Visiting Jewish Essaouira

As someone who loves to travel, being stuck at home has made me nostalgic for trips past and dream of trips to come. “If only,” I say, “we could be back in Essaouira, looking out at the blue boats beating against the stone harbor walls.” My husband reminds me that the prettiness of the Moroccan city wasn’t all that impressed us. It’s true: Essaouira is a hidden Jewish gem.

As a traveler who is compulsively curious about the Jewish history of every place I visit, I naturally looked in our guidebook for a note about Jewish life as soon as we arrived in Morocco. Little was written. The map in our “Lonely Planet” did, however, demarcate Essaouira’s “mellah” — the term, I knew, for a Jewish quarter — so we set off to explore it.

At first, seeing the mellah was devastating. The buildings lay in ruins. A swastika graced a Nazi eagle painted on a wall. Dozens of stray cats, drawn by the potent smell of fish, ran underfoot as we cautiously stumbled through the narrow alleyways of what appeared to be a forsaken section of the Essaouira’s medina (old town).

We later learned that when the Jews left their homes in the 1950s and 1960s, after the state of Israel was born and Morocco gained independence from France, squatters moved in. With no landlords, the apartments and shops had no one to manage their upkeep, repair their faulty pipes and broken windows or maintain their former integrity. Slowly but surely, things fell apart. The buildings were abandoned, and their walls crumbled. The only inhabitants we saw as we began exploring the mellah were the cats that leaped from ledge to ledge, unimpeded by walls that once separated inside from out.

Essaouira, formerly Mogador, was once the main port of Morocco — and a very Jewish city. In 1757, according to Lakhdar Omar’s carefully researched book, “Mogador Judaïca: Dernière génération d’une histoire millénaire” (sold in the mellah), when Sultan Sidi Mohammed Ben Abdallah gained the throne of Morocco, he named Samuel Sumbal, a Jew, the first counselor of the kingdom. In 1764, the sultan and Sumbal appointed ten families of Jewish merchants as the sultan’s merchants; they were charged with transforming Mogador into an important international port, one that would offer a straight line from the coast, through Marrakech, to the Atlas Mountains and the Sahara. The Jews who founded the city, nicknamed “The Port of Timbuktu,” enticed other Jews to join them; by 1770, Mogador had 1,875 Jews living there. Their community would continue to grow over the next century and a half, comprising the majority of the city.

Looking at the collapsed buildings and piles of rubble, my husband and I wondered if physical evidence of Jewish existence in Essaouira had been lost forever.

Suddenly, we turned a bend, and there before us, amidst the ruins, was a sign for a synagogue. Under the name was an arrow and the invitation “pour visiter” with a phone number, which we called. To our amazement, we found that the synagogue was perfectly intact! An old woman with a covered head (Muslim? Jewish?) ushered us in and gave us a tour of the synagogue and former home of Rabbi Haim Pinto Hagadol, a North African rabbi born in the late eighteenth century. He has been deemed a “saint” by the community, and there are Jews, the old woman told us, who still make pilgrimages to his gravesite.

There before us, amidst the ruins, was a sign for a synagogue.

The sanctuary of the Haim Pinto Synagogue was built to be coextensive with its location. The walls were painted the clay red of the land, and golden ripples set against them suggest the nearby Atlas Mountains at sunset. The ark was the brilliant sky blue of Maghreb. The bimah cover, inscribed with the words of Tehilim, also explicitly marked place and date, resplendent in golden thread. Everything was in pristine condition and working order: the candles burned, the lamps shone bright, the Torah was nestled in the ark. We were told services were regularly held there — for the few hundred Jews who remain in Essaouira and for tourists.

We made a donation to the synagogue, tipped the woman who had given us a tour — her French conveying reverence for the long-dead rabbi — and stepped back into the ruins of the mellah. This is it, I thought, the last Jewish house of prayer in Essaouira, where once there were forty-eight. But I was wrong. We didn’t walk more than a minute further before I spied a Magen David above the narrow entrance of yet another dilapidated edifice and a sign in English, French, Spanish and Italian welcoming visitors to Slat Lkahal.

We entered the synagogue. Again, the outer world had seeped into the inner one: the walls and ceiling were sky blue, the wood of the ark had a reddish tinge like the earth. Slat Lkahal, however, had no burning candles or polished picture frames. The ark was empty. But as we climbed the uneven, narrow concrete steps to the women’s section, we discovered a man who was bringing the synagogue back to life. Haim Bitton was a former resident and congregant who left Essaouira in 1964, in one of the last waves of Jewish emigration from Morocco. He was living in Southern California when we met him some fifty years later. His restoration got UNESCO funding in 2012, and he was slowly returning the synagogue to the magnificent house of worship it once was, with careful attention to archival images. He called the work his “labor of love.” I promised him I would come back to see it when it was done. If only I could go now.

In many parts of North Africa, Jewish history has been erased. Synagogues have been converted to mosques; streets have been renamed; textbooks have written out founders and residents. I saw the absence of my own family’s history when I visited Egypt. Yet, in Morocco, we witnessed the residue of Jewish life everywhere — sometimes as a way of pandering to Jewish tourists, sometimes because Jews, like Bitton, were keeping it alive, sometimes because it was impossible to hide. Towns built into the walls of the Atlas Mountains featured signs for mellahs, rabbis’ homes, synagogues. In Aït Behaddou, Jewish goods, looted or saved — shutters, doors, bowls and plates inlaid with Stars of David and menorahs — were sold in outdoor markets. In Marrakech, the lavish Bahia Palace, home of Si Moussa, the nineteenth-century grand vizier to the Sultan of Morocco, contained three reception rooms: one each for the Berbers and the Arabs, inscribed with Koranic verses, and one for the Jews, decorated with Stars of David.

In Morocco, we witnessed the residue of Jewish life everywhere — sometimes as a way of pandering to Jewish tourists, sometimes because it was impossible to hide.

Our last stop in Essaouira was the ramparts, set above the roiling waters, a scene both picturesque and sublime. Artists and their work dotted the landscape. We stopped to watch a man displaying blue and white scenes painted on small, stretched canvases. With none of the aggressive urgency that the snake charmers and monkey-men in Marrakech’s Jamaa El Fna exhibit had shown, the artist urged us to admire his craft, done in the popular naïve style there, and then paused. “You look like my sister,” he told me. I assumed he would add, “Special price for a girl who is like family.” But he didn’t. He just smiled. “You look Moroccan,” he said, and then he turned to the next flock of tourists.

My family is from a different part of North Africa, but his comment hit home; once, Jews were deeply embedded in the whole region. We were brothers, sisters.

When this pandemic ends, I hope that we all can return to exploring the world and finding, again, our places in it.