Hebrew Voices #238 – The Jewish Girl Who Died for Her Faith: Part 1

You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Nehemia: When you call her a martyr in the title of your book, that’s how the Jews viewed her.

Sharon: Yes.

Nehemia: What did that mean to the Jews?

Sharon: That she died be’kiddush Hashem. She died sanctifying the name.

Nehemia: Which means what? For my audience, who may not be familiar with that terminology…

Sharon: Okay. So, that she died because she refused to convert, because she stayed faithful to her religion. And in a lot of the Jewish sources, she died while saying the Shema.

—

Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I’m here today with Dr. Sharon Vance, who’s an associate professor at Northern Kentucky University, in the History and Geography Department, where she teaches courses in Middle Eastern and North African history, Jewish history, the Holocaust, history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, world history, and US history. She received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2005 from the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. After working on anti-Semitism in France, in colonial Algeria, her current research now focuses on anti-Semitism in the US. Some of her publications included… and there’s a bunch of publications here. We’ll put links on the website.

The one we’re going to talk about today is a book she wrote called The Martyrdom of a Moroccan Jewish Saint. And I heard about this relatively recently, and I was very surprised. I have a PhD in a field of Jewish studies, and I’d never heard of this person. I went to 12 years of Jewish school, day school, right? It wasn’t just the afternoon Hebrew school, and I’d never heard of this person. And there were Moroccan Jews in my school. I would imagine they might have heard of her, but I had not.

So, tell us about this Moroccan Jewish martyr. I hope I’m pronouncing her name right; Sol Hachuel? Or how do you say her last name?

Sharon: That’s okay. Sol Hachuel.

Nehemia: All right. So, tell us about Sol Hachuel.

Sharon: Okay. Well, she was born in Tangier, perhaps in 1817, and she was martyred in Fez in 1834, because her neighbor stated that she converted to Islam and she denied having converted. And so, she was first brought before the governor in Tangier, and then word got out that she was there and she was refusing, basically, to convert. And then the Sultan, who at the time was Mullah Abdul Rahman, demanded that she be brought to his court, where they tried to persuade her to convert, and she refused. And so, therefore, she was publicly executed by beheading in Fez in 1834. And she’s buried in the Jewish cemetery in Fez, and the book contains a photograph of her gravesite with a description on the tombstone of her.

Nehemia: So, I think we have to set some context for the audience here, because, let’s say she had converted to Islam and changed her mind; why would that get her executed in Fez in 1834? I feel like the general audience is missing a piece of the picture.

Sharon: Oh, yeah.

Nehemia: Especially coming from America. Like, how is this possible? You get executed because… Explain, please.

Sharon: Okay. So, a couple of things. There’s the fact that Jews had the status of dhimmah, which means they were a protected minority. So, they had autonomy within their community, but they were subordinate to Muslims, and that included subordinate to Islamic courts. So, for example, if there was a dispute between two Jews, it would stay within the Jewish court and the Jewish community. If there was a dispute between a Jew and a Muslim, it would go to Islamic courts, and Jews weren’t allowed to contradict Muslims. That was part of the subordination.

Nehemia: Subordination is a really big word. Give us a more, like, regular English word. What do you mean by that?

Sharon: Okay. So, that meant that there were restrictions. Jews were legally inferior to Muslims.

Nehemia: By law. They were legally inferior before the law.

Sharon: Yes, yes, yes.

Nehemia: I know we talk a lot in America about systemic racism. This is systemic; maybe it’s not based on race. It depends what Jews are, right? That’s complicated.

Sharon: Right.

Nehemia: But systemically, by law, Jews were second class… they weren’t really even citizens, but they were subordinated to Muslims.

Sharon: Second class subjects, yeah.

Nehemia: Subjects.

Sharon: As non-Muslims. Yes.

Nehemia: Okay. And Jewish testimony had no value, am I right?

Sharon: No, no, no.

Nehemia: Okay. I’m not right, or I am right? Sorry.

Sharon: Yes, yes, yes.

Nehemia: So, in other words, when Sol said, “No, I didn’t convert,” and the Muslim neighbor, Tahara, according to one source, said she did. “Well, I mean, we don’t listen to you. You’re a Jew.”

Sharon: Yeah. You’re inferior. Yeah, exactly.

