Last Jewish Resident Keeps Heritage Alive in Marrakech’s Historic Mellah

Mushi Halioua’s family arrived in Marrakech in 1962 from Zagora. Today, the Jewish community numbers around 3,000 people in Morocco. The city of Marrakech, for its part, has barely 200 Jews, including tourists from France or the United States. Before leaving the city, the latter do not fail to exchange a few words in Hebrew with Mushi Halioua.

"All these shops you see here were Jewish. In the neighborhood, there were no Arabs before," he confides to EFE. And he adds: "In the 1980s, there were still about a thousand Jews in Marrakech, but they all left little by little." Halioua has very good relations with his neighbors and specifies that he does not work with Jews, but with Arabs.

This septuagenarian, who lives with his wife and four children, is the last Jew of the "mellah." He does not believe that the Moroccan Jews of Israel will return, because they are the children of emigrants and "the new generations no longer know Morocco."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZN6yzMltuag