One of the first stories I remember is the one my father used to tell me about our family’s origins. On our couch in Brooklyn, my dad explained that it began with my “great-great-great-great” grandfather, who lived in the Anti-Atlas mountains of southern Morocco. One day, all of the Jewish men in the village were ordered to convert (in my father’s strange phrase) “on the pain of death”. They refused. Fifty of them were burned alive in a bonfire. Our forefather, Maklouf, and his grown sons were among them, but his wife, whose name has been lost to time, fled the village with her baby boy. After weeks of trekking across the harsh terrain that stretched from the mountains down to the coast, she somehow reached the gates of her hometown, Essaouira, a walled port city at the crossroads of the great trading routes of the Atlantic and the Sahara.
In time she recounted the saga to her son, Moshe, who grew up to become a scribe remembered for his beautiful handwriting. He in turn told it to his son Yosef, a rabbinical scholar known for both his height and his humility; and Yosef told it to his son David, a rabbi admired for his fairness as an arbiter of disputes, and David told it to his son Isaac, a painter and writer and raconteur who memorised the poems of Cyrano de Bergerac and Victor Hugo. Isaac told it to my father Hai, a conceptual artist who drove a cab in New York before landing a job as a renderer of pointillist pen-and-ink portraits for the Wall Street Journal.
One morning last May, my wife and our one-year-old daughter went for a dip in the pool at our resort in the beach town of Agadir while I set off for the place where it all began. As a kid, I had never imagined that the village of Oufrane Atlas Saghir was a location you could actually visit. And yet there I was, heading south on the road that leads into the rugged Anti-Atlas.
Sitting beside me was my father’s cousin Régine, a retired accountant. She wore a glittery blouse and hexagonal sunglasses studded with rhinestones. She’d always had a certain pizazz about her. At 87, she still travels alone and, until a few years ago, drank red wine every night before a tooth infection forced her to switch to beer. Although she left Morocco for Paris when she was 20, she had been back to visit many times. When she heard about my plans to travel to Oufrane, she declared that she would be coming along. Now she was looking out the window at the expanse of arid hills dotted with scrub. “Magnifique!” she exclaimed. “Incroyable!”
After four hours, we arrived at our destination, a cluster of boxy houses surrounded by barren brown slopes. A man in a white turban and a blue kaftan met us by the roadside and introduced himself as the guardian of the Jewish cemetery. He led us on a hike up a dry riverbed outside town, Régine clutching our hands as we crunched and wobbled over the rocks.
We climbed up the riverbank and came to a shoulder-high wall. The guardian unlocked a metal door with an old-fashioned key. A field of jagged, copper-brown stones sprawled before us. Looking closely, we could see that some of the stones had Hebrew letters carved into them. Régine hobbled from one to another, wiping the dust from the letters with a tissue, but as far as she could tell none of them said Knafo.
There are a few thousand Jews living in Morocco now. In the 1940s, there was a quarter of a million. They were merchants and farmers and leather workers. They knotted carpets, fashioned ornate silver jewellery and played Andalusian orchestral music. They were inextricably woven into the fabric of Moroccan culture and society. Then, in the two decades following Morocco’s independence from France in 1956, almost all of them left.
There is no single answer as to why. The Zionist movement had something to do with it. So did the promise of economic opportunity in Canada and France. One thing that is clear is they haven’t been forgotten. Throughout the trip, I kept meeting people who seemed nostalgic for the days when the Jews were around. One guy pointed to a hole in the ground that used to be a spring. The water dried up, he claimed, when the Jews went away. Others insisted that the Jews had lived in blissful harmony with their Muslim neighbours – “like brothers”. I would have liked to believe this, but I had my doubts. Granted, what happened to our forefather and his sons in Oufrane was, by all accounts, an aberration: Jews generally fared better in Morocco than in other Muslim countries and, for most of history, they fared far better in Muslim countries than in Europe. Still, under the Muslim dynasties that ruled Morocco for more than a thousand years before the French took over, Jews didn’t have the same rights and freedoms as Muslims. And although the French colonial government eventually accorded special privileges to some Jews, this only served to deepen the divisions between them and their fellow Moroccans (which may have been the goal). The establishment of Israel in 1948 drove the wedge deeper.
