Isabel Savory

The Fast of RÁmadhan—Mohammed—His Life and Influence—The Flood at Saffi—A Walk Outside Tetuan—The French Consul's Garden-House—Jews in Morocco—European Protection.

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CHAPTER IV

Manage with bread and butter till God brings the jam.

Old Moorish proverb.

We had not been long at the fonda before the Fast of RÁmadhan began. RÁmadhan, ordained by Mohammed, takes place in the ninth month of every Mohammedan year, and lasts for twenty-eight days, during which time the Faithful fast from dawn, when it is light enough to distinguish between a black and white thread, to sunset. It alters by a few days every year according to the moon, and when it falls during summer in scorching hot countries the agonies of thirst endured mean a penance indeed.

RÁmadhan begins when the new moon is first seen. Tidings were sent from Tangier to say that it had been observed there, which tidings Tetuan handed on to the farthest mountain villages: a gun was fired from the Kasbah at sunset, horns were sounded, and RÁmadhan began. It sometimes happens that Tetuan does not see the new moon till the day after Tangier has seen it at the beginning of the fast, in which case the Tetuan people are guilty of "eating the head of RÁmadhan": this year it was not so. During the twenty-eight days of the fast, every night, or rather every early morning at 2 a.m., the householder was awakened by the crashing of his knocker on his door and a shout bidding him "Rise and eat": the mueddzin at the same time from the top of the mosque called the hour of prayer, and long brass horns brayed to the same effect.

The month was almost over before we had learnt to sleep through it all. As the fonda was in the Moorish Quarter our door was not exempt. Far away up the street the knockers clanked, nearer and nearer every moment, then the man's footsteps, then our own knocker sounded like a sledge-hammer, and "Rise and eat" followed: the man went on to the next door, and back again shortly up the opposite side of the street. And every Mussulman arose in the dark and had a large meal. Again at sunrise the big gun boomed from the Kasbah, the concussion shaking our ill-built room, and we woke once more.

A CLUSTER OF COUNTRY WOMEN.

A Cluster of Country Women.

No doubt the original motive of fasting and abstinence in the Old Testament was the promotion of sanitary conditions. It is not good to eat pig in hot countries: thus pork was "unclean," and is to-day in Morocco. Nor is the consumption of much spirituous liquor wise when the thermometer marks a hundred and one: hence the Koran forbids the use of strong drinks. The same motive underlies the fast, which rests and relieves systems over-fattened and little exercised. But the "all or nothing" theory which governs the uneducated and knows no moderation runs a benefit into an abuse. RÁmadhan had its disadvantages. Tetuan was revelling at night and in a sodden sleep through the day; work was slipshod and at sixes and sevens; men were irritable and quarrelsome; every one looked indisposed; and the excuse for it all was always RÁmadhan. Worst of all, the countrywomen still tramped four and five hours into market with loads, and children a month old, only half nourished at the time of the fast. But RÁmadhan came to an end at last: Morocco breathed again. The day before the fast was over everybody was smiling, and Tetuan had but one hope, that the new moon would be seen that night, and thus the month of penance come to an end. After the letter from Tangier had been received next morning, which said that the new moon had been seen there, the gun from the fort thundered, the basha went in gorgeous state to the Jama-el-Kebeer (Big Mosque) on a white mule, all caparisoned in blue, and read aloud the letter, the city was uproarious, and the mountains echoed again, for soldiers were sent post-haste up the valleys, and fired all day at intervals to notify to the fathermost villages that RÁmadhan was over.

And the next day! The first day of the Aid-el-Sereer (Little Feast)! Everybody was in shining white, if not new, apparel, and all Tetuan was abroad. That among a people clad so largely in white and in gorgeous colours means a great deal, and the streets of Tetuan might have competed with the Park on the Sunday before Ascot. The Moorish crowd was almost entirely a male one, dressed like peacocks: satins embroidered with gold and silver prevailed.

And if the snowy haiks and turbans and the resplendent shades of the kaftans were the first point about the feast, the sweetmeat stalls were the second. A Moor is a born sweet-tooth, and at every corner of the streets a board was stacked with creamy mixtures in which walnuts were embedded, with generously browned toffee full of almonds, with carmine-coloured sticks, with magenta squares of sweet peppermint, with blocks of nougat inches thick. And the joys of the feast seemed amply to compensate for the fast.

