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The Curse of the Saint
Judaism, Spring, 2001 by Daniel J. Schroeter
Ben-Ami pays scant attention to history in most of the book, and there is very little speculation on when and why the veneration of saints began and developed among Moroccan Jews. Nevertheless, there are some hints about the evolution of the phenomenon. The mass pilgrimage to the tombs of saints (called the hillulah), usually taking place on the supposed anniversary of the saint's death, was clearly a twentieth-century development. The French conquest of Morocco and the "pacification" of the southern regions of the country in the 1930s, twenty years after the French Protectorate began, enabled, through new roads and transportation, a larger number of people to gain access to the shrines of the Atlas Mountains and valleys where the biggest concentration of saints was located. Shrines that had previously served a local community, unknown to Moroccan Jewry as a whole, rapidly began to develop into major pilgrimage centers. Buildings to accommodate the pilgrims during the hillulot were constructed or refurbished, and through personal initiative, local shrines were promoted, leading to the formation of local committees that took control of the fiscal needs and activities of the shrine. With the development of this "saintly" infrastructure, larger communities began seeking greater control over local committees, and eventually, in 1947, a "Central Commission for the Holy Sites and Hillulot" was established, under regulation from the French colonial administration. This effort by the central authorities to appropriate local authority proved to be ephemeral, failing to find a practical way to control these local initiatives. If Ben-Ami were to update his fieldwork today, he would undoubtedly have reported on still more initiatives, sometimes by descendants of the saints, to develop and appropriate the activities and revenues connected to these lieux de memoire. What were once shrines of little more than local importance are being transformed into centers of pilgrimage/tourism, and at least in one instance that we observed, into nearly five star deluxe accommodations (at least if the saint-accommodations category were to exist in the Guide Bleu Maroc) to house pilgrims from the far-flung diaspora of Moroccan Jews living not only in Casablanca, but France, Canada, and above all, Israel.
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Ben-Ami does not neglect the resurgence of the phenomena in Israel, with small, privately organized hillulotsometimes giving way to much larger pilgrimages. Many Moroccan saints have posthumously moved to Israel, continuing to work miracles in the Holy Land, even among the new generations of North African Jews born in Israel. This translocation of the dead saints from Morocco to Israel-a subject extensively studied by Yoram Bilu-frequently occurs after the tsaddiq requests to take up residence in the home of the devotee, revealing himself in a series of dreams. Cults developed based on the initiative of entrepreneurs to increase the popularity of their new-founded shrines. On other occasions the actual bones of the saint have been disinterred and transferred to Israel, such as the case of Rabbi Hayyim Pinto who lived in Essaouira (Mogador) in the first half of the nineteenth century. New dynasties of saintly lineage have been created in Israel, perpetuating practices that began in Morocco. This serves to legitimize and strengthen the identity of Moroccan Jews, especially for a community that felt such a profound sense of loss, dislocation, and discrimination after arriving in Israel. Moroccan Jews have also appropriated Israel's sacred spaces, Moroccanizing the graves of rabbis from antiquity.
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