I was thinking about all this, trying to reconcile the rosy narrative people painted for me with the darker stories I’d heard all my life, when my family and I arrived in Taroudant, a city cradled in the alluvial basin between the High Atlas and Anti-Atlas ranges, some 50 miles inland from Agadir. The turreted walls wrapped around the town reflected the glow of the afternoon sun. They’d been standing since the 16th century, when they were built to keep out Portuguese invaders. Today they attract tourists, though not too many. On the winding streets of the medina, most of the stalls sold things that locals needed: plastic bins in fluorescent colours, and miscellaneous pieces of agricultural equipment.
I’d come to Taroudant because I’d read that it was a stronghold of Amazigh culture. The Amazigh or “Berber” people – the term Berber, an exonym, comes from the same Latin root as barbarian – are the Indigenous people of North Africa. According to local tradition, many of the Jews who used to live in the mountains of Morocco descended from Amazigh tribes that converted to Judaism as far back as 2,500 years ago, when Phoenician conquerors made their way across the North African coast, possibly with some Israelites in their boats. Arab soldiers swept through the region centuries later, overcoming fierce Amazigh resistance. Today Morocco is generally thought of as an Arab country, but its rulers never fully succeeded in suppressing the Amazigh language and culture.
That night, we stayed at Dar al Hossoun, a hotel set amid the olive groves outside the city walls. Its modern-rustic buildings of wood and baked earth overlooked an extraordinary botanical garden bursting with desert plants from around the world — cacti, agaves, kalanchoes, aloes, euphorbias. It had originally served as the home of Eric Ossart and Arnaud Maurières, landscape architects from France who had come to Taroudant to work for Farah Diba Pahlavi, the widow of the last Shah of Iran.
Sitting in the hotel garden that evening, I had a long conversation with an Amazigh guy who worked there, a soft-spoken young man named Marouane. After I recounted my family’s history in Oufrane, he revealed that his family had a story that was almost a mirror image of ours. According to their oral history, they had once been Jewish. Around the same time that my ancestor and his sons chose death over conversion, his ancestors, sensibly enough, chose survival. Many Amazigh people had stories like that, he told me. One result, he said, was that Amazigh people felt a strong sense of kinship with Jews. After all, if these stories were true, we had once all been related.
Marouane did not try to convince me that the Jews had always been happy there. Amazigh Muslims had endured discrimination and oppression too. But he noted that the restrictions placed on Jews had been enforced most strictly in big cities, where the country’s powerful elites held sway. In the Amazigh hinterlands, where the grip of the authorities was relatively weak, Jewish and Muslim neighbours did live in close harmony with one another. Later, reading up on the Jews of Oufrane, I learned something that I didn’t remember ever hearing before. According to the book Jewish Morocco by the historian Emily Gottreich, 10 of the Jewish villagers were saved from the bonfire by their Muslim neighbours.
My father's hometown, Essaouira, was built on a tongue of land that sticks out into the Atlantic. A sandy beach stretches along one side, bending towards a harbour filled with blue fishing skiffs. On the other side, Portuguese cannons poke out from the citadel walls, and surf slams into the rocks below. As happy as I was to arrive in the city, I thought about how much happier my great-great-great grandmother must have been. I’d spent the last few hours in a luxury van, my baby in a car seat next to me; she’d spent weeks carrying a baby on her back through the desert, subsisting on carab.
We were in Essaouira to celebrate my father’s 75th birthday. He had left Morocco in 1956, when he was nine, and had only been back once, when he was 63. In some ways, that trip had depressed him. The old white buildings had looked more or less the same as he’d remembered them, but all of the people who had crowded his memories were gone.
This visit would be a little different. At some point while we were planning it, he had told me that Régine and maybe a few other relatives would be joining us. “A few” quickly turned into 20. Régine is one of 13 siblings, 11 of whom are still alive. Improbably, they all get along, which makes for very large gatherings. (Their annual Seder in Israel draws 300 people.)
Walking around the city with my wife and baby, I kept running into relatives who had come to town for the event. They knew every street, every dark, crooked alley. To see the place through their eyes was to see it as it was when they were young. There was the Jewish club that my grandfather established just a few years before the Jews began to leave. And there was my long-dead grandfather in a suit and tie, serving cocktails in glasses he had imported from France for way more than he could afford. And there was Régine, young and radiant, singing in the choir he directed, a backdrop of painted roses hanging behind her. And there was my grandmother, her dark hair swept up into a crown, scolding my grandfather for painting that backdrop on one of their bedsheets.
