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Shrine of David Ben Barukh at Bizou, Morocco

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David Ben Barukh HaCohen Azugh: Rabbi David Ben Barukh HaCohen Azugh was a member of a long line of Moroccan Jews regarded as saints, with an ancestry tracing back to the high priests of the First Temple. He is said to have performed many miracles, both during his life and after his death in 1760. He left the hamlet of Imin Taga as a child after inadvertently setting a fatal curse on the sheik's son. The title Azugh may derive from the Berber word for "great" or may represent the women unable to marry high priests. David Ben Barukh's shrine--located near Azrou n'Bahamou and Oulad Berhil--was a popular pilgrimage site during Morocco's colonial period between 1912 and 1956, attracting visitors from all over Morocco and the Jewish diaspora.¹

The Azugh Family: Other members of the Azugh family, which supposedly descends in an unbroken line from the First Temple era, are also recognized as saints. They trace their ancestry back to Phineas, the grandson of Aaron, the first high priest.² Venerated members of the family include Barukh Ben David (also known as Baba L'Aziz) of Casablanca, David Ben Baruch of Essaouira, and Barukh Ben David (also known as Baba Doudou) of Taroudant.³ Their graves in Taroudant and Casablanca are recognized as shrines, by both Jews and local Muslims. Several members of the Azugh family live in Casablanca, keeping the pilgrimage tradition and their holy status alive.⁴

Morocco: By the early 1200s, the Jews of Morocco gained the ruling Berber dynasty's permission to openly practice Judaism. Morocco became a haven for Jews fleeing persecution in Spain; such as after the anti-Jewish pogroms of 1391, and after the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492, causing as many as twenty thousand Jews to arrive in Morocco.⁵ By the seventeenth century, Jews lived in more than 250 communities in Morocco; Jewish traders were everywhere in the countryside, providing a connection between the coastal cities and the smaller communities of the Sahara.⁶ During Spain's occupation of Tetouan between 1859-1862, many Jews fled from port cities to the countryside or even to Algeria. When the Crémiuex Decree of 1870 granted French citizenship to Algerian Jews, many Moroccan Jews settled in Algeria. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Morocco had the largest Jewish population of any Arab country, numbering between 110,000 and 120,000 people (about 2.5 percent of the population) in 1912. The population reached a peak of around 280,000 in the 1950s.⁷ Morocco gained independence in 1956, and a series of governmental decisions (including partially nationalizing the Alliance Israélite Universelle schools and temporarily forbidding postal relations with Israel) made many Jews eager to emigrate. Once emigration policies were relaxed in 1962, more than 130,000 Jews left Morocco over the next thirty years, usually settling in Canada, France, or other Western European countries.⁸ In records from 2019, Morocco's Jewish population is around 2,100, only a fraction of what it used to be.⁹

Bizou, Morocco

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