JEWS IN THE HIGH ATLAS MOUNTAINS OF MOROCCO: A PARTIAL RECONSTRUCTION.

The article presents information on Jews in Morocco. Although Jews are still to be found in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, this paper is a reconstruction derived from the memories and continuing behavior of immigrants to Israel soon after their arrival. Most of the fieldwork on which it is based was carried out in an Israeli village called Ometz. Informants who were systematically questioned included immigrants who arrived in Israel knowing Hebrew, those who had learned enough during their first year there to be able to respond to questions, Israeli instructors who lived in Ometz with the immigrants, and Israeli emissaries and urban Moroccan immigrants who had visited the Atlas Mountains. Many of these villages, according to the testimony of Israeli and urban Moroccan emissaries who visited the Atlas Mountains, are situated at an altitude that can attain over 2,000 metres, and such villages may be accessible only by mule or by foot. They may be built against mountain slopes or on the tops of cliffs, and the emissaries described some villages as being partly hewn out of the mountainsides.