Nehemia: So, why do you get executed for… explain that to the audience, because that’s not obvious. Meaning, if someone today, and I honestly don’t know the answer to this question; if someone today in Pakistan converted to Islam and then decided, “No, I want to go back and be a Christian,” or something, right, would they be executed in Pakistan?

Sharon: Yeah. Because apostasy…

Nehemia: They would? Even today?

Sharon: Apostasy from Islam is punishable by death.

Nehemia: Okay. All right. So, apostasy isn’t just an insult, it’s actually a capital offense, meaning, you get the death penalty. And to convert to Islam, all it really takes is to say the Shahada, which I want to say is something like eight words, or something like that.

Sharon: Yeah, exactly. It’s basically one sentence.

Nehemia: So, one sentence. And then if you say, “Oh no, I didn’t…” Number one, you say, “I didn’t say that.” Or number two, you say, “No. I said that, but I didn’t mean it,” you get executed.

Sharon: Yeah.

Nehemia: Okay. Just as simple as that, okay. There’s so many things to talk about here. So, all right, so, you’re the expert on anti-Semitism. Is this anti-Semitism?

Sharon: That’s an interesting question. So…

Nehemia: What is anti-Semitism? Maybe that’s too big of a question for…

Sharon: Let’s just start with this, because I don’t want to be here all night.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Sharon: But, when I did the research for this and I looked at how Jews were referred to in fatwas, in Islamic legal texts from Morocco, I didn’t see any, like… and this is from the 19th and early 20th century… and these are legal texts. When I did research on history, from historical texts from early 20th century in Arabic on the Maghrebi Jewish community, I found a lot of anti-Semitism, and most of it was translated from, like, European anti-Semitic texts from the 19th and early 20th century, okay? So, there is anti-Semitism.

But within these legal texts, Jews were basically referred to as ahl ad-dhimmah. In other words, people of the dhimmah, protected people. They weren’t specifically referred to as Jews. Now, the thing is, theoretically you could say, “Okay, well, would she have been treated differently if she was a Christian?” But the problem is that Jews were the only dhimmah native to Morocco in the 19th century.

Nehemia: Okay.

Sharon: So, there isn’t really a test case.

Nehemia: So, when the crowd wanted to desecrate her body and rip her to shreds, that was the way they would have treated anyone who was executed. Or did they have special treatment for Jews? Is that not clearly anti-Semitism? Meaning, part of the story, and you could tell it better than I can…

Sharon: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah…

Nehemia: …is, after she was executed, they wanted to desecrate her body…

Sharon: Right. So, the thing is that…

Nehemia: If someone was executed for murder, would they have ripped his body apart?

Sharon: If they were Muslim… I don’t know. I mean, that’s a counterfactual. I don’t know.

Nehemia: Okay.

Sharon: But the fact that she wasn’t a Muslim, the fact that it was considered an insult to Islam, and the fact that France had, four years previously, started colonizing Algeria, and the Muslim… the Ummah, was up in arms over that, that all contributed to this atmosphere of heightened fanaticism, as the text…

Nehemia: Okay. All right. So, all right. And one of the accounts, and I don’t remember if you talked about this in your book. I know you mentioned Yosef Ben Naim, who wrote an account about a hundred years later.

Sharon: Right.

Nehemia: And you say it sounds like he’s got a lot of eyewitness information. He describes the story of the Muslim… So, the earlier sources talk about this woman, Tahara, who was the neighbor, the Muslim neighbor, who said, “She converted in my presence.” That is, Sol Hachuel converted in front of her. The account in Ben Naim is that the man who lived next door wanted to marry her. And when she spurned him, he then accused her of converting to Islam so he could get her killed.

Sharon: Right.

Nehemia: Or maybe marry her.

Sharon: So, there is… I’m not sure what all of Ben Naim’s sources were.

Nehemia: Okay.

Sharon: But if you, you know, look at the first chapter of the book, there are accounts by Europeans that talk about a Muslim male neighbor who fell in love with her and wanted to seduce her. So, there is that within the European text. And there’s also… you know, there were probably oral sources that were transferred, you know, between Tangier and Fez, and around, you know, the Moroccan Jewish community, and that perhaps might be a source for that.

