Abstract
This chapter traces the ways in which Jews in sixteenth-century Fez perceived the “Battle of al-Qsar al-Kabir,” which took place in Morocco in the summer of 1578. These Fassi Jews, many of whom were familiar with the traumatic experiences of the expulsion from the Iberian peninsula only a few generations earlier, had historicized, ritualized, vernacularized, and ultimately “scripturalized” this battle. Similarly, another European assault, the French naval attack on the coastal towns of Tangier and Mogador in 1844, was registered in a local Hebrew scroll. Much as with the event of 1578, and in what can be seen now as a pattern of communal behavior, the Jewish community of Tangier established a special memorial day that was given the Spanish name “Purim of the Bombs” (Purim de las Bombas). The chapter examines these two literary historical episodes through three aspects—the Jewish, the Moroccan, and the historical—as well as the interplay between them.
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Notes
- 1.
al-Qaṣr al-Kabīr (“a grand castle” in Arabic; often called in European languages Alcazarquivir, Alcácer Quibir, Alcazar, Elksar) is a town located in northwest Morocco, 50 miles south of Tangier and approximately 20 miles from Larache on the Atlantic coast. The city, which dates back to the eighth century, became a refuge for Jewish and Muslim exiles from the Iberian Peninsula after June 1492. During the fifteenth century, Portugal had occupied and established several fortified outposts along the Moroccan coastline; among them were Ceuta (1415–1668), Tangier (1471–1661), Arzila (1471–1549), Ksar es-Seghir (1458–1550), Azamor (1513–1541), and Safi (1488–1541).
- 2.
For a detailed analysis of the Iberian and Moroccan political climates that had led to the battle, see Mercedes García-Arenal, Ahmad al-Mansur: The Beginnings of Modern Morocco (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2009), 6–39. See also David Abernethy, The Dynamics of Global Dominance: European Overseas Empires, 1415–1980 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 48. On Sa‘adian Morocco (1554–1660) see Dahiru Yahya, Morocco in the Sixteenth Century: Problems and Patterns in African Foreign Policy (Essex: Longman House, 1981), and especially the chapter “The Reign of ‘Abd al-Malik and the Battle of al-Qaṣr al-Kabir, 1576–8,” 66–91. The study of sixteenth-century Morocco requires the larger context of the two dominant powers of the time, namely the Spanish Habsburgs and the Ottoman Turks. For a useful “Mediterranean” framework of the peninsular expansions in North Africa, see Andrew Hess, The Forgotten Frontier: A History of the Sixteenth-Century Ibero-African Frontier (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978).
- 3.
Studies devoted specifically to the Jews of al-Qaṣr al-Kabīr are rare. For a brief historical overview of Jewish life in Spanish Morocco, see Michel Abitbol, “Juifs ibériques, musulmans et chrétiens après l’expulsion: le cas nord-africain,” in Les Juifs d’Espagne: histoire d’une diaspora, 1492–1992, ed. Henry Méchoulan (Paris: Liana Levi, 1992), 519–22. See also Yoseph Bengio, “The Spanish-speaking Jews of Morocco,” in Jewish Communities in Spanish Morocco [Hebrew], ed. Elia Onne (Tel-Aviv: Beit Hatfutsot, 1983), n.p.; Yom Tov Assis, “The Jews of the Maghreb and Sepharad: A Case Study of Inter-Communal Cultural Relations through the Ages,” El Presente 2 (2008): 11–30; and David Corcos, “The Jews of Morocco from the Expulsion of Spain until the Middle of the 16th Century” [Hebrew], Sefunot 10 (1966): 55–111.
- 4.
Less than two decades after Sephardic exiles had arrived in the Maghrib in 1492, they found themselves deeply affected by the Spanish Reconquista, now being “exported” overseas, to port cities of Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya.
- 5.
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Washington: University of Washington Press, 1982), 47. For halakhic legitimization of instituting a minor Purim in North African rabbinic literature, see Question #49 in Moses ben Isaac Alashkar (1466–1542), Shut Maharam Alshakar (Jerusalem, 1958), 183–86. A question sent from people of Lepanto (Spanish name of Naupactus, in west Greece) to Rabbi Alashkar who was staying in a nearby city, Patras, reveals hesitations as to the level of implementation of local Purim custom. According to local rabbis, this special day, which was ordained in the city of Lepanto, ought to travel with the city’s Jews to other cities as well. In other words, locality was not a geographical concept but a communal one, as local traditions were perceived to be obligatory not only on a local basis but to some extant were also binding elsewhere. See also Question #686b in Amram Aburabia’ (1892–1966), Shut Netivei Am, vol. 1. (Petah Tikva: published by the author’s family, 1964), 278. Alashkar’s words resonated with Rabbi Yosef Mashash (1892–1974). See “An Author’s Introduction” to the section “The Story of Purim of Mejaz,” in Yosef Mashash, Ner Mitzvah (Fez: Mas’uod Sharvit & ‘Emram Hazan, 1939), 59–67. Named after the Moroccan political dissident by the name of al-Jilali b. Mustafa, known as al-Majaz (the lazy), Purim del Mejaz, was yet another minor Purim in which the Jews of Meknes indicated the 16th of Adar a day of deliverance from al-Majaz’s failed rebellion in 1862.