Mohammed ordained many minor feasts and fasts. RÁmadhan stands out chief of the one: Aid-el-Kebeer (Great Feast), falling two months and six days afterwards, is chief of the other.

The three reforms which Mohammed instituted were temperance, cleanliness, and monotheism, at a time when reform was badly needed. He was born in Mecca five hundred and seventy years after Christ, an Arab of the tribe of Beni Has`sim. Christianity was not unknown around him in his day.

Always somewhat of a visionary and introspective turn of mind, when he was about forty years old he became deeply interested in the subject of religion. Living in the imaginative East, in a hotbed of mysticism and superstition, it was easy for him to conceive himself a chosen vessel of the Almighty, and to assume by degrees the rÔle of prophet, in the honest belief that the words he uttered came direct from that God whose mouthpiece he conceived himself to be. A small band of followers by degrees collected round him, and in the ordinary course of events his end would have been that of a saint with a tombstone white; but, added to the saint's fanaticisms, Mohammed possessed the talents of a leader, and the ambition which accompanies those talents.

Men and more men were attracted to him; he instituted among them a ceremonial of prayer, feasts, and fasts, and built a mosque at Medina, in which they worshipped. Persecution from their fellow-countrymen followed as a matter of course, and Mohammed's disciples, who began to call themselves Mohammedans, turned to him as their chief. The one "able man," he naturally assumed the position of a theocratic ruler, and led them against their enemies; while the words he spoke were committed to memory, constituting later on the Koran.

As a general Mohammed was successful: battle after battle was fought and won, reverses were amply compensated for, and men flocked to his standard, while deputations from surrounding tribes poured in upon him, acknowledging his supremacy, and asking for instruction in his creed.

That creed was admirably adapted to suit the manners, opinions, and vices of the East: it was extraordinarily simple, it proposed but few truths in which belief was necessary, and it laid no severe restraints upon the natural desires of men; above all, its warlike tendencies captivated the men of its day, and war, which at first had been necessary in self-defence, was still carried on, and gradually came to be looked upon by Mohammed and his followers as a lawful means towards spreading their religion. In the name of a Holy War the conquerors offered their defeated enemies the option of death or embracing the new religion, while the women and children taken in battle were sold as slaves, after the manner of the time.

And the Prophet's influence deepened and extended. Meanwhile, his sayings, or "the Koran," were written down from time to time by one or other of his followers, on palm leaves, on stone tablets, on the shoulder-plates of goats and camels, and even tattooed on men's breasts; while his ritual was strictly carried out—prayer with absolution, frequent washing, fasting, almsgiving, the pilgrimage to Mecca, and the recital of the formula "There is no God but God, and Mohammed is his prophet."

Prayer was offered up five times a day, as now, by every true believer—at sunrise, at midday, at three in the afternoon, at sunset, and two hours after sunset: the adzan (call to prayers) was chanted at each time by the mueddzin from the minarets of the mosques. The first thing in the morning at sunrise the call ran, "God is great; God is great. Mohammed is his prophet. Prayer is better than sleep. Come to prayer; come to prayer." The believer, obeying the summons, washes, enters the mosque, and repeats from four to eight short prayers, with genuflections between each.

Mohammed strictly obeyed the forms of his doctrine, and himself performed the yearly pilgrimage to Mecca and the ceremonies round the Kaaba. He was familiar with at least part of the Gospels, but his knowledge was possibly scant and distorted: he was unfriendly towards Christians. For the Old Testament he had a profound respect.

As far as can be gathered he was a sober and meditative man: he sought neither state nor riches for himself, when either might have been his for the asking. He looked upon women from a point of view not unlike the characters in the Old Testament—a distinctly Eastern one. He possessed five wives, and probably concubines—bondwomen in much the same position as Hagar of old.

Mohammed instituted the veiling of women, with corresponding restrictions on domestic intercourse, as a check upon undue sexual licence—the curse of hot climates.

There is no reason to believe that Mohammed was not honest in the conviction that his mission was divine, and that, if he countenanced vindictive revenge, rapine, and lust as a means towards the furtherance of his teaching, he justified the act in his own mind by what he believed to be revelations from a spirit other than his own.

