חורבן ותקומה -יוסף שיטרית-הרס החיים היהודיים במרוקו בשמד המוואחידון וטשיקומם-שער ב- התקומה

חורבן ותקומה -יוסף שיטרית-הרס החיים היהודיים במרוקו בשמד המוואחידון וטשיקומם

שער ב- התקומה

שקום החיים היהודיים בעזרת דמות משה רבנו והליטורגיה בערבית יהודית.

This treatise presents a multidisciplinary study based on hundreds of Hebrew manuscripts. It concerns a constitutive event in the history of Moroccan Jews in particular and North African Jews in general, i.e. the forced conversion to Islam imposed by the Almohad sovereigns during the period 1145-1269, and the restoration of Jewish communities and Jewish life after that. The results of the study include new testimonies, documents, Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic poems that were mostly written by the forced converts themselves, and shed new light on this traumatic event. All of the Jewish communities were then destructed, and Jewish life was entirely abolished for more than four generations. Contrary to the opinion of most historians interested by this issue, the forced conversions of the Almohads were very hard from 1195 to 1269, after the massacre of the Jews of the Draa Valley in 1145, the assassination of 150 Jews in Sijilmassa in 1146, and numerous hundreds in other places. The Almohad sovereigns persecuted, impoverished, and humiliated the forced converts, and lowered them to the rank of pariahs. The new Marinid dynasty authorized the survivors to recover their judaism and restore their communities (first section). The restoration includes a renewal and strengthening of the Jewish consciousness, which was almost eradicated during the forced conversions. For that purpose, the superhuman and mythological figure of the Prophet Moses was mobilized and glorified in numerous new Judeo-Arabic poems as the supreme prophet because of his proximity to God and his successful struggle with the archangels for getting the Torah. Judeo-Arabic was also introduced in the special liturgy of Pesah, through the large trilingual corpus of the Dhir, and of Shavu'ot with the reading of the Midrash on the Ten Commandments in Judeo-Arabic too. In addition, the Torah and other biblical and post-biblical texts were translated in medieval Judeo-Arabic of the 14th century (second section). The third section consists in the central place occupied by the multifaceted figure of Moses in the poetry of Moroccan Jews. It presents numerous Judeo-Arabic and Hebrew poems on his birth, childhood and adolescence, his mission as savor of Israel, his dramatic death, and his special rank in the pantheon of the ancestral figures of Israel.

Prof. Joseph Chetrit taught French, Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic linguistics at the University of Haifa. His research includes the development of Socio-Pragmatics and the application of its principles and methods to the study of language, discourse, text, identity and culture. He also studies Judeo-Arabic dialects of North Africa, and especially Morocco, and their uses in the communal cultural heritage. He published numerous essays in these domains and others, and a great number of articles. He currently prepares to publication two new series of essays: a) Prolegomena to the study of Judeo-Arabic poetry and culture of the Moroccan Jews; b) Moroccan Jewry as mirrored by its Judeo-Arabic poetry.