But the thing that needs to be realized about Ben Naim is that he is Fezi. He’s from Fez. And what I said was that his account sounds like, the vividness that he gives of the execution, sounds like he could have been there. But of course, he wasn’t, because he was born, you know, decades later, and his account is in fact a century later. But he probably received, you know, heard stories that were passed down, you know, from one generation to the next, you know, of Jews and perhaps maybe in his family who had witnessed the execution. Because the execution took place in Fez. And the account that he gives is much more detailed of events that take place in Fez than it is of events that take place in Tangier.

Nehemia: Okay. So, talk to me about the… so, the status of the Jews; you use the word dhimmah, which I think many people might be familiar with the term dhimmi or dhimmitude in English.

Sharon: Yeah.

Nehemia: That’s what you’re referring to. And these Jews are… they’re not even citizens. They’re second-class subjects, as you explained.

Sharon: Yeah. Well, at the time, technically nobody was a citizen.

Nehemia: Okay.

Sharon: “Citizen” doesn’t come until, you know, the Europeans bring the notions of citizens…

Nehemia: Okay, but they’re subjects of this government and they’re, by law…

Sharon: And they’re second-class subjects, yeah.

Nehemia: …second class, right.

Sharon: Because they’re not…

Nehemia: So, you know, there’s this notion that we have, or that I hear a lot today, that before Zionism, that everything was wonderful and hunky dory between Jews and Muslims. It was this golden age where we all lived as wonderful, friendly neighbors. And then I read something like this, where she has a fight with her mother, and she runs next door to the neighbor, the woman or the man, whoever the neighbor was, and she ends up getting executed because she refuses to convert to Islam. I mean, that doesn’t sound so wonderful. So, am I…

Sharon: There is a statement that Ben Dror Yemini said, actually made in the 1980s, when I interviewed him, and basically, he said…

Nehemia: And who is Ben Dror Yemini? I don’t know who that is, sorry.

Sharon: Ben Dror Yemini, he is a publicist who writes… I think he’s writing for Yediot Aharonot right now.

Nehemia: Israeli newspaper, okay.

Sharon: Yeah, an Israeli newspaper. And he’s written a number of… his position on the Arab Israeli conflict has evolved over the decades in response to events that have evolved over the decades. But he basically said, “It wasn’t Auschwitz, but it wasn’t a five-star hotel,” you know? And there was a lot of, you know, room in between there.

So, from what I’ve seen, and I also sort of talk about this in the second chapter of the book, but from my readings and from my discussions… I spent six months in Morocco in the mid-1990s, and I interviewed Moroccan Jews. From what I can see, relations between neighbors were very warm, you know. And in Tangier, unlike in a lot of the other cities, there was no mellah. There was no Jewish quarter. So, Jews and Muslims… I mean, one of the reasons why Sol had access to this neighbor was because they shared a courtyard. So, in a lot of the other cities in Morocco, Jews were confined to a specific quarter which was called mellah. In Tangier, they weren’t. So, there was interaction between… but there was structural inequality. And from…

Nehemia: Does that mean? That sounds like buzzwords. What does structural inequality mean?

Sharon: Basically, they were dhimmah. They were inferior. They were legally second-class citizens. They didn’t have equality before the law, and there were restrictions. They… you know, there were official restrictions that were determined by the Pact of Umar, that were determined by Islamic law.

Nehemia: And one of the things I hear today is that, you know, “What’s wrong with paying the jizya? The Muslim has to pay the salat,” which is like tzedaka, charity.

Sharon: Right.

Nehemia: And the Jew paying the jizya, this dhimmi tax, it’s in place of having to serve in the military. But isn’t there part of the jizya where it’s meant to be humiliating?

Sharon: Oh, yeah, that’s it. That they would pay it in humiliation and be humbled. And there was…

Nehemia: Like, there’s one account where they’ll grab the beard and rip it out of the Jew’s hand or the dhimmi’s hand.

Sharon: Yeah. Or in other words, they pay the jizya, and then they get slapped. In other words, there’s a violent act that is involved in it. And many of the Jewish sources, the Jewish Moroccan sources, talk about the jizya. And this is not just true in Morocco. I also saw it in accounts of the history of the Jewish community in the Land of Israel… or Palestine, or whatever you want to call it, when it was under the Ottoman Empire. Or when it was under the Fatimids, or Ayyubids or, you know, earlier Muslim empires, where the taxes that they had to pay were exorbitant. And for that reason, the Jewish community, particularly there, was, for the most part, impoverished.

Nehemia: And just to be clear; these are taxes that Muslims didn’t have to pay, right?