A great character has perforce its great faults, and the courage and ambition which made so mighty a leader were naturally enough the rock upon which that leader split, blinding his eyes and distorting his point of view, leading him into compromise and error. But though self-deceived and fanatical, it is improbable that Mohammed was insincere. By the spirit of his day he must be judged. His day believed in him.

He died early in the seventh century, sixty-three years old, saying, "Verily I have fulfilled my mission. I have left that amongst you, a plain command, the Book of God, and manifest ordinances, which, if ye hold fast, ye shall never go astray." Within two years of his death the Mohammedan armies had overrun Syria; Egypt was in their possession, and the whole northern coast of Africa.

The scraps which contained in writing the sayings of the dead Prophet were all collected by his chief amanuensis: his followers appointed three judges to overlook the work. The new collection was written in Mohammed's own pure Meccan dialect, and every spurious copy was burnt. So carefully was this done that there is but one and the same Koran throughout the vast Mohammedan world.

Mohammedanism satisfied the East for two reasons: first, because it was a warlike religion, and therefore appealed to warlike tribes; secondly, because, deeply underlying it, was the strong, calm spirit of fatalism, that world-old foundation-stone on which many a man has come to anchor. The very word Mussulman means, "One who has surrendered himself and his will to God."

There are no subtle intricacies in such a creed, no mysterious contradictions to puzzle the uneducated mind; it amply satisfies a simple people; and probably no other dogma makes so many converts.

In Morocco to-day the Mohammedan religion is interwoven with the whole fabric of life. To the Moor Allah is always present, is behind every decree of the Sultan, and enters into the smallest detail of his own private life to such a degree that barely a single action is performed without invoking the sacred name. Religion is, according to the temper of the individual Moor, "a passion, or a persuasion, or an excuse, but never a check": for a man may commit any sin under heaven, and "Allah is merciful; Mohammed is his prophet; all will be forgiven." And this is not hypocritical: the larger soul includes the smaller—that is all.

It follows as a natural sequence that, because Allah is as much part of a Moor's life as the air he breathes, he is forgotten. The repetition of words bulks so largely in Mohammedanism, that, as with the Jews of old, the letter of the law has killed the spirit. The evil of Mohammed's religion lies in its essential antagonism towards progress and civilization: scientific investigation is forbidden; a proverb runs, "Only fools and the very young speak the truth." Thus Mohammedanism will never advance or regenerate Morocco; for these tenets are Government policy.

At the same time there is in Mohammedan society a certain negative virtue which contrasts strongly with the gross immorality existing in Christian countries. The conditions of what is lawful for a Mohammedan are wide enough to content, and extremes offer no temptation. Polygamy, divorce, and slavery are all allowed, and war upon unbelievers is enjoined as a duty. And yet "social evils" and the lowest depths to which humanity falls are almost unknown in Morocco; while what is held to be sin is rigorously punished—adultery by stoning (a father has no hesitation in shooting his daughter himself), robbery by mutilation, and so on.

Unlike many Christian churches, a Moorish mosque is never closed: the sanctuary is always open. It is council-chamber, meeting-place, and for travellers at night resting-place. There are no priests in the European sense; but the basha (governor) or the kadi (judge) reads prayers on Fridays, a sermon follows, and letters or decrees from the Sultan are given out in the mosque after service.

The treatment of Mohammedan women, against which so much has been written, is after all Oriental, and nothing more. The Koran speaks of woman as an inferior being, an incomplete creation, needing no education, to be rigorously and jealously guarded all her life, and who after death may or may not be admitted into the Mohammedan heaven. Her function, if rich, is to bear children, and to be treated like a petted lap-dog: if poor, to work as a labourer. But interrogate the wife of a rich Moor on the subject, and she will not have the slightest wish to educate herself, but will affirm emphatically, "We have children and enough to eat. Why should we want to learn anything?"

It is manifestly absurd to compare Mohammedanism with Christianity, which are each the outcome of a distinct race, divided by that greatest barrier—a racial gulf.

