In the preamble of the constitution Morocco adopted in 2011, one sentence carries more weight than most diplomatic accords. The kingdom’s unity, it declares, is forged by the convergence of its Arab, Islamic, Amazigh and Saharan components and enriched by its African, Andalusian, Hebraic and Mediterranean influences. The word Hebraic is easy to glide past. It should not be. Morocco was not inventing a minority to please a foreign audience; it was writing down something older than the state itself. Jews had lived in these lands since antiquity, and after 1492 the Atlantic ports absorbed whole communities expelled from Spain, among them the traders who turned Mogador, later Essaouira, into one of the busiest harbors on the Moroccan seaboard and home to one of the most prosperous Jewish communities in the Islamic world.

The monarchy’s relationship with that inheritance has never been merely administrative. Moroccan kings present themselves as protectors of a plural nation, and the title they prize most, Commander of the Faithful, carries an obligation that the present King has articulated without ambiguity: guardianship of the believers of all the revealed religions, Judaism included. When Mohammed VI acceded to the throne in July 1999, that idea was already encoded in his family’s self-understanding. What he added was an unusual willingness to turn memory into policy.

Consider the record. In 2013, when the seventeenth-century synagogue Slat al-Fassiyine reopened in Fez after restoration, the King sent a message read out by his prime minister. His patronage, he wrote, attested to “the importance I attach to the preservation of the spiritual and cultural heritage of the Jewish community,” a community “held in high esteem by my venerable ancestors.” He went further, tying the older heritage to the new constitution: “the Jewish legacy, with its rituals and specific features, has been an intrinsic part of........

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