I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM
Amazigh Silver Jewellery
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Silver jewellery in the Maghreb was currency made wearable. The metal came from coins, the designs varied by valley, and the maker was often a specialist from outside the community.
At a glance
- Region
- Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and neighbouring areas
- Material
- Silver, frequently melted coins
- Primary wearers
- Women in rural Amazigh communities
- Function
- Garment fasteners, adornment, portable wealth
Look closer
Triangular plates as clasps
The characteristic form is a large triangular plate with a pin mechanism on the reverse, worn in pairs to fasten a cloak or outer garment at the shoulders. The triangle is not decorative whimsy: it distributes the weight of heavy wool fabric and provides a stable surface for engraving or appliqué. Regional variations are visible in the proportions of the triangle, the density of decoration, and the presence or absence of chains linking the two fibulae across the chest.
Coin silver, not mined silver
Much of the silver was melted currency: French francs, Spanish dollars, and Maria Theresa thalers, the Austrian trade coin that circulated widely in North Africa into the twentieth century. The advantage was purity and availability. Coins were a known standard of silver content, and melting them bypassed the need for mining or refining. The result is that jewellery made in the same decade might contain silver from three different mints, hammered into a single brooch.
Jewish silversmiths in many towns
In Morocco and Algeria, many of the silversmiths producing Amazigh jewellery were Jewish, working to commission in styles specific to each client's region and community. They adapted techniques and motifs across different traditions, producing jewellery in recognisably Amazigh forms alongside other styles. This was a professional specialisation, not an ethnic monopoly: Muslim and Amazigh smiths also worked, though the historical record shows Jewish craftsmen were numerous in urban centres.
The story
Amazigh jewellery is a category defined by who wore it and where, not by a single style. The term covers the silver adornments made for and worn by Amazigh women across the Maghreb, primarily in rural areas of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, with related forms in Libya and other regions. The designs vary by valley, by mountain range, by proximity to trade routes. What unites them is material, function, and social role.
Silver was the metal of choice, and much of it began as coinage. French francs, Spanish dollars, and Maria Theresa thalers—an Austrian trade coin minted from 1741 and still produced for export into the twentieth century—were melted and reworked by specialist silversmiths. The appeal was straightforward: coins were a reliable source of silver at a known purity, and melting them required no mining infrastructure. A woman's dowry might arrive as a handful of thalers and leave the silversmith's workshop as a pair of fibulae, a necklace, and a set of bracelets.
The fibula, a large triangular brooch worn in pairs to fasten a cloak at the shoulders, is the most widespread form. The triangle provides a broad surface for decoration—engraving, repoussé work, inlaid enamel, coral, or coloured glass—and the pin mechanism on the back is engineered to hold heavy wool. Some designs include chains linking the two brooches across the chest, creating a draped effect and adding more silver to the ensemble. Regional variations are specific enough that a practised eye can place a fibula to within a few dozen kilometres.
The makers were often specialists from outside the wearer's immediate community. In many Moroccan and Algerian towns, Jewish silversmiths produced jewellery in Amazigh styles to commission, working within the aesthetic expectations of each region while adapting techniques and motifs from other traditions. Muslim and Amazigh smiths also practised the trade, but the historical record shows Jewish craftsmen were particularly numerous in urban centres, where they maintained workshops serving rural clients. This was a commercial relationship, not an ethnic division of labour, though it became one strand in the complex social fabric of the region.
By the late twentieth century, the tradition had largely ended. Gold replaced silver as the preferred metal, and styles changed with access to imported jewellery and shifting ideas about rural and urban identity. What remains is now in private collections, museums, and the tourist market, where simplified versions of the fibula and the hamsa—a hand-shaped amulet—are sold as fashion items. The original pieces, handed down through generations as part of a woman's inheritance, are increasingly rare outside institutional collections.
Why it mattered then
The jewellery was portable wealth in a form that declared identity. A woman's silver was her own property, part of her dowry and hers to keep, sell, or pass on. In communities where land ownership was restricted and cash savings impractical, jewellery converted currency into something wearable, visible, and secure. It could be pawned in lean years and redeemed in better ones. The metal had value, but so did the craftsmanship and the regional specificity of the design. Wearing the jewellery was also a statement of affiliation. The style of a fibula, the arrangement of chains, the choice of enamel colours—all of these located the wearer within a particular community and, often, a particular social stratum within it. In rural areas where Amazigh identity was maintained through language, dress, and custom, jewellery was one of the most visible markers of that identity, especially for women, whose clothing and adornment were more elaborately differentiated than men's. The reliance on specialist silversmiths, many of them Jewish, reflects the economic structure of the Maghreb before the mid-twentieth century. Craft specialisation was common, and silversmiths operated as a professional class serving clients across ethnic and religious lines. The relationship was commercial, but it was also embedded in long-standing social patterns of trade, commission, and mutual dependence.
Why it matters now
The jewellery survives as a record of a way of life that has largely ended. Rural Amazigh communities still exist, but the economic and social structures that sustained the production and wearing of traditional silver jewellery have changed. Gold has replaced silver, and the regional specificity of design has given way to more generalised styles influenced by global fashion. The original pieces are now collector's items, museum artefacts, and family heirlooms, valued as much for their historical and cultural significance as for their material worth. The tradition also raises questions about craft, identity, and ownership. Who owns a cultural tradition when the makers and the wearers belong to different communities? The answer in this case is that both do, in different ways. The silversmiths brought technical skill and adapted motifs across traditions; the wearers shaped demand, maintained the social meaning of the jewellery, and passed it down through generations. The jewellery is the product of both. In the tourist market, the hamsa and simplified fibula designs are sold as symbols of North African culture, often stripped of their regional specificity and reduced to generic exoticism. This is a common fate for traditional jewellery that enters the commercial sphere, but it also means that the original pieces, with their precise regional variations and documented provenance, have become more valuable as records of a more differentiated past.
The surprising detail
The Maria Theresa thaler, an eighteenth-century Austrian coin, was so widely used in North Africa that it continued to be minted specifically for trade there well into the twentieth century. The design never changed—it still bore the portrait of the empress and the date 1780—because traders and silversmiths trusted the consistency of the silver content. A thaler minted in 1900 looked identical to one from 1780, and both might end up melted into a fibula in a Moroccan souk. The coin became a kind of silver bullion with a portrait on it, valued not for its nominal currency but for its metal and its recognisability.
What is disputed
The proportion of Jewish to Muslim silversmiths varied by region and period, and the historical record is uneven. In some areas, Jewish craftsmen dominated the trade; in others, the work was shared more equally. The social and economic relationships between silversmiths and clients were also more complex than a simple maker-wearer division suggests, and the extent to which designs were dictated by clients versus invented by craftsmen is not always clear from surviving pieces or written accounts.
Remember this
Silver from coins, designs by region, made by specialists—jewellery that was wealth, identity, and craft all at once.
Test yourself
Why would melting coins into jewellery be preferable to using mined and refined silver, even when both were available?
Coins were a guaranteed standard. Their silver content was known, their purity was consistent, and they required no assaying or trust in an unfamiliar supplier. Mined silver had to be refined and its purity verified, which added cost and risk. A thaler or a franc was a unit of silver you could count on, and melting it was simply a change of form, not a change of value. In a context where jewellery was wealth storage as much as adornment, that reliability mattered. The lesson applies beyond jewellery: when a material also functions as currency, standardisation becomes more valuable than novelty.