Sephardic Jewish Genealogy in Morocco

Morocco is the most important country on this site after Amsterdam and London, and for a plain reason: this is where the Iberian exile actually went. The Megorashim — the expelled — arrived in Fez, Tetouan, Marrakech and Debdou in the years around 1492 and 1497, kept their Castilian and Portuguese names, kept their own liturgy, and for generations wrote their marriage contracts “according to the custom of the exiles of Castile” as distinct from “the custom of the residents of Morocco”. They are not a branch of the Sephardi story. They are the trunk.

Why does Morocco matter so much to Sephardi research?

Because Morocco received the exile directly, and because Moroccan families are behind a surprising number of the communities treated elsewhere on this site.

Tangier and Tetouan founded the Jewish community of Gibraltar. Mogador families married into the Montefiores and settled in London and Manchester. Moroccan Jews founded Mahane Israel in 1867, the Maghrebi neighbourhood outside the walls of Jerusalem. And from 1809 they sailed to the Amazon, where their descendants still live in Belém and Manaus. If you research the Western Sephardi world for long enough, you end up in Morocco.

The difficulty is that Morocco kept almost no civil records until the twentieth century. Understanding what replaced them is the whole of this page.

Who were the Megorashim and the Toshavim?

Two populations — the Iberian exiles and the long-established residents — who kept separate customs for centuries and then merged.

The Toshavim, the residents, had been in Morocco since antiquity. There are Hebrew epitaphs and menorah lamps at Roman Volubilis and the remains of a third-century synagogue; Ifrane of the Anti-Atlas claims a foundation date of 361 BCE. They spoke Judeo-Arabic and, in the mountains and the south, Judeo-Berber.

The Megorashim, the expelled, came from Spain in 1391 and 1492 and from Portugal after 1497, settling above all in Fez, Tetouan, Marrakech and the northern coast. In the north they spoke Haketía, the Judeo-Spanish of Morocco; in the south, Judeo-Arabic. They generally took over rabbinic and communal leadership, and Moroccan Jewry as a whole eventually adopted the Andalusian Sephardic rite.

For centuries the two kept separate customs, separate synagogues and, in places, separate courts. They also intermarried steadily, and by the twentieth century the distinction had largely dissolved — except in liturgy, in food, and in the memory of families.

What does the DNA evidence now show?

That Moroccan Jews are overwhelmingly of Middle Eastern paternal descent, that the Berber-conversion theory does not hold, and that nearly half of them share a Y chromosome with Western Sephardim.

A study by the Avotaynu DNA Foundation, led by Raquel Levy-Toledano with Adam Brown, tested 247 Moroccan Jewish men among 381 North African participants and identified 107 distinct Moroccan patrilineal lineages. Its findings:

Roughly 70 per cent of Moroccan Jewish Y-chromosome lineages originate in the Middle East — the same Levantine source as Jewry generally.
About 11–12 per cent are Iberian, and around 9 per cent Greek.
Only about 4–6 per cent are North African. The old theory that Moroccan Jews descend substantially from converted Berbers is not supported. This independently confirms what Alexander Beider had already concluded from surnames.
31 of the 107 Moroccan lineages are shared with Western Sephardim, and nearly half of the Moroccan participants carry a Y chromosome also found in the Western Sephardi world. For this site, that is the single most useful number on the page.
On Megorashim and Toshavim: about forty lineages show evidence of a sojourn in Iberia and are taken to be Megorashim; only five or six are confidently Toshavim, and those are very large lineages. Because Jews moved back and forth between Morocco and Iberia constantly for centuries, the distinction is finally more religious and cultural than genetic.

Two further findings are worth knowing. The Kohanim of Morocco belong in part to a lineage whose common ancestor lived some 2,700 years ago, and the Moroccan members fall into eight distinct sub-branches — meaning eight separate arrivals, not one founding family. And Moroccan Jewish lineages are shared with the Xuetas of Majorca, with a common ancestor about a thousand years back, consistent with James I of Aragon inviting Moroccan and Aragonese Jews to Majorca around 1200.

What can Moroccan Jewish surnames tell you?

A good deal — but less than people assume, and the DNA has just proved it.

