Marc Eliany's collection of tales is based on narrative traditions that he heard from his grandparents as a Jewish boy in the Moroccan city of Beni Mellal. The hero is Seha (better known by the nickname Juha) – a pseudohistorical figure, usually a trickster or a fool, highly popular in the folktales of the Arab world as early as the ninth century C.E. (Marzolph 2017; Alexander-Frizer 1999). The book contains twenty-seven chapters and forty-four stories and is divided into two parts: Tales of Seha the Sage and Tales of Seha the Clown. Each tale or tale cycle is prefaced by a short overview of the socio-historical context in which the story was told. These commentaries, together with Annette Fromm's short introduction and Eliany's detailed conclusion, bring to life the cultural climate of Morocco's Jewry in the first half of the twentieth century. This climate included popular beliefs and pilgrimages to the graves of holy men, neighborly relations as well as conflicts with the surrounding Arab society, and all the usual challenges of everyday life – at home and in the mellah (the Jewish quarter of a Moroccan city), on the road and in the fields, and even at the royal court. The book is ornamented with photographs of traditional clothes, religious articles, craftsmen, and so on, alongside Eliany's illustrations.

This is not the first collection of Jewish Moroccan tales about Juha. There have been other, partial compilations (e.g., Noy 1967; Elfassy 2002) as well more comprehensive ones (Koén-Sarano 2003). A wealth of Juha tales can also be found at the University of Haifa's Israel Folktale Archives (IFA), named in honor of Dov Noy. Moreover, Jewish Moroccan humor has received its share of attention from scholars, in studies such as those of Ben-Ami (1975), Alexander-Frizer (1999), Chetrit (2013), and Pinto-Abecasis (2014).

Nevertheless, Eliany's book offers a rich and, as far as I know, unusual repertoire of tales in which Juha appears not only as a trickster or fool, but as a Jewish holy man who comes to believers in disguise or in their dreams, even granting miracles to visitors at his grave. This is not an unknown aspect of the literary trickster, a figure known to function as a bridge between the sacred and the mundane; however, it is not common in Jewish folklore, nor is it typical of any of the other collections mentioned above. Seha the sage, as Eliany calls him, is found mainly in the religious-didactic legends that Eliany heard from his grandfather. By contrast, Seha the clown (who appears in the book's first part as well) is typical of the humorous, everyday novellas that Eliany's grandmother and great-grandmother used to recount. While the legends situate communal memory in a distinctly Jewish context, which Eliany emphasizes and expands on in his notes, the humorous novellas are more universal in nature, pointing to Juha's function as a cross-cultural hero. This lends support to scholarly claims that the choice and design of genres used by Jewish Moroccan storytellers bear a gendered significance and role (Bar-Itzhak and Shenhar 1993; Koén-Sarano 2003; Chetrit 2013).

According to Eliany’s conclusion, the many faces of the trickster and Seha's multiple incarnations (as both Jew and Muslim, sage and fool, advisor to the king and poor merchant, an agent of the historic and of the quotidian) are the products of a metamorphosis, and the fate of a tragic figure