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Updated: June 2, 2025
Blind beggars and feeble cripples who could not see or stir shouted hideous oaths at Israel from the back of the crowd. As the procession went past the gates of the Mellah, two companies came out into the town.
But into the Mellah of Sefrou it never comes, for the streets form a sort of subterranean rabbit-warren under the upper stories of a solid agglomeration of tall houses a buried city lit even at midday by oil-lamps hanging in the goldsmiths' shops and under the archways of the black and reeking staircases. It was a Jewish feast-day.
Thus they were scolded and abused on every side, kicked, cuffed, jostled, and wedged together well-nigh to suffocation. Their banners were torn out of their hands, their tambourines were broken, their voices were drowned, and finally they were driven back into their Mellah and shut up there, and forbidden to look upon the entry of the Sultan even from their roofs.
Israel the Jew!" cried the Moors. "God of Jacob, save us! Israel ben Oliel!" cried the people of the Mellah. "What is it? What has happened? What has befallen them?" they all asked together. "Balak!" cried the soldier in front, swinging his staff before him to force a passage through the thronging multitude. "Attention! By your leave! Away! Out of the way!"
Thus, they would call their dogs and their asses by his name, and the dogs would be the scabbiest in the streets, and the asses the laziest in the market. He would be caught in the crush of the traffic at the town gate or at the gate of the Mellah, and while he stood aside to allow a line of pack-mules to pass he would hear a voice from behind him crying huskily, "Accursed old Israel!
And through the other window of the room, which looked out over the Mellah into the town, and across the market-place to the mosque and to the battery on the hill, there came up from the darkening streets below the shuffle of the feet of a crowd and the sound of many voices.
The overcrowding of the Jews in the Mellah is a shocking evil, already stamping the rising generation with disease. Earlier by three-quarters of an hour than Tetuan at the same time of year, the city gates at Mogador were shut at six o'clock, and picnic parties of Moorish or European traders were hurried back in broad daylight.
Most of the Jewish men seemed to have had smallpox; in their speech they relied upon a very base Arabic, together with worse Spanish or quite barbarous French. Djedida having no Mellah, as the Moorish ghetto is called, they were free to trade all over the town, and for rather less than a pound sterling I bought quite an imposing collection of cutlery, plate, and dishes for use on the road.
Under the gate of the Mellah a second messenger was standing, so placed that he could see the movement of the flag. If the flag fell, the sentence would be "death," and the man under the gate would carry the tidings to the people gathered in the market-place.
On approaching an intending purchaser the slave seizes and kisses his hand, then releases it and stands still, generally indifferent to the rest of the proceedings. "It is well for the slaves," says the Atlas Moor, rather bitterly, for the fifth and last girl child has gone up beyond his limit. "In the Mellah or the Madinah you can get labour for nothing, now the Sultan is in Fez.
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