The Dra‘a, the name of a river and region in southern Morocco, was home to some of the oldest Jewish communities in Morocco. The Jewish communities of the Dra’a valley were the only ones in North Africa, according to some sources, to exist as autonomous powers before the Arab conquest.  Local Jewish chronicles, dating from a much later period, recount that there was a Jewish kingdom of the Dra‘a, and its capital city was Tamgrut (Tamgrout). These facts have not been confirmed by other documents, and scholarship remains divided regarding their reliability. Nevertheless, traces of these stories are still present in the oral traditions of Jews from the Dra‘a: they locate the cemetery where the last defenders of the Jewish kingdom are buried ten at a time (‘ashra f-al-qbar) in Akhalluf, near La‘roumiyat in the *Zagora region. These stories are also mentioned in a nineteenth-century poem in Hebrew.

It is certain, however, that Jewish communities were established in this region in the ninth-century CE, if not earlier. Like other Jewish communities in North Africa and Andalusia, they suffered from *Almohad invasions in the mid-twelfth century. A Judeo-Arabic letter from the Cairo Geniza dating from 1148 mentioned it; a whole stanza is dedicated to the destruction of the Jewish communities from the Dra‘a in a famous qina (elegy) in Hebrew composed by the poet *Abraham Ibn Ezra.

Jewish communities throughout Morocco reclaimed a normal life under the Marinid dynasty in the thirteenth-century, who restored their status as *dhimmis protected by the Muslim state, and since then the survival, prosperity, or decline closely depended on the strength of the ruling dynasty, and the regional powers, and the ability of the central and regional authorities to maintain order.

Since the fifteenth-century, various testimonies from travelers and writers mention prosperous Jewish communities in this southern region, which held a key economic role in the flourishing trans-Saharan trade of the sixteenth-century. The large community of Taragale, as well as those of Tidri, Tansita and Tizgi—now all extinct—located in the vicinity of the oasis of *Mḥamid El-Ghozlan, worked in the production of powdered gold from West Africa, its transformation into bars, and in minting coins. Jews also financed trans-Saharan *caravans, shipped Moroccan goods, and distributed African products until the early twentieth-century.

Along the Dra‘a valley, from Mḥamid El Ghozlan to Agdz (where Europeans established a new center during the Protectorate period), about 30 Jewish communities–of which the largest had about 200-300 residents–lived among Berber and Arab tribes and the non-tribal black population (ḥarāṭīn, mainly agriculturalist sharecroppers), which had a rigid hierarchy. Among the L-ktawa (Iktawen, Lektaoua), on the bend of the Dra‘a, lived the communities of Mḥamid El Ghozlan and, 20 km further up, Beni Sbiḥ (B’ni Sbih) and Beni  Ḥayyun (Beni or B’ni Hayoun), which constituted a good part of the town of Tagounit. In the middle Dra‘a, in Zagora (former Tazagurt) lived the communities of Amzrou, Asrir, Al-Mansuriya, La‘roumiyat; in the high Dra‘a, starting with Agdz, lived many rural communities such as Rabat Asellim—where the grave of the holy rabbi Hillel Cohen lies—Tamnoulgalt (or Tamnuggalt; called al- Ḥara among the Mezgita), Timsla, Beni Zouli, Rabat-Tinzoulin, Ksebt el Makhzen and Targhellil (not to be confused with Taragale), where the tomb of the venerated eighteenth century kabbalist Makhluf *Abuḥaṣera (Abiḥaṣera)was recently restored.

After the decline of central power in the Dra‘a in the seventeenth-century, Jewish families and small communities asked neighboring Berber tribes for protection. This request was performed through the al-‘ar ceremony, during which the protected person sacrificed a calf or sheep at the door of the protector, which made the former the protégés of the latter; this new status involved duties and rights, favors asked from the protected, including participation in tribal warfare. Relationships between protecting tribes and protected families were thus socially and economically close, even intimate; sometimes Muslim neighbors understood the secret code language that Jews used (*Lashoniyya, Talashont, Taqolit).  Jews worked in association with Muslims in agriculture and in the trade of the famous Dra‘a dates, among other products, since the former owned farmlands and date palms. Besides retail trade, particularly of fabrics that they bought in Marrakech, Jews also worked in handicrafts, as jewelers, tinsmiths, mattress makers, saddlers, cobblers, and utensil repairmen.