Christianity, it must be confessed, bearing in mind the Christian renegades with whom the Moor has traded, is looked upon by him for the most part as a thing beneath contempt. It had five hundred years, before Mohammed was born, in which to impress itself on the East. It signally failed. And yet only a few years after Mohammed's death his religion had taken by storm Egypt, Turkey, Arabia, Persia, Turkestan, parts of India, the Malay Peninsula, the north coast of Africa, and parts of China, introducing monotheism, and impressing temperance and cleanliness on uncivilized millions, but never advancing beyond that point. It is borne in upon one that, in spite of missionary effort, Morocco will change its religion for that of Christianity when, as its own proverb says, "The charcoal takes root and the salt buds." The East, when it adopts other tenets, will exchange its own for a wider and a more universal cult than that which modern sects and parties are endeavouring and failing to introduce to-day.

While we were in our small quarters at the fonda, the weather by no means came up to the high standard it is said to reach in December. A few sunny days, when we could bask out of doors, were grudgingly sandwiched between many wet ones, and again and again the RÁmadhan sunrise gun awoke us to gouts of almost tropical rain, a fiery sunrise followed by an hour's brilliant sunshine, the herald of a shamelessly distorted April day. The little gutters down the middle of the streets ran like torrents, carrying off chickens' heads and cabbage-stalks; hail scoured the pebbles; outside the city "the dry land was over your boots"; the road to the sea was impassable, and the rivers between Tangier and Tetuan were unfordable; snow lay in patches on the mountains; half the vale was inundated; the river could be heard a mile away; both our windows leaked; and down in the little patio, where the family sat, the waters were out.

A TYPICAL MOORISH STREET.

A Typical Moorish Street.

Photo by A. Cavilla, Tangier.

From the west coast at Saffi terrible reports arrived of the havoc the weather had made of the city. The lowest barometer ever seen had preceded sheets of rain, and a solid hamla (flood) had entered the gates from the valley above, filling the narrow streets in a few moments to a depth of seven and eight feet, and carrying everything before it: men, women, children, and cattle were swept in a torrent through the water-gate out to sea, sometimes a hand stretched out above the eddies. Then the gate became blocked with floating debris and bodies, and the flood rose to ten feet in the principal street. The townspeople who survived took refuge on their roofs. The vice-governor was drowned. Houses, shops, mills, and mosques were gutted as if by fire; furniture and household goods were ruined; the Saffi shopkeepers were beggared. For many weeks after the survivors starved upon roots, in spite of a subscription raised in Tangier to relieve them.

The rain apparently was something like a waterspout. Happily Tetuan was exempt from waterspouts, and on days when the rain gave over for a time we rode, or, picking our way along the muddy streets, drank tea with some Moor.

One dull afternoon we sampled the state of the roads outside, R. on a donkey, and Mr. Bewicke and myself on foot. Walking out by the Gate of the Tombs, we bore to the left, and dived into the narrowest of narrow lanes, shut in with tall cane fences and high mud-banks crowned with prickly pear, the shape of whose fat, fleshy leaves recalls moles' paws.

The donkey was an unusually large one, and its pack rolled more than packs in general: before we saw the last of Tetuan its rider had many a fall off her unsteady perch; and if there is truth in the Moorish saying that "one does not become a horseman till one is broken," R. may claim to have qualified. It shied and bucked and came on its nose over rocks; but this time Mr. Bewicke's boy, Mohr, directed its ways, and thoroughly enjoyed cudgelling it along with a stick, helped by its rider's switch, cut from a quince-tree, which often as not hit Mohr instead of the ass.

By-and-by we met a countryman, his wife, and a donkey. The woman, who wore little except two striped towels, and a handkerchief round her head, staggered along under a great load of faggots. She was stunted and wrinkled, removed mentally but few degrees from the three-year-old weather-beaten donkey which minced along in front of her, also loaded with faggots. The woman had strips of rough leather bandaged round her legs to protect them from thorns. Her feet were bare. Her husband sauntered last of all, presumably looking after the donkey: he had no load. Another time the donkey also might be exempt, while the woman was still burdened; and the man, when asked why, if he would not carry the load himself, he did not at least put it upon the donkey, would reply, "Because it is too heavy for the ass."

