In 1760, Sultan Sidi Muhammad ibn Abdallah designated the Jewish merchants of Morocco as his official trade intermediaries for a new Atlantic port. They became the most powerful commercial class on the coast.
By the early nineteenth century, the Jewish merchant houses of Mogador were conducting business on three continents at once. Gold from sub-Saharan Africa passed through the port. Textiles from Manchester arrived by British clipper. Sugar, leather, and wax moved in both directions.
The families at the center of these transactions — the Aflalo, Corcos, Levy, and Pinto families — were not marginal traders on the edge of Moroccan commerce. They were the port.
It had begun with a royal decree. In 1760, Sultan Sidi Muhammad ibn Abdallah needed to establish a deep-water Atlantic port — a counterweight to the trade controlled by European powers at Tangier and Agadir. He chose a bay on the windswept Atlantic coast, commissioned a French architect to design the city, and made a calculation about who would run it.
The Jews of Morocco — literate in Arabic, French, Spanish, and Haketia, connected to European trading houses through a diaspora network extending from Livorno to Amsterdam — were his answer. The arrangement had a name: tujjar al-sultan, the sultan's merchants. It was not a courtesy title.
In the diplomatic archives of London, Paris, and Amsterdam, they appear not as minority merchants but as the Moroccan crown's principal commercial agents.
The Mellah they built to house themselves became, by the mid-nineteenth century, one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in Africa. Sixteen thousand people lived in a grid of streets covering less than a square kilometer.
The last tujjar al-sultan families left in the 1950s and 1960s. Their archives — the ledgers, correspondence, and contracts documenting two hundred years of Atlantic trade — are scattered across consular records in Europe, private collections in Montreal and Tel Aviv, and the oral memory of descendants who mostly cannot read the documents their ancestors wrote.
Bab Doukkala, the northern entrance to the Mellah, still stands. It looks like a gate. What it was, for nearly two hundred years, was something closer to a door to the world. What it connects to now — that is a different question.