The Curse of the Saint

Daniel J. Schroeter

IN THE SUMMER OF 1997, OUR RESEARCH THREESOME reached the village of Tillit in the Dades Valley, on the southern side of the Moroccan Atlas Mountains. My group included Joseph Chetrit, an Israeli scholar of Moroccan origin from Haifa, and Abderrahmane Lakhsassi, a Moroccan Berber scholar from Casablanca. It was the first of four summers of fieldwork at sites in rural Morocco that Jews once inhabited. In our effort to map the historical and cultural landscape of Jews who once lived among Berbers, the dominant population in rural Morocco, we encountered at every site of Jewish significance, at least one shrine of a holy man (qadosh). Tillit was no exception, and in theJewish cemetery lay the tomb of Rabbi Abraham HaCohen. According to tradition, he came from the Holy Land as an emissary, but ended up marrying a local woman and staying in Tillit. Legend tells us that saints are buried in the Dades Valley since the destruction of the First Temple. "This is Jerusalem!" Rabbi Abraham Ha-Cohen supposedly said. The cemetery where the tomb was found was quite large, surrounded by houses, but few tombstones remained at the graves. Several dispersed tombs had been redone in recent years, including the tomb of Rabbi Abraham Ha-Cohen. The mellah or Jewish quarter of this rural village may have contained as many as 300 Jews a half a century ago before the mass departure of the Jewish communities of the Atlas and Sahara in the 1950s and early 1960s. Today the mellah is still in good condition since most of the houses, buildings, and synagogues are inhabited by the Muslim population (often not the case for many mellahs we visited that lie in ruins). Mirroring the imposing fortresses (qasbahs) dotting the near-desert Dades landscape, the mellah houses seemed to tower over the narrow and intricate maze of passages through this former Jewish quarter. On at least one of the houses, I observed a satellite disk, not at all uncommon in even some of the most remote mountain villages in Morocco.

In my rationalist frame of thinking, the Jewish veneration of saints seems like an aberration in Judaism. As much as it may be possible to analyze the phenomenon, or even to rationalize it in the context ofJewish tradition, it is this occult practice more than any other aspect of Moroccan Jewish culture that for me challenges the myth of a common Jewish identity. For my Moroccan-Israeli colleague as well, the veneration of saints and the beliefs and practices associated with it is very disturbing and backward. Therefore, with some uncomfortable hesitation, I admit that after visiting dozens of these sites throughout Morocco over the last four years, I find something compelling about these shrines and the surrounding landscapes. While it may be easy to dismiss the superstitious practices associated with these tombs of holy men (and occasionally holy women), there is a subjective factor, an inescapable sense of aura that surrounds these shrines that are frequently situated in awe inspiring landscapes where the desert and the mountains meet. Here, scattered along the many precipitous gorges, lush wadis and oases, plateaus and valleys, mountains and desert, were about two hundred Jewish communities in Berber villages and small towns until their mass departure in the 1950s and early 1960s. Any self-respecting Jewish community had at least one saint.

Out of respect for the Moroccan Jewish practice, I would join my Israeli colleague in lighting a candle at the grave of the holy man and recite the customary prayer for the qadoshim. We were generally well-equipped with candles, but on this occasion at Tillit our supply had run out. We left the cemetery, crossed the road and climbed a hill, reaching a sacred cavern (known as Ifri n 'Buwmdin). The entrance to the cave had collapsed and a fig tree was growing out of it. The site was once frequented by theJewish population. It was a calm day and the air was still. We were almost ready to depart for our next destination, and as we descended the hill, my Israeli colleague took out his wallet to tip a local guide who had led us to the site. Suddenly a gust of wind snatched the wallet out of his hand. Papers, credit cards, business cards, bits of paper with names and phone numbers flew helter-skelter in the wind as his bulging wallet fell to the ground along the rocky hillside. Giggling children, watching our bemusement, scurried off along the hillside to try to recover the contents of the wallet. That evening, as we were discussing the day's events, our Moroccan colleague joked that the reason why the wallet incident happened was because we had failed to light candles at the tomb of Rabbi Abraham HaCohen: the curse of the saint. What none of us were willing to admit, was that at some level, there was a touch of seriousness in the joke. Had we lighted the candles, would the incident have occurred? Rationally dismissing such superstition, we nonetheless did not neglect even on one occasion for the rest of our trip and in the three subsequent journeys in Morocco to light candles at the tombs of venerated saints. Was it out of respect for tradition alone, or were we hedging our bets?

We learn from Saint Veneration among the Jews in Morocco by Issachar BenAmi (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998) of the belief that neglecting to fulfill one's obligations at the graves of a qadosh or even doubting the saint's efficacy, is liable to offend even a dead saint and consequently punishment is to be expected. I could give a number of other personal anecdotes that would probably suggest to the believer that the curse of the saint was so powerful that it might even influence the most skeptical of people.

