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Visions of Suffering and Death in Jewish Societies of the Muslim West

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Haïm Zafrani

Abstract

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The author encountered evocations of suffering and death in all the studies and research he devoted, over 40 or so years, to the intellectual, social and religious life of western Muslim Judaism, and indeed the whole of traditional Jewish thought and its varied modes of expression: rabbinical law, Hebrew poetry, the literature of homily and preaching, mystical writings and the kabbala, dialect and popular literatures in Judeo-Arabic and Judeo-Berber. Some passages are taken from the Zohar (‘The town the angel of death cannot enter’, for instance). The author also refers to the Talmud and magic therapeutics, the power of sacred names, Jewish and Muslim miracle workers, hunting down and casting out demons, etc. Agony, refusal to die, joyous commemoration of death, the cemetery and the cult of the dead, Judeo- Muslim pilgrimages, the wealth of the customs, beliefs and rites of the past lead the author to reflect on the question of death in the present-day world.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 52 , Issue 1 , February 2005 , pp. 83 - 104
Copyright
Copyright © ICPHS 2005

References

Notes

This text is a revised and augmented version of my lecture given in the context of a round table on ‘Suffering, sickness and death’ at the Fourth International Conference on anti-cancer chemotherapy, which took place in Paris in February 1993 and brought together researchers and doctors.

1. Mille ans de vie juive au Maroc, Paris, Maisonneuve et Larose, 1982 (1998 under the title Deux mille ans de vie juive au Maroc, with additions and a new postscript), in which the vision of death and the associated cult, rituals and beliefs were exhaustively examined. As for the mystical speculations on death and the therapies from the practical kabbala, which I found in North African Jewish kabbalistic writings, they are included in some of the chapters from my book (1986/1996) Kabbale, vie mystique et magie, Paris, Maisonneuve et Larose.

2. English quotations from the Bible are from the New English Bible (2nd edn, 1970), slightly adjusted where necessary (translator’s note).

3. See Mille ans de vie juive au Maroc, p. 99. The town is frequently mentioned in the Bible (Genesis 28.10; 35.6; 48.3; Joshua 16.2; 18.13; Judges 1.23 and 26), where it is identified with Bet-El in the land of Canaan, then a town built by a refugee from Bet-El in the country of the Hittites (Judges 1.23-6). The legend itself is recounted in the Talmud (Sotah 46b, Sukkah 53a), the Midrash (Genesis Rabbah, on Genesis 28.19). See also Zohar I 137a.

4. ‘Ireland in the Middle Ages’ in Jewish Quarterly Review VI, p. 336.

5. See also Kabbale, vie mystique et magie, pp. 54, 162, 206, 238.

6. See Zohar I 204a.

7. It is impossible here to give the text from the Zohar referred to above with its many commentaries. It will merely be noted that it says that the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, whose creation preceded that of the world, appeared before God in various shapes and combinations resulting from the permutations defined by certain rules; one of those shapes is the presentation of the letters in reverse alphabetical order from taw to alef, with each begging for the creation of the world to start with itself. The Creator decided that this task should be performed by Bet…, the expression of Wisdom, sefirah Hokhmah, and that the completion of creation should be carried out by yod, the expression of sefirah Malkhut, the sovereignty of God over the earth. Furthermore, following speculation on the structures and functions of the four worlds (Asilut, Beri ah, Yesirah, Asiyah) and the ten sefirot that make up each of them, we get to the fact that each sefirah corresponds to a particular space, and so Jerusalem is part of the heritage of Malkhut, the tenth sefirah and the letter yod, while Luz belongs to the ninth sefirahrepresented by the letter tet and called yesod, which means the attribute hay olamim ‘the Eternal Living One’.

8. Citron fruit and willow branches are two of the four species that make up the ritual bouquet (lulab) for the feast of Sukhot (see Mille ans de vie juive au Maroc, pp. 253-5). The apiqomen is the half massah, the symbol of the Paschal lamb eaten at the end of the meal on the eve of Pessah (ibid., p. 241). Apart from its mystical symbolism inherited from the many exegeses carried out on the Song of Songs over 2000 years, the pomegranate fruit is also a miraculous remedy. All its parts (skin, seeds) and its various species (there are sweet and bitter ones, cooked or raw) are thought to have virtues and special qualities in the area of magic therapies. It is the fruit ‘par excellence that can delight the heart’, as our manuscript emphasizes (p. 24).

