marrakesh

When I told friends in London I was heading to Marrakech for a while, many who had been there were horrified. Everyone assured me it was not place for a woman to go, and certainly not without her boyfriend. I would be harassed and heckled by vendors, Moroccan men and so on. Such issues never particularly bother me, and would certainly never stop me from going somewhere, so I just ignored everyone, as I usually do. In any case, things have turned out much the opposite. When I got my tickets I made one phone call to a childhood friend in Paris, who then made one phone call to M, the Important Cousin here in Morocco, and no one has touched me, spoken to me or looked at me since I arrived. Everywhere I walk, seas of people part and move away respectfully, which is fine with me! M, The Important Cousin is part of what is left of the city’s once vibrant Jewish community. Jews have been present here since Phoenician times, and their community flourished for centuries by working at middlemen between Christian merchants and the local Muslim population. According to the Alliance Israelite Universelle, there were just under 16,000 Jews in Marrakech at the start of the 20th century. Today my contacts tell me there are less than 3,000 in all of Morocco and less than 300 in Marrakech. Soon, M reckons there will be none left at all, as those who are left tend to be elderly. His only hope was that perhaps some aspects of their culture might have entered into the Moroccan national culture, and thus some memory of them will remain. Perhaps for this reason, all the members of the remaining Jewish community I have met here are obsessed by their history. Over dinners, I get told the family story from a variety of perspectives: the illiterate grandmother who was married at the start of the 19th century in the Mellah at the age of 9 and had the first of her 7 children at the age of 13. Although she was less than 5 feet tall, all her children and grandchildren were terrified of her, even when she was in her 80s. About one of the sons who fought in the war and then decided, still a teenager to immigrate to nascent state of Israel- the mother was not for this and went all the way to Israel to bring him back, but only after humiliating him by forcing him to drink a glass of milk in front of his mates. Then there was another son who was condemned to death by the previous King of Morocco, Hassan II, for his activities in the communist party, but the family arranged for him to be smuggled out to France. I struggle to keep up with the stories, there are so many and the family appears so large it is hard to remember who was who exactly in this great saga. Every lunch and dinner encounter turns into an epic oral history of war and heroes, oppression and survival. Incredible stuff.