Abraham Laredo’s Les noms des Juifs du Maroc remains the indispensable reference and is where most researchers should begin: it gives the probable origin of each name and lists notable bearers, which alone will often tell you which towns to search. Joseph Toledano’s later dictionary supplements it.

Treat conclusions carefully, though. The DNA study found Zrian, a Berber-sounding name, to be a Megorashim lineage. Names confidently identified as pre-expulsion Sephardi include Toledano, Halioua, Benattar, Pinto, Amiel, Almosnino and Corcos. All the Moroccan Toledanos tested share one Y chromosome and descend from Rabbi Daniel Toledano, who reached Fez from Salonica in 1610.

Were there Marranos in Morocco before Spain?

Yes — three and a half centuries before Spain, and the episode deserves to be far better known.

Under the Almohads from 1130, Jews across northern Morocco were forcibly converted, and for most of a century there was effectively no open Judaism there. The Marinids later permitted a return. Those who came back had been living as outward Muslims and secret Jews. Those who did not return became the Beldiyin, Muslim families of Jewish descent who remained distinct, married among themselves, and in some cases still carry Jewish surnames.

This also complicates the neat Toshavim story: many of the “residents” whom the Iberian exiles met in 1492 were themselves descended from families that had spent a century as Muslims.

Which communities should you search?

Tangier

An international city, and the northern gateway. The community was expelled and readmitted repeatedly; the last expulsion was in 1680, when the English left, and the continuous community dates from 1725. That matters — claims that the old cemetery goes back to the 1500s should be treated with caution.

Two cemeteries. The old cemetery was surveyed and mapped by Philippe Abensur and Sidney Pimienta, who recorded roughly two-thirds of it — about 1,200 names, each keyed by number to a plan, with legible stones running from the late 1800s to the 1940s. There are no death dates, and older graves are no longer visible. The new cemetery, from the mid-1930s, holds over 3,500 graves and is fully searchable online, with good photographs — and, unusually, the compilers married the grave records to the community records, so entries give parents’ names as well. Expect Ashkenazi burials too: Tangier’s international status made it a refuge in the 1930s and 1940s.

Tangier is also where Gibraltar comes from. The Gibraltar Jewish community originates from Tangier and Tetouan, and the two should always be researched together.

Tetouan

The most Andalusian of the Moroccan communities, founded by exiles from Granada and Castile, and the place where the Alliance Israélite Universelle opened its first school anywhere in the world, in 1862.

The cemetery is one of the largest in Morocco — estimated at over 35,000 graves, of which only about 1,200 are online, covering roughly 1910 to 1960. Be warned that a great many Moroccan graves carry no name at all: it was common practice not to inscribe one, or to carve letters in relief that weathered away, leaving the location to family memory.

Two exceptional documents survive and are accessible:

The Libro de Metim, the register of the dead, 1897–1971, seventy-six pages, written in Moroccan solitreo and in Haketía — so entries switch between Hebrew and Spanish. Women are frequently recorded only as “wife of” or “mother of”. A transcription has been placed on Academia.edu; it contains errors but is searchable, which the manuscript is not.
The circumcision register of R. Yitzhak Bar Vidal Ha-Sarfaty, 1881–1940, covering most male births in the community for sixty years. Its columns give the child, the date, the father — and, in place of the mother’s name, “daughter of” her father. So you get the maternal grandfather, which in Moroccan genealogy is gold.

Fez

The oldest and most learned community, and the first mellah (Fes-Jdid, 1438). Maimonides lived here; Isaac Alfasi was born here. The Megorashim settled in force after 1492.

Two cemeteries: the older stood on land later taken by the Sultan; the survivor dates from the early 1800s but was used on a large scale only from the late nineteenth century, so the stones are not as old as the community. It contains the grave of Sol Hachuel — Solica — executed at Fez in 1834, aged seventeen, for refusing to convert to Islam, and venerated since. Her surname is indexed variously as Hachuel, Hatchwell and other forms; try every spelling.

Fez’s outstanding record is the circumcision register of Rabbis Moshe and Shmuel Aben Danan, 1839–1912 — father and son, two generations, at the National Library of Israel. It gives three generations of names in a single line.

