In 1727, with a Spanish army camped around the Rock and the land frontier shut, the man holding Gibraltar's sole contract to import food from Morocco was an ordained rabbi. His name was Isaac Netto. The lieutenant governor, Brigadier Jasper Clayton, handed him the monopoly because the garrison had no other way to eat. That one appointment tells you more about the Sephardic contribution to Gibraltarian food than any list of pastries does. This post was commissioned as a piece about borekas and bollo. Having gone through the sources, we are writing a different one, because the two dishes in that brief are the two with the weakest claim to be Gibraltar's Sephardic inheritance. Here is what the record actually supports, and where it runs out. Gibraltar fell on 4 August 1704, which was 27 July by the English calendar of the day. Prince George of Hesse held a town with no farmland, a hostile countryside behind it, and salt meat arriving from England and Ireland that would give his men scurvy if nothing fresh came in. The arithmetic was brutal. On 23 October 1704 the commissary in charge of supplies, John Knox, wrote that the garrison was "about 2,600 souls including inhabitants which I victual and have no more left than will last above 10 weeks at short allowance". Ten weeks. That is the whole problem in one sentence. The nearest place willing to sell was Morocco, and the foreign trade of northern Morocco ran out of Tetuan, largely in the hands of the Spanish speaking Sephardi Jews of that city. Tangier had only been handed back by the English twenty years earlier. So the supply line to Gibraltar's dinner table ran from Tetuan, and the people who could work it were Jewish merchants. The historian Tito Benady set this out in [Cuadernos de Gibraltar, published by the University of Cadiz](https://rodin.uca.es/bitstream/handle/10498/19920/cgib02-benady-jews.pdf), working from the Gibraltar papers at The National Archives. He opens with the plain version: the British occupation of 1704 brought in Jewish merchants from Tetuan to supply the fresh food the garrison required. One man mattered more than the rest. Moses Ben Hatar was the Nagid, the head of the Jewish community of Sale, and treasurer and man of business to the Emperor of Morocco. Colonel Bennet of the Engineers reported in 1712 that Queen Anne declared Gibraltar a free port partly because the Emperor, after complaints from the Jews in Gibraltar, would not allow timber, lime and bricks through for the fortifications. Ben Hatar never settled on the Rock. He worked it through an agent, Samuel Alevy ben Suffat. Then Britain signed the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, which contained a clause saying no leave should be given to Jews or Moors to reside in the town. Jews were expelled in 1717. It did not hold, because by 1718 relations with Spain had broken down and supplies stopped coming across the frontier, and a fortress that cannot eat does not get to be fussy about its treaty obligations. Captain Charles Stewart went to Tetuan Bay to fix it. The new Anglo Moroccan treaty was signed and exchanged on 17 January 1720, which is 1721 in the modern calendar. It ran to fourteen articles. Article 7 ends with the words that mattered: the subjects of the Emperor of Fez and Morocco, whether Moors or Jews, residing in the dominions of the King of Great Britain, shall entirely enjoy the same privileges granted to the English residing in Barbary. That directly contradicted what Britain had promised Spain at Utrecht. Benady is blunt about why it was signed anyway: Stewart's main purpose was to ensure supplies from Morocco. Which brings us back to 1727. The thirteenth siege ran from 11 February to 12 June. Nothing came from Spain. The Basha of Tetuan wrote to Clayton offering provisions, and Clayton made Isaac Netto sole contractor for importing food from Morocco. Netto held it for about a year, until his father Haham David Nieto died and he left for London to become rabbi at Bevis Marks. The monopoly passed to an English merchant, James Argatt, and was abolished in 1729 after questions in the House of Commons. A kitchen is carried by people, so the question of which Sephardic kitchen landed in Gibraltar is answerable. Colonel Richard Kane counted the civilian population in August 1725 and found 1,113 people, of whom 137 were Jewish, about 12 per cent. The breakdown is 111 men and 26 women, and the return records where the men came from. |Where the 111 men came from|Number|Share of the men| |Barbary, the North African coast and overwhelmingly Morocco|87|78 per cent| |Livorno|17|15 per cent| |England|4|4 per cent| |Holland|3|3 per cent| Read that again. Nearly four in five came off the Barbary coast, and Benady's narrative is about Morocco throughout: Tetuan, Tangier, Sale. The 26 women's origins are not given in that return, so we are not going to guess at them. Kane was not pleased about it. He complained three months later that every vessel arriving from Tetuan brought more Jews,