WHAT’S MISSING IN Today’s Amazigh Jewelry Revival
By Aurele Tobelem.
Recovering my family legacy and the Jewish roots of Morocco’s jewelry trade.
Eat according to your own taste but dress with the taste of others.
- Moroccan Proverb
In 1930s Tangier, when Sultan Abdelaziz bin Hassan— deposed, exiled, yet still regal— decided to part with his vast collection of Moroccan jewelry, there was only one man he trusted to handle the sale.
That man was Simon Berdugo, my great-great-grandfather.
Simon was a jeweler from Essaouira and descendant of the Marchands du Sultan, Sephardi Jews appointed by Sultan Mohammed III in the mid-eighteenth century to represent monarchical interests in foreign trade. He had long since relocated northwards to marry Laetitia Toledano, a woman of elegant bearing from Asilah. It was there that he rose to become head of the jewelers’ guild, presiding over a consortium of craftsmen in a city that had for millennia served as a vital gateway between Europe and North Africa.
When the Sultan approached him with the task, Simon hurriedly convened the guild and negotiated the transfer of the royal collection to the Bank of British West Africa. On the surface, it was simply a transaction facilitated on behalf of a powerful nobleman. However, the story carries a deeper undercurrent of trust across religious lines, of Jewish artisans safeguarding Moroccan history, and of objects whose value often transcended monetary dimensions.
Anyone who has spent time in North Africa— and Morocco in particular— will know that in many indigenous societies, it is women, not men, who are the primary bearers of artistic expression.
Among the Amazigh, it is women who adorn their faces with tribal tattoos, who wear elaborate ornamental jewelry, and who perform ritual dances and songs that transmit both memory and meaning. These creative and spiritual practices were often shared with Jewish women, woven into the rhythms of everyday life. Yet many have all but vanished, lost to the forces of exile, assimilation, and intermarriage.
The story I am about to tell begins with Simon and his circle of men, but it is important to acknowledge that his work was entangled in a world where women wore, guarded, and passed down the very objects he crafted and sold. For centuries, Jews and Imazighen shared superstitions, symbols, and ways of protecting those viewed as most vulnerable to evil spirits. In those shared artisanal practices, there emerged a talismanic language that to this day still exists, even as its slowly fades away.
Among the most distinctive adornments shared between Amazigh and Jewish communities was the fibula— known in Tamazight as the tisaghnast or tazarzit, derived from the words for “pin” and “hair,” respectively. The metal fibula, initially crafted in bronze, and later in iron, silver, or gold, appears to have evolved from a simple pin fitted with a fastening appendage.
These triangular brooches, often ornately decorated, served both aesthetic and practical purposes: they secured unstitched garments, were woven into braided hairstyles, and also indicated regional identity across North Africa. For example, the fibulae of the Kabylia region in northern Algeria are instantly recognizable for their vivid enamelwork and the frequent incorporation of red coral. These decorative fibulae likely entered the region via Mediterranean trade routes during the Punic and Roman periods.
These eras were marked by vibrant commercial exchange, in which Jewish mercantile networks played a significant role, facilitating both the movement of goods and the transmission of artisanal forms across cultural frontiers.
One archival photograph (featured below) produced by the French ethnographer Jean Besancenot in the mid-1930s documents the festive headdress of a young Jewish woman from Goulmima in southern Morocco, with a visible tazarzit pinned upon her clothing. Her heavy amber and coral necklaces are all hallmarks of Amazigh aesthetic tradition, reinterpreted through Jewish ritual sensibilities. Those familiar with Shir HaShirim, the biblical love poem traditionally attributed to the Israelite King Solomon, may recall one of its verses when gazing upon this image: “Your cheeks are lovely with rows of jewels, your neck with strings of beads.”
The central rosette on this fibula has traces of colored enamel, a decorative technique believed to have been introduced to Morocco from Spain. This method was transmitted through the skilled hands of Jewish artisans fleeing the Iberian Peninsula due to Almohad persecution. It would become a hallmark of North African silversmithing during the early modern period.
Jean Besancenot, Coiffure de la femme juive de Goulmina dans le Ferkla (c.1935). Fonds du musée d’Art juif de Paris.
The image also brings to mind a poetic incantation from the Sephardic Jews of Rhodes— likely rooted in medieval Iberian folklore— which testifies to the deeply held belief in the protective power of metal against malevolent forces. Judeo-Spanish tales of a figure clad in iron, condemning the evil eye ('ayin ha-ra) to the depths of the sea, bridges together Iberian, Jewish, and broader Mediterranean traditions.
When Sephardic Jews fled to the coastal cities of North Africa, they brought with them a rich tradition of rituals and beliefs meant to protect and heal their families, children, and communities. These merged with Amazigh cosmologies, particularly the notion of jinn (demon)-induced ailments and the healing properties of amulets and charms.
The tazarzit came to reflect this convergence. Among Sephardic women in Tetouan and Tangier, the brooch often took on more elaborate and materially valuable forms, which indicated both Iberian heritage and a higher socioeconomic status than the so-called forasteros (Sp. “outsiders”) of central and southern Morocco. Figure 1.2 depicts a pair of ornate fibulae from the northern Moroccan city of Tetouan, whose Jewish community was composed almost entirely of Sephardic exiles.
The use of gold as the base metal, the inclusion of rubies and emeralds, and the refined, miniature design all signal elevated social status and clear Iberian influence.
Pair of fibulae, Tétouan, Morocco (c. 18th C.). Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme, Paris.
For centuries, particularly in the Atlas mountains of North Africa, the craft of jewellery making was practised almost exclusively by Jews living in towns and villages. Across North Africa, gold and silversmithing were professions traditionally associated with Jewish communities. And according to historical accounts, rulers often entrusted Jews with the minting of coinage, a task linked to practices such as usury, which is prohibited in Islam. This monopoly may have contributed to the widespread adoption of the jeweler’s trade among North African Jews, embedding it as a defining feature of their material and economic culture.
But by the twentieth century, as French colonial rule took hold, a new mindset took over, one that saw development as something that inevitably had to replace local traditions. Colonial policies divided communities by ethnicity, breaking apart the close ties between Jews and Amazigh people. Things like traditional jewelry and clothing, once central to Amazigh identity, were now seen as backwards or out of step with the modern world.
Following independence from colonial authority, newly rising Arab nationalist movements accelerated this cultural destruction. The ideological drive for Arabization and Islamization by deeply supremacist revolutionaries such as Allal El Fassi and Ahmed Ben Bella, combined with the mass exodus of Jews fleeing persecution and instability, led to the erasure of shared artisanal traditions. On December 12th, 1960, Algerian Jews were devastated to find that the Great Synagogue of Algiers had been ransacked and firebombed by Arab nationalist thugs.
By 1962, the synagogue had been converted into a mosque, humiliatingly dubbed Jamaa-Lihud: “Mosque of the Jews.”
Jews were not the only targets of exclusion. Amazigh tribes who fiercely resisted Arabization policies, particularly those in the northern Rif and Kabylia regions, were often met with harsh repression and cultural marginalisation. What had once been a vibrant realm of creative and spiritual collaboration between Amazigh and Jewish communities became, in the post-colonial imagination, an obscured, largely forgotten relic.
Since the early 2000s, Amazigh activism has surged across North Africa, particularly in Morocco, where the 2011 Constitution officially recognized Tamazight as an official language of the state. This marked a major symbolic victory after decades of state-enforced Arabization that had marginalized indigenous identities. Amazigh activists have increasingly revived pre-Arabian contributions to the region’s cultural and spiritual landscape, reclaiming suppressed traditions, aesthetics, and vernacular expressions. Among the most striking emblems of this resurgence is the tazarzit. The Amazigh fibula, too, now adorns everything from jewellery to protest banners, reasserting a material connection to land, femininity, and ancestral sovereignty.
Yet this cultural renaissance has not been accompanied by a corresponding revival of Jewish memory, not even in relation to the Jewish contributions to one of its most iconic symbols.
The absence of Jews from the daily life of most North Africans, largely resulting from mass emigration and decades of alienation, has created a void. Few in the region today have personally known a Jew, let alone learned of the deep spiritual and material symbiosis previously shared between Amazigh and Jewish communities. This historical amnesia risks simplifying and sanitising what was truly once a richly pluralistic culture.
However, as frameworks like the Abraham Accords expand, there lies the potential for educational initiatives and cultural programs to reintroduce the Jewish threads of North African heritage. As extremist groups and foreign interference networks scramble for narrative in North Africa, reconciling Amazigh revival efforts with their Jewish history is an investment in a more plural, stable, and promising region. •
For more on the history of Judeo-Amazigh collaboration in Morocco’s jewelry trade, see Cynthia Becker’s Amazigh Arts in Morocco: Women Shaping Berber Identity and Amira Bennison’s Jihad and Its Interpretation in Pre-Colonial Morocco.
Aurele Tobelem is a final-year History undergraduate at King’s College London, specializing in colonial North African history. He serves as the Director of Research at the Forum for Foreign Relations and as Middle East Editor for the King’s Geopolitics Forum. Aurele has contributed to publications such as The Times of Israel, The Jerusalem Post, Quillette, and Global Arab Network, focusing on regional security, interfaith relations, and political dynamics in the Middle East.