A sunlit lane in an old Moroccan medina, lined with carved wooden balconies

Jewish Morocco,
street by street

Private journeys through the mellahs, synagogues and cemeteries of Fes, Marrakech, Essaouira and Casablanca, with historians who grew up beside them.

Plan your journey See the three journeys

A community that never entirely left

In the late 1940s Morocco held around a quarter of a million Jews, the largest Jewish population in the Muslim world. Most left between 1948 and the 1970s, and some 2,500 live here today, nearly all in Casablanca. What they built stayed: walled mellahs inside the imperial cities, synagogues with painted cedar ceilings, cemeteries still tended by families who come back every year.

Our journeys are built around those places and the people who keep them. We travel with local historians, we keep the days unhurried, and we leave the afternoons open. That is usually when these trips turn personal.

Tiled street sign reading Hay El Mellah in Arabic and Latin letters
The mellah of Marrakech, built in 1558 beside the royal palace.
Entrance of the Museum of Moroccan Judaism in Casablanca
The Museum of Moroccan Judaism in Casablanca.

What these journeys are built around

Two carved and painted doors in an old Moroccan quarter

The mellahs

Walled Jewish quarters built beside the royal palaces. Fes has the oldest, founded in 1438. Marrakech, Meknes, Essaouira and Rabat each kept their own layout, their own bakeries, their own hour for closing the gates.

Prayer hall of a restored Moroccan synagogue, with wooden benches and the Torah ark

Synagogues

Slat al Azama in Marrakech, Ibn Danan in Fes, Beth El in Casablanca. Some hold services, some are museums, some open only when asked.

A craftsman at work beneath hundreds of handmade copper lanterns

Craft and architecture

Zellige, carved cedar, hammered copper and silver. Jewish metalworkers and bookbinders worked these lanes for generations.

Embroidered textiles and household objects in a museum display case

Museums and collections

Wedding robes, Torah cases, household silver. What families could not carry with them is kept in Casablanca and Essaouira.

Three ways to travel this

Visitors inside a restored synagogue, beneath its lamps and Torah ark

8 nights, Casablanca to Marrakech

Mellahs of the Imperial Cities

Casablanca, Rabat, Meknes, Fes and Marrakech, from the Beth El congregation to the restored Ibn Danan synagogue. Two nights in Fes, because the mellah takes a full day and the cemetery registers take another.

A synagogue interior, a whitewashed wall under blue sky and a Star of David plaque

5 nights, Casablanca to Marrakech

The Atlantic Route

Essaouira at the centre, where Jews were close to forty percent of the town in the nineteenth century and the mellah is being rebuilt house by house.

Two men with a donkey in a palm grove in southern Morocco

6 nights, Marrakech to the Draa

Southern Roads and Hiloula

South over the Atlas to the Draa, where Jewish villages, saints’ tombs and old ksour sit along the river. Timed to the hiloula calendar in spring.

  • Licensed national guides on every journey
  • Local historians in Fes, Marrakech and Essaouira
  • Private departures, on your dates

None of these is fixed. Tell us which one is closest, and we rebuild it around your dates and the places that matter to your family.

Plan your journey

A journey through generations

Some of the people who travel with us are going back to a street their grandmother described from memory. Others come because a name on a family document turned out to be a town in the Atlas. We write to the community ahead of time, we bring someone who can read the cemetery registers, and we keep the afternoon free.

Bring what you have. A photograph, a surname, the name of a street. It is often enough to start.

Start with three details

Your dates, how many of you are travelling, and any family name or town you hope to find. We come back with a first route built around them.