A little farther on and a magnificent Riffi passed us, walking along at a smart pace into the city, his face "old oak" colour, framed in a turban of dark red-brown strings of wool. He wore a chocolate-coloured jellab, embroidered at the edge with white, and sewn with tufts of red, violet, yellow, and green-coloured silks: a tall, wiry fellow, with a back like a ram-rod, a thin face, and keen, defiant eyes. The light glittered on his long, brass-plated Riffi gun: a red leather pouch full of bullets hung at his side. He was a great contrast to the labourer who passed us afterwards, also bound for the city—an old and grizzled monkey-faced man, with his head tied round with a ragged red cloth gun-case. His jellab hung in tatters, but he also carried a gun, and by a string a brace of partridges and a wild duck, which "bag," after some bargaining, became ours for the sum of one-and-sixpence.

Among the brown jellabs and varied turbans European clothes were forcibly out of their place: a people like the Moors, childlike, patriarchal, whose lives embody one of the oldest and perhaps best ideas of a simple existence, may well hate the sight, on the face of their select country, of prosaic tailoring and hideous head-gear. The traveller in his boots, where boots are things unknown, passes the muffled women with their silent gait, the picturesque ruffians with their swinging stride, and is unable to help feeling not at home and something of a blot on the landscape.

The lane we wandered up had been, and was still in places, a watercourse, and we struggled along the steep chasms gouged out of the soft soil, and clambered over rocks which had withstood the torrent.

By-and-by a red door intervened on our left, fitted into an imposing whitewashed arched gateway, with a mounting-block on each side, and the great brass ring-shaped knocker in the middle of the door which the Moors have left all over Spain—the garden-house of the French Consul. In another four months, when all aristocratic Tetuan would migrate in a body into their "summer-houses," and by their mutual presence reassure each other as to their safety, the Consul would move out of the city: at present he would look on such a step as sheer madness.

An old negro slave, with a beard like cotton-wool, was at work in the garden, and, opening the door, let us in to look round. A wide gravel path led up to the dazzling walls of the house, spotless as a sheet of glazed cream-laid note-paper, the window-frames and door picked out with Reckitt's blue. A white railing in front edged the terrace, the steps of which were tanned by the damp salt air a fine rusty ochre. The house inside was built on the invariable Moorish lines—kitchen and inferior rooms on the ground floor, one great lofty room above, and the flat roof over all. A garden-room flanked the house on the south-east, the front open to the garden, pillared and arched with the old white plastered "horse-shoe." In underneath the arches were shade and cool tiling, and outside more tiled ground suggested steaming brews of fragrant green tea, tiny glasses, low tables, and long divans spread under the sky.

It was a grey day, and height beyond height on into the Riff country was cloud-capped, while shar d'jebel (the hair of the mountain, as the Moors call snow) whitened a few furrowed peaks. The flats lay below to the left, and a horizontal blue pencil line was scored beyond them. Cow-birds stalked about the garden among some new vines which the old negro was putting in.

We sat down on the terrace, looking at the view, and the silence of the place was above all things most striking. A cavalcade of mules tailed away in the distance in single file along the faint track to the sea; the packed white city lay to the right, but no voices reached us; here cart-wheels, railway-trains, threshing-machines, and busy farm life were not. It would have been hard to age and wrinkle in such a spot—Adam and Eve might have felt at home.

It was also a weedy one, this Paradise: a tangle of greenery spread underneath the oranges, hanging like yellow trimming on a green fabric, choking the vines and a few scarlet geraniums. Labour, in such indolent and self-possessed acres, was a crude and gauche idea.

The greybeard with the marmoset face and leathern apron let us out at the red door: he had a history. His master, a prosperous Moor, once offered to free him: the old slave refused the offer, on the score that he was quite content as he was. However, his master urged him to accept, and he was eventually given his freedom. But later on the master lost all his money, and ruin was before him. His old slave came back. "See here, my master; here am I. Take me; sell me"; and he finally persuaded the man to sell him. He seemed contented enough as the property of the French Consul, who is a Moor.

We passed a party of closely veiled women, as we strolled citywards, taking advantage of a break in the wet weather to visit their gardens, carrying a great key, and accompanied by two or three ink-black slaves, fine upstanding women, well fed and clothed, looking good-tempered to a fault, whose children, by the same husband and master, would rank equally with those of the wives.

Mohammedan women, though veiled and supervised, have at least their gardens to saunter out to and visit when the tracks allow. Jewesses in Morocco deserve infinitely more pity. Their one recreation seemed to consist in walking as far as the Jewish cemetery, ten minutes outside the Gate of the Tombs, and attending to the gravestones of their friends.