Rabbi Abraham Ha-Cohen, also known as Rabbi Abraham Cohen BuDwaya, is one of the many righteous or saintly persons (tsaddiq, pl. tsaddiqim; also referred to as "holy ones," qadosh, pl. qadoshim), who appears in BenAmi's book. Like many venerated saints in Morocco, miracles are attributed to him.

Before his death, may he rest in peace, atfour o'clock on a Friday afternoon, he told them not to leave his corpse overnight. He told them to drive an iron tent peg between the sunlight and the shade, and the sun would stand still until they had finished burying him. And so it came about. He passed away. The members of the Burial Society prepared him. They sent men to dig the grave. They drove the tent peg between the shade and the sunlight, and the sun stood still until they finished burying him. They lit candles, pulled out the tent peg, and only then did the sun set. (204)

A folklorist by training, Ben-Ami has devoted his career to collecting and recording the popular traditions of Moroccan Jewry and in particular, stories about the hundreds of venerated saints scattered throughout Morocco's over 200 urban and rural Jewish communities. This present book is an abridged version of the author's encyclopedic Hebrew version, Ha-aratsat ha-qedoshim be-qerev YehudeMaroko, a virtual "who's who" of Moroccan saints. Throughout our travels, Ben-Ami served as an indispensable though sometimes frustrating guide to the various places of memory (lieux de memoire, as the French put it) during the four summers we spent visiting Jewish historic sites in Morocco. Inevitably, since Ben-Ami recorded testimonies mostly from Moroccan Jews living in Israel, there is sometimes confusion and inconsistencies in geographical locations and place names. Moreover, Ben-Ami is often uncritical of his informants' stories. Not infrequently, it seems, individuals who might have been important members of his informants' families are elevated to the status of saints, when in some instances they were not venerated by the community as such. Motivated by a sense of urgency to record the memories of Moroccan Jews before the generation that left Morocco disappears, Ben Ami insists on the value of documenting every shred of material that he has collected, and therefore, he is not always very discriminating in his evidence. The major value of the book is a primary source for researchers on Moroccan culture, raw data that needs to be filtered through analytical lenses.

The first part of the book comprehensively divides the practices and beliefs associated with Moroccan saints into categories. How saints come into being, is the theme of one chapter. Here, as elsewhere in the book there is little historical or even sociological analysis; rather, Ben-Ami documents beliefs in what the signs of sainthood are, such as performing miracles or leading an exemplary life. Saints are created when they reveal themselves in dreams; or weird phenomena at the time of death may signal the creation of a qadosh. Although some saints are individuals, there are also saintly lineages, in which other members of the saint's family and their descendants attain venerated status. Such is the case of Rabbi Ya'aqov Wazana, the subject of Yoram Bilu's illuminating book, Without Bounds: The Life and Death of Rabbi Ya'aqov Wazana (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000).

The performance of miracles is perhaps the most important attribute of saints in the popular imagination. Divine intervention, manifested by miracles performed by saints, both living and dead, brings the sacred into the believers' everyday life. Moroccan Jews constantly recount and retell the miracles of the saints, the hagiologies embellished with the passage of time. Not only are these special powers reflected in the recounting of events in the saint's lifetime, but the miracles of the tsaddiq are also manifested after death in tales of the saint appearing in the disciples' dreams. The full array of miracles is documented in Ben-Ami's book. Some saints were particularly well known for specialties. Thus, much like a consumer today shopping around for a good medical specialist, if you are interested in finding a saint with a reputation for curing a particular physical illness or mental disorder, remedying infertility, or exorcising demons you will find the referral you need in this book.

A familiar motif found in many of the miraculous legends is the saint who saves a Jewish community from calamity at the hands of a Muslim oppressor through miraculous feats. As the only indigenous religious minority in Morocco, Jews were well aware of their inferior status, and divine intervention through the saint's mediation can perhaps be seen as a "weapon of the weak." More revealing in these stories, however, is the clear recognition thatJews and Muslims in Morocco belonged to the same cultural universe of popular beliefs, a milieu in which the supernatural was an inherent part of daily life. Legends often recount how a saint, either dead or alive, might gain the respect of a Muslim in recognizing the efficacy of his powers. Muslims frequented the graves of Jewish saints, or consulted with Jewish holy men for assistance. Decades after the departure of Jews, Muslims are still convinced of the efficacy of Jewish powers, and we witnessed many cemeteries literally littered with combs, water bottles, undergarments, left by women, a fertility related practice. Although Ben-Ami is correct to point out differences between the ways in whichJews and Muslims understood their saints, the many similar practices and beliefs described in the book suggest an even greater cultural affinity than acknowledged by the author.

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.

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.

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.

