Is it at all possible to discuss the concept of Mediterranean
identity without falling into the trap of futile cliches and heavy
romanticism? What is it that in many ways seems to make the
silhouette of this unpopulated mass of water as tangible as that of
any patch of solid land in the world? Why does its very name evoke
associations of sensuality, pleasure, even indulgence, even though
God, the Goddess and all the gods know that over the ages it has
witnessed more than its share of toil and suffering?
For me these questions presented themselves anew when, at the end
of May 1994, a women's conference on cooperation in the
Mediterranean region convened in Marrakesh, hosted by the European
Community and King Hassan of Morocco. Some two hundred women
participated from all the countries of the Mediterranean Sea,
excluding Syria and Libya and with the addition of Jordan and
Mauritania, which strictly speaking do not reach the sea. On the
agenda was cooperation between women in the spheres of
parliamentarism, economy, non-governmental organizations (NGO's),
culture and communications.
The core group of the conference was composed of parliamentarians
from all the countries, including one Israeli minister, Shulamit
Aloni, and five Knesset members from Labor, Meretz and Hadash. The
Palestinian delegation was headed by Ambassador Leila Shahid and
PNC member Mayada Abbasi. I was fortunate enough to be added to the
Israeli delegation at the last moment as representative of Reshet,
the Israeli women's peace net.
Our two active and sizeable delegations, the Israeli and the
Palestinian, also embodied the long-time cooperation of women from
the two peoples. This had gone on continuously in spite of acts of
violence by individuals and organizations from both sides and
notwithstanding the protracted mutual lack of recognition of our
political establishments, including the law prohibiting meetings of
Israelis with PLO members.
Now, in the era of our peace process, other political problems in
the region seemed to cry out more desperately: how can one forget
the Algerian woman who told us of the pain suffered by the women of
her country when the very world they had won in blood and toil
during the years of the Revolution was threatened by fundamentalist
terrorism (it was rumored that by her very presence at the
conference, especially with Israelis present, she was endangering
her life); or the words of the daughter of the President of Bosnia
on the suffering of women in her country as victims of ethnic
cleansing and unrestrained sexual brutality; or the echoes of the
strife between Greeks and Turks? Far as we felt from a satisfactory
solution to our conflict, after the Oslo and Cairo Agreements we
could see some light at the end of the tunnel. In a way, we had a
message of hope to share with others.
We had arrived in Marrakesh via Paris (half a day of European
sunshine and affluence) and the Casablanca airport, worthy in its
design of the most magnificent Thousand and One Night folk tales.
At the foot of the central Atlas Mountains, Marrakesh is a tasteful
combination of old and new, of ancient and modern, thus perfect as
a sort of time-and-space machine, for which I was to use it. Though
I had never actually visited it, my journey to Marrakesh turned out
to be a trip back to a place where I had been before in a certain
sense.
The first of our three afternoons was free. We, a group of five
Israeli women, were fascinated by the charms of the so uk and got
seriously entangled in its labyrinth of silver, wool, silk and
leather. Then we asked our friendly guides and security personnel
to show us the old Jewish quarter, the mellah. Jews no longer
inhabit its narrow alleys, most having left the country or moved to
more comfortable parts of the town. Fatima's hand, the Hamsa, is
imprinted in bright colors on the walls. Spice shops also exhibit
dry chameleons and hedgehogs; thinking of the famous lines of
Shakespeare's witches, one wonders whether they are used for magic
or simply eaten.
A young boy guided us to the synagogue where we were shown around
by an old Muslim keeper. The building and furnishings enjoyed good
maintenance and we were told that the place was in frequent use.
Then on in the burning sun to the Jewish cemetery. The old man
pointed proudly to an elaborate structure of woodwork and stucco in
which one of the leaders of the community had found eternal
rest.
For myself, however, I was fascinated by two other tombstones. One
covered the earthly remains of Rabbi Yehuda Aturki, deceased in the
late 1950s, who had been blessed with a revelation of the prophet
Elijah. The other bore the name of Rabbi Pinhas Khalifa Ha-Cohen
(the Priest) Azug, great-grandson of Rabbi David Ben Baruch. I
recalled having seen Rabbi David's name on one of the two alms
boxes on the synagogue wall - the other bore the name of Rabbi
Amram Ben Diwan, one of the most renowned holy men of Moroccan
Jewry. But then Rabbi Pinhas was a long-standing acquaintance of
mine. I did not quite believe it when I saw that the year of his
death was 1952.
