Toshavim Erotic

The Toshavim were the Jews already living in North Africa, above all in Morocco, when refugees from Spain and Portugal arrived after 1492, and over the following centuries they merged so thoroughly with those newcomers that today's Moroccan Jews, most of them now in Israel, France and Canada, descend from both. The name is Hebrew for residents, and it only makes sense as half of a pair; the other half was the Megorashim, the expelled. Before the exiles came, the Toshavim were simply the Jewish communities of Fez, Sijilmasa and many smaller settlements in the Atlas and the southern oases, with roots in the region going back at least to Roman times. They lived under Muslim rulers as a protected but subordinate minority and spoke what their neighbors spoke: Judeo-Arabic, written in Hebrew letters, in the towns and plains, and Berber in some mountain villages. Fez was a real seat of learning; the eleventh-century legal scholar Isaac Alfasi carried the city's name with him to Spain, a small irony given who would later come back the other way. The community also absorbed hard breaks, among them the Almohad forced conversions of the twelfth century and the relocation of Fez's Jews into a separate quarter, the mellah, in the fifteenth.

The arrival of the Megorashim turned a quiet fact into an open argument. The exiles brought their own rabbis, the Spanish language, the prestige of Castilian scholarship and a firm belief that their customs were the correct ones. In Fez the two groups kept separate congregations and quarreled over how slaughtered meat should be inspected and how marriage and inheritance should work. The exiles' ordinances, rooted in Castilian practice, eventually became binding on the whole community, and the Sephardic rite displaced older local usage. The merger was not one-sided, though. Over time the exiles' descendants in Fez gave up Spanish for the Judeo-Arabic of the Toshavim, while in northern towns like Tetouan and Tangier Spanish lived on as Haketia. Away from the exiles' urban strongholds, Jewish families in the High Atlas and the pre-Saharan valleys kept older ways longest, working as silversmiths, cobblers and traders among Amazigh villages. The mass emigration that followed 1948 and Moroccan independence emptied most of those places. The Toshavim survive now as a layer rather than a group: in the Judeo-Arabic and Berber heritage of Moroccan Jewish families, and in a community whose ancestry runs both to the medieval Maghreb and to Castile.