The Curse of the Saint

This "ethnic revival" manifested by the veneration of saints in Israel has been among the favorite subjects of Israeli anthropologists (such as Alex Weingrod and Shlomo Deshen). Yoram Bilu has brought the study of the phenomenon to a new level, combining the "thick description" of cultural anthropology, with the analytical skills of psychiatry, both fields that he professes. No one has done such penetrating analysis of these bizarre, cultic phenomena in Israel as Bilu. Without Bounds: The Life andDeath of Rabbi Ya'aqov Wazana goes even further than his previous studies, by offering a cultural biography and psychological profile of Wazana, transporting the reader from Israel back to the Atlas Mountains where Wazana lived, through the memories and stories recounted by his adherents in Israel.

In comparison to, in my mind, an already bizarre cast of rabbis/ healers/mystics found in Ben-Ami's saint directory, Wazana is the weirdest of them all. Ya'aqov's saintly pedigree may have destined him to rather runof-the-mill sainthood, with a more standard repertoire of miracles, but this was not to be. Bilu speculates that his extraordinary career may have been caused by his yearning for his father, who died young, and close attachment to his mother; unable to free himself from the memory of either parent, he compensates for this loss by becoming a healer and unlike most people who avoided demons at all cost, Wazana raised demons from the depths of the earth, something he could never do with his deceased parents. He never had an ordinary marriage, but instead formed a kind of surrogate family by marrying a she-demon, with whom he fathered somewhere between two to five children (depending on account).

Wazana's willingness to go to all lengths to control the demonic world and hence, heighten his healing powers, was tolerated by his devotees, according to Bilu, because of where he lived: in the remote peripheries of the Moroccan Jewish world. One of the most remote regions thatJews inhabited in Morocco was the valley of Tifnout. In 1999, our research team began a long journey up the valley, following the river up the Western Atlas mountains. The unpaved road was treacherous, barely wide enough for one vehicle to pass. A string of tiny mellahs once dotted this valley. Nowhere in Morocco were the Jews more thoroughly acculturated to their environment, their dress virtually indistinguishable from the Muslims. It was one of the few, if not the only place in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries where some of the Jews were monolingual, only speaking Tashelhit, the Moroccan Berber dialect of Southern Morocco. TheJews of the Atlas mountains were usually bilingual, speaking Berber with their Muslim neighbors but Moroccan Judeo-Arabic at home, like communities all over Morocco. The linguistic and cultural isolation of the Jews of Tifnoutwas observedby a Jewish traveler to the region in the late nineteenth century (in a Hebrew manuscript brought to my attention by Professor Chetrit), and this is pointed out by Bilu. Our research confirmed this as well. Our destination was Assarag, the birth place ofYa'aqov Wazana, but it became clear that we were not going to make it if we were to return the same day. Assarag was remote, but now as well as in the past, not totally cut off from the Jewish world. We observed in many rural regions that electrical lines have been-built in the last few years, but still have not reached the upper stretches of the Tifnout valley. Evidence of an encroaching civilization is seen in the occasional satellite dish, on top of concrete houses (the newly constructed homes of returning emigrants who invested some of their hard earned savings from Europe in their native villages), in contrast to the vast majority of adobe houses in the villages. Our interviews with Muslims seemed to confirm Bilu's comments based on hisJewish informants: life was relatively harmonious, with Jews and Muslims intricately linked by the necessities of everyday co-existence. I was filled with admiration for these ruggedJews, eking out their existence in this harsh and beautiful environment. Yet unlike parts of the Atlas that we visited, this was hardly a barren land, situated in this high mountain valley with abundant water and produce.