The Mellah: the Jewish community in Fez
There are many and different accounts about the Mellah, especially those related to the name, origin, and date, and this difference and multiplicity may be due to the loss of objectivity in many writings on the Jews of Morocco and what is related to them, especially about the Mellah. With Things to Do in Fez, we will go through the history of Mellah and discover the truth by ourselves.
As for the naming of the Mellah, the most common and closest narrative of historical credibility and objectivity is that this name was given to the first Mellah built in the Marinid era in 1438 CE in the Moroccan city of Fez (southeast) in a region where (salt) was collected and stored in preparation for export via caravans to Europe; As the salt was collected at a site at the entrance of the city before its distribution, then this was the first gathering for Jews, and since that time the term Mellah has been circulated by Muslim and Jewish as a neighborhood surrounded by high walls that have mostly two doors and inhabited by Jews.
Another, but (Jewish) narration says that the genesis of the Mellah came after the so-called (wine plot) in 1438 AD, in which the Jews were accused of replacing a bowl of water with a bowl of wine in a mosque in the areas near Fez, which led to an attack on the Jews, especially in light of The weak central government in the country and the increase in Islamic religious extremism in it, and led to the establishment of the Mellah in Fez as a special neighborhood for the Jews to live in and they were expelled from all areas surrounding this mosque. In a narrator related to this same narrator, too, she says that the creation of the navigator came after the discovery of the tomb of Idriss II, one of the founders of the Moroccan state, in the neighborhood where the Jews lived in Fez.
It is not an exaggeration to say that the Mellah in Fez combined two opposite things: preserving Jewish privacy within Moroccan society with a Muslim majority, and at the same time it was a space for coexistence between Muslims and Jews in Morocco, especially since it was and still is the commercial and economic heart beating of Fez. Especially with the Jewelry sellers that exist a lot in this neighborhood.
The Mellah was also considered an integral part of the Islamic city in Morocco in its architectural and political concept, as Fez was built an incomparable way, However, due to the dense Jewish presence in Morocco due to successive historical circumstances, a neighborhood of their own has appeared within this city. But it is not separated from the fabric of the city. Rather, it was considered a cycle of social communication, a living economic activity point, and a melting pot of the Jewish-Muslim coexistence and harmony in Morocco.
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