- 6.
Shemuel ben Sa‘adia (RaSHBaD) was a notable rabbinic figure of the Jewish community of Fez in the second half of the seventeenth century. His name appeared on more than 40 social, legal, and communal taqqanot, which formed the basic foundation of autonomous Jewish life in the post-expulsion generations. For an overall review and appraisal of his work, theology, and exegesis based on the little of what remained of his corpus, see Yisrael Maimaran, “Prakim behaguto shel Rabbi Shemuel ibn Danan,” in Mishpaḥat Ibn Danan: Elef Shenot Hisṭoryah, ed. Me’ir Abitbol (Jerusalem: Mekhon Bene Yiśakhar, Or ha-Ma‘arav, 2008), 175–248. See the introduction of the new edition of Sefer ha-Taqqanot (The book of communal ordinances), in Shalom Bar-Asher, ed., Sefer ha-Taqqanot: Yehude Sefarad ve-Portugal be-Maroqo (Jerusalem: Academon, 1990), 1–41.
- 7.
One of the most notable Jewish families in Fez, the Ibn Danans hold historical records that date to at least the fourteenth century. Their chronicle covers events from 1438 to 1724. See Nahum Slouschz, “The History of Fez and its Writers, the Ibn Danan Family” [Hebrew], in Sura: Sefer Shana Yisraeli-Amerikai, ed. Samuel K. Mirsky (New York and Jerusalem: Yeshiva University and Sura Institute, 1957–58), 165–91.
- 8.
Meir Benayahu, Divrei ha-Yamim shel Fes: Gezirot u-Meoraot Yehudei Maroqo kefi Sherashmum Benei Mishpaḥat Ibn Danan le-Doroteihem [History of Fez: Misfortunes and Events of Moroccan Jewry as Recorded by the Ibn Danan Family and Descendants] (Tel-Aviv: Hamakhon leḥaqer hatefutzot, [5]753/1993), 13. The comparative study of the historiographical similarities between the Hebrew Divrei ha-Yamim and the Arabic Tārīkh is rare. A recent study of the tensions between Islamic historiography and Iberian historiography (in the context of the Portuguese expansion into the Indian Ocean region in the sixteenth century) may offer an insight in that direction. See Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Intertwined Histories: Crónica and Tārīkh in the Sixteenth-Century Indian Ocean World,” History and Theory 49, no. 4 (December 2010): 118–45.
- 9.
The immediate connection between historical knowledge and halakhic knowledge was raised by Sa‘adia Ibn Danan (b. c. 1440, Granada; d. 1492, Oran) in his Judeo-Arabic chronicle-essay Seder ha-Dorot (The order of the generations).
- 10.
Versions of this text were published in several languages as part of the Ibn Danan chronicle and in scholarly articles. On a visit to Morocco in 1947 Georges Vajda located a manuscript of the chronicle, which he edited and translated in 1948. See G. Vajda , ed., Un recueil de textes historiques judéo-marocains (Paris: Larose, 1951); a description of the battle appears on pages 15–17. Several Hebrew versions of the Ibn Danan texts were published (not as liturgical texts but as chronicles): first by Ya‘akov Moshe Toledano, a Palestinian-born Moroccan scholar in his Ner ha-Ma’arav (Jerusalem, 1911), 93–9; second and partially by David ‘Ovadiah in 1979; and a critical edition by Benayahu in 1993. See David ‘Ovadyah, Fas ve-Hakhameha, vol. 1 (Jerusalem: Hotza’at Beit ‘Oved, 1979); Benayahu , Divrei ha-Yamim. The relevant passages as a study source for the Battle of the Three Kings were printed by Haim Zeev Hirschberg, Toldot ha-Yehudim be-Afriḳah ha-Tzefonit, vol. 2 (Jerusalem: Mosad Byaliḳ, 1965), 212–13, and appeared again in the English edition: Hirschberg , A History of the Jews in North Africa, vol. 2 (Leiden: Brill, 1981), 191–93. The complete Ibn Danan chronicle was reprinted recently by Benjamin Danan of the Association pour la Restauration de la Synagogue Danan de Fès. See “Sefer Divrei ha-Yamim shel Fes,” in Mishpaḥat Ibn Danan: Elef Shenot Hisṭoryah, ed. Me’ir Abitbol (Jerusalem: Mekhon Bene Yiśakhar, Or ha-Ma‘arav, 2008), 249–87.