Sharon: No, Muslims paid the zakat. And, you know… There were also…

Nehemia: Tell the audience what zakat is. I know, but they may not know.

Sharon: Zakat is basically the taxes that… it’s part of the five pillars of Islam that as a Muslim you’re supposed to pay. There were also land taxes that were supposed to be paid…

Nehemia: Mm-hmm.

Sharon: And there wasn’t any countervailing power… Within the Ummah, within the Muslim community, there was a certain countervailing power of Islam itself and of the Ulema, of the Muslim clerics, who could invoke this common religion. And, depending on how strong the sultan, or the king, or the caliph was, they could actually, perhaps, if he wasn’t strong enough, get him to back down.

The Jews had no such power. They had no countervailing power. Whatsoever. And of course, as a minority, they couldn’t, you know… Muslims would rebel. Under certain circumstances there were rebellions. There was no rebellion. I mean, that would have been… you would have been completely wiped out.

Nehemia: Meaning, Jews didn’t have the capacity to rebel if they were mistreated, is what you’re trying…

Sharon: Exactly!

Nehemia: Okay. So, as an expert, and I know you said your time is limited, but just briefly then, as we say, “standing on one leg,” as an expert in anti-Semitism, and this isn’t related necessarily to Sol Hachuel, and I want to talk about her, but what is this modern narrative that there was this paradise living under Islam, and it was only because of… “We only hate you, we Muslims, because of Zionism.” Where does this come from? Are they gaslighting us? What is going on?

Sharon: Well… it was an ideology, or a statement, or a claim that was sort of popular, you know, in the 1980s, 1990s, in earlier decades, particularly when Arab nationalism was sort of the more dominant ideology in the Middle East.

Nehemia: Okay.

Sharon: It’s a lot harder to make that kind of statement today, in the face of, for example, Hamas, Hamas’s writings, Hamas’s, you know, charter.

Nehemia: Or the Houthi flag, which says “curse upon all the Jews”, right? They’re not hiding the ball. I mean…

Sharon: Exactly, exactly. But the thing is… and, you know, I hope… a person who would be a good person for you to have on to talk more in depth about this would probably be Jeffrey Herf, because he wrote a book on Nazi propaganda in the Arab world during the Holocaust.

Nehemia: Okay. I’m writing this down.

Sharon: Yeah. And there was a significant amount of it.

Nehemia: Let’s go back to Sol Hachuel. What does it mean she’s a martyr? Like, I mean, so, people get executed all the time, probably quite often, I would imagine, in 19th century Morocco. In other words, when you call her a martyr in the title of your book, that’s how the Jews viewed her…

Sharon: Yes.

Nehemia: What did that mean to the Jews?

Sharon: That she died be’kiddush Hashem. She died sanctifying the name.

Nehemia: Which means what? For my audience, who may not be familiar with that terminology.

Sharon: Okay. So, that she died because she refused to convert, because she stayed faithful to her religion. And in a lot of the Jewish sources, she died while saying the Shema.

Nehemia: Right.

Sharon: Like Rabbi Akiva, you know.

Nehemia: So, in one of the poems, it says her soul went out on, “be’echad”.

Sharon: Be’echad.

Nehemia: And at first, I’m like, “What’s that? Oh, she’s saying the last word of the Shema, on the word echad.” Wow.

Sharon: Which is exactly similar to accounts of Rabbi Akiva.

Nehemia: So, is that just a… what’s the word? Is that a flowery account? Or do you think that really happened, that she said the Shema as she died?

Sharon: I think it might be both. I mean…

Nehemia: Okay. Meaning, it’s actually not unusual. There are people today…

Sharon: You know what…

Nehemia: …you’ll hear stories, who die saying the Shema.

Sharon: I have heard accounts of the released hostages talking about saying the Shema.

Nehemia: So, I actually wanted to ask you about that. There was a hostage named Rom Braslavsky, and he is one of several hostages who have said that they were told, “We’ll feed you and we won’t beat you as much if you convert to Islam.”

Sharon: Yeah.

Nehemia: And I just heard that like two days ago while I was reading about this in preparation for this interview. And I’m like, “1834 and not much has changed.” Right? The difference is we can fight back now. Sometimes.

Sharon: Yeah.

Nehemia: I guess we can fight back. Not always effectively, sometimes more effectively. What are your thoughts on that as a historian? I mean, how, in 2025, is this kind of thing still going on?

