the vow, where the dogmatic boundary dissolved before the power attributed to the saint.

This cult was moreover articulated with a living scholarly culture. The renown of certain rabbinical lineages of the South, among them the Abehsera and the Afriat, radiated across the entire mountain region [rol-benzaken, Un peu d'histoire des Juifs du Sud marocain], and the attachment to kabbalistic texts noted above inscribed these remote communities within the long tradition of Jewish thought, where mysticism and book learning combined despite geographical isolation [Sirat, La philosophie juive au Moyen Âge selon les textes manuscrits et imprimés, 1983].

The decisive turning point in the history of Midelt lies in its refounding at the beginning of the twentieth century. The present-day city is not the direct continuation of the ksour of Outat: it was born from the conjunction of mining activity — lead and the mines of the Aouli and Mibladen region — and the establishment of a French administrative and military center during the Protectorate. Situated on the axis linking Fès and Meknès to the Tafilalet, the new settlement progressively attracted the populations of the surrounding ksour, including Jewish ones.

This displacement reflects a general movement that affected rural Moroccan Judaism in the twentieth century: the migration from the countryside toward urban or semi-urban centers, where communal organization could be structured around a synagogue, a mellah, and educational institutions. Midelt thus became what the prefatory notice aptly calls a "meeting point": Jews from the mountains, having descended from their ksour, lived alongside those who had come from the plains and cities, each bringing their own customs, rites, and commercial networks.

The city consolidated its role as a regional market. It extended, in an urban form, the ancient function as a crossroads that the valley of Outat had exercised between the eastern High Atlas and the northern plains. The Jews of Midelt, artisans and merchants, found there a natural outlet for the activities they had practiced for generations: metalworking, jewelry-making, the trade in fabrics, and peddling into the hinterland. Dress and adornment also attest to this urban and mountain duality: according to Jean Besancenot, ethnographer of Moroccan costume, the Jewish women of Midelt wore a headdress comparable to that of the city-dwelling women of Fès, a sign of the cultural exchanges that linked the small Atlas town to the great metropolises of the North [Besancenot, Costumes du Maroc, via judaisme-marocain.org].

As in most Moroccan localities, Jewish life in Midelt was concentrated in a mellah — the Jewish quarter, whose name, of Arabic origin, refers to salt. The mellah designates the place of residence historically assigned to Jewish communities in Morocco, a quarter generally enclosed by a wall and equipped with a fortified gate, often established near the residence of the sultan or governor [Wikipedia, Mellah]. In Midelt, a young city, the mellah was more a residential concentration and a hub of sociability than an ancient enclosure.

The memory of this mellah has reached us through visiting testimonies, precious because they restore the atmosphere of daily life. One of them evokes a family stay in 1959, the author being then ten years old and living in Rabat, and recalls that the foundation of the community dated back to the mid-nineteenth century, without an exact date, due to the absence of birth records in these remote rural areas [riboh-descendance-famille, La vie au mellah de Midelt d'autrefois]. The same account situates the setting: a picturesque place in the High Atlas, at the foot of one of the highest mountains in Morocco, the Jebel El Ayachi, at an altitude of more than three thousand meters [riboh-descendance-famille, La vie au mellah de Midelt d'autrefois].

The religious heart of this communal life was the synagogue. The old photograph preserved in the archives of descendants, showing Jews of Midelt in prayer around 1950, bears witness to the vitality of worship on the eve of the great departure [rol-benzaken, Cimetière juif de Midelt]. Around the synagogue were organized the festivals, the cycles of the liturgical year, weddings and mournings, as well as study — the small town extending, within a more institutional framework, the tradition of attachment to texts that already characterized the Jews of the ksour.

Relations with the Muslim population, as communal memory has preserved them, are described under the sign of harmony. The same saints were venerated by all, and the dress of Jews and Muslims, just like their food, language, or physical appearance, was almost identical [rol-benzaken]. One should bear in mind that these testimonies, written after exile, are tinged with the nostalgia particular to diaspora narrative, which does not diminish their value but invites us not to idealize a coexistence that also knew its tensions.

The fate of the Jews of Midelt is part of the great wave of emigration that, within a single generation, emptied Morocco of nearly its entire Jewish population. The general context is well established: at the height of its history, in the 1940s, Morocco counted 265,000 Jewish inhabitants, the largest Jewish community in the Arab world, most of whom emigrated to Israel and France between the 1950s and 1970s [Slow Morocco, Jewish Heritage in Morocco].

