De tu boca a los cielos: Jewish women's songs in Northern Morocco as Oracles of Communal Holiness
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This study focuses on the intrinsic relationship between Jewish women’s songs in Haketía, Moroccan Judeo-spanish and the internal communal structuring relating to tribal family lineages in Morocco’s Sephardic community. This chapter will demonstrate how women’s songs and their messages serve as active nuclei in the dynamic of preservation, transmission and survival of Jewish communities in Morocco. The survival of physical and spiritual lineages are ensured by protecting the group’s tahara, ritual purity. Only through the preservation of tahara can holiness be ensured to the next generations. In Morocco, the community’s holiness as a whole depends in great measure on women’s physical and spiritual behavior. This has been ensured for generations by various mechanisms of control regarding women’s sexuality. The concept of women’s responsibility for holiness and the consequences for not adhering to these principles permeate through the narratives of romances, wedding songs and newly composed satyrical coplas. This chapter links these women’s songs in the vernacular to Talmudic teachings which stress the primordial concern of Jewish communities throughout the world: maintaining the community’s spiritual lineage intact while living as a cultural and religious minority.