by Beverly Mizrachi

The Moroccan Jewish community during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was the largest Jewish community in North Africa, though it always constituted a small minority among its Muslim neighbors (Tsur, 2001). In the absence of formal statistics, it has been estimated that approximately 120,000 to 130,000 Jews lived in Morocco at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Formal statistics calculated later revealed that 160,000 Jews lived there in 1936 (Hatal, 1964) and 240,000 in 1952 (Laskier, 1983). As a result of emigration to Israel and other countries, the number decreased to 160,000 by 1960 (Laskier), but it nevertheless remained the largest Jewish community in the region.