Abstract
Torah scrolls are more than ritual objects; when used in a congregation, they take on semi-human characteristics and are given special agency. For Sephardic communities, some scrolls bear witness to the history of migration and trade that has uprooted them over five centuries. This article examines Torah scrolls originating in Morocco or used today by Moroccan communities, arguing that they take on a different meaning for the community depending on whether they are used, displayed, or guarded. We consider the difference in social meaning between chanting from a scroll and venerating it, and how Moroccan Jewry is impacted by efforts in Morocco, Israel, and the diaspora to ascribe ownership of the Torah via networks of patrimony and belonging. Offering an ethnographically informed analysis of Torah scrolls in London, Essaouira, and Tel Aviv, this article demonstrates that Torah scrolls serve as productive members of the communities that own them when they facilitate a thorough understanding of the migration networks that create communities.
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Notes
“Taking out the third Torah scroll, two hundred…taking out the third Torah scroll three hundred…taking out the fourth Torah scroll, two hundred…taking out the fifth Torah scroll, three hundred.” All translations by the author.
See Goldberg 2013: 588–589 for some description of the practice of auctioning honors in the Torah service. An aliyah is the honor of being called up to the Torah to say the blessing preceding and succeeding the chanting from the scroll. The Torah service is broken into three aliyot (plural) on weekdays, four on Rosh Hodesh (the New Month), five on a festival, six on Yom Kippur, or seven on Shabbat morning. Its meaning here is distinct from the use of the same word when it refers to immigration to Israel.
There are only a few evenings of the year in which the Torah is taken out of the ark. Another is kol nidrei, the evening service at the beginning of Yom Kippur, but the auction did not take place then.
I use the term “empire” several times as code for the modes of power and patronage whereby Jews moved around and across the Mediterranean via a series of push and pull factors. The major push factor was expulsion, as occurred in Spain and Portugal (and, previously, in England), then later in several Arab countries. The pull factors were economic, such as the movement of Jews from Tetouan to Gibraltar as merchants or to Livorno, or for increased religious toleration, such as the Spanish and Portuguese migration to Amsterdam or across the Ottoman Empire. Therefore, when I refer to empire, I refer to a combination of top-down migration orders and more elite movement between and among Christian and Muslim powers. I draw from the work of Marglin (2014), Stein (2008, 2015), Schreier (2017), and Everett and Vince (2020).
Certain experts can identify scrolls quickly, such as the historians and scribes at the Memorial Scrolls Trust in London: (http://memorialscrollstrust.org, last accessed 21 July 2021). That expertise is well beyond the knowledge of scrolls required of even expert chanters.
Actually, its journey to London was my second thought. My first thought was whether I was the first woman who had the privilege of handling it, and I was grateful to the congregant who went through some strict gatekee** to show it to me.
Scrolls are not only of interest to Jews, either; an Evangelical Christian charity in Cleburne, Texas has collected 40 scrolls, including several from Morocco, and the scrolls tour the Bible belt: https://www.cmj-usa.org/blog/ancient-hebrew-scroll-project (accessed 21 July 2021). (Also http://ancienthebrewscrollproject.org/Websites/ancienthebrewscrollproject/images/Ancient%20Hebrew%20Scroll%20Brochure%202016.pdf, which is currently inaccessible for General Data Protection Regulation reasons).
There are some differences in scribal traditions, like in the Yemenite school, but they are minor and, for the most part, only detectable to experts.
Kligman’s work on the liturgy of Aleppo (2009) focuses in part on “the red book” (Shir Ushevacha Hallel Vezimra) of pizmonim or paraliturgical contrafacta, a repertoire that is used by Syrian Jews.
Procession refers to the parading of the scroll before or after a Torah reading, or in a rotation (hakafah) on a festival. This can, in some circumstances, also refer to a procession during a hillula (see footnote 12 below).
A hillula takes place on the anniversary on the Jewish calendar of a righteous person’s (tzaddik’s) death. The prototype of the hillula is Lag ba’Omer, held in May in celebration/commemoration of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, but Moroccan Jews have 656 tzaddikim (plural). The first of Elul is the hillula for Rabbi David Hanagid, grandson of Maimonides, who was a leading jurist in Cairo until his death in 1300.
