The Jewish Tribes of the Berber Mountains & Sahara
In 1857, 31 year old Rabbi Mordechai Aby-Seour set off from Akka, in South West Morocco, to travel across the Sahara desert to Timbuktu. He was planning to re-establish the old Jewish trade routes between the two cities. His journey would take him through the mountains and desert occupied by the Berbers, the people who had originally populated the region before the arrival of the Arabs during the 7th century.
His itinerary was long and arduous. He was nearing its end, only 150 miles from his final destination, when he was captured by the Sheikh of the town of Aouane, who demanded he convert to Islam. After a hard year of persuasion and probably some bribery, the rabbi managed to extricate himself without converting and got himself to Timbuktu. Over the next couple of years other Jews joined him, they established a community and Aby-Seour built up a flourishing trading business.
Aby-Seour made several journeys between Timbuktu and various Moroccan entrepots. On at least one occasion, as he was passing through the desert oases of Touat, now in South Algeria, he came across a tribe known as Daggatouns. He’d heard about them; his father had been born in the area and had told him that the Daggatouns were the descendants of people who, many years earlier, had been Jews. The rabbi confirmed this, at least to his own satisfaction, by noting that the Daggatouns were lighter skinned than the members of the surrounding tribes. He wrote about his meeting with them in his journal. In 1880 his story was translated into French and published.
Aby-Serour is not a hugely reliable source, his account is short on detail and heavy on conjecture. It needs to be treated with a certain amount of scepticism. He summarises a series of conversations he had with various members of the Daggatoun tribe. He found out that although they were allegedly Muslim, they did not know the Qur’an, didn’t know how to pray in Arabic and were treated as pariahs by the other tribes, none of which would intermarry with them. They were still effectively regarded as Jews, even though they remembered nothing of their Judaism.
The main town in the area where the Daggatouns lived, not much more than a large village really, was called Tamentit. It was one of four, very ancient, local settlements that dated back to at least 600 BCE. Jews had lived in Tamentit for centuries but their sojourn in the city came to an end in 1492. That was the year when all the Jews were expelled from Spain, with many fleeing across the Mediterranean to North Africa. This must have created a backlash in Tamentit because in the same year the Islamic zealot, Abdel el-Krim el-Mahili, launched a pogrom in the city. Many Jews were slaughtered and the synagogue was destroyed. The survivors either fled to join other Jewish settlements in North Africa, or converted to Islam. According to Rabbi Aby-Serour, the Daggatoun tribe that he encountered were descended from those Jews of Tamentit who had converted.
Although Aby Serour’s report doesn’t tell us much about the history of the Daggoutan, there is no doubt that Jews had lived amongst the Berber tribes for centuries, particularly in the region of Touat. There are many myths and legends about how and why they settled in the area and although none of them can be treated as history, it is generally agreed that Jewish traders had lived in the in the Sahara, possibly since Roman times, certainly long before the Islamic conquests of the 7th century.
The Saharan Jews did not form themselves into large communities; they tended to live scattered around the villages, mixing quite comfortably with their Berber neighbours. Some of the more fanciful tales speak of a Jewish Berber queen, the ‘Kahina’ who is said to have died with her sons in a war against the Islamic invaders. Others mention a Jewish tribe whose members played music and sang for a living. Another tale is of Jews who lived nomadic lives, wandering from town to town, burying their dead in hollow trees. The more reliable sources don’t mention any of these legends, more realistically they describe the Jews of the Sahara as craftsmen and traders.
The craftsmen were jewellers and smiths, working in gold and tin, or leatherworkers making saddles, shoes and baskets. The traders would travel from village to village, selling their goods in the markets or bartering them for produce they could trade elsewhere. They traded in cloth, copper and horses that had come the north, and gold, ivory, nuts and pepper from the south. The 16th century Spanish traveller, Leo Africanus, described seeing Jewish and Muslim traders travelling in groups together on horseback. all dressed identically in robes and turbans. The traders – today we would probably call most of them pedlars - lived peripatetic lives; staying away for home for weeks at a time, lodging either in the homes of Berbers who they knew or with fellow Jews, often members of their extended families. The Jewish merchants had a reputation as shrewd traders, so much so that the Berbers coined a proverb: ‘Jews in the market are like salt in the dough.’
Relations with the Berbers were good, but the Berbers had the upper hand. One of the difficulties for the Jews was that, as a minority, they often found themselves caught up in the middle of conflict between the fiercely independent Berber tribes and the government. To keep themselves safe the Jews would turn to the Berber chieftains, asking them to appoint a ‘protector’ or siyid, who would look after them in return for certain duties, such as helping to defend the village from outside attacks. The linguist Joseph Chetrit, recorded a conversation with a woman who recalled the relationship her family had with their ‘protector’:
My father told me that his Berber master came to see him early in the morning with a bag and asked him to fill it with a Mudd (approximately 5 kilograms) of barley [for his horses]. He also came and took away a sugar cone every morning. When a [Muslim] festival approached, he came to choose from among our best fabrics, took the fabric of his choice to be used by himself, his children and his wife. When my father was informed that brigands were planning to kill him, he told his master that he could not go to the market or anywhere else. The master told him: ‘We will go with you’. They then came with their guns on their shoulders. My father and my brother mounted the mule and one of the master’s men was present on either side to protect them. He would only be killed if his masters were killed too. Nobody could hit him. Woe to any enemy who came from another tribe.[1]
It is thought that at one time around 20% of the Jews, in the countries we now call Morocco and Algeria, lived in the Berber mountains or the Sahara. Their lives remain one of the foggiest areas of Jewish history, although they are becoming a subject of considerable scholarly interest. Recovering the story of the Berber Jews is not an easy task. Unlike Jewish communities elsewhere, they were barely literate; they left no great works of Jewish law, philosophy or mysticism. There were no famous Berber Jewish rabbis with names that went down into posterity. There are a few scattered tombs of rabbis in the area but by and large they hold the remains of collectors who had travelled from Israel to raise funds for their own impoverished communities and who had died on their journey. They were not local scholars.
The difficulty of gathering information about Berber Jews is made even harder because there are now so few Jews left in the area. The vast majority of Morocco’s Jews left for Israel in the 1960s, in the wake of the country’s independence from France and then the Six Day war. Some of the information, like the conversation recorded above, comes from those few Jews who remained behind. But mainly, the stories of life in the Berber Jewish communities comes from the families of former Moroccan Jews now living in Israel, who are recounting family traditions that have been handed down over centuries. It is an area of research that is likely to see much more work over coming years. There is much still to learn.
[1] Intimacy, Cooperation and Ambivalence Social, Economic and Cultural Interaction between Jews and Berbers in Morocco Joseph Yossi Chetrit, European Judaism Vol. 52 No. 2 Autumn 2019, pp. 18-30
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