9. According to Doutté, quoting an Arab author, Magie et religion, pp. 73-4, this is one of the fifteen perfumes with the most effective magical properties. In fact it is a preparation with a musk base that contains cinnamon, honey, gallnut, wallflower. According to other sources it is also a creamy perfumed paste, black in colour, based on musk, amber and bân ‘cassia’ oil or a mixture of musk and civet (see Littératures dialectales et populaires juives en Occident musulman, p. 107, n. 15). In Morocco and Algeria people know the seven perfumes used for the sab bkur ‘seven fumigations’: al-jawi al-khel (black benzoin), al-jawi la-byad (white benzoin), bkhur as-sudan (ebony resin), al ud-al-qmayri (aloe wood), al-qesbur (coriander), al-luban (incense) and al-mi a (myrrh). Others are known too, such as al-hramel (harmel) and al-ruta (rue), which enjoy a high reputation, as do saffron, camphor, myrtle, alum and salt.

10. Deciphering of and commentary on this talisman are to be found in my book Kabbale, vie mystique et magie, pp. 392-5.

11. See Kabbale, vie mystique et magie, pp. 361-413.

12. Mo ed Qatan 28a.

13. Erubin 41b, Shabbat 118b.

14. Hebrew Amulets, London, 1966, p. 56.

15. Ibid., p. 72.

16. Here we should note that, for Jews as for Muslims, death is not the end of life. It is a threshold opening onto eternity.

17. In addition to my personal experience and my own evidence there is, in this chapter on death, information borrowed essentially from the ritual Nahalat Abot, ‘the fathers’ legacy’, published in Livorno in 1808, in which a rabbi from Mogador, Isaac Qoriat, collected the liturgical texts for the days of mourning and an account of the funeral rites performed in Morocco.

18. It was Zerubabel who brought the exiles from Babylon into Judea after Cyrus’s decree authorizing their return (539/538 BC).

19. This concerns the idea that some just people, and Moses in particular, had the privilege of being exempt from the sufferings of death and of leaving this world in a state of quietude and ineffable gentleness, with a divine kiss. Two texts from the Zohar develop this notion (II, 124b and 145a/b). This spiritual relationship is one of union suggested to mystics by the Song of Songs 1.2: ‘He will kiss with kisses from his mouth.’ So a person whose soul leaves ‘with a kiss’ belongs to another spirit from which they are never separated; their spirit has been part of the divine spirit. In the first text the Zohar expresses it as follows: ‘I will send my angel before you…’ (Exodus 13.20). Rabbi Isaac began his speech thus: ‘May he give me a kiss with his mouth’ (Hymn I, 2). The Community of Israel says: ‘May he give me a kiss from his mouth.’ Why does it not say: ‘May he declare his love for me’? We are taught that it is because, by kissing, friends exchange spirits and in that way become a part, unite one with another. And that is why the kiss is placed on the mouth, the source of the spirit. When two friends’ spirits meet in a kiss, mouth to mouth, they do not leave one another ever again. Hence death with a kiss is so desirable. The soul receives a kiss from the world above (the divinity) and unites with the Blessed Holy One, nevermore to be parted. That is why the Community of Israel says: ‘May he give me a kiss with his mouth; its spirit unites with His and will never again be parted.’

20. See Haïm Zafrani, Littératures populaires et dialectales, pp. 164-84.

21. According to Derek Emet (marginal glosses in the Zohar, ed. De Wilna, 1895) this refers to the seven companions of the Zohar legend, symbols of the seven eyes that together watch over the world; see the end of the Idra de Nazir, fol. 144a.

22. Watching Alain Corneau’s film Nocturne indien I could not help comparing this idea from the Zohar with one of the episodes from the film. Talking to an Indian philosopher, the narrator refers to a character who said these words in the last moment of his life: ‘Give me my glasses.’

23. See Zohar I, 245a; III, 54b and 126b. See also M. Idel and R. Yehudah Halewa (1984) and his Safenat Pa’aneah, in Shalem, Year IV, Ben Zvi Institute, Jerusalem, pp. 131-4. In this unpublished work, which M. Idel briefly analyses here, we have the original opinion on this familiar theme from the kabbala of another Moroccan kabbalist, from Fes, who emigrated to Palestine in the first half of the 16th century.

24. Berakhotl8b.

25. Ibid.

26. ‘There are 903 ways of dying, the most painful and the hardest is dying by suffocation as caused by croup; the gentlest is the death that occurs with or via a kiss’ (Berakhot5a). People die peacefully or violently, each according to their desserts (see Mille ans de vie juive au Maroc, p. 97). Like many other just people, e.g. Aaron, Myriam and the patriarchs, Moses died with God’s kiss, according to an interpretation given to Numbers 33.38 and Deuteronomy 34.5 (Deuteronomy Rabbah XI, 10; Yalqut787 and Baba Bara 17a). In Muslim society it is said, in reference to the commentary on the Koran by Al-Baydawi (surah 79, 1), that ‘when a just person dies, the Angel of death… makes sure he takes their soul as one takes a drop of water out of a bucket’.