Visiting Jewish Essaouira
As someone who loves to travel, being stuck at home has made me nostalgic for trips past and dream of trips to come. “If only,” I say, “we could be back in Essaouira, looking out at the blue boats beating against the stone harbor walls.” My husband reminds me that the prettiness of the Moroccan city wasn’t all that impressed us. It’s true: Essaouira is a hidden Jewish gem.
As a traveler who is compulsively curious about the Jewish history of every place I visit, I naturally looked in our guidebook for a note about Jewish life as soon as we arrived in Morocco. Little was written. The map in our “Lonely Planet” did, however, demarcate Essaouira’s “mellah” the term, I knew, for a Jewish quarter so we set off to explore it.