The cemetery is gradually absorbing one side of a rough red-earthed hill; it has no fence of any description round it, and the flat pale-blue and white tombstones spread over the ground look in the distance like so much washing out to dry. The stones are all alike, oblong lozenges, inscribed in Hebrew.

Here, especially on Fridays, the women's day, Jewesses congregate, flocking along the cemetery road—the mourners in ponderous black skirts, vast breadths of crimson silk let into the fronts and embroidered with gold, white shawls over head and forehead, a yellow sash-end edged with red appearing behind, and completing their mourning. Some of the shawls are family heirlooms, and only parted with for five-pound notes.

Loud checks and gaudy colours adorn the Rahels, Donahs, Zulicas, and Miriams not in mourning, as well as the white shawls; and the procession troops to the cemetery, sallow, sad-eyed daughters of Jacob, talking a mixture of Arabic and Spanish, with a few English and Shillah words thrown in.

Of all life's unfortunates, the Jew in Morocco was once, next to the negro in the West Indies, the most persecuted and degraded of God's creatures.

In Tangier and the seaport towns, where the Christian representatives countenance and support him, the Jew, subject to certain restrictions, is in the present day a flourishing member of the community; but in the interior his fate is still a hard one.

There is a Jewish tradition that when Shalmaneser, King of Assyria, conquered the Israelites, the tribe of Naphthali took refuge in the interior of Africa, and spread to Morocco. Jewish tombstones are certainly to be found dating as far back as twelve hundred years, and one synagogue possesses fragments of the Old Testament written on parchment, while there is a population of from four to five thousand Jews in the Atlas Mountains who have lived there since time immemorial.

Perhaps the wandering Jew merely drifted into Morocco just as he drifts all over the universe, and he would have taken refuge in North Africa more particularly when Spanish persecution became intolerable.

Once in Morocco, the Moors permitted the Jews to remain because they were useful to them; but upon certain conditions. They are confined to a certain quarter of the city—the Jews' Quarter, the Ghetto in fact—which is shut and locked by a gate at sunset, barring them from the outer world. In their own quarter they may do as they like, except ride a horse; the horse is considered too noble an animal to be ridden by the Jew: outside they may not ride at all, not even a mule, but are obliged to trudge barefoot through the slush of the rest of the city, summer and winter. They are compelled to wear one costume—a long black gabardine and a black skull-cap. Few Jewesses care to leave their quarters by themselves, for fear of insult. No synagogues or public places of worship are allowed them, and they must address Moors as Sidi, or "My lord."

But these customs are fast dying out. There is one which universally obtains: the Jews' Quarter is known as the Mellah; Mellah means "salt" in Arabic,—the Jews are compelled to salt the heads of conquered tribes killed in battle, and of criminals, which are afterwards nailed on the city walls as trophies and warnings.

In Tetuan the Jews are influential and well treated: many of them wear European clothes. On Saturday—the Jewish Sabbath—a young masher (a Mordejai, or Baruch, or Isaac) would boast a pair of brand-new yellow shoes and white socks, but wear at the same time a dove-coloured gabardine down to his heels and a mauve sash round his waist. Claret-coloured gabardines were fashionable, and a black skull-cap inevitable.

Though Tetuan was lax and liberal in its treatment of the Israelites, wealthy families of whom it possessed, the Mellah was at once the noisiest and filthiest quarter of the city, teeming with children (unlike the Moorish quarters, where there are few), who played and fought, laughed and cried, by fifties down the three principal arteries of the quarter, whose few feet of walking-space were lined with small and dirty greengrocers' and butchers' shops, their stock-in-trade encrusted with flies. On hot days the Mellah stank; on wet it was deep in black slime.

Once upon a time it ran close to the Jama-el-Kebeer; and when a hundred years ago the Sultan who had built the big mosque sent his envoy to examine it, all was approved of except the proximity of the Jews' Quarter. "Can a mosque be admired near Jews?" was speedily answered by the Tetuanites, who turned the Israelites neck and crop out of house and home, giving them another piece of ground walled in and sufficiently removed.

