I am not jewish, and the Aleph tattoo on the inside of my left wrist has two meanings, one is sacred to me, the other is in respect to the shared/merged heritage of the North African/Moroccan esoterical spiritual paths, when the peoples of the lands lived in harmony before Zionism and Western colonialism.

 

The Aleph before Sephardi influence

Before the arrival of the Sephardim (from Spain and Portugal after the expulsions of 1492–1497), Aleph already held deep mystical and protective meaning among:

• Yemenite and Babylonian Jews

• North-African Jews of Amazigh origin (sometimes called Toshavim)

• and even Muslim mystics (Sufis) who associated the first Arabic letter Alif (ا) with the divine unity (Tawḥīd).

So, Aleph/Alif was a shared Semitic sacred glyph long before Iberian Jews arrived.

Meaning:

• The upright form (|) represents the axis mundi, connecting heaven and earth.

• In Kabbalah, it’s the beginning before creation, the silent breath of God.

• In Sufi calligraphy, Alif is the “one” — pure unity, standing before multiplicity.

This shared mystical layer was already indigenous to Afro-Semitic thought stretching from Egypt to Yemen.

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 The Sephardi wave and the new layer of symbolism

When the Sephardi Jews came to Morocco (mainly to Fez, Tetouan, Essaouira, and Marrakech):

• They brought with them Spanish-Hebrew mysticism, Kabbalistic texts, and Iberian amuletic traditions.

• The Safed Kabbalists (Isaac Luria’s school, 16th century) circulated widely through these communities, reinforcing the Aleph as a divine gate between worlds.

• Sephardi talismans often used the Aleph-Lamed pair (א–ל) as shorthand for El (“God”), written on parchment amulets, metal jewelry, or inscribed on walls for protection.

This Sephardi influx didn’t replace the older Amazigh–Jewish–Arabic cosmology, but merged with it. The result was a hybrid North African magical alphabetic system, where:

• Aleph became both a letter of God (Kabbalah)

• and a protective mark (Amazigh folk magic).

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How this reached Maghrebi folklore

In Moroccan folk belief, letters—especially sacred first letters—became portable talismans. The shwāfa (seer) or fqīha (religious healer) might:

• Write a single Aleph on parchment or the skin with saffron ink.

• Place it on the left side of the body or a threshold point (foot, hand, door lintel).

• Combine it with geometric motifs (triangles, eyes, stars) that were Amazigh in form but Hebraic or Qur’anic in function.

Thus, Aleph in Moroccan folklore sits at a crossroads:

• Formally Semitic (shared Hebrew/Arabic lineage)

• Mystically Sephardi (divine unity and beginning)

• Practically Amazigh (protective earth-magic and threshold symbology).