In about a minute I had used up the whole packet. Even a blind man somewhere at the back of one of the booths heard a rumour of cigarettes and came crawling out, groping in the air with his hand. Instantly, from the dark holes all round, there was a frenzied rush of Jews, many of them old grandfathers with flowing grey beards, all clamouring for a cigarette. I was just passing the coppersmiths' booths when somebody noticed that I was lighting a cigarette. At his side his grandson, aged six, is already starting on the simpler parts of the job. He works the lathe with a bow in his right hand and guides the chisel with his left foot, and thanks to a lifetime of sitting in this position his left leg is warped out of shape. A carpenter sits cross-legged at a prehistoric lathe, turning chair-legs at lightning speed. In the bazaar huge families of Jews, all dressed in the long black robe and little black skull-cap, are working in dark fly-infested booths that look like caves. Down the centre of the street there is generally running a little river of urine. Many of the streets are a good deal less than six feet wide, the houses are completely windowless, and sore-eyed children cluster everywhere in unbelievable numbers, like clouds of flies. Under their Moorish rulers the Jews were only allowed to own land in certain restricted areas, and after centuries of this kind of treatment they have ceased to bother about overcrowding. When you go through the Jewish quarters you gather some idea of what the medieval ghettoes were probably like. In the last sentence of the following passage from 'Marrakech,' Orwell seems to foretell the fate that European Jews were to meet only a few years later. I wonder how a Palestinian living in Israel would react to Orwell's description. One of the most interesting things that he saw was the living conditions of Sephardic Jews who were subject to cultural restrictions imposed on them for centuries in North Africa by Muslim rule. He was no stranger to strange places and cultures, and in his characteristic fashion he wrote about what he saw in Morocco - the dirt, poverty, and the injustice of a people whose country was being run by someone else. The following year, he wrote the beautiful essay, 'Marrakech,' which was first published in the Christmas issue of New Writing. After a tubercular hemorrhage put him in hospital for much of the Spring and Summer of 1938, George Orwell travelled to Morocco to convalesce.

Marrakech by orwell