Sharon: Well, there you need to sort of look at the whole, like, history of, kind of within the 20th century, of Islamic fundamentalism and its popularity among certain groups of Muslims who are identified with the Iranians and their supporters, called the Muqawama, the Resistance.

Nehemia: Okay.

Sharon: And so, people in that group are drawing on Islamic texts to justify their actions, although the circumstances are thankfully very different, you know, because the State of Israel exists.

Nehemia: Right. So, one was backed by a government, and there was nobody she could complain to, and the other was… well, I mean, it was a government. Hamas was elected as a government. Although this was actually Palestinian Islamic Jihad that held Rom, but still… I have to wonder about some of the hostages who didn’t make it. Maybe they were killed for that reason, we don’t know.

Let’s go back to Sol Hachuel being a martyr. So, I read some of the sources here in Hebrew that you had mentioned, and I went and looked them up. And one of them is a song, a… you call it an elegy, I think, by Hayim Haliwa. It’s sort of like a dirge.

Sharon: Yeah.

Nehemia: And I want to read some of this.

Sharon: I haven’t looked at the Hebrew sources in like…

Nehemia: That’s fair.

Sharon: I haven’t actually looked in fifteen years or so.

Nehemia: All right, that’s fair. I’m putting you on the spot. But so, I’ll read this part. So, it says, “And she also he’eza paneia,” she had the chutzpah, basically, to say “it’s better to trust in God, in Hashem, than to trust in,” which is from the Psalms, right?

Sharon: Yeah.

Nehemia: “…than to trust in benefactors.” And then she said, “Who would replace the water of Diyomsit,” which is probably like a hot spring at Emmaus, “these beautiful living waters with the stagnant water of pools.” And so, then here’s the response. “When they heard, they were very angry, and they were ravenous like dogs.” And it says here… so, this is the false accusation against her, right? In the words of the poet, right? As a poet in the 1830s or something, 1840s, maybe. “Kaze ve’kaze dibra hana’ara mi’Eretz Yisrael dvarim asher lo tovim.” “Like this and like that has spoken the girl,” and this is interesting, “from the Land of Israel, bad things.” Meaning, they’re falsely accusing her.

So, that’s interesting. I didn’t know what to make of that. She was born in Tangier and died in Fez. She had never stepped foot in the Land of Israel. But in the mind of the poet, the Arabs see them as foreigners in Morocco, right? The Jews see themselves, for sure, as exiles from the Land of Israel, and as exiles you’re this foreign entity. It’s the reason that if a Moroccan Jew today says, “I’m an Arab Jew,” every Arab in the world laughs at them. Because, no, you’re a foreigner from, you know, from Palestine, or from some other place.

Sharon: Well, I wouldn’t say every Arab in the Arab world…

Nehemia: Most Arabs would laugh at that. Most Jews for sure would laugh if you said, “I’m an Arab Jew,” as a Moroccan Jew.

Sharon: Yeah, but there are some… So, the situation with Morocco is really interesting. Including with Moroccan Jews, many Moroccan Jews today, particularly in Israel, there is this, like, fond memory of life in Morocco.

Nehemia: They’ll have pictures of the king in their living room. I’ve seen it.

Sharon: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: The king of Morocco.

Sharon: Yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah. And I think there’s sort of the nostalgia for what isn’t there anymore and for an idealized version of the past versus a, you know, a contemporary everyday life in Israel. Which, you know, can be really hard. So, there’s that element, and then there is the fact that in the 20th century, the Moroccan kings were seen as extremely close to the Jewish community.

Nehemia: Okay.

Sharon: And, you know… and Muhammad V is credited with refusing the Vichy orders to deliver the Jews to the Nazis. To what extent that is an overstatement, and at what point in World War II did he make the statement? Did he make it, you know, when it wasn’t clear who was going to win the war? Or did he make it, you know, when the Americans were about to land in North Africa, you know? So, that’s also… But he is revered by Moroccan Jews as someone who protected the Jewish community.

Nehemia: And even in the accounts… or at least one of the Hebrew accounts, I think it was Ben Naim, he says something to the effect of, “Well, the king didn’t really want to execute her, but the…”

Sharon: Yeah…

Nehemia: …but the Muslim authorities didn’t give him a choice. He’s like, “All right, this is the law. I can’t do anything about it.”

