and a black skull-cap
inevitable.

Though Tetuan was lax and liberal in its treatment of the Israelites,
wealthy families of whom it possessed, the Mellah was at once the
noisiest and filthiest quarter of the city, teeming with children (unlike
the Moorish quarters, where there are few), who played and fought,
laughed and cried, by fifties down the three principal arteries of the
quarter, whose few feet of walking-space were lined with small and dirty
greengrocers' and butchers' shops, their stock-in-trade encrusted with
flies. On hot days the Mellah stank; on wet it was deep in black slime.

Once upon a time it ran close to the Jama-el-Kebeer; and when a hundred
years ago the Sultan who had built the big mosque sent his envoy to
examine it, all was approved of except the proximity of the Jews'
Quarter. "Can a mosque be admired near Jews?" was speedily answered by
the Tetuanites, who turned the Israelites neck and crop out of house and
home, giving them another piece of ground walled in and sufficiently
removed.

The sons of Abraham are only tolerated all the world over. As a nation,
Moors loathe them. To a pig, which they count "unclean," they give the
epithet of _jew_: out pig-sticking, when the pig breaks, the beaters
shout, "The jew! the jew!" To begin with, having forced his presence on
an unwilling people, the Jew retains his own exclusiveness, neither
marries a Moor nor eats with a Moor, nor treats him as anything else
except unclean. Not only this, but by unscrupulous cunning Jews contrive
to exercise a maddening oppression over a people with whom they have
chosen to cast in their lot, swindling, extorting money, and playing a
hundred low tricks upon the very race on the produce of whose labour they
live: at the same time their exasperating patience and cringing humility,
court contempt and insult.

[Illustration: _Photo by A. Cavilla, Tangier._]

A STREET IN THE JEWS' QUARTER, TETUAN.

[_To face p. 116._]

The poorest Moor in Tetuan is a gentleman: the richest Jew is not. But he
has his good points: a great sense of brotherhood, a strong bond of
freemasonry among the Jewish nation, undaunted energy, and an unshaken
faith in their religion are all admirable points in themselves. Energy in
Tetuan was concentrated in the Mellah. The best workmen were all Jews. A
hundred things were sold by them which no Moor made.

Thus in their Ghetto live the Chosen People, the Separate People, of
strange and ancient