Travel to Great Mirror: Photo 9

On the east side of the kasbah is the mellah, until the 1970s the Jewish quarter. Few Jews live there still, but in 1902 a census showed 15,000, including over a thousand Jewish seamstresses, 300 women spinners, 276 male button makers, 258 tailors, almost 500 male and female slipper embroiderers, 227 distillers or sellers of alcohol, and so on down to 159 goldsmiths, 100 women water carriers, 51 rabbis, 25 mattress makers, and seven blacksmiths. George Orwell came by in the mid-1930s and wrote: "Many of the streets are a good deal less than six feet wide, the houses are completely windowless, and sore-eyed children cluster everywhre in unbelievable numbers, like clouds of flies. Down the centre of the street there is generally running a little river of urine. ¶In the bazaar huge families of Jews, all dressed in the long black robe and little black skull-cap, are working in dark fly-infested booths that look like caves. A carpenter sits cross-legged at a prehistoric lathe, turning chair-legs at lightning speed. He works the lathe with a bow in his right hand and guides the chisel with his left foot, and thanks to a lifetime of sitting in this position his left leg is warped out of shape." Despite all this, the street plan of the mellah was, for Marrakech, uniquely orthogonal, a far cry from the blind alleys of most medina neighborhoods. (See Emily Gottreich, The Mellah of Marrakesh, Indiana University Press, 2007, for a map, aerial photograph, and census data. The Orwell essay is anthologized in Marrakech: The Red City, ed. by Barnaby Rogerson and Stephen Lavington, 2003.)

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