In this very same year Avraham Lugasi, formerly of the townlet of
Asni and now a resident of Kiryat Gat, immigrated from Morocco to
Israel. Lugasi is the master of all the narrators - storytellers -
that I have been privileged to meet and hear throughout my career
as a folklorist. In my very first year of teaching at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem (1971-72), I also taught once a week at the
Ben-Gurion University of Beersheva. It was there that I was
fortunate enough to have as one of my students David Lugasi, and
when I assigned the students as field work the recording of
narratives from the oral tradition, he presented the following two
stories from his father Avraham.
The first tale is of a miracle which occurred about forty years
earlier. The Rabbi was accustomed to visit the villages and
townlets near the Atlas Mountains to collect donations from the
Jews for the poor and the Yeshiva students. He would make the trip
to each village every four years, staying at the house of one of
the distinguished Jews. One village would inform the neighboring
villagers of the visit, so that a number of people would serve as a
delegation to welcome the Rabbi. This would continue until his
return to Marrakesh.
In Asni the name of the Rabbi's host was Yaish. His spacious house
was always open to the poor. Everyone was welcome. Years passed and
the head of the family died. His sons divided up the property he
had left. Some of the sons left the village while others remained
but they became impoverished.
When the time came for the Rabbi's visit, the villagers prepared
for him to stay not with the usual now poor family, but with a
distinguished family who could look after him well. The former
family did not oppose this, knowing that as they now had nothing,
their economic position didn't enable them to receive the holy
visitor properly.
The reception committee informed the Rabbi that he would be hosted
by a different family. But the Rabbi refused and demanded to stay
in the same house. The delegation tried to convince him that the
material situation of the family had completely deteriorated since
the death of the father. It was to no avail and the Rabbi insisted
on staying in the same place. In the end they were forced to
explain that even the new head of the family, the son of the
deceased, had agreed to the honorable Rabbi staying with the other
family because it would be beneath the Rabbi's dignity to stay with
him. The Rabbi responded that with God's help, everything would
work out.
On arriving in the village, the Rabbi went to the usual house, to
find that they had everything they needed, just as in the days of
the late head of the house. He informed the delegation of their
error, with the new head of the family listening. The latter
recounted what had occurred the day before the visit of the
respected Rabbi.
"Yesterday at night time", he said, "an Arab came to Asni bringing
with him the best of everything. He entered my house and said that
everything he had with him was now mine. Amazed, I asked him to
explain further: I had never seen this Arab in my life so why
should he give me all that he had brought with him? The Arab
started to explain that his late father had done business with my
father." "When he died and left me all his property, I knew that
part of it belonged to your father. However, I didn't intend to
return it. The day before yesterday I had a dream in which my
father appeared and shouted at me: 'How can you behave this way,
living from assets which don't belong to you? Beware, if you
continue on this way, you will be punished.'
Next day my mother told me that in the village of Asni eighty
kilometers from here, there is a Jew who traded with my late
father. I couldn't calm down and took two sheep, dates, currants,
butter, honey etc. and decided to go and find your village. After
riding for thirty-six hours I found it. I am grateful to Allah that
I arrived safely and paid my debt, thus honoring my father's
behest."
Among the Jews of the village the story spread, and some of them,
being merchants, brought it to other neighboring villages as well.
It even reached the big cities of Morocco. Naturally this miracle
was attributed to our worthy Rabbi Pinhas. The second miracle
occurred during the same visit by Rabbi Pinhas Cohen to the same
village. After morning prayers on the day following his arrival,
the Rabbi asked for fresh cows' milk. His host and also his
neighbors told him that they didn't have cows and it would be
necessary to travel to the next village to get milk. The Rabbi
asked why this was so when he could see with his own eyes that a
Gentile woman nearby had a cow, which would provide the milk.
However, the host replied that this cow was dangerous. Nobody could
get near her, never mind milk her. The Rabbi responded that by the
holy Torah all will be well." Moreover, so that the miracle of the
milk will be augmented, your small son will milk the cow."
When the boy went and asked the Gentile for the chance to milk the
cow, she began to laugh, remarking that he knows the cow doesn't
let anyone approach her. He at once told her of the miracles
wrought by the Rabbi and that from now on he himself would milk the
cow, and the animal's behavior would change.
