Jewish communities existed continuously in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt for a very long time, in some places predating the Arab conquest, and were joined after 1492 by Sephardi refugees from Iberia. Their synagogue silver is a distinct body of work, and the Torah case is its most substantial object. Local decoration draws on the same repertoires as the surrounding craft traditions, so a Moroccan case can look like the metalwork of the town it came from while carrying an entirely Jewish set of inscriptions, and dedications name donors, families and dates in ways that make individual cases documentary as well as liturgical.
Almost all of those communities emigrated in the middle of the twentieth century, in the two decades after the establishment of Israel and around decolonisation. Synagogues closed. Scrolls and their cases moved with congregations to Israel, France, Canada and elsewhere, and many are in use in communities that reconstituted themselves around them; others entered museums, and a number remain in buildings that no longer have a congregation. The object therefore now sits in three quite different situations, still in liturgical use, preserved as heritage, or stranded, and which of the three applies is usually a matter of where a particular community ended up.