The sons of Abraham are only tolerated all the world over. As a nation, Moors loathe them. To a pig, which they count "unclean," they give the epithet of jew: out pig-sticking, when the pig breaks, the beaters shout, "The jew! the jew!" To begin with, having forced his presence on an unwilling people, the Jew retains his own exclusiveness, neither marries a Moor nor eats with a Moor, nor treats him as anything else except unclean. Not only this, but by unscrupulous cunning Jews contrive to exercise a maddening oppression over a people with whom they have chosen to cast in their lot, swindling, extorting money, and playing a hundred low tricks upon the very race on the produce of whose labour they live: at the same time their exasperating patience and cringing humility, court contempt and insult.

A STREET IN THE JEWS' QUARTER, TETUAN.

A Street in the Jews' Quarter, Tetuan.

Photo by A. Cavilla, Tangier.

The poorest Moor in Tetuan is a gentleman: the richest Jew is not. But he has his good points: a great sense of brotherhood, a strong bond of freemasonry among the Jewish nation, undaunted energy, and an unshaken faith in their religion are all admirable points in themselves. Energy in Tetuan was concentrated in the Mellah. The best workmen were all Jews. A hundred things were sold by them which no Moor made. Thus in their Ghetto live the Chosen People, the Separate People, of strange and ancient customs,—leaving the hair uncut for a year after a relative's death, sitting on the floor, and not on a chair, for a week after; twisting a pocket-handkerchief round the waist on the Sabbath in order to save "the work" of carrying it; slitting the button-hole of the waistcoat in time of distress instead of "rending the garment"; eating adafina on the Sabbath, an indigestible dish of hard-boiled eggs, meat, and potatoes prepared overnight and left on the fire till next morning.

There is no end to ceremonials throughout a Jew's life: the first at his circumcision, the next when his hair is cut for the first time, the next when he goes to the synagogue for the first time, and so on.

When a Jew was buried in Tetuan, the uncoffined body, wrapped in sheets on a wooden bier, might only be borne out of the city by the BÁb-el-Je'f, literally the Gate of the Unclean Dead—that is, the Jews' Gate.

The mourners howled and the male relatives cried aloud; friends followed, talking and smoking cigarettes. It happened sometimes that the grave was not ready when the cortÈge reached the cemetery, and that the party would sit down on the hillside while it was lengthened and deepened; from time to time the body would be measured with a walking-stick, and the result compared with the grave.

It is impossible to write about the Jews and omit one certain point. Before the traveller has lived a week in Morocco he begins to hear of protection, and he carries with him vague words—"protected Jews" and "protected Moors"—which one sentence can explain. Protection means that a European living in Morocco, a Portuguese, a Frenchman, an Englishman—it matters not—has it in his power to make the Jew or the Moor desiring protection a nominal citizen of that country, Portugal or France or what not, and can allow him the rights of a citizen and the protection of the same; while it follows that the Sultan and the Moorish Government have no more power to touch him than they have to touch a French or an English subject, the protected Jew or Moor being outside their jurisdiction, and only answerable to the consul of that country which has given him protection, whether Germany, France, or any other. The advantage of protection is to guarantee thereby the safety of property. It was instituted a hundred years and more ago, to obviate the difficulties and dangers incurred by Europeans in trading with Jews and Moors in a country so badly governed as Morocco. Supposing that a European went into partnership and traded with a Jew or a Moor who was unprotected, in course of time, when the Jew or Moor became rich, the Moorish Government would hear of it, and set to work systematically to bleed him. Naturally the European partner would lose money in the general robbery. Therefore protection.

There is scarcely a Jew of property in Morocco who is not protected, and there are hundreds and hundreds of protected Moors; but though many Moors have enjoyed security for themselves and their belongings by this means, others less fortunate, more especially some years ago, have only escaped the talons of Moorish despotism to fall into the clutches of European swindlers, adventurers who have dared—themselves somewhat beyond the reach of their own home government—to fleece the unsuspecting Mohammedan, bribing some basha to imprison him for the rest of his days.

A European consul has before now "sold" his Moorish protected partner—that is, he tells him that, if he does not produce so much money within a certain time, protection will be withdrawn. The wiser course for the Moor is to pay the sum. If protection is withdrawn, the Moorish Government and the European blackleg will divide his worldly goods between them.

Such risks are minimized every year, and protection is greatly sought after by Moors and Jews. From the French they get it easily enough. The system is a bad one: that it prevails at all is a proof of the corruption of the Moorish Government.