The Moroccan Jews

Jewish heritage tours of Morocco typically cycle through Casablanca, Tangiers, Fes, and Marrakesh. But the Jewish Moroccan heartland lies south of these metropolitan centers, in the towns and villages of the Atlas mountains and Sahara desert. Here, Jewish life punctuated the landscape, legendary rabbis helped sustain rural communities, and a distinctive Judeo-Amazigh (Berber) culture developed over the course of two millennia.
Decades after the community’s dissolution, the once-vibrant Jewish heritage these sites embody is ubiquitous yet hidden, seemingly indelible but inevitably fading. Where it still exists, it does so behind unmarked walls, just off treacherous dirt trails, deep within mountains, in the annual pilgrimages (hillulot) that attract hundreds of expatriates — and increasingly only in the memories of aging Muslim former neighbors as well as the superstitions that they have bequeathed to their children and grandchildren. D’fina means “covered” or “buried” in the Moroccan dialect, a fitting–and, in some cases, literal–description of what remains.