The Last Berber Jews

As a child, the French filmmaker Kamal Hachkar learned the Berber language from his grandparents in Tinghir, a Berber oasis city east of the Atlas Mountains in Morocco.  As an adult he discovered that the now exclusively Muslim town once had a substantial Jewish community.  In Hachkar’s film Tinghir-Jerusalem, Echoes from the Mellah: The Rediscovery of a Judeo-Berber Culture, which appeared at the New York Sephardic Film Festival this spring, Hachkar walks through Tinghir with his grandfather.  They stop at a certain spot, and Hachkar asks the old man if this is where the synagogue was.  It is there no longer: All that remain in the old Jewish quarters of this and other Berber towns are crumbled adobe walls, vacant lots, and once-Jewish stores now owned by Muslims.