The Ruins of a Remote Jewish Community in Morocco Could Be a Treasure Trove for Researchers

In the middle of the last century, Morocco was home to some 250,000 Jews. Today, their descendants make up a sizeable portion of Israel’s population. Ofer Aderet reports on the discovery of the remains of a forgotten Moroccan Jewish community deep in the Atlas Mountains, near the Sahara Desert:

The small Jewish community of Tamanart lived there from the 16th century to the early 19th century. Recently, researchers from Israel, Morocco, and France conducted salvage excavations in its ruined synagogue. Along with the building’s walls, they found Scriptures and pages from the synagogue’s genizah, a repository for damaged written matter and ritual objects, as well as a few paper amulets. One was meant to protect a woman in labor and her newborn, another a personal charm meant to protect its owner from trouble and disease.

Over the past two decades, the Moroccan royal family has initiated and given support to a host of projects meant to preserve the kingdom’s Jewish history. . . . This plan also encompasses the project undertaken by the abovementioned researchers. The synagogue in Tamanart, a village with 6,000 residents, is just one of the locations on an honorable list of Jewish sites in a large region in the southern part of Morocco.

The list includes the adjacent village of Ifrane, which, according to tradition, was home to one of the oldest Jewish communities in North Africa and the oldest one in Morocco. Some traditions say that after the destruction of the First Temple, refugees fleeing Jerusalem established a Jewish kingdom in Ifrane, headed by a king called Efrati. The village was also known for a tragic incident which occurred there in 1792, when 50 members of the Jewish community jumped into a burning furnace after the local ruler made them choose between converting to Islam or death by fire. They’ve been called “the immolated” since then, their ashes interred in the ancient local cemetery.

Read more at Haaretz

More about: Archaeology, Moroccan Jewry, Morocco, Synagogues

Egypt Is Trapped by the Gaza Dilemma It Helped to Create

Feb. 14 2025

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.

Read more at The Editors

More about: Egypt, Gaza War 2023