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.
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