Just finished reading Stillman and Stillman’s translation of Romanelli’s “Travail in an Arab Land.” Although it is outside the core topic of this group, it concerns Italian and Moroccan Jewry, which interacted extensively with our Nacao, and it features a handful of Portuguese individuals residing or imprisoned in Morocco in the 1780s.The author of the work is Samuel Romanelli (1757-1814), a professional scholar whose original thinking and knowledge of commercial languages enabled him to travel regularly through the Mediterranean and North Atlantic worlds.Finding himself stranded at Gibraltar in 1787, he accepted the offer of a merchant to partake in a business venture in Morocco. When this failed, his travel documents were unexpectedly lost, and he had to live by his wits in Morocco until he could obtain an exit visa. He ended up staying there from 1787-1790, returning virtually penniless to Amsterdam after bribing his pathway out of the deadly social upheavals as Mulay Yazid assumed the Sultanate.One of the ways he helped restore his fortunes in Europe was to publish an account of his time in Morocco for a Jewish audience. He called it “Masa Be’arav,” in a play on Isaiah 21:13 that exemplifies the rich Biblical allusions that permeate its fourteen chapters. It was quite popular among contemporary European Jewry, which had been largely unaware of conditions of Jewish life in Morocco, and it went through several editions.In the text, readers get a rich feel not only of Moroccan Jewish life, which was a key ethnographic interest of the author, but also of the challenges of social and political life in Morocco in general. It is filtered through Romanelli’s strong personality, which ranges from genuine intellectual curiosity to stern judgments of what he felt was the backwardness and superstition of Moroccan Jewry and the corruption and brutality of Moroccan Muslims.(Apparently the post is too long - the rest is in the first comment)