He went up to the cow fearlessly, milked her and gave the milk to
the Rabbi. All those present including the Gentile woman saw the
great miracle performed by the pious Rabbi and acknowledged his
greatness. From that day on, she began to relate better to the Jews
and made a yearly donation to the Rabbi.
These two stories provide only slight indications of the
extraordinarily rich repertoire of narratives of various genres in
which Lugasi excelled. I have recorded some hundreds of texts from
this treasury, some of which were published with scholarly
annotations. He has appeared before hundreds, perhaps thousands, of
students and teachers both in person and through video-tapes. In
spite of his appearances in the press and on the radio, I have not
succeeded in making his stories as well-known and popular as they
deserve.
Most of Lugasi's narratives recall not the pious atmosphere of
worshipping holy men, but rather the exotic plots of a Thousand and
One Nights. There are cursed bridegrooms in the shape of snakes and
maidens enchanted into becoming birds. The women in these tales are
active and enterprising, with an ability to solve all riddles and
pose insoluble ones. There are magicians who can fool everyone
except the clever young son, with whom the magician's daughter is
in love. "In the whole world there is nothing like this", Lugasi
would say when he wanted to emphasize the beauty of one of his
heroines or the splendor of an expensive object belonging to one of
his heroes. These residents of his wondrous and distant kingdom
were conjured by Lugasi into the confines of a modest immigrant's
house in Kiryat Gat.
In the first years of our working together I used to dream at night
of the stories which he had recited during the day. I became a
stowaway passenger on journeys through the ocean of his stories.
They featured cities like Seville and Granada, introduced into his
tales by the mysterious paths that stories take, perhaps by Jewish
exiles from Spain or French merchants crossing the sea southwards.
These places which I was not to see until years later, became
scenes for my dreams of anguish as well as of pleasure. Little did
I then know that slowly I may have been collecting building blocks
for the future construction of my Mediterranean identity.
Post-modern analysis might call this de-territorialization. My
soul, hungry for identity, welcomed the fictitious intruders. Born
in Helsinki on the shores of the Baltic Sea, which freezes over in
winter, I thirsted for warm streams to match my primordial
temperature, never really afar with my beloved Nordic climate.
Being an immigrant to multi-cultural Israel from Finland was
exotic, but it involved belonging to no one cultural collective
identity, neither Polish nor Russian nor Sephardi nor Iraqi nor
Moroccan nor Arab.
Pure fascination with the novelty was soon tempered by adaptation
to the controlling mechanisms of academic study. Rather than
dreaming, I started writing scholarly articles. Maybe herein lies
the secret of my postponing the work with Lugasi's texts, although
others, perhaps less deserving, have been completed. I, whose
identity had been the object of invasion, became the subject who
narrated and gave meaning to the heroes and heroines of folk tales.
Since then, my methodology has grown into a dialogue with folk
literature and its creators. The peace dialogue between Israelis
and Palestinians has taught me much, but that is another
story.
On the first evening of the conference, my table at the gala dinner
included a woman from Gabes, in Tunisia, a city whose Jewish
women's folk culture has lately been the subject of dialogic
research which I am doing along with a Jewish woman from Jerusalem
born there. Another woman at the table was a feminist,
anti-fundamentalist Palestinian poet from Jordan. When I answered
her question as to where I was born, she said, "Why did you have to
come and throw us out when you were born in such a beautiful and
rich country?" I did not feel that the technical answer, that "I
only arrived in 1957, long after you had been thrown out", bore any
relevance to the discussion. For the moment, she lives in Amman, I
in Jerusalem - we have to acknowledge the pain and the
dispossession and start from there.
To my right sat a delightful Moroccan woman who saw it as her
responsibility to explain to her guests the origin of the tunes
played and sung incessantly throughout the three hours of the
dinner by an all male ensemble. "This is Berber, this is Arab, this
is Andalusian, this is French and this is Jewish." Through her I
began to understand the perspective of Jewish culture as one which
has fertilized in the rich melange of Moroccan civilization
together with African, European and Mediterranean cultures. I
sensed Morocco as straddling from Africa, from which it had been
partly disconnected by the Sahara, toward the southern coast of
that very sea in whose honor we were feasting in such a magnificent
meal of Tagine and Couscous and other delicacies.
It was not by chance that the great Orientalist Shlomo Dov Goitein
coined the phrase "Mediterranean Society" as the heading for his
mighty research project which was based on Jewish texts in Hebrew,
Arabic and other languages (there are even a few texts in Yiddish),
found in the Geniza (storeroom) of the ancient Cairo synagogue.