Rabat and Salé

Facing each other across the river, historically two towns and now one city. Salé was a major community with a cemetery going back at least to the 1700s; some of its graves are indexed on JewishGen. Rabat’s newer cemetery, from the 1950s, is not searchable, but photographs taken by a visitor circulate and are legible.

Rabat matters disproportionately for two reasons. First, the founders of the Casablanca community came largely from Rabat, so Rabat families turn up in Casablanca records. Second, about four hundred Jews left Rabat for the Holy Land in the 1850s, and they can be found in the Montefiore censuses — one of the clearest documented Morocco-to-Jerusalem migrations.

There is also a Rabat Geniza project, and a blog that maps the streets of the Rabat mellah and lists who lived in which house around 1910–1920 — the kind of source that exists nowhere in a catalogue.

Casablanca

Not an old community: it was founded around 1850–60, mostly by families from Rabat, and grew to become the largest in Morocco and the home of nearly all who remain today.

Two cemeteries. The old one, in the mellah, runs from about the 1880s to the 1940s, holds thousands of graves and is not online at all — a substantial opportunity for anyone able to visit. The new cemetery, from the 1940s, has over 11,000 graves, fully searchable online. Search it even if you have no reason to think your family was ever in Casablanca: in the twentieth century almost everyone passed through.

Essaouira (Mogador)

The best-documented Jewish community in Morocco, and possibly in the Islamic world.

The city was founded in 1764 by Sultan Sidi Mohammed ben Abdallah as an international port — “he who comes poor will live rich” — and he personally invited the first ten merchants. It became the Atlantic terminus of the trans-Saharan caravan trade from Timbuktu, and at its height housed ten European consulates. Jewish merchants served as consuls: Abraham and Meyer Corcos were consuls for the United States, and Meyer, who died in 1925, is reckoned the last of the tujjar as-sultan, the sultan’s merchants.

Two things follow for the genealogist. First, the consulates issued patents of protection and of nationality to Jewish merchants, and those documents survive. Second, in 1809 the Jews were ordered out of the medina and into the mellah, an event that generated a paper trail in four languages.

Mogador is also the direct link to England. Families went to London and Manchester as trading agents, some on diplomatic missions to Amsterdam and London, and married into English Jewish society — including into the Montefiore family.

Two cemeteries: the old one on the ocean side, going back to the early 1700s with a last burial in 1875 and badly eroded by salt and wind; the new one inaugurated in 1892. Together about 2,325 graves, searchable online.

The archival position is extraordinary, and it is the work of one man. Sidney Corcos spent thirty years assembling roughly 90,000 documents on Mogador for his history of the town, from: the Nantes diplomatic archives (over 80,000 documents on Mogador alone), La Courneuve in Paris, the British Foreign Office (about 7,000), the AIU archives (over 10,000), the Brussels collection of Mogador beth din records (over 8,000), the Rabat national archives and library, the Essaouira civil registry for 1913–1956 (over 5,000, from which he compiled more than 5,000 marriages), the CAHJP in Jerusalem (over 9,000 files, including seven beth din registers), the Jewish Chronicle, the Anglo-Jewish Association reports at Southampton, and family papers including 256 sherifian decrees. His book is the model for what a Moroccan community history can be.

Bayt Dakira, the House of Memory, opened in Essaouira as a museum of the town’s Jewish heritage and received over 120,000 visitors in 2025, most of them Moroccan Muslim students.

Marrakech

Indexed, and worth searching whoever you are looking for. Its cemetery holds over six hundred tzaddikim — more than any other in Morocco — and where a rabbi is buried the website often supplies biographical detail: son of, grandson of, author of. If your ancestors were rabbis you may find manuscripts, handwriting and signatures. Many graves, as elsewhere, are unnamed.

Debdou

A small town in the east with an outsized story: it was founded largely by exiles from Seville and remained overwhelmingly Sephardi, endogamous and distinct for centuries — enough that Eliyahou Marciano’s history calls it Une nouvelle Séville en Afrique du Nord. For anyone tracing an unbroken Iberian line in Morocco, Debdou is the place to look, and Marciano’s book is the source.

