ON THE ORIGINS OF THE MELLAH OF MARRAKESH

Extract

In the summer of 1555, by writ of Papal Bull, the ghetto of Rome came into being. Within less than half a decade, across the Mediterranean at the foot of the High Atlas Mountains, the Jews of Marrakesh met a fate not unlike that of their Italian co-religionists when they, too, were transferred to their own “city within a city.” Located where the Moroccan sultan's stables had previously stood, the new walled Jewish quarter of Marrakesh was in fact the second of its kind in Morocco, and like its predecessor in Fez it was called a mellah,² a name that originally referred to the salty marsh area to which the Jews of the northern Moroccan capital had been transferred. The Roman ghetto had similarly appropriated its name from its predecessor, the Venetian foundry (getto or ghetto) where a policy of Jewish confinement was first put into official practice in Italy. The terms continued to follow parallel trajectories, moreover, with ghetto and mellah each coming to describe the generic Jewish quarter within its respective environment.