Mellah: the Jews’ quarter of the medinas of Morocco. A new interpretation of minority space in the Islamic city

Abstract

The mellah, in Morocco, is the walled quarter of certain cities where the Jewish minority was forced to live in a dominant Muslim context though they enjoyed religious freedom and some degree of autonomy. Of different origins and with varying features, all of them were isolated from the city, but they repeated the same urban structure. They showed the exercise of power in pre-colonial Morocco: each new dynasty created an exclusive neighborhood for Jews, dhimmis according to Islamic law, under the protection of the Sultan. Life in the mellah (which cannot be compared to the European ghetto) possessed a specific Judeo-Moroccan identity, parallel to its complex relationship with the Muslim community in the Medina. Both spaces constitute a single structure of coexistence, manifestations, not so different, of the same story that affected, in different ways, both communities. The concept of the Islamic city was forged by the French orientalists of Algiers who, in the colonial spirit, argued that its “urban disorder” was a result of social disorganization. In these terms, the segregation of the mellah would be one effect of this. In this preconceived and simplistic scheme, minority communities are marginal exceptions to the “true essence” of the Islamic city. Although later scholars considered each city in its context, and recognized the differences between their societies, they rarely observed the interaction and mutual influence between mellah and medina. Islamic legal tradition had a double influence in shaping the medinas: regulating public and private space; and in the specific rules for minorities. However, the results were not the same everywhere. The mellah, a peculiarity of the Moroccan medinas, was one of its constituent districts; porosity between mellah and medina reflected inter-communal relations. They were spaces of interrelation. In this paper any exclusionary approach is questioned, and the minority is reinserted in a broad reading of the Islamic city of the western Mediterranean, considering this as a composite of multiple and parallel connected elements that evolved over time, conditioned by the needs and contingencies arising among all its inhabitants, including minority groups, over history.