- 11.
Susan Gilson Miller, “The Mellah of Fez: Reflections on the Spatial Turn in Moroccan Jewish History,” in Jewish Topographies: Visions of Space, Traditions of Place, eds. Julia Brauch, Anna Lipphardt and Alexandra Nocke (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 101–18, 107.
- 12.
Sefer Ahavat ha-Kadmonim (Jerusalem: Shmuel Zuckerman, 1889), 12b–13a. The book is labeled #636 in Shoshanna Halevy, Sifre Yerushalayim ha-Rishonim (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1975), the first indexical dictionary of Hebrew books printed in Jerusalem in the second half of the nineteenth century, 1841–1890. The printing house of Shmuel Halevy Zuckerman (b. Mezhyrich, 1857; d. Jerusalem, 1929) was located in the old city of Jerusalem for more than four decades.
- 13.
Yigal S. Nizri, “Maghribi Itineraries: Rabbi Raphael Aaron Ben-Shim’on,” in Nizri , “Sharifan Subjects, Rabbinic Texts: Moroccan Rabbinical Writing, 1860–1918” (PhD diss., New York University, 2014), 93–146.
- 14.
For a recent study of twelve North African piyyutim (liturgical poems), a literary form related to the aforementioned historical-literary scrolls, see Ephraim Hazan and Rachel Hitin-Mashiah, eds., Mi Khamokha, Who Is Like unto Thee: Local Piyyutim on Miraculous Deliverance in North African Jewish Communities [Hebrew] (Beer Sheva: Ben-Gurion University Press, 2012). The late Yosef Halevy has studied aspects of poetry of lament among Jewish writers (rabbis included) which were influenced by the political changes in the interwar period in the Mashriq. See Yosef Halevy, “The Reflection of Violent Incidents in Literature: Calamities in the Eye of Piyyutim and New Poetry in the Jewish East in Recent Generations” [Hebrew], in Be-Sod Yahid ve-Eda: Masoret hitḥaddesut u-Vesora ba-Sifrut ha-Ivrit shel Bene ha-Mizraḥ [Tradition and Renewal in Hebrew Literature Written by Oriental Authors], ed. Yosef Halevy (Ramat-Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2003), 84–120.
- 15.
Among them Samuel ibn Nachman, Eliyahu ben Elqana Kapsali, Solomon ibn Verga, Joseph ibn Yitzhak Sambari, David Conforte and Joseph ibn Joshua ha-Kohen. On the events leading up to “the Cairene Purim,” in and of itself a historiographical and textual “event,” see the chapter “The Purim of the Cairene Jewish Community,” in Benjamin H. Hary, Multiglossia in Judeo-Arabic: With an Edition, Translation and Grammatical Study of the Cairene Purim Scroll (Leiden and New York: Brill, 1992), 115–28.
- 16.
Aḥmad b. Khalid al-Naṣiri, Kitab al-istiqṣa li-akhbar duwal al-Maghrib al-aqṣa, vol. 5 (Casablanca: Dar al-Kittab, 1955), 84.
- 17.
Son of Rabbi Samuel Elbaz (1790–1844), Raphael Moshe Elbaz (1823–1896), known as “the RaMa of Sefrou,” was a rabbi, jurist, and liturgical poet in Sefrou. With his father, Elbaz transcribed entire collections from manuscripts. For a detailed biography and bibliography, see David Ovadia, Ḳehilat Tzafaru [The Community of Sefrou], vol. 4, 66–74. To illustrate the investment of Elbaz in sixteenth-century texts, I shall note that he wrote a commentary (titled Yad RaMa) to the kitzur (Hebrew for “shortening” or “abridgment”) of the sixteenth-century legal code Sefer ha-Taqqanot (The book of ordinances) penned by Refael Berdugo (1747–1821) of Meknes.
- 18.
This edition of Kisse ha-Melakhim was included in David Ovadia, Ḳehilat Tzafaru [The Community of Sefrou], vol. 4. The bulk of Elbaz’s historical essay is devoted to the genealogy of Islam, and especially since the Muslim conquest of the Maghrib. Events are described according to both Hebrew and Islamic Hijri calendars. The section about the Battle of al-Qaṣr al-Kabīr is taken almost entirely from the Ibn Danan chronicle. See David Ovadia, Ḳehilat Tzafaru, vol. 4 (Jerusalem: printed by the author, 1985), 80.