See Bilu (2009: 244–266) for a gendered perspective on ritual being classed as sacred or witchcraft.
This is a generalization, and a fluid one. At the Aden Jews Congregation, the chanter touches the parchment directly while reading.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/smugglers-of-rare-torah-scroll-caught-in-tunisia/ (accessed 21 July 2021).
https://www.cjfai.com/en/la-communaute-juive-de-djerba-tente-de-capter-le-trafic-des-objets-de-cultes-juifs/ (accessed 21 July 2021).
https://www.tunisienumerique.com/tunisie-photos-manuscrit-de-torah-unique-monde-decouvert-saisi/ (accessed 21 July 2021).
Djerba, as the home of a notable scribal school, is the purported home of some of the most important scrolls in Israel today; the pioneering work of Robert Lachmann documented the cantillation style of Djerba.
There is indeed some precedent here in Harvey Goldberg’s work on Torah scrolls in southern Morocco (1990), in which he describes the welcoming of a scroll in and out of the synagogue when it is required elsewhere.
There is no single term commonly used for the mass emigration of Jews from the Arab world, but it is widely acknowledged that the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 (and the dispossession of local Palestinians) was a major catalyst for emigration of the Jews of Iraq and Yemen and, over the next 20 years, Egypt, Syria, Morocco, Libya, and so on.
Ray (2008) argues that it is worth considering in more detail how the local identities of the Jews of Cordoba or Barcelona became a homogeneous unit called Sephardi in the sixteenth century. He explores the way that diasporic identities are sometimes constructed without consideration of local specificity, and one can see a similar dynamic at play today in France with the gradual erosion of small local differences between North African Jewish communities.
Minutes of the Council Meeting for Lauderdale Road Spanish & Portuguese Synagogue, August 27 1968. While Bevis Marks is the historic Sephardic synagogue in the City of London, and remains an important institution and tourist site, the flagship Sephardic synagogue today is Lauderdale Road, which is located closer to London’s Jewish community. The report on the condition of the Torah scrolls was written by a Rabbi P. Toledano. I thank my student and research assistant Isaac Montagu Treuherz, who photographed the minute book in the archive at Lauderdale Road Synagogue during the height of the pandemic.
Whether Azoulay is the driver of this process or a product of it is a legitimate matter for deliberation elsewhere. There seems to be a consensus, though, that he has played a key role in facilitating the enshrining of Jewish history in Moroccan law, education, and tourism.
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=losct_h_haM (accessed 27 July 2021).
In Israel today, the discussion of the weekly Torah portion (parashat hashavua), is sometimes referred to as inyana deyoma, an Aramaic term for “the matter of the day.” This is an interesting construction because it implies that the study in the presence of the weekly chanted portion is current and pressing.
The concept of reverse diaspora might bring to mind the concept of yerida, of a Jew emigrating from Israel to the diaspora. The literature of yerida is prominent in Israel Studies, from high theory (Zerubavel 1986) to sociology of labor patterns (Rebhun 2014, Uriely 1995) to pop culture (Habib and Locker-Biletzki 2018).
The number commonly cited is that 90% of Moroccan Jews went to Israel (Laskier 1989: 323) and the remainder to France, while the figure for Algeria is the reverse.
Since 2012, annual immigration from France has been in the thousands, and reached a record high in 2015–2016. Jews from working-class and lower-middle-class neighborhoods like Paris’s nineteenth arrondissement or Sarcelles, or the Mzabi Jews from Strasbourg, immigrate, too, but they are more likely to move to the coastal city of Netanya where property is affordable.
There are distinct cantillation styles across North Africa, but he refers here to Sephardic pronunciation of Hebrew, which is the norm in Israel among all but ultra-Orthodox Jews. Lemmel himself received his rabbinic ordination in the UK, where taught pronunciation would be Ashkenazi like the pronunciation of the ultra-Orthodox in Israel. For Sephardic Jews, pronunciation of the letter tav as saf would be confusing and difficult to follow, for example.
See https://www.consistoire.org/liste-communautes/ (accessed 21 July 2021).
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Webster-Kogen, I. Moroccan Torah Scrolls: Theorizing a Diasporic Afterlife. Cont Jewry 42, 157–176 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12397-022-09420-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12397-022-09420-7