Sharon: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, it’s kind of like, he’s not an absolute monarch. Meaning, he is maybe, or was, in some respect, but also, he’s got to give in to the religious authorities. Okay, so, I want to maybe shift gears here and talk a little bit about this idea of her as a martyr. Because a lot of my audience, certainly the non-Jews, and even some of the Jews, will be like, “Wait. We don’t have saints in Judaism. What’s this about?” And there’s that tension within the story that she’s called Lala Solika.

Sharon: Yeah.

Nehemia: Solika was the diminutive name… or maybe that’s the original name, actually, Zuleikha, right? Meaning, Sol is the diminutive name, and Solika was probably her more original name, right?

Sharon: Well, I think it’s the other way around.

Nehemia: Oh, okay, all right. So, Sol is the original name, meaning sun. You think?

Sharon: I’m not absolutely sure, but I think so, yeah.

Nehemia: And does that reflect her being a descendant of Jewish refugees from Spain?

Sharon: Yeah, megurashim. Yeah.

Nehemia: Okay. And then that would explain, maybe, her blond hair, which is a bizarre detail I read there, and I’m like, “Wait, what?” Why would they even mention that? Right? So, there’s this description that, when they’re smuggling her body out of the square somebody gets a glimpse of her blond curls.

Sharon: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: What was that about?

Sharon: That is part of Ben Naim’s story. I’m not sure, you know, how to interpret that. But if you look at the photo in the book, you see that there is a painting, a lithograph that is attributed… it’s in the Em Habanim Museum, which is right next to the Beit Hachayim in Fez. So, there is a lithograph of a young woman, with, you know, light skin and black hair in the painting itself. And then, around the frame there is this, like, blond wig, pigtail basically, around the top of the frame, and that, you know, is reflecting that element in Ben Naim’s story. But there are different versions, you know, of what her hair color is and what she looked like.

Nehemia: Right. In the European, she has jet black hair or something, right?

Sharon: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: Yeah. Or raven black hair, I think.

Sharon: Yeah.

Nehemia: All right. So, Ben Naim relates that they called her Lala Solika, which is something like Saint Solika, and she…

Sharon: Well, lala is an honorific term for lady. It’s a…

Nehemia: Okay.

Sharon: It’s lady. It’s an honorific. It’s a term for someone who… It’s a term of respect that’s given to Muslim women in…

Nehemia: Muslim women.

Nehemia: Isn’t like the Virgin Mary called Lala, I think you said in the book? Is that right?

Sharon: No, I don’t talk about the Virgin Mary.

Nehemia: Oh, okay, all right. I read that somewhere…

Sharon: No, that…

Nehemia: …that she’s called Lala Maria or something like that, but all right. In any event, so, according to Ben Naim, she appears in a dream and says, “Stop calling me Lala, because I fought not to be a muslim. Why are you calling me Lala?”

Sharon: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: So, explain what saint veneration was in 19th century, and maybe 20th century Jewish Morocco. Somebody I know had a Moroccan boyfriend who swore that if you left a glass of water on the grave of the Baba Sali and drank it the next day, it would heal any ailments.

Sharon: Yeah.

Nehemia: And when I heard that in the 90s, I thought like, “That’s not Judaism I grew up with.” So, what is this saint veneration?

Sharon: Well, you know, the saint is… it’s kind of a mistranslation of tzadik.

Nehemia: Okay. Is it a mistranslation? Tzadik means righteous person, saint is holy person, right? I mean…

Sharon: Right, right, a righteous or a holy person. Because look, these are not saints like the Catholic Church saints. You don’t, like, save parts of their bodies and, you know, and revere them or…

Nehemia: But you go to the grave, and you pray to them, don’t you?

Sharon: Yeah. So, you go to the grave. Okay, so, there are hilulot to the grave.

Nehemia: What are hilulot? Tell the audience what that is.

Sharon: So, hilulot are pilgrimages to the grave site. And the most, sort of, famous one, and the most massive one is Shimon bar Yochai on Lag ba’omer.

Nehemia: So, he’s a 2nd century rabbi who, in the 13th century, was credited with writing the Zohar.

Sharon: Yes, exactly. Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: Okay.

Sharon: And there’s a huge hillula for him.

Nehemia: And I think there’s over a million people who go every year. Meaning, it’s not some small… like literally a million.

