Aomar Boum, University of Arizona
During their journeys in the southern fringes of Morocco and North Africa, European travelers gave varied and informative accounts of Jewish communities. Their narratives have allowed historians to reconstruct the networks of what Pierre Flamand (1959) referred to as the chains of Mellas in southern Morocco. In this paper, I use the statistics that these travel accounts provided to argue that there was a constant internal Jewish migration throughout southern Morocco and that this migration was conditioned by what I call traditional risk. Ulrich Beck’s (1992) research on risk society assumes that traditional societies did not have the concept of risk because they did not need it. Using the patterns of Jewish migrations throughout southern Morocco, I argue that risk and political security stand at the core of our understanding of the movement of the Saharan Jewish population.