All dear unto God: Saints, pilgrimage and textual practice in Jewish Morocco.

Abstract

All Dear Unto God: Saints, Pilgrimage and Textual Practice in Jewish Morocco, is based on two years of ethnographic and archival research centered around annual pilgrimages to the shrines of deceased Jewish holy-men in Morocco. My approach to the these events combines: (1) a rich ethnographic account of pilgrimage as experienced by variously situated devotees with (2) sustained attention to ways in which shrine activity has been articulated with the historical forces of French colonialism, post-colonial nationalism, transnational capitalism, and Moroccan Jewish diaspora. The ethnographic core of my dissertation develops the argument, relatively absent in previous accounts of the phenomenon, that Moroccan Jewish hagiography and pilgrimage emerges as an extension of textual ideologies and practices that circumscribe Judaic experience in Morocco more generally. I demonstrate that saints and pilgrimage are situated within a phenomenology of Judaic torah in which sacred texts mediate an authoritative but open-ended domain of written and oral genres of production and transmission, mutually indexing liturgical practices, and shrine-based pilgrimage rituals. As such, my dissertation contributes to the anthropology of local religion, ritual experience, textual practice, and narrative performance. At a second level, my dissertation demonstrates the ways in which Moroccan Jewish pilgrimage has been represented and regulated in service of colonial, nationalist, and Jewish modernist projects. Specifically, I show how a range of colonial representations critically cast Moroccan Jewish pilgrimage as evidence of indigenous archaism, whereas post-colonial discourses have exploited the events as tourist attractions and celebrated pilgrimage as emblems of Moroccan national patrimony and Jewish cultural heritage. Finally, I argue that the hagiographic narratives and ritual performances creatively mediate contemporary Moroccan Jewish social transformations related to gender hierarchy, diasporic identity, and global capitalism. Rather than exploring pilgrimages only as sites for the expression of religious community, I attend to the competing forms of social hierarchy and identity that emerge and are displayed by Moroccan Jews who arrive at shrines from throughout Morocco and the Moroccan Jewish disaspora.