POOR NEIGHBORS OF THE WEALTHY DEAD
The next day we devote to the Jewish quarter, a distinct and separate city, called the "Mellah." We approach it through the Hebrews' burial ground, a place of whited sepulchers, dwellings for the dead, and dingy huts, temporary abodes for living men and women; for there are two populations in the Jewish cemetery, a fixed population of the wealthy dead, a passing population of the living poor. You must remember that in these Moorish cities the Jews are still compelled to dwell apart from true believers. Their houses are confined in the restricted Mellah, where no provision was originally made for an increase of population. Therefore the poorer and the weaker Jews have been squeezed out of its gates and have found refuge here in the city of the dead, where they have built crude huts and begun life anew. The streets or passageways are, however, far cleaner than those of the inner Mellah, and we cannot but agree that residence in the freer atmosphere of this city of the dead is preferable to living on the other side of yonder walls, where every inch of space is occupied, where the atmosphere is heavy with bad odors, and where sunshine and fresh air are things almost unknown.
A HOME IN THE CEMETERY
THE WALLS OF THE "MELLAH"
A poor old Jew, a man with a large dependent family, serves as our guide. He tells of the misery of his people, begs me to repeat in my own land the story of their woe. It is not the Sultan, he says, who is most cruel to them; it is the rich men, the elders and the rabbis of his own tribe whom he accuses of injustice.
A FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD MOTHER
The right to build these shelters in the cemetery was granted by the Sultan to the poor, when the overcrowding of the Mellah proper became a menace to the public health. Nevertheless, no poor man is permitted to take up his abode among these cast-out members of the tribe until he has paid certain fees to the headmen of the quarter. He says that the oppression of Jew by Jew is harder to bear than the much-talked-of oppression to which the children of Israel have been subjected by the Sons of Ishmael. The statements of our pauper guide surprised us, but what he said was confirmed by every poor Jew with whom we talked. They all declared that the rich elders and the rabbis of their own tribe were their hardest masters. A wealthy man, with whom we discussed the question later, assured us that his class had almost impoverished itself with charities, that the cause of all the evil lay in the decrease of commerce and the rapid increase of the Jewish population. The poor, undoubtedly, are very poor; and though the rich live in apparent luxury and comfort, it cannot be true that Fez is the only city in the world where the rich Jews abandon their own people to starvation and distress. The noble Jewish charities throughout the world argue the contrary, and even in Fez the philanthropy of European Jews is manifest in the excellent school established here in this very Mellah by the French branch of the Israelite Alliance.