One day, I was wandering through the medina, unsure of where I was, when I passed Bayt Dakira – House of Memory – a new museum and cultural centre dedicated to preserving the history of the Jews of Essaouira and promoting Jewish-Muslim relations. Under King Mohammed VI, the country had been making an effort to honour its Jewish heritage, and this building was part of it. Peering into the lobby from the street, I saw a familiar face looking back at me, ghost-like, from a blown-up old photograph hanging on the wall. The man had a squarish white beard and a dark sasia, or skull cap, and his eyes were like my father’s – soft and a little sad, with the eyelids drooping in the outer corners. It took me a moment to realise I was looking at my great-grandfather, the esteemed Rabbi David Knafo.
The next day, for my father’s birthday lunch, we gathered in a mosaic-lined hall donated by one of Régine’s friends. There were plates of fish tagine and fried sardines. Little dishes of beets and spicy carrots and harissa. Some of my relatives prayed before the meal. Although I’m not religious I found myself reflecting, as I often have, on Maklouf’s decision to die for his faith. Why did each successive generation persist in telling that story? Did they tell it because they wanted their descendants to be as religious as he was? Because they wanted us to know our people had been oppressed? Because they were proud that our patriarch had refused to kneel to an oppressor? Or was it a story about a woman’s strength and perseverance? If so, why hadn’t we recorded her name? And what about the 10 Jewish villagers who had reportedly been rescued by their Muslim neighbours? Why hadn’t I ever heard that part of the story before?
My father was sitting in the middle of a long table laden with bottles of wine and Mahia, a Moroccan Jewish fig spirit, laughing with his cousins and sister over something that happened long ago. A few seats away, my daughter sat in my mother’s lap, eating bits of aubergine, smiling and babbling. Earlier in the trip, my father had wistfully pointed out that she would remember none of it. I’d told him not to worry – I would tell her the story.
Where to go along Morocco's central coast
These are the cities and towns worth adding to any itinerary incorporating the dazzling Moroccan coast. Expect colourful stays, fine foodie experiences and lush, ever-changing landscapes.
Taroudant
An hour and a half inland from Agadir, Taroudant is an evocative gateway to the snow-capped High Atlas mountains. Within its monumental rammed-earth walls, bustling souks teem with healers, musicians and nomadic rug sellers. Often seen as a smaller, less touristy Marrakech, the city has smart riads, including the charming four-bedroom Dar Louisa, with curios around a verdant courtyard. Its feted designers, French landscape architects Eric Ossart and Arnaud Maurières, are also behind Dar al Hossoun, the beloved eco-bolthole just outside town, with angular baked-earth villas and long slender pools spread among lush interconnecting gardens frequented by peacocks and vocal frogs.
Taghazout and Imousane
Half an hour past tree-dwelling goats up the turmeric-coloured coast from Agadir, the waves pump hardest between Taghazout and Imsouane, another hour north. There’s a glut of new development at Taghazout Bay, south of the town, where Fairmont has brought Africa’s largest spa and a crisp style of clean neutrals and Moroccan blues set around a giant lagoon pool. Things are saltier in the mural-adorned town itself, albeit with smart stays including the driftwood-chic, labyrinthine Munga Guesthouse and Amouage, an angular place of coolly tropical vibes from British surf-camp pioneers Surf Maroc. Now more energy is moving north to slower Imsouane, where the scent of kif hashish drifts across the pastel-pink lighthouse by the harbour and longboarders cruise past wooden fishing boats. In-the-know surfers still head for The O Experience’s Tayourt Lodge, with its wood-and-leather minimalism, slow food and verandas overlooking the Atlantic.
Essaouira
It’s another few hours’ drive from Imsouane to Essaouira. The weathered blue-tone city of fishing skiffs, sleeping cats, clamouring gulls and Portuguese cannons poking from peeling citadel walls (recognisable as Astapor in Game Of Thrones) still feels like the place that inspired Jimi Hendrix to write “Purple Haze”. Stays run the gamut from the Chill Art Hostel, a bright backpacker riad that’s been around since the 1970s, to more refined stays. These include Jardin des Douars, a kasbah-inspired spa hotel in the argan and olive groves overlooking the Ksob River, and L’Heure Bleue Palais, a classic 19th-century riad next to the Bab Marrakech bastion, with courtyard palms, a rooftop pool and a plush sense of history.
The details
Artisans of Leisure offers bespoke Moroccan tours from £7,100 per person, including stays at luxury hotels, a private guide and a driver. artisansofleisure.com