The timeline of this emigration was first constrained, then massive. Before the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, very few Moroccan Jews emigrated to Palestine; although the spread of Zionism in Morocco had begun at the turn of the twentieth century, it was not until 1948 that significant Zionist emigration occurred [Wikipedia, Migration of Moroccan Jews to Israel]. From 1947 to 1949, the Jewish Agency organized emigration that was nonetheless illegal, with candidates caught attempting to cross the Algerian border being sent back [Wikipedia, Migration of Moroccan Jews to Israel].

For rural and mountain communities such as those of the eastern High Atlas, departure was both a rupture and the culmination of a long-held aspiration. The Jews of the Atlas ultimately left their villages for good [riboh-descendance-famille, Un peu d'histoire des Juifs de Midelt], and this desertion struck in turn the localities of Outat el Haj, Missour, and Midelt, united within the same network of ancient Jewish presence. The motivations blended messianic expectation and religious Zionism: according to community sources, most emigrated for religious reasons to Israel, a country where, unlike other Arab states, Jews described themselves as feeling very much at ease [rol-benzaken, Cimetière juif de Midelt].

Soon, all that remained of the community were material traces: the cemetery, whose very existence signals both the antiquity and the permanence of a presence, and the tombs of saints, now bereft of their faithful. These vestiges are today the subject of renewed scholarly attention. In the Moroccan Atlas, teams of researchers — among them Orit Ouaknine-Yekutieli, the archaeologist Yuval Yekutieli, as well as Salima Naji, Mabrouk Saghir, David Goeury, and Aomar Boum — have undertaken to document the remains of vanished Jewish communities and to reconstruct their history from the ruins of synagogues and villages [The Times of Israel, Des vestiges d'une ancienne communauté juive découverts dans l'Atlas].

The history of Midelt raises, in an exemplary manner, the question of sources for a rural and peripheral Jewish community. Three regimes of knowledge intersect there, without ever perfectly overlapping. The first is that of the colonial and administrative archive: censuses, reports by officers of the Affaires indigènes, cartography of the ksour, in which Foucauld's observations constitute a precious milestone [Encyclopédie berbère]. The second is that of contemporary scholarly research, archaeological and ethnographic, which excavates and interprets the vestiges [The Times of Israël]. The third, paradoxically the most abundant, is that of diasporic Memory: descendants' blogs, family accounts, preserved photographs, testimonies gathered from the last living witnesses.

This preponderance of transmitted testimony is not a shortcoming but a constitutive given. For a community that, by its own admission, did not know the date of its founding nor the origin of its ancestors, Memory serves as archive. It carries Memory's virtues — the warmth of lived experience, the precision of domestic detail — and its limits: fragility, retrospective reconstruction, the temptation of idealization. The historian's task therefore consists in setting these registers into dialogue, in confronting the memory of Judeo-Muslim concord with the documented realities of credit, dependence, and sometimes coercion, without reducing one to the other.

In doing so, Midelt inscribes itself within a broader History — that of the Mediterranean Jewish diasporas, each of whose centers — from Tlemcen [Schwarzfuchs, Tlemcen, mille ans d'histoire d'une communauté juive, 1997] to Sousse [Rubinstein-Cohen, Portrait de la communauté juive de Sousse, 2011], from Livourne [Lévy, La Communauté juive de Livourne, 1996] to Salonique [Veinstein, Salonique 1850-1918, 1992] — knew its own trajectory of rooting, apogee, and dispersal. The singularity of Midelt lies in its character as a mountain threshold: a community shaped by altitude, the Berber world, and the cult of saints, which tipped in the space of a single generation from the immemorial longue durée to the Memory of exile.

Midelt was less a large community than a nodal point: the place where the Jews of the ksour of the ancient Outat converged with those drawn by the new town born of the mines and the Protectorate. Its history, caught between the ruins of kasbahs and the yellowed photographs of the 1950s, illustrates the condition of Atlas Judaisms — rooted in the Berber tribal world, integrated into an economy of peddling and credit, imbued with a piety in which the veneration of saints crossed confessional boundaries, and yet faithful, even in isolation, to study and tradition.

The disappearance of this community in the mid-twentieth century was not a brutal erasure but a departure, motivated by hope as much as by the upheavals of the era. What remains — the cemetery, the tombs of saints, the scattered archives of the diaspora and, now, the gaze of researchers — sketches in negative a presence whose temporal depth still largely eludes the historian. Midelt thus remains a place of Memory in the fullest sense: a space where the fragmentary archive and the vivid recollection speak to one another, and where the Great Book can claim no closure, only prudent fidelity to the traces.