Agadir and the south

Agadir was mainly a Berber Jewish town for five hundred years before mixing with the Sephardim of the coast. Only a modern cemetery survives, and most burials there date from the 1960 earthquake, in which around 1,200 Jews died — many bodies were never recovered, so absence from the cemetery does not mean absence from the disaster.

The others

Meknes, Sefrou, Ouezzane (pilgrimage site of Rabbi Amram Ben Diwane), El Jadida (Mazagan), Safi, Larache and Asilah in the Spanish zone, Oujda, Ifrane of the Anti-Atlas, and the Atlas and Souss villages — Tinghir, Tahala and dozens more — which held Judeo-Berber-speaking communities that emptied almost entirely in the 1950s and 1960s. From the mid-nineteenth century there was a steady drift from the interior to the coast: to Essaouira, Mazagan, Safi and finally Casablanca.

What replaced civil registration in Morocco?

The beth din, the mohel and the cemetery — and, for merchant families, the European consulates.

The structural fact. Morocco had no civil registration of Jewish births, marriages and deaths before the Protectorates of 1912. Under Islamic law each community administered its own personal status, so everything went through the beth din — marriage, divorce, inheritance, property, disputes. Where you would look for a birth certificate in Europe, in Morocco you look for a circumcision register; where you would look for a death certificate, a burial register or a stone; and where you would look for probate, a rabbinical inheritance deed.

Beth din records

Scattered but real. The National Library of Israel’s Ktiv manuscript portal holds registers from the batei din of Fez, Meknes and Rabat, including inheritance divisions that name three generations in a sentence. The CAHJP in Jerusalem holds the records of the former Mogador beth din. Paul Dahan’s Centre de la Culture Judéo-Marocaine in Brussels holds thousands of Mogador beth din documents — marriages, judgments, family disputes. Much is undigitised; the NLI will usually digitise on request, within weeks, at no charge.

Expect Judeo-Arabic, and budget for a translator.

Circumcision and mohel registers

The single most productive record type in Moroccan genealogy, because a mohel‘s book typically names the child, the father and a grandfather in one line. Known and accessible registers include:

Fez — Rabbis Moshe and Shmuel Aben Danan, 1839–1912
Tetouan — R. Yitzhak Bar Vidal Ha-Sarfaty, 1881–1940
Mogador/Essaouira — eighteenth-century registers, and the Bendahan registers
Tangier and Meknes — Habib Toledano’s book, which also contains entries from Faro and Lisbon, because he travelled
An 1855 register kept by a mohel from the Holy Land covering Mogador, Marrakech, Rabat, Meknes, Taroudant and Ifrane

Two cautions. A mohel’s book was his private professional record, not a community register, so it will not contain every boy in town — families used different mohalim. And of course it records only sons.

Ketubot

Over six hundred Moroccan ketubot are held at the National Library of Israel, with more at Yale, the Israel Museum and in various European collections. A ketubah routinely gives the groom with his father and grandfather and the bride with her father, grandfather and sometimes great-grandfather, plus the witnesses’ signatures. Search the NLI catalogue in Hebrew rather than English, since English forms are often modern Israeli spellings that were never used.

Alliance Israélite Universelle school records

The AIU ran some eighty schools in Morocco from 1862 and its archives in Paris are enormous — Corcos alone found over ten thousand documents relating to Mogador, because directors filed quarterly and annual reports describing the school, the pupils and the state of the town. The Paris catalogue is searchable; the documents are not digitised, but the archive answers letters.

Separately, the Israel Genealogy Research Association has indexed AIU school registers for Fez and Casablanca from the 1920s to 1945, with Marrakech following. Entries give the pupil’s name, age and father, and later both parents, or a guardian where the child was an orphan. Because the Casablanca run spans about twenty-five years, you can sometimes trace two generations within a single series.

Consular and protection records

For merchant families this is where the documentation is, and it is in Europe.

Archives diplomatiques, Nantes — the French consular archives. For Mogador alone Corcos found more than eighty thousand documents. Every consulate of consequence had a post at Mogador, Tangier, Casablanca, Rabat and elsewhere.
La Courneuve, Paris — the more political and colonial series.
The National Archives (UK) — Foreign Office correspondence, thousands of documents per town.
Spanish, Danish, Austrian, Dutch, American and Italian consular archives, according to which power protected the family.

