The Wave of Persecution That Put Moses in Moroccan Haggadahs

In the standard seder liturgy, Moses—the apparent protagonist of the exodus narrative—goes unmentioned, with his name appearing not once. But Jewish communities from Morocco and Western Algeria traditionally add a text in Judeo-Arabic near the beginning of the Haggadah that makes extensive mention of the biblical prophet. Joseph Chetrit explains why:

As can be discerned from the Arabic language of the two versions discussed here, the text about Moses was formulated at the end of the 13th or the beginning of the 14th century. . . . It seems [therefore] that the return of the figure of Moses and his role in the exodus story came at a time when the Jewish communities in Morocco and other lands of North Africa and Andalusia (Muslim Spain) were allowed to return to open practice of their Judaism at the end of the 13th century under the rulers of the first Marinid sultanate. The connection is a dramatic and even tragic event of long duration that nearly destroyed all the North African and Andalusian communities at the beginning of the reign of the fundamentalist Muslim Almohad caliphate.

During the Almohad persecutions (ca. 1121–1269), Jews were forcibly converted to Islam en masse, and authorities did their best to stamp out every trace of Jewish practice, even as many of these apostates clung to their ancestral faith in secret—in an adumbration of what would happen two centuries later in Christian Spain. This experience, Chetrit writes, would shape the practices of these Jews’ descendants after the Almohad dynasty collapsed and many conversions were reversed:

The hidden Jews saw their return to Judaism as a second exodus from Egypt. Moreover, because of the forced Muslim education they received, and the Muslim sermons they were forced to hear in the mosques, the central figure etched in the minds of the converted Jews was the figure of the prophet Mohammad, who has always been at the center of Islamic worship and belief. The community leaders who sought to restore Jewish life and Jewish consciousness among the survivors of the apostasy needed to obliviate the image of the prophet of Islam and counter it with a central Jewish figure that would overshadow it.

Hence their need for the image of Moses. . . . From the end of the 13th century and through the 14th century, the image of Moses appeared in other Judeo-Arabic poems and texts that were at the core of the Judeo-Arabic culture and poetry that developed from that time among Moroccan Jewry and until the community’s dispersal in the third quarter of the 20th century.

Recordings of the recitation of the text can be found at the link below.

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More about: Anti-Semitism, Conversion, Haggadah, Moroccan Jewry, Muslim-Jewish relations

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

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More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF