A Letter to the King

Abstract

Many of the Jews who were expelled from Iberia in the fifteenth century settled in North Africa. More than 400 years later, Moroccan Sephardic Jews in Fes would engage with Spain again. In this article, I present an unpublished document of historical interest: a letter written in Judeo-Arabic in 1905 by the Jewish community of Fes and addressed to the Spanish king, Alfonso XIII, asking for financial support to build a Spanish school in the mellāḥ of the city. Sephardic Jews in the region had preserved Spanish traditions, claimed to be part of that culture, and, perhaps more importantly, demanded to be protected by it. I take this letter, whose edition, translation, and images are included, as a vantage point for exploring the linguistic, social, and political situation of Sephardic Jews in Fes at the turn of the last century.