Casablanca Jewish Heritage: The Mellah District, the Miara Cemetery, the Museum of Moroccan Judaism, the Sephardic Cultural Legacy, and the Moroccan Jewish Community Today
The Casablanca Jewish heritage route covers the Casablanca Mellah district, the Miara cemetery as the largest Jewish cemetery in Africa, the Museum of Moroccan Judaism as the only Jewish museum in an Arab country, the Sephardic cultural legacy in Morocco, and the contemporary Moroccan Jewish community.
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Museum of Moroccan Judaism: The Only Jewish Museum in the Arab World
The Museum of Moroccan Judaism in Casablanca, founded in 1997 by the Moroccan Jewish Community Foundation and hosted in a converted villa in the Oasis suburb, is the only Jewish museum in any Arab country and the most important single institution for the preservation of the Moroccan Jewish cultural heritage. The museum permanent collection includes the synagogue furniture, the Torah scrolls, the ceremonial silver objects, the embroidered textiles, the religious manuscripts, and the photographs documenting the 3,000-year Moroccan Jewish presence from the pre-Islamic Berber Jewish communities to the contemporary diaspora.
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Casablanca Mellah: The Historical Jewish Quarter
The Casablanca Mellah, established in the 19th century adjacent to the old medina for the Jewish community that was the most commercially important single minority in the pre-Protectorate Moroccan economy, is now almost entirely Muslim in resident population after the post-1948 and the post-1967 Jewish emigration to Israel and to France but retains the most distinctively Mellah single architecture in the Atlantic Morocco region with the balconied houses, the Hebrew-inscription doorways, and the former synagogue buildings converted to mosque or residential use.
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Miara Cemetery: The Largest Jewish Cemetery in Africa
The Miara Cemetery in the Casablanca Mellah district is the largest Jewish cemetery in Africa with over 200,000 graves from the 19th and early 20th century Casablanca Jewish community representing the most comprehensive single demographic record of the Moroccan Jewish urban population. The Miara cemetery is still maintained by the remaining Casablanca Jewish community (approximately 2,500 individuals from the peak of 80,000 in 1960) and the cemetery is the most historically significant single Jewish heritage site in Morocco outside the Fes Mellah.
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Moroccan Jewish Heritage: The 3,000 Year Presence
The Moroccan Jewish community is the oldest continuous Jewish presence in any North African country, tracing the settlement to the pre-Islamic Berber Jewish tribes of the Atlas mountains, the Phoenician Jewish traders of the Carthaginian period, and the Jerusalem exile community that arrived after the Temple destruction in 70 AD. The subsequent Sephardic refugee community from Spain (1492) reinforced and culturally enriched the existing Moroccan Jewish community to create the most culturally distinctive single Jewish diaspora in the Arab world with the Judeo-Berber language, the Moroccan-Spanish Haketia dialect, and the distinctive Moroccan Jewish religious and musical traditions.
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Sephardic Culture: The Moroccan-Spanish Jewish Heritage
The Sephardic cultural legacy in Morocco, the most completely maintained single Spanish Jewish heritage outside Israel, includes the Haketia Judeo-Spanish dialect still spoken by the older generation of the Moroccan Jewish diaspora in Israel and Montreal, the Moroccan Jewish music tradition (the Andalusian piyut liturgical poetry), the Moroccan Jewish food tradition (the most complex single North African Jewish cuisine), and the Moroccan Jewish architectural tradition of the synagogue and the mikveh ritual bath that survives in the cities where the Jewish community was largest. The Sephardic cultural heritage is the most intellectually important single minority cultural legacy in Morocco.
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Moroccan Jews Today: The Diaspora and the Return
The contemporary Moroccan Jewish community is primarily located in Israel (700,000 Moroccan Jews and their descendants), France (300,000), and Canada (Montreal 50,000) with the smallest community remaining in Morocco (2,500 in Casablanca and 300 in each of the other major cities). The King Mohammed VI personal relationship with the Moroccan Jewish diaspora, the royal guarantee of the Jewish community rights, and the annual Hiloula (saint pilgrimage) festival that bring the Moroccan Jewish diaspora to the Moroccan Jewish shrines represent the most actively maintained single monarch-to-minority relationship in the Arab world.