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Cemetery at Salé, Morocco
Cemetery at Salé, Morocco
Description
Along the start of the road connecting Salé and Fez, across from the cemetery of Sidi Bil-‘Abbas, lies the town’s Jewish cemetery (Kenneth L. Brown, People of Salé: Tradition and Change in a Moroccan City, 1830-1930, (Manchester University Press, Manchester: 1976), 45). This cemetery was an especially important location during the salat al-istisqa’, or prayer for rain, as Salé’s Jews would follow the prayer itself with a trip to the tombs of local “saints,” including Rabbi Raphael Anqawa, where they would chant the psalms of David (Ibid., 91). Jewish saints were incredibly important in the culture of Salé, and every rabbi who died in the town was buried near the grave of Rabbi Anqawa out of custom (Issachar Ben-Ami, Saint Veneration among the Jews in Morocco (Wayne State University Press: Detroit, 1998), 51). For much of the town’s history, it was home to some of the wealthiest merchants based in Rabat, both Jewish and Muslim. These two groups were quite tightly economically entwined, and Jews served as creditors for Muslims throughout the economic growth of the Salé (Brown, 159).
