Protectors and protected: Aït Atta, Haratin and Jews

As they expanded towards the oases, the Aït Atta, armed pastoralists, established protection relationships with sedentary cultivators (mainly Haratin) and with Jewish communities. Hart writes that in exchange for Aït Atta protection the Haratin received one-fifth of the crops they grew for their patrons, a sharecropping relationship that still persisted in the 1960s.

Syntheses based on Hart report discriminatory customary rules: Haratin were forbidden to own land, carry arms or take part in councils, and fines punished the sale of a house or land to a Hartani. Land was the basis of social status.

These relationships were officially abolished after independence, with legal equality. However, the art historian Cynthia Becker observed in the 1990s the persistence of marriage discrimination among the Aït Khabbash towards their neighbours of the Black community of the Ismkhan.

Recent sources disagree on the nature of these ties. Among the Aït Khebbach, Marie-Luce Gélard describes a protection often paid with a fifth of the dates, “freely agreed”, variable over time, and notes that “no link any longer exists between former protégés and protectors”; she also notes the absence of words distinguishing dominant groups from former tributaries, except sometimes for descendants of slaves (2004, PDF pp. 3-4).

M'hamed Ahda, on the contrary, stresses hierarchy: the Rteb code he publishes keeps the mass of the Haratin away from power, excludes freed slaves and the descendants of the shurafa present before the Aït Atta arrived from the tribal djemâa, and the author speaks of a society where “the most destitute were ruthlessly exploited” (2001, pp. 89, 106). In 1930 Beaurpère calls the Haratin of the Todgha and eastern Saghro the “khammès of the Aït 'Atta”, sharecroppers paid a fifth (pp. 205, 237).

The Moroccan historian Kamal Mohamed (2026), citing a study by F. de La Chapelle of a town of the Dra (Hespéris, 1929), describes a different arrangement in an oasis at the bend of the Dra: qsour there were under the protection of Aït Atta, notably Ait Isfoul and Ait Ouahlim drawn by the palm groves. The Aït Atta approached in a show of force and pitched their tents; the inhabitants, the Draoua, offered them a sacrifice to obtain protection and, by agreement, handed over a quarter of their land together with a share of the harvests, to the point that every Drawi or Jew had an Aït Atta family as protector. This second-hand figure differs from the fifth of the harvest recorded by Hart and by Beaurpère.

Hart (1984, pp. 123-126) also describes the place of Jewish communities under Aït Atta protection. They were few: citing Spillmann, he gives 355 families in 1931 from Mezguita to Mhamid, then 537 people for the whole of Aït Atta country in 1939 and 913 at the 1960 census; departures began in 1948, and by 1963 the last families had left Amzrou, near Zagora, and other places for Casablanca, France, Israel or Canada. Each Jewish family sacrificed a sheep to an Aït Atta man, who became its protector (amzttid) and was entirely answerable for it; the Jews, mostly silversmiths, owned no land and brought their protector a gift at every feast. Hart stresses that the relationship was very unequal and, drawing on deeds one of which dates from 1910, that until 1932 Jews of the Ktaoua and the Mhamid could be transferred from one Aït Atta lineage to another; he adopts Flamand's view of it as serfdom rather than slavery. Flamand also reports that Jews acknowledged the seriousness of their protectors, who forced, at gunpoint, those who had robbed them to return the loot.