Look specifically for patents of protection and patents of nationality. A Jewish merchant under consular protection was outside the Sultan’s jurisdiction, which was contentious at the time and is a gift now.

Spanish police files — the northern zone

An unusual and productive source. During the Franco period the Spanish authorities in the northern zone arrested Jews on suspicion of freemasonry or communism, and each arrest generated a file. These are catalogued through PARES, the Spanish archives portal, largely in the Salamanca repository. They are not digitised, but a file can be scanned and sent for around fifteen euros.

Their special value is that Spanish records use two surnames — the father’s and the mother’s. That gives you the mother’s maiden name, which is otherwise among the hardest things to establish in Moroccan genealogy.

Algeria

Search Algerian records even if you believe your family never lived there. Algeria kept European-standard civil registration from the early nineteenth century, Moroccan Jews moved back and forth constantly, and Algerian certificates name the mother — a birth record from Oran will state that the father was born in Mogador and give his wife’s name, which no Moroccan source of the period will do. The Algerian civil registers are online through the French overseas archives.

Gibraltar and the Montefiore censuses

Two censuses that catch Moroccan Jews abroad and are properly indexed:

The Gibraltar censuses, 1777–1914. Gibraltar’s community came from Tangier and Tetouan and the traffic never stopped.
The Montefiore censuses of the Holy Land, 1839–1875, which record Moroccan-born Jews in Jerusalem, Tiberias and Safed with their place of origin and year of arrival.

It is possible to find the same man in both — a Mogador native in the 1875 Montefiore census at Jaffa and in the 1878 Gibraltar census three years later. Always download the original image, which often names parents, siblings and children that the index omits.

The press and official gazettes

Le Petit Marocain, published in Casablanca from 1925, carried family announcements of deaths, marriages and engagements. Death notices name the associated families, which tells you who was related to whom. It is on Gallica and full-text searchable.

The Bulletin Officiel recorded property transactions, inheritances and marriages, including for zones outside direct French control. Partly on Gallica, partly on Google Books; the British Library holds hundreds of editions.

The Jewish Chronicle from 1841 covered Morocco closely and even kept a resident correspondent at Mogador. It carried the 1844 bombardment, Montefiore’s relief committee for “the sufferers of Mogador”, and a great deal of incidental family news.

Twentieth-century civil records

French Protectorate, 1912–1956 — état civil registers; those for Essaouira alone run to over five thousand documents. Held in Morocco and through the French archives.
Spanish Protectorate, including the 1950 census and the Tangier telephone directories of 1947 and 1950–51.
Moroccan national archives (Archives du Maroc) and the Bibliothèque Nationale du Royaume, Rabat.

Emigration records

The Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem hold the Jewish Agency’s records, including passenger lists of every ship arriving in Israel, giving name, year of birth and parents’ names — invaluable when an elderly emigrant’s parents were born in the 1800s. These are not online; the archive will search them for a fee. Further, every immigrant had a file, and the Agency took away the Moroccan identity cards and passports people arrived with, so those documents may survive in the files. Teenagers who came alone under Cadima or Operation Yachin were placed in boarding schools, and their files often describe the family they left behind.

Crowdsourcing — not optional here

Because the records are thin, Moroccan genealogy is unusually dependent on collective memory, and the community has organised itself well:

Généalogie des Juifs Marocains on Facebook, with over twelve thousand members, and city-specific groups for Fez, Oujda, Agadir, Tangier and others
Dafina, the forum, with discussions running back to the 1990s that are searchable and full of reconstructed genealogies
Geni, which now carries over seventy thousand Moroccan Jewish profiles, organised into projects by community
Personal blogs — one maps the Rabat mellah house by house

The standing advice from those doing the work is blunt and correct: put your tree online, because if it is not online nobody can find you, and ask the surviving generation now.

Where did Moroccan Jews go?

Almost everywhere — and every destination has its own records.

Morocco held 250,000–350,000 Jews in the 1950s and around a thousand today.

