After becoming the latest Arab state to formalise ties with Israel, the fourth in as many months, Morocco has gone a step further; it will start teaching Jewish history as part of the school curriculum. Morocco is now the first modern Arabic state to embrace its tradition of religious pluralism — a pluralism that has over the decades faded into mono-cultural Sunni Islam. Over the last 70 years, the number of Jews living in Morocco has fallen from half a million to just 2,000.
In January, Moroccan King Mohammed VI visited a Jewish museum and synagogue in Essaouira to celebrate the country’s pluralistic past as well as the Moroccan monarch’s recent attempts to restore Jewish heritage sites. Indeed, in the 18th century, Sultan Mohammed Ben Abdellah oversaw the building of nearly 40 synagogues in Essaouira, a city where once four in ten of its population was Jewish. Before that, Morocco welcomed Iberian Jews cast out of modern-day Spain by the 1492 Alhambra decree, giving them legal autonomy over their worship.
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