The communities of the Dra‘a became well-known for their rich and original contributions to the kabbalistic movement, which developed at the end of the thriteenth and especially in the fourteenth-centuries. An often-repeated tradition even claimed that the foundational book of Jewish mysticism, the Zohar, was discovered in the Dra‘a at the end of the thirteenth-century. Evidence suggests that the kabbalists of the Dra‘a region followed almost simultaneously developments in Jewish mysticism in thirteenth to fourteenth-century Provence and Spain, and contributed to their exegesis. In the fifteenth and sixteenth-centuries, they wrote numerous tractates of Jewish mysticism—the most famous ones include Sefer Ha-Malkhut (“The Book of Kingship”) by David Ha-Levi, who was expelled from Spain and settled in the Dra‘a, and Ma‘ayenot ha-Ḥokhmah (“The Sources of Wisdom”), written by his disciple, Rabbi Mordekhai Buzaglo, which represented the science of combining the divine name and the Hebrew alphabet, as well as occult and prophetic mysticism. It seems that this boom in Jewish mysticism came in the context of the great development of Muslim Sufi orders at the same time in the Dra‘a, which led to the founding of the famous Naṣiriyya order (zāwiya) in Tamgrut. In the introduction to his work, David Ha-Levi mentioned his discussions with the Dra‘awi sharīf  held over ten days. Nevertheless, with the expansion of the Zāwiya, the establishment of a Jewish community was forbidden in Tamgrut, despite the fact that this town was the likely birthplace of Judaism in the Dra‘a region.

Because of the political anarchy and the ensuing economic decline in the eighteenth-century, the Jewish communities of the region were less innovative, and they became more dependent on the communities in the *Tafilalet (Tafilalt) of southeastern Morocco, which also practiced ancient Jewish traditions. The largest communities of the Dra‘a in the 1950s before their dispersion– La‘roumiyat, and Beni Sbiḥ–had about 200 Jewish inhabitants, while most of the small mellahs (mallāḥs) ranged from about ten to one-hundred residents. In the 1950s Lubavitch emissaries offered Hebrew and Jewish studies classes within the religious schools of Tamnuggalt, Amzrou, La‘roumiyat and Mḥamid Ghozlan, and the *Ozar Hatorah maintained a school in Tagounit. The *Alliance Israélite Universelle barely reached these scattered communities, establishing a short-lived school in Tagounit for a few years following Moroccan independence in 1956.

The dispersion and masse immigration to Israel in the late 1950s and early 1960s century put an end to the millennium-old Jewish presence in this region.  While there are several shrines still visited by former Jewish residents of the Dra‘a, there is not one Jewish cemetery in good condition left.

 

 

Bibliography

Elior, Rachel.”The kabbalists of Draa” (in Hebrew),” Pe’amin nº 24 (1985):  36-73.

 

Flamand, Pierre. Diaspora en terre d’Islam. I: Les communautés israélites du sud marocain (Casablanca: Imprimeries réunies, 1959).

Hirschberg, H.Z., Inside Maghreb: The Jews in North Africa (in Hebrew), Jerusalem: Jewish Agency Press, 1957).

 

Jacques-Meunié, Djinn. Le Maroc saharien des origines à 1670, 2 vols. (Paris: Editions Klincksieck, 1982).

Schroeter, Daniel. “On the Identity of Indigenous North African Jews”, in Nabil Boudraa and Joseph Krause (eds.), North African Mosaic: A Cultural Reappraisal of Ethnic and Religious Minorities (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007).