Street studies Moroccan -Jewish culture from Sharia to popular practices

Two new volumes, issued in the Hebrew language, are interested in the double culture of Moroccan Jews and its transformation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Youssef Street, a professor of maturity at the Haifa University of occupied Palestine.

This book is concerned with jurisprudence, magic and folklore in the common thought between the Moroccan Jewish sects, in two centuries, a radical transformation with the entry of colonialism, and the change of patterns of living economically and socially.

The new book includes, according to its presentation, “an examination of the double culture of the Jewish Moroccans in the past two centuries, which is nutritious with biblical culture and popular culture”, where the rabbinical culture was in the first part of “nourishing and being managed by a small intellectual elite that was responsible for studying and applying the Halakhi law and its principles, at all levels of community life, and was conducted in writing and orally in the Hebrew language And the local Jewish language. ”

While “in contrast to that”, in a second slit, “The True Culture is more than ninety percent of the members of society, and was almost orally transferred in the Arabic Jewish or Spanish Jewish language,” which is a culture that combines the observance of the commandments of Jewish law and the principles of Jewish faith, with the belief in the supernatural powers of magical nature, such as demons and magic, which contradicts the spirit. ‘Al -Halakhah’ (Sharia).

The new author also stands at the “creative” side in popular culture, such as “creating auspicious celebrations as a festive system”, in addition to religious celebrations.

However, the two volumes are not limited to studying what was, but rather “the transformations that have occurred on the popular culture of Moroccan Jews in the modern era, from the mid -nineteenth century to the end of French protection on Morocco.”

These transformations included “the spread of modern education, the growth of Hebrew education, and the establishment of the first Zionist societies before the era of protection with a new political awareness and the growth of a new identity”, and in light of the foreign colonial rule, “a relative economic prosperity arose, collapsed in World War II, social and cultural transformations, including the adoption of European lifestyles and consumption, the establishment of a Jewish civil society in central societies, Arab and French Jews, and the development of an Arab Jewish theater, “which studies the new version some of its models.