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finally wrote to Muḥammad Bargāsh, the Makhzan’s minister of foreign affairs, asking him to
communicate the Jews’ complaint to the Spanish ambassador in Tangier, hoping that this would
succeed in getting the door blocked.
In a well-documented incident from 1877, the Jews of Essaouira complained to ‘Amāra
b. ‘Abd al-Ṣadīq, the city’s governor, about a group of British missionaries led by J. B. Crighton
Ginsburg who had come to Morocco to convert the Jews to Protestantism. 36 Essaouira’s Jews
were incensed at these proselytizers, and especially at Ginsburg, a Jewish convert to
Protestantism. After a local Jewish woman converted to Christianity, her father sacrificed two
bullocks in the square in front of the Dār al-Makhzan (the administrative headquarters of the
city), in a plea to convince the governor to stop the missionaries. 37 A group of Jews explained to
‘Amāra that the missionaries were trying to “corrupt their religion.” 38 These proselytizers, the
Jews claimed, “incited their children and their poor people to change their religion for the new
religion and gave them money [to do so].” 39 This language was carefully chosen (either by the
Jews themselves or by Bargāsh, their intermediary with the sultan) to invoke the prohibition on
dhimmīs changing their religion to anything but Islam. 40 The Jews “requested that [the Makhzan
officials] remove this harm from them by forbidding [the proselytes] from living with them.” 41
36
On Protestant efforts to convert Moroccan Jews more generally, see Eliezer Bashan, Ha-Yehudim be-maroko beme’ah
ha-19 ve-ha-misyon ha-anglikani (Ramat Gan: Hotza’at Universitat Bar Ilan, 1999). See also Jean Louis
Miège, “Les missions protestants au Maroc, 1875-1905,” Hésperis 42 (1955) and J. B. Ginsburg, An Account of the
Persecution of the Protestant Mission among the Jews at Mogador, Morocco (London: E. G. Allen, 1880).
37
See Parfitt, “Dhimma versus Protection,” 152-3.
38
DAR, Yahūd, 17240, John Drummond Hay to ‘Amāra b. ‘Abd al-Ṣadīq, 8 Muḥarram 1294/ 23 January 1877. See
also the letter from a group of Jews in Essaouira to the sultan, dated 16 January 1877 (in Bashan, Ha-misyon haanglikani,
155-6).
39
Ḥaḍḍa awlādihim wa-masākīnihim ‘alā ibdāli dīnihim bi-dīnihim al-jadīdi wa-a‘ṭawhum al-darāhim: Mawlāy
Ḥasan to Muḥammad Bargāsh, 6 Rajab 1296 (in Mūdirīyat al-Wathā’iq al-Mālikīya, Al-Wathā’iq, v. 4, 456-7). See
also Mawlāy Ḥasan to Muḥammad Bargāsh, 7 Ramaḍān 1296 (in ibid., 466-7).
40
Yohanan Friedmann, Tolerance and Coercion in Islam: Interfaith Relations in the Muslim Tradition (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003), Chapter 4.
41
Ṭalabū raf‘a ḍurarihim ‘anhum bi-man‘ihim min al-suknā ma‘ahum (Mūdirīyat al-Wathā’iq al-Mālikīya, Al-
Wathā’iq, v. 4, 456-7, Mawlāy Ḥasan to Muḥammad Bargāsh, 7 Ramaḍān 1296).
343