Israel — around a million people of Moroccan descent, the second-largest community in the country, arriving through Cadima (1949–56) and Operation Yachin (1961–64). France (~55,000), Canada (~27,000, chiefly Montreal and Toronto), the United States (~25,000), Spain (~11,600), Venezuela and Brazil (~6,000 each), Gibraltar (700, from Tangier and Tetouan), the United Kingdom and Argentina.

Two of these deserve special notice on a Sephardi site. Gibraltar is effectively a Moroccan Jewish community on European soil, and its records are excellent. And the Amazonian Jews of Belém and Manaus descend from Moroccan Jews who began arriving in 1809 — a two-hundred-year-old community, still there, with its own synagogues and cemeteries, and largely unknown to researchers working the Mediterranean.

Sephardic World lectures

Our video pages carry lectures on Moroccan Jewish records and cemeteries, on the Avotaynu DNA Foundation’s North African study, and on Gibraltar — which for research purposes is an extension of Tangier and Tetouan.

What has and hasn’t been researched

Casablanca’s old mellah cemetery is not online, holds thousands of graves and covers the community’s formative decades. It is the largest single indexing opportunity in Morocco.
Tetouan’s cemetery is 35,000 graves with 1,200 indexed. Same point, larger scale.
The mohel registers are not indexed. They are the richest structured source Morocco has, they are written in a script few can read, and nobody has systematically transcribed them. Anyone who did would transform the field.
The Mogador model has not been applied anywhere else. Sidney Corcos showed what one community’s records look like when somebody assembles them properly — Nantes, the Foreign Office, the AIU, the beth din, the civil registry, the cemetery. The same could be done for Fez, Marrakech, Tetouan, Rabat or Casablanca, and the archives are the same archives.
The consular protection registers have never been listed. A roll of Jewish protégés at each consulate would effectively be a directory of the merchant families.
The Judeo-Berber communities of the Atlas and the Souss are barely documented, and the generation that remembers them is going.
Nobody has matched Moroccan families to Amsterdam, London and Livorno records systematically, though the DNA study shows nearly half of Moroccan lineages are shared with Western Sephardim.

Organisations and repositories

National Library of Israel — ketubot, mohel registers, the Ktiv manuscript portal, Moroccan Jewish newspapers.

Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, Jerusalem — including the Mogador beth din records.

Israel Genealogy Research Association — the indexed AIU school registers.

Central Zionist Archives, Jerusalem — Jewish Agency immigration files and passenger lists.

Alliance Israélite Universelle, Paris — school and community archives from 1862.

Centre de la Culture Judéo-Marocaine, Brussels (Paul Dahan) — beth din documents, artefacts and photographs.

Archives diplomatiques, Nantes and La Courneuve; The National Archives (UK); PARES, Spain.

Archives du Maroc and the Bibliothèque Nationale du Royaume, Rabat.

Bayt Dakira, Essaouira; the Museum of Moroccan Judaism, Casablanca — the only Jewish museum in the Arab world.

Cercle de Généalogie Juive (Paris) and its North African group; Association Généalogie Algérie Maroc Tunisie; Généalogie des Juifs Marocains and Dafina; Geni; JewishGen; SephardicGen.

Help us find records

Morocco is well served by comparison with most of this site, and the gaps are therefore specific. We are looking for:

Photographs or transcriptions from Casablanca’s old mellah cemetery, and from any Atlas or Souss village
Transcriptions of mohel registers — the Aben Danan, Sarfaty and Toledano books above all
Consular protection and nationality patents issued to Jewish families, from any of the powers
Beth din documents in private hands
Family papers documenting the move to Gibraltar, England, the Amazon, Venezuela or Canada
Ketubot, and photographs of them — one ketubah can supply four generations

If you hold any of this, or know where it is, please email [email protected]. Material contributed is credited, and we are happy to work under any conditions you set.

Research services

Moroccan research means working without civil registration for everything before 1912: circumcision registers in place of births, beth din deeds in place of probate, cemeteries in place of death certificates, and consular archives in France, Britain and Spain for the merchant families. It takes Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic, Haketía, French and Spanish, and a tolerance for spelling variation that would defeat most European research. It also, more often than people expect, ends back in Spain or Portugal. If you would like help, including for a Portuguese or Spanish nationality application, you can hire a professional Sephardic genealogist.

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