As Ramadan descends upon the Muslim world this week, millions of hands will reach for the same ritual fruit – the large, amber-fleshed, honey-sweet date that has become synonymous with the breaking of the fast.

In supermarkets from London to Dubai, from Toronto to Jakarta, the packaging will read “Medjool” – and the country of origin will say Israel, or California, or Jordan. It will almost never say Morocco. This is not a marketing oversight. It is the final act of a dispossession that began nearly a century ago, and it is time to correct the record with the precision it demands.

The date the world calls “Medjool” is, in fact, Mejhoul – an Arabic word meaning “the unknown” – and it is as Moroccan as the couscous, the caftan, or the Western Sahara. Its homeland is the Tafilalet Oasis in the province of Errachidia, the largest oasis in Morocco, a region that houses 151 of the country’s 453 registered date palm varieties and has cultivated dates for centuries before any modern state in the region existed.

As early as the seventeenth century, Mejhoul dates from Tafilalet commanded premium prices in the markets of England and Spain, establishing an international reputation that predates the founding of the United States, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and the State of Israel by centuries.

What happened next is not a story of natural market evolution. It is a story of botanical extraction under colonial auspices, followed by the systematic erasure of origin.

In 1927, the French colonial authorities governing Morocco formed a scientific commission to investigate the Bayoud disease – a devastating fungal infection caused by Fusarium oxysporum that was ravaging Moroccan date plantations, with the Mejhoul variety proving particularly susceptible. Among the scientists dispatched was the American botanist Walter Swingle.

Visiting the Boudnib oasis, home to approximately nine thousand date palms predominantly of the Mejhoul variety, Swingle was struck by the fruit’s extraordinary quality. He collected eleven offshoots from a single mother tree – eleven genetically identical specimens – and shipped them to Washington.

The offshoots arrived approximately five weeks later and were placed under strict agricultural quarantine in an isolated site along the Colorado River in southern Nevada, where no existing palm trees could risk cross-contamination.

Two of the eleven offshoots died. The remaining nine survived. After nine years of quarantine – during which the plants produced sixty-four additional offshoots – all seventy-three specimens were declared disease-free in 1936 and transferred to a USDA research station in California.

By 1944, the station began distributing offshoots to growers in California and Arizona. The Bard Company of California alone acquired twenty-four offshoots, and today, ninety-nine percent of the date palms cultivated in Yuma and the Bard Valley descend from that single Moroccan mother tree in Boudnib.

From California, offshoots reached Israel in the 1960s, where they were planted in settlements in the Arava Valley. Israel’s commercial Mejhoul industry accelerated in the 1990s, and the country now holds thirty percent of the world’s Mejhoul production, exporting over half to global markets.

Every single one of these millions of trees traces its DNA to one oasis, one town, one tree – in Morocco.

This is not conjecture. It is genetic fact. In a landmark study compiled in the book “Mejhoul Variety: The Jewel of Dates,” published in 2022 by Abdelouahhab Zaid, Secretary General of the Khalifa International Award for Date Palm and Agricultural Innovation, and his colleague Abdellah Ouahabi, researchers employed advanced genetic fingerprinting to compare Mejhoul specimens from every producing country against the original mother tree in Boudnib.

The results were unequivocal: all specimens worldwide were found to be 99.93% genetically identical to the Moroccan source. The DNA analysis, conducted by Moroccan researcher Mohamed Lahmizi, confirmed that Mejhoul is a landrace variety – a cultivar shaped by centuries of natural selection and traditional cultivation in its specific environment – originating exclusively from Morocco’s Tafilalet region.

And yet the dispossession extends even to the name itself. Somewhere between Boudnib and California, “Mejhoul” became “Medjool” – a phonetic corruption that severed the variety’s linguistic connection to its Arabic and Moroccan roots.

The book documents no fewer than twelve erroneous spellings circulating in international markets: Majdoul, Mejhol, Madqul, Majhool, Majhul, Mashghul, Mechghoul, Medjeheul, Medjool, Medjoul, Mejhool, and Mejool.

Each misspelling widens the distance between the fruit and its homeland. Each variant makes it easier for consumers to believe that this is an Israeli date, or an American date, or a Jordanian date – anything but what it actually is.

This Ramadan, as families from Casablanca to Cairo to Kuala Lumpur break their fast with what they believe to be a foreign luxury, they deserve to know that they are eating the fruit of Moroccan soil, cultivated by Moroccan hands for centuries, extracted under colonial conditions, propagated across continents without acknowledgment, and sold back to the Muslim world under names that obscure its origin.

The Mejhoul date is not Israeli. It is not Californian. It is not Jordanian. It is Moroccan – 99.93% identical to the mother tree that still stands in Boudnib, in the Tafilalet, in the kingdom that gave the world this jewel and received in return not recognition but erasure. The least we owe the Mejhoul this Ramadan is its real name.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)