- 19.
See David Gans, Zemah David, ed. Mordechai Breuer (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1983), 410.
- 20.
For the first edition, see Joseph ha-Kohen, ‘Emek ha-Bakha (Vienna: M. Letteris, 1852). For the French translation, see La vallée des pleurs, trans. Julien See (Paris, 1881). An English translation by Harry S. May was published in 1971. See Joseph Ha-Cohen, The Vale of Tears / Emek habacha: Joseph Hacohen and the Anonymous Corrector, trans. Harry S. May (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971).
- 21.
Ha-Cohen, The Vale of Tears, 117–18.
- 22.
The idea of a “Muslim revenge” appears quite frequently in modern scholarship. For an example, see “Hispano-Muslim arquebusiers gained a measure of revenge against their Christian enemies,” in Hess, The Forgotten Frontier, 98.
- 23.
Ezekiel 25:14, with relation to the (biblical) Edomites: “And I will lay my vengeance upon Edom by the hand of my people Israel: and they shall do in Edom according to mine anger and according to my fury; and they shall know my vengeance, saith the Lord GOD.”
- 24.
Fourteen thousand Portuguese, among them almost the entire Portuguese nobility, were taken captive by Ahmed Al-Mansur . During the 1580s, these captives were made the object of an entire ransom industry. After 1578, the Mellah of Fez was home to a particularly large number of Portuguese prisoners who stayed in the Mellah while the demands for their ransom were met. See García-Arenal , Ahmad al-Mansur, 71.
- 25.
Immanuel Aboab, Nomologia, ó Discursos legales compuestos por el virtuoso Haham Rabbi Imanuel Aboab de buena memoria (Amsterdam, 1629), ch. 27, 308. The translation is mine. I am grateful to Ori Kleiner for his help with Spanish and Portuguese sources.
- 26.
The English translation is taken from Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews, vol. 4 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1894), ch. 12, 381. In a popular book by Cecil Roth, first published in London 1931, an entry devoted to August 4, under the title “Deliverance,” gives a short narrative based on Graetz, and ultimately Aboab’s Nomologia. See Cecil Roth, The Jewish Book of Days: A Day-by-day Almanac of Events from the Settlement of the Jews in Europe to the Balfour Declaration (New York: Hermon Press, 1966), 184–85. Roth nevertheless confused the Purims of 1578 (Purim de los Christianos) and 1844 (Purim de las Bombas).
- 27.
Born in Salé, Morocco, on July 4, 1847, Ben-Shim’on moved to Ottoman Jerusalem in 1854, where he spent the next three decades of his life. In 1888 and 1890, he traveled back to Morocco on behalf of the Jewish Maghribi community of Jerusalem, which sent him on several fundraising missions to Europe and North Africa. In February 1890, he was called by Cairo’s Jewish community to serve as the chief rabbi (hakham bashi) of Cairo, a communal position he held from 1891 to 1921. In June 1921, after retiring from his position as the chief rabbi of Cairo, he moved back to Palestine. After a short period in Jerusalem, Ben-Shim’on moved to Jaffa, a city in which a growing number of Moroccan Jewish families had been residing since the 1830s. He lived there until his death on October 24, 1928, and was buried in Jerusalem. Raphael Aaron Ben-Shim’on was a prominent figure in the formation of what can be viewed as a new phase of “print consciousness” among Jews in Morocco, as well as among Moroccan Jews in the Mashriq at the time. For his various textual and cultural activities in Morocco as well as the contours of his biographical standpoint as a “Maghribi” scholar outside of Morocco, see note 13.
- 28.
From sanad, “support” in Arabic; the term isnād relates to the chain of authorized transmission attesting to the historical authenticity of a particular hadith of the Prophet.
- 29.
This anecdote is rather interesting as Sebastian himself emerged from the battle as a Portuguese “Messiah,” becoming the core of a cult calling to restore Portuguese power and unity. See Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, The Ten Lost Tribes: A World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 176. The death, or disappearance, of the heirless young monarch Dom Sebastian in 1578, and the loss of political sovereignty of Portugal to Habsburg rule in 1580, led four impostors to claim, on different occasions (in 1584, 1585, 1595, and 1598), that they were the legendary Sebastian. Stories about the “Messiah” who merely had gone into hiding, in penance for having lost the battle, but who would return to help Portugal in its darkest time, bore clear messianic overtones, a cultural phenomenon that was called “Sebastianism.” See also the first chapter of Mary Elizabeth Brooks, A King for Portugal: The Madrigal Conspiracy, 1594–95 (Madison and Milwaukee: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1964).
- 30.
See ch. 4: “Réjouissances: 5538 – ‘Il a envoyé la délivrance a son peuple,’” in Lucette Valensi, Fables de la mémoire: la glorieuse bataille des trois rois (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1992), 107–17, and especially her concept of “un double archétype” (109). The Ibn Danan text, according to Valensi , is characterized by motives and archetypes associated with “sacred history.”
- 31.
Jacob Rader Marcus, “Notes on Sephardic Jewish History of the Sixteenth Century,” in Hebrew Union College Jubilee Volume, 1875–1925, ed. David Philipson (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College, 1925), 391. In this article, Marcus transcribed the full text of the letter, along with a few other documents concerning the “sociological presentation of Jewish life” as reflected in the economic activities of the New Christians in the late sixteenth century. Of course, by “Danon,” Marcus is referring to Ibn Danan, whose text he encountered in Toledano’s Ner ha-Ma’arav (Jerusalem 1911), and not in Ahavat ha-Kadmonim.
- 32.
Calendar of State Papers, Foreign series, Of the reign of Elizabeth, vol. 13: 1578–1579, ed. Arthur John Butler (London: Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1903), 167. The English translation is loaded with mistakes, some of which derived from misapprehension of the original Spanish of the text, or its Italian rendering. In the next decade, when the agents of the French Protectorate regime in Morocco were fully in power, the French official Henry de Castries (1850–1927) published the letter in Spanish (with elaborated footnotes in French), which may be the language in which it was originally written. See document CXIX: “Lettre d’un médecin juif à son frère,” in Les sources inédites de l’histoire du Maroc: Première série, Dynastie Saadienne Archives et Bibliothèques d’Angleterre, ed. Henry de Castries, vol. 3, pt. 1, ser. 1 (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1918), 312–21. Moroccan historian Mohammed Boukhalfa had published the letter in Arabic, at length. The translation was made by ‘Abd al-latif al khatib, the governor of Tetuan, who found it in the collection of Henri de Castries. According to Boukhalfa , “the tabib yahudi (Jewish physician) sent a report to his brother in Fez on the 16th of August 1578.” Mohammed Boukhalfa, Al-Tariq li-Ma‘arefat al-Qsar al-Kabir (Tetuan: n.p., 1972), 78–79.
- 33.
Saul Pinchas Rabbinowicz, “Megillat Ta‘anit shel Galuyot” [Scroll of Fasting of Exiles], in Almanac Ahiasaf (Warsaw: Ahiasaf Publication Society, 1896–97), 131–42. The title is an allusion to Megillat Ta‘anit (Scroll of Fasting), a Pharisaic Aramaic chronicle dated to the first century CE, which enumerates 35 eventful days commemorating glorious deeds or joyful events in the life of ancient Jews.
- 34.
The mistake in the date of the event (1570 instead of 1578) in Almanac Ahiasaf had led Ya‘akov Moshe Toledano to duplicate it in his Ner ha-Ma’arav (Jerusalem, 1911), 92. Despite this mistake, the ambiguity around the nature of the event and its tradition manifests a nineteenth-century awareness regarding the tradition of the 1578 battle. See the following section regarding the “Tanjawi texts.”
- 35.
The “Moroccan” Purim made it into later Jewish glossaries. In the middle of the twentieth century, a prominent figure in the field of folklore in Israel, Yom Tov Lewinsky published a list of 90 “special Purims” throughout the Jewish world. See Lewinsky, Sefer ha-Mo‘adim: Parashat Mo‘adei Yisrael, ‘Erkam, Giluyeihem ve-Hashpa‘atam be-ḥaye ‘Am Yisrael uve-Sifruto mi-Yeme Kedem ve-’ad ha-Yom ha-zeh [The Book of Festivals: The Tale of Jewish Holidays, their Values, Discoveries and Influence in the Life of the Jewish People and its Literature from Ancient Times to the Present], vol. 6 (Tel-Aviv: Agudat ‘Oneg Shabat’ a. y. Devir, 1956), 297–322. Interestingly, the last Purim on this list, chronologically speaking, is called “Purim Hitler,” which took place on 2 Kislev 5703 / November 11, 1942, in Casablanca, Morocco, when local Jews celebrated their relief only a few days after the Allies invaded Morocco on November 8, 1942. On Jewish Moroccan textual fashioning of those events, mostly in Judeo-Arabic, see “Qasidas, Haggada and Two Megillot from Morocco,” in Michal Saraf, Megillat Hitler be-Tzefon Afrika [The Hitler Scroll of North Africa: Moroccan and Tunisian Jewish Literature on the Fall of the Nazis] (Lod: Habermann Institute for Literary Research, 1988), 7–51. For a literary analysis, contextualization and translation of “Haggadah of Hitler,” see Avishai Bar-Asher, “How is this Night Different from the Night of Trente Neuf? The Haggadah of Hitler from Morrocco” [Hebrew], Pe’amim 114–15 (2008): 137–96.
- 36.
By the late nineteenth century, the event was celebrated as “a Moroccan event,” not only by the Polish chronicler but also by Moroccan Jews themselves. By then, the battle and its commemoration had at least six, fairly “local” names: Purim dos Portugueses, Purim de los Cristianos, Purim de Tanger, Purim de Sebastian, Purim Edom, and Purim of Elul.
- 37.
See the chapter “Morocco and the West, 1860–1900” in Edmund Burke, Prelude to Protectorate in Morocco: Precolonial Protest and Resistance, 1860–1912 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 19–40.
- 38.
The two full Hebrew texts were first published in an academic forum in 1935. See M. Ginsburger, “Deux pourims locaux,” Hebrew Union College Annual 10 (1935): 445–50. A Spanish version of Purim de los Cristianos (of 1578) was made by Francisco Cantera Burgos, “El ‘Purim’ del Rey Don Sebastian,” Sefarad: Revista de estudios hebraicos, sefardíes y de Oriente Próximo 6 (1945): 219–25. The text was also translated into Portuguese. See José de Esaguy, O minuto vitorioso de Alcacer-Quibir: Batalha do Mohácen, 4 de Agôsto de 1578 (Lisbon: Divisão de Publicações e Biblioteca, Agência Geral das Colónias, 1944). A French translation of both scrolls was made by Abraham Issac Laredo, “Les Purim de Tanger,” Hésperis 35 (1948): 193–203. Finally, an edited translation of the scroll of “Purim of the Bombs” (of 1844) was included as an appendix in Susan Gilson Miller, “Crisis and Community: The People of Tangier and the French Bombardment of 1844,” Middle Eastern Studies 27, no. 4 (1991): 593–94.
- 39.
It is possible to argue that the title “Purim of the Bombs” was nevertheless “borrowed” from other events that occurred prior to 1844, and in Italy. Cecil Roth dedicated a detailed study to the annual festive “local celebrations” by Jews during the last decade of the eighteenth century, when the French revolutionary wars and its subsequent events affected Italy. According to him, “the antiquity of the various communities, their long and chequered history, their keen historical sense, and their unique power of self-expression all combined to favour the institution” of a special Purim—two events occurred that bear similar names. Thus, escaping a mob scene during the siege over Fossano on the fourth day of Passover on April 26, 1796 / 18 Nisan 5556, Jews sought refuge in the local synagogue. A French shell that burst through the wall of the synagogue’s vestibule caused the assailants to run away, an escape that seemed a direct act of God. A golden Hebrew inscription in that synagogue proclaimed this event as the “Miracle of the Bomb.” A similar “deliverance” took place a few years later, on 5 Kislev 5560 / December 3, 1799 at Cuneo. While the city was besieged by the combined Austrian and Russian forces, a shell fell in the synagogue without exploding. The commemoration of this event became known as Purim della Bomba. See Cecil Roth, “Some Revolutionary Purims (1790–1801),” Hebrew Union College Annual 10 (1935): 451–83.
- 40.
An edited translation of the scroll of “Purim of the Bombs” was offered by Gilson Miller as an appendix to her study of the event. See Gilson Miller, “Crisis,” 593–94. Compare with the description on page 490 in Jacob M. Toledano, “Ha-Yehudim be-Tangier” [The Jews of Tangier], Hebrew Union College Annual 8–9 (1931–1932): 481–92.
- 41.
In a “Printer’s Introduction” to Berit Avot (Livorno, 1848), a collection of sermons and responsa by Abraham Coriat (d. 1845), a kabbalist and dayyan from Essaouira, Eliyahu Benamozegh, a nineteenth-century Moroccan Livornese rabbi, scholar, and publisher, references the bombardment of the port of Essaouira by the French in 1844, during which much of the literary corpus of Coriat was destroyed. Also, family ties played some role, as Benamozegh’s maternal uncle, Yehuda Coriat, was the father of Avraham Coriat. Another Hebrew source on the event was written in the Tetuani rabbi Yosef Ben Adhan’s “memories,” a supplement to Shufraya deYossef (Alexandria, 1897).
- 42.
Gilson Miller, “Crisis,” 587.
- 43.
Ibid., 588.
- 44.
The question of the scrolls’ authorship is not discussed in Gilson Miller’s analysis. Regarding the 1844 scroll she notes: “The scroll is two pages long and its author is unnamed. Most Jewish families in Tangier possess a copy, often handwritten and ornamented.” Gilson Miller, “Crisis,” 596. Similarly, previous scholars had paid attention to circulation but not to authorship. Cantera Burgos, “El ‘Purim’ del Rey Don Sebastian,” 221, noted that as of 1937, it was rare to find any given Jewish family in Tangier who did not have a copy of the 1578 scroll: “que en 1937 comprobó que es rara la familia israelita de Tánger que no posea una copia de tal documento para celebrar todos los años el ‘Purim de Sebastian.’” Writing in Spanish, José de Esaguy testified that “[the] méguilá [can be found] […] in synagogues of Ceuta.” In his analysis of the period, Hirschberg mentions the bombardments of Tangier and Mogador, and adds: “Of course great suffering was also caused to its Jewish inhabitants. In memory of their miraculous escape, the Jews of Tangiers […] introduced a ‘Purim’ to be observed on the 21st of Ab.” However, there is no mention of the scrolls. See Hirschberg, A History, 2:305.
- 45.
In a discussion about the “invention of tradition” of local Purims among the Mediterranean Jewish communities during the sixteenth century, Elliott Horowitz wrote: “[A]fter Sebastian was defeated and killed in the ‘Battle of the Tree Kings’ at Alcazaequebir, a local Purim […] was observed on the first of Ellul. On this occasion a specially written scroll was also read, as was customary in Cairo.” In addition, added Horowitz in a footnote, “for the Hebrew text of the scroll” one should go to M. Ginsburger’s article “Deux pourims locaux.” (See note 38.) It seems to me that the existence of a special Judeo-Arabic scroll in Cairo, Megillat pūrīm il-miṣriyyīn (around 1524), has led Horowitz to assume that a similar text was written and used in Morocco around 1578. However, as I hope to show here, there is no evidence of a written scroll in Morocco before the middle of the nineteenth century. See Elliott Horowitz, Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 305–306. Similarly, Lucette Valensi wrote about a material object that was apparently in communal circulation for many generations: “ce ‘rouleau’ qui rapportait l’histoire et que l’on se passa de main en main au fil des generations.” Although theoretically her distinction between the scarcity of the Ibn Danan chronicle and the availability of what she calls “la megillah du Pûrîm” is valid—given the different textual genres—such a scroll was apparently in use only more than two and a half centuries after the event of 1578. Valensi, Fables, 115.
- 46.
Gilson Miller, “Crisis,” 589–90.
- 47.
Moshe Bengio, who had succeeded his father-in-law, Chief Rabbi Abraham Toledano when the community was reestablished, spent much time in forming the institutions of the reestablished community. See M. Mitchell Serels, A History of the Jews of Tangier in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York: Sepher-Hermon Press, 1991), 7, 265. See Toledano, “Ha-Yehudim,” 491, where the name Rabbi Moshe Bengio is mentioned. Burgos, “El ‘Purim’ del Rey Don Sebastian,” 221, also mentions the name Bengio ; his translation (of the 1578 text) is based on a “copia que dice pertenecer a la familia Aarón Begió.”
- 48.
According to Ginsburger , who in 1905 founded the Historical Society of Jews from Alsace and Lorraine (Gesellschaft für die Geschichte der Israeliten in Elsass-Lothringen) in Mulhouse, the texts, in manuscript form, were intended to be sent to the Paris-based Alliance Israélite Universelle archives but eventually ended up in the Alsatian archive. See M. Ginsburger, “Deux pourims locaux,” Hebrew Union College Annual 10 (1935): 445–50. A few years earlier, in 1932, the Hebrew Union College Annual published an article in Hebrew about the Jewish history of Tangier by Ya‘akov Moshe Toledano, a Palestinian-born Moroccan scholar (author of Ner ha-Ma’arav, Jerusalem 1911), then av bet din in Cairo, who among many other communal activities served in the rabbinical court of Tangier between 1926–1928. See Toledano, “Ha-Yehudim.”
- 49.
Abraham Moise Tanji of Tetuan keeps the zayin transliteration. I thank Mitchell Serels for his valuable help on this transliteration and for providing me information about Abraham Moise Tanji.
- 50.
It is not uncommon, Laredo added, to find copies of these scrolls in the hands of some of the old families of the city: “A Tanger, toutes les synagogues possèdent un phylactère de parchemin sur lequel sont écrites ces deux meghilla-s. Chacune d’elles est donc lue le jour du purim qui lui correspond. L’officiant doit faire la lecture en public, pendant la prière du matin. Il n’est pas rare de trouver des copies de ces meghilla-s chez les vieilles familles de la ville.” Laredo , “Les Purim de Tanger,” 203. His article featured pictures of the two texts written by the same scribe. Other printed facsimiles of the manuscript can be found in Lucette Marques Toledano, “Deux Purim marocains,” in Mosaïques de notre mémoire: Les judéo-espagnols du Maroc, ed. Sarah Leibovici (Paris: Centre d’études Don Isaac Abravanel, 1982), 67–84.
- 51.
The terms borni and borniyot appear twice in the Babylonian Talmud (e.g., Rosh Hashanah 23a) in reference to “a gallant ship,” which Rav defined as “this is a large borni.” In his commentary, based on the Old French, Rashi invokes the word dromont, a large medieval warship. These terms are most likely a Hebrew rendering of liburnian or liburna, a type of standard battle ship that was used by the Roman navy. The medieval lexicographer Nathan ben Jehiel of Rome, a contemporary of Rashi and the author of Sefer ha-‘Aruch, arrived at similar definitions. See Alexander Kohut, Aruch Completum, vol. 2 (Vienna, 1890), 195.
- 52.
Yerushalmi , Zakhor, 47, briefly mentions this rather peculiar detail, and adds, “just as had been done to the whole of Portuguese Jewry in 1497.”
- 53.
The “Judeo-Iberian” perspective of the battle requires further investigation. In his work on Marrano history and literature, the nineteenth-century German historian and rabbi Meyer Kayserling claimed that Dom Sebastian had financed his campaign against the “infidels” in Morocco largely with money taken from the geheimen Juden (the so-called Marranos or Conversos ) who lived in Portugal. In exchange for protecting their property from being confiscated by the Inquisition and the right to emigrate, Dom Sebastian had extracted 225,000 ducats from those Jews. See Meyer Kayserling, Geschichte der Juden in Spanien und Portugal (Berlin: J. Springer, 1867), 159. E. W. Bovill wrote that it was the Moriscos (Spanish Muslims who were forced to convert to Christianity) who paid this amount: “the Moriscoes were allowed to purchase for 225,000 ducats freedom from confiscation of goods as punishment for sinning against the inquisition.” He added, however, that the substantial cost of arms and equipment “were to be financed by borrowing from the Jews against an undertaking to repay in three years’ time with 92,000 quintals of pepper.” E. W. Bovill, The Battle of Alcazar: An Account of the Defeat of Don Sebastian of Portugal at El-Ksar el-Kebir (London: Batchworth Press, 1952), 62 and 66.
- 54.
Mitchell Serels has called the Purim of 1578 a “uniquely Tangierian Jewish celebration.” Serels, A History of the Jews of Tangier, 12.
- 55.
Both the chronicle and the scroll refer to Morocco in plural, artzot ha-Maghrib (the lands of the Maghrib), invoking most likely the Arabic form of Aradi al-Maghrib, which was common in Moroccan Muslim historiography.
- 56.
European observations (mainly from the Peninsula) were also limited. See “Note on the Contemporary Account of the Battle of Alcazar,” in Bovill, The Battle, 187–88.
- 57.
On al-Qadi see Nabil Matar, Europe Through Arab Eyes, 1578–1727 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 3–28, 47–51. There might be a Portuguese equivalent to this, the epic Os Lusíadas (The Luisads, first published in 1572) by Luís Vaz de Camões (ca. 1524–1580). Eventually, poems written in the court of al-Mansur became the bases for the construction of national Moroccan memory just as Camões’s poetry became for Portugal.
- 58.
I consulted the French translation: Nozhet-Elhâdi: Histoire de la dynastie saadienne au Maroc (1151–1610) (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1888), 131–39.
- 59.
Isaac D. Abbou, Hisṭoryah del-Yahud del-Maroḳ bil-‘Arabiya (Casablanca: Yehudah Razon, 1953). The book is a Judeo-Arabic adaptation of the third part of Isaac D. Abbou, Musulmans andalous et judéo-espagnols (Casablanca: Antar, 1953). Isaac D. Abbou (1896–1961) was a community leader in Casablanca.
- 60.
The phrase “les traitèrent avec bienveillance” is taken from Isaac D. Abbou, Musulmans andalous et judéo-espagnols, 300, which itself is a reference to Jornada de Africa (Lisbon, 1607), an account written by Jeronimo de Mendoça, a Portuguese chronicler who himself was a captive in Morocco. Jeronimo de Mendoça described the Portuguese prisoners who were sent to the Mellah, writing that they were the luckiest of all the hostages because they were so well treated by the Jews, who “mourned a thousand times their banishment from Spain.” See García-Arenal , Ahmad al-Mansur, 71.
- 61.
Valensi , Fables, 113–14.
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Nizri, Y.S. (2018). Judeo-Moroccan Traditions and the Age of European Expansionism in North Africa. In: Rauschenbach, S., Schorsch, J. (eds) The Sephardic Atlantic. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99196-2_13
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