Here, especially on Fridays, the women's day, Jewesses congregate, flocking along the cemetery road—the mourners in ponderous black skirts, vast breadths of crimson silk let into the fronts and embroidered with gold, white shawls over head and forehead, a yellow sash-end edged with red appearing behind, and completing their mourning. Some of the shawls are family heirlooms, and only parted with for five-pound notes.
Loud checks and gaudy colours adorn the Rahels, Donahs, Zulicas, and Miriams not in mourning, as well as the white shawls; and the procession troops to the cemetery, sallow, sad-eyed daughters of Jacob, talking a mixture of Arabic and Spanish, with a few English and Shillah words thrown in.
Of all life's unfortunates, the Jew in Morocco was once, next to the negro in the West Indies, the most persecuted and degraded of God's creatures.
In Tangier and the seaport towns, where the Christian representatives countenance and support him, the Jew, subject to certain restrictions, is in the present day a flourishing member of the community; but in the interior his fate is still a hard one.
There is a Jewish tradition that when Shalmaneser, King of Assyria, conquered the Israelites, the tribe of Naphthali took refuge in the interior of Africa, and spread to Morocco. Jewish tombstones are certainly to be found dating as far back as twelve hundred years, and one synagogue possesses fragments of the Old Testament written on parchment, while there is a population of from four to five thousand Jews in the Atlas Mountains who have lived there since time immemorial.
Perhaps the wandering Jew merely drifted into Morocco just as he drifts all over the universe, and he would have taken refuge in North Africa more particularly when Spanish persecution became intolerable.
Once in Morocco, the Moors permitted the Jews to remain because they were useful to them; but upon certain conditions. They are confined to a certain quarter of the city—the Jews' Quarter, the Ghetto in fact—which is shut and locked by a gate at sunset, barring them from the outer world. In their own quarter they may do as they like, except ride a horse; the horse is considered too noble an animal to be ridden by the Jew: outside they may not ride at all, not even a mule, but are obliged to trudge barefoot through the slush of the rest of the city, summer and winter. They are compelled to wear one costume—a long black gabardine and a black skull-cap. Few Jewesses care to leave their quarters by themselves, for fear of insult. No synagogues or public places of worship are allowed them, and they must address Moors as Sidi, or "My lord."
But these customs are fast dying out. There is one which universally obtains: the Jews' Quarter is known as the Mellah; Mellah means "salt" in Arabic,—the Jews are compelled to salt the heads of conquered tribes killed in battle, and of criminals, which are afterwards nailed on the city walls as trophies and warnings.
In Tetuan the Jews are influential and well treated: many of them wear European clothes. On Saturday—the Jewish Sabbath—a young masher (a Mordejai, or Baruch, or Isaac) would boast a pair of brand-new yellow shoes and white socks, but wear at the same time a dove-coloured gabardine down to his heels and a mauve sash round his waist. Claret-coloured gabardines were fashionable, and a black skull-cap inevitable.
Though Tetuan was lax and liberal in its treatment of the Israelites, wealthy families of whom it possessed, the Mellah was at once the noisiest and filthiest quarter of the city, teeming with children (unlike the Moorish quarters, where there are few), who played and fought, laughed and cried, by fifties down the three principal arteries of the quarter, whose few feet of walking-space were lined with small and dirty greengrocers' and butchers' shops, their stock-in-trade encrusted with flies. On hot days the Mellah stank; on wet it was deep in black slime.
