Chefchaouen Mellah: The Jewish Quarter of the Blue Town

Chefchaouen was founded in 1471 as a fortress by Moulay Ali ibn Rashid, and refugees from Spain and Portugal, Muslim and Jewish, settled there in the years that followed. Some popular accounts say Jews helped found the town; the standard history credits Ali ibn Rashid.

The quarter moved over time. According to the Larache-born writer Dr José Edery Benchluch, the Jewish quarter first lay outside the walls near the river and was later moved inside the medina, to the edge of the Seflia quarter, with a gate called Bab el Mellah opening onto Souika. Diarna places the quarter between the Kasbah and the Bab el-Ain gate and dates the move inside the walls to an 18th-century sultan’s order, which is why it was called Mellah el-Jedid, the “new mellah”. Its earliest buildings date to the 16th century, with courtyards, small balconies and tiled roofs that recall the Andalusian homes many of its families came from.

The community spoke Haketia, the Judeo-Spanish of northern Morocco, kept since the expulsion from Spain. According to Edery, most Jewish families were merchants, and they were prominent in tanning, the cloth trade and saddle-making, with silversmiths working in the Souika quarter. A rabbi who grew up in the town recalled at least three synagogues before 1936, one of them the first building in Chefchaouen with a paved floor. The town’s main inn, the Fondak del Yhudi, stood in the mellah and took its name from its Jewish owner.

The community was never large. Around 1918 there were about 22 Jewish families, some 200 people, in a town of about 7,000; Edery counts about 200 Jewish-owned houses out of roughly 2,000 in 1924. Accounts of earlier numbers conflict. During the Rif war of the 1920s many families left for Tetouan, and some returned after Spain reoccupied the town in 1926. From the 1940s families moved on to Tetouan, Ceuta, Venezuela and Israel. One source says the last Jewish family left in 1968; another puts the last departures in the 1950s.

Chefchaouen’s blue paint is often credited to its Jews, but the origin is not settled. One explanation links it to a Sephardic custom brought in the 15th century; another, Edery’s, to Jews who arrived from Rif villages around 1927–1930. Some connect the colour with the sky and the divine in Jewish symbolism. Others point to Jewish refugees from Europe in the 1930s, to keeping mosquitoes away, or to residents adopting the colour to attract tourists in the late 20th century. No documentary evidence decides between them, and a good guide will present them as stories rather than fact.

The mellah is a public part of the medina and you can walk it at any time. Nothing marks the former synagogues, and no Jewish families live here now. What survives is the architecture of the quarter and some of its crafts: in 2023 an artisan in the former mellah was still making donkey saddles and woven baskets with techniques he learned from Jewish families, and he said descendants of those families still visit from England, France and Israel.

A guide who knows the quarter can show you its boundaries and the gate, and explain how the Jewish and Muslim neighbourhoods related. Without one, the mellah reads simply as another lovely corner of the blue medina.

The community’s cemetery lies outside the town on the road to Ouazzane; see the Jewish Cemetery of Chefchaouen. Chefchaouen pairs naturally with Tetouan, whose mellah, synagogue and cemetery give the fuller picture of Sephardic life in the north. Our Tangier and Tetouan guide covers the region, and our sample Jewish heritage tour shows how we build these places into a private trip.