Wazana was closely linked to the Berber and Muslim culture of the surrounding society (though the Berbers are usually incorrectly referred to as "Arabs," which is the term used by the informants in Israel for Muslims). Wazana immersed himself in Muslim traditions and Arabic writings on magic and healing, in effect, becoming an apprentice to a Muslim sorcerer. Perhaps in the major centers ofJewish learning in Morocco, this behavior would have caused him to be ostracized from the community, but in Assarag and later in Agouim (Agwim), another town in the High Atlas mountains where he settled following his mother's death, Wazana remained within the borders of acceptability. It might even be argued, that his propensity to court danger, to push the frontiers of acceptable behavior by relying primarily on the esoteric knowledge of Muslims for his healing talents, was the litmus test for his great courage. None of his followers doubted his great healing powers, to which the many fantastic stories collected by Bilu attest. His readiness to convene his demonic servants, enabled him to restore the critically ill to good health. Unusual among healers was his ability to remedy problems that were the result of sorcery and spells. Many of the stories recount how Wazana's fame was by no means confined to the Jewish community; even the most powerful governors of the region sought his miraculous intervention in times of need. A half century after his death, his memory is still vivid among the Muslim inhabitants of Agouim. In 1998 practically the first person we met in Agouim, recounted his experiences with Wazana to my Israeli colleague. Echoing the Jewish traditions that Bilu collected, we learned that theJewish saint was married to a she-demon. We were also told that Wazana had made a talisman that enabled our informant to have three sons, after he had told the Jewish healer that he wanted no daughters. Belief in the mystical powers of this extraordinary holy man easily transcended religious boundaries.

His death was the result of his taking on the daughter of the local sheikh (or amghar as the local chief would have been called in Berber) as a client. The story told is that the daughter stumbled over several snakes, who were in fact the offspring of demons. The result was the snakes took possession of her body. Near death and after the family had exhausted other avenues of cure, the sheikh brought her to Wazana. Unwilling to heed the warnings of the demons to desist from healing the doomed girl, Wazana miraculously restored the sheikh's daughter to health, but at the expense of his own life. The saint's death, however, did not spell the end of his extraordinary powers that followed his devotees to Israel.

Bizarre as Wazana was, he is described as very personable and human. He was friendly and sociable, relaxed, and not at all arrogant. Known for his hearty laugh, he lived for the pleasures of the moment. He loved liquor but of course never got drunk! He used his demonic connections to amuse himself by playing trivial tricks, but all of this playful, even childish prankishness seemed only to endear him to his followers.

Without Bounds is a very personal work, with reflections of the author's own feelings about not only his relationship to his informants, de rigueur in anthropological writing these days, but the impact of his own writing and engagement in the subject on the people about whom he is writing. The original Hebrew text, published in 1993, received some attention of the media, which he rather modestly attributes to "Wazana's colorful and intriguing character" (154). This English version of the book contains an Epilogue, entitled "Wazana's Afterlife," which examines the developing cult of Wazana, influenced by the attention given to the rabbi-healer following the Hebrew edition of the book which enhanced the prestige of the saint despite Bilu's expose of Wazana's character, deviant even in comparison to other Moroccan rabbi-healers. Appropriating the legacy of Wazana, Yosef Waqnin, a 35-year-old ex-barber of Be'er Sheva, decided to "go public" with nightly dream encounters with the saint, and develop a cult after the publication of the book. He revealed his visions to Bilu who was subsequently invited to events Waqnin organized. As the Wazana cult expanded, this "saint impresario" (as Bilu dubs the phenomenon) became Rabbi Yosef Waqnin Shlite (an acronym for "May he live for many days and years"), the saint of Be'er Sheva. Bilu admits to being an unwitting participant in Wazana's afterlife and Waqnin's sanctification.

The conclusion to this eloquent book makes me uncomfortable, perhaps because it reflects some of my own ambivalent feelings about this research.

From a credulous perspective grounded in the discourse common in Yosef's arenas of action, it is not difficult to show that the concatenation of all events in Wazana's afterlife constitutes further evidence of the legendary healer's endless powers. More than forty years after his death, this energy seems to activate the researcher no less than Wazana's former acquaintances and new followers. Given my skeptical point of view, this perspective is presented with a modicum of irony. Butin a serious vein we may conclude that what started as an attempt to document and present a dynamic reality evolved into an intricate interaction, epistemologically precarious, in which the ethnographic work became a building block in constituting this reality. In this process I have unwittingly become a popularizer and propagator of Wazana-an impresario of saint impresarios. (166-167).

I wonder if there is more than irony in Bilu's admission of being energized by the legendary healer's endless powers. Immersed for years in Wazana's story, can the researcher escape the curse of the saint? I can almost hear the mystical healer chuckling, always having the last laugh.

DANIEL J. SCHROETER is the Teller Family Chair in Jewish History, University of California, Irvine. His most recent book is The Sultan's Jew: Morocco and the Sephardi World (forthcoming). He is currently working on a book on the subject of "Jews among Berbers in Morocco. "

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