Most of these texts are not song, prayer or philosophy but everyday
texts reflecting life in the past as dynamic events interacting
between social, legal, economic and family subjects.
Long after the Romans lost for ever the right to call the
Mediterranean mare nostrum, our sea, this wonderful sea continued
to serve as the sea of the Jews whose places of residence encircled
it on every side. This was so since the wanderings which the same
Romans forced upon them nearly 2,000 years ago and increasingly so
after their expulsion from the prosperous co-existence mainly with
the Muslims in Spain more than 500 years ago. The expulsion of the
Jews from Spain was one of the outstanding indications of the
struggle conducted from the northern side of the Mediterranean
against the expansion of the culture to the south of it.
I eagerly told my neighbor Ms. Eskalli about my discovery at the
Jewish cemetery the same day, and about Lugasi. "Would you like to
go to Asni?" "What do you mean 'like'?" I replied. "It has
literally been my dream for many years". Ms. Eskalli confessed that
she was a high official in the Ministry of Tourism and could
arrange a car and a guide.
Next day, with the permission of the head of our delegation two of
us left the deliberations for a few hours and departed with
security men and a specialist-guide for the spectacular Atlas
Mountains. The vast geography of the country was inscribed in
hundreds of kilometers of road signs pointing to Agadir on the West
Coast. But we were looking for the smaller sign to Asni. We got
there for the Souk Samedi for it was Saturday. I remembered
Lugasi's description of the weekly market to which people brought
their merchandise from near and afar. I was intrigued by the
question of whether in the past the market was held on Saturday and
if so, how did the Jews fit in. Now, there are no Jews in
Asni.
On our last afternoon (of three) in Marrakesh, we were taken to
Gama'at E-Fna, the Place of Nothingness. A local guide fluent in
some six languages told us of a tradition that the place was once
the site of executions. It is part of Morocco's lovable softness,
complexity, richness and humor ¬which I had also found in
Lugasi's narratives - that the name Place of Nothingness is given
to a place which every day at sunset becomes the scene of
Everythingness. Before a crowd mainly of local people along with
some tourists, every genre, mode and form of folk creativity is
presented, including folk theatre with children and adult actors,
snake charmers, singers and orchestras. Then there are the
storytellers, who stop in the middle of a tale to collect their
fees, giving an idea of the genesis of the tale form used in the
Thousand and One Nights: the audience is manipulated to stay on
through postponing the gratification which comes with the end of
the tale.
The conference appears to have been more successful than we could
have expected. Networks of cooperation were initiated, material
exchanged, addresses listed, projects planned. In sessions on
culture, the great civilizations of the past - Greek, Italian,
Israelite, Arab, Spanish, Turkish and others, along with their
particular feminine cults, were commemorated. We tried to envisage
a Mediterranean built not on hierarchy but on grassroots
cooperation. (The conference declaration is to be found on p. 109
of the Journal).
The same complex relations between the South and the North of the
Mediterranean now occupy a central position in the discussion, in
which the European Community stretches out its hand warmly and
generously to the women of the Mediterranean, offering support and
involvement in our affairs. We for our part demanded assistance to
joint projects in the Mediterranean region, without the Community
forcing upon us a "Eurocratic" presence.
Israeli women were welcomed as equals in the Mediterranean
community.
For the first time in 2,000 years, as we Israelis often say. Our
presence personified both the great possibilities now opening up
since the Oslo Agreement and the feeling of alienation still latent
in Israel's relations with the Arab world. A Palestinian friend and
colleague from outside the country expressed her surprise that we
Israelis are indeed sliding into the Arab world. "I am still
somewhat against it, but probably in a few months I will feel
differently." In-sha-Allah.
Is the Mediterranean region currently a cultural and political
framework of real significance for us? Does my personal experience
of association with the Mediterranean tales of a Moroccan
story-teller indicate something deeper than academic romanticism,
perhaps on the lines of the folk-tales of the Grimm brothers, but
two hundred years late? After the Marrakesh Conference, one senses
that there may after all be a positive answer to these questions.
At all events they deserve consideration.
I recall lines from a poem I wrote long ago called "The
Mediterranean",
The waves of the Atlantic
in the depths of the Mediterranean
have forgotten
their oceanic origin.
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