Sharon: But it built up over time, because I went on it with Yoram Bilu in the 1990s when I was a graduate student at Hebrew University. And Yoram Bilu is a professor of anthropology, and he’s written a lot on the Moroccan veneration of tzadikim.

Nehemia: Okay.

Sharon: And so, we went in the 1990s, and the main groups that were there were North African Jews, especially Moroccans, and Hasidim, Haredim. Those were the groups that were there. But it wasn’t a million people; there were maybe 100,000, and you could walk…

Nehemia: A whole lot.

Sharon: Well…

Nehemia: A hundred thousand is a lot of people, even now!

Sharon: Right. Well, actually, I don’t even think there was that much, because like, you could walk around…

Nehemia: Okay.

Sharon: I was able to walk around. I went in on the women’s side. I was able to, you know, stand in front of the tomb and watch while people were walking around with trays of couscous and offering people food. And people were praying, and there were people who were sitting there. I have some photos of this, of people who were sitting there, just sitting there on the ground praying, you know, and there was room to move! It wasn’t like, you know, you weren’t packed like sardines.

Nehemia: And literally a few years ago, there was a trampling where people were, I think they were killed or something.

Sharon: Yes, exactly. Exactly.

Nehemia: Okay.

Sharon: So, in terms of popularity and how many people actually go, or try to go, it’s just like been massive.

Nehemia: So, how does this translate to Solika over the last, let’s say, 200 years?

Sharon: Well, I was there in, like, 1984. And when I was there, the day that I was there, I was the only one there. The person who’s in charge of the cemetery allowed me to go in, and I went in, and that’s where I took the photo. And as far as I know, there are no hilulot for her, although there was one that took place in Canada.

Nehemia: Really?

Sharon: Yeah, yeah. I talk about that.

Nehemia: In the 19th century, they weren’t going to her grave to pray? It sounds like there were, from the poems.

Sharon: No, people were…

Nehemia: Oh, they were? Okay.

Sharon: But there wasn’t, like, an organized, one day… From what I’ve seen from the sources, there wasn’t really an organized one-day hilula the way there was for Rabbi Chaim Pinto, or for Davido u-Moshe, or the other famous Moroccan rabbis, where there are, you know, these annual pilgrimages. In some cases, to Morocco, and other cases, to places in Israel.

Nehemia: So, I want to read from this poem here, because when I read this, I’m… okay, I’m familiar with this, but I think it’s still shocking to me, and it justifies the title of your book, Martyr. Meaning, she wasn’t just martyred for her religion, she was really seen in Moroccan Judaism as a saint, or tzadeket, right, is the term they use. Right?

Sharon: Yeah.

Nehemia: But the parallel to saint there is… I’m not sure the Christians didn’t get that from us. And I’m not trying to be funny. Meaning, like, obviously a lot of things they got from us, so… So, Hayim Haliwa, he writes in poem Am Asher Yivcharu, he says, and this is my translation: “Children of God, every man who is poor and scrawny, worship God on this mountain. Entreat her face, that she may pray to her God, spread out her hands with supplication and prayer.” That really sounds like they’re going to the grave and asking for intercession.

Sharon: Yeah.

Nehemia: It’s in Hebrew: Bakshu paneiha tidrosh Eloheha, tifros kapeha tchina u’tfila. Right? So, they’re going to her and asking her to pray on their behalf.

Sharon: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, can you explain that?

Sharon: Yeah. So, the idea of the merit of the tzadik is, it will grant, you know, the supplicant, like, I don’t know, favors with the Hakadosh Barukh Hu, you know, with “the Holy One, blessed be He”. So, I think that is what’s being expressed. That the idea…

Nehemia: So, because she died bekiddush Hashem, as a martyr, she can pray to God on your behalf.

Sharon: Yeah. Her merit is… yeah.

Nehemia: Even though she’s dead, right? Meaning…

Sharon: Yeah.

Nehemia: Okay.

—

Nehemia: And then there’s this idea of her blood as a sacrifice. You talk about that in the book. Can you say something about that?

You have been listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon’s Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

We hope the above transcript has proven to be a helpful resource in your study. While much effort has been taken to provide you with this transcript, it should be noted that the text has not been reviewed by the speakers and its accuracy cannot be guaranteed. If you would like to support our efforts to transcribe the teachings on NehemiasWall.com, please visit our support page. All donations are tax-deductible (501c3) and help us empower people around the world with the Hebrew sources of their faith!