Essaouira (Cl. Ar. al-Ṣuwayra; Mor. Ar. Ṣwīra; Port. Mogador), a city located on the southwestern Atlantic coast of Morocco, was the most important seaport of Morocco from the last decades of the eighteenth to the end of the nineteenth century. It was home to one the largest Jewish communities in Morocco in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

1. Jewish Merchants in the Town’s Early Development

Jews were closely connected to the early development of Essaouira, which was founded in 1764 by Sultan Sīdī Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh as the port for the southern capital of Marrakesh. When the Al…