The great nucleus of these Shelouh Jews is in Jebel Melge, or the vast ridge of the Atlas capped with eternal snows; and they hold communications with the Jews of Ait Mousa, Frouga or Misfuva.  They rarely descend to the plains or cities of the empire, and look upon the rest of the Jews of this country as heretics.  Isolation thus begets enmity and mistrust, as in other cases.  A few years ago, a number came to Mogador, and were not at all pleased with their visit, finding fault with everything among their brethren.  These Jewish mountaineers are supposed to be very numerous.  In their homes, they are inaccessible.  So they live in a wild independence, professing a creed as free as their own mountain airs.  God, who made the hills, made likewise man’s freedom to abide therein.  Before taking leave of the Maroquine Israelites, I must say something of their personal appearance.  Both in Tangier and Mogador, I was fortunate enough to be acquainted with families, who could boast of the most perfect and classic types of Jewish female loveliness.  Alas, that these beauties should be only charming animals, their minds and affections being left uncultivated, or converted into caves of unclean and tormenting passions.  The Jewesses, in general, until they become enormously stout and weighed down with obesity, are of extreme beauty.  Most of them have fair complexions; their rose and jasmine faces, their pure wax-like delicate features, and their exceedingly expressive and bewitching eyes, would fascinate the most fastidious of European connoisseurs of female beauty.

But these Israelitish ladies, recalling the fair image of Rachel in the Patriarchal times of Holy Writ, and worthy to serve as models for a Grecian sculptor, are treated with savage disdain by the churlish Moors, and sometimes are obliged to walk barefoot and prostrate themselves before their ugly negress concubines.  The male infants of Jews are engaging and goodlooking when young; but, as they grow up, they become ordinary; and Jews of a certain age, are decidedly and most disgustingly ugly.  It is possible that the degrading slavery in which they usually live, their continued habits of cringing servility, by which the countenance acquires a sinister air and fiendishly cunning smirk, may cause this change in their appearance.  But what contrasts we had of the beauty of countenance and form in the Jewish society of Mogador!  You frequently see a youthful woman, nay a girl of exquisite beauty and delicacy of features, married to an old wretched ill-looking fellow of some sixty or seventy years of age, tottering over the grave, or an incurable invalid.  To render them worse-looking, whilst the women may dress in any and the gayest colours, the men wear a dark blue and black turban and dress, and though this is prescribed as a badge of oppression, they will often assume it when they may attire themselves in white and other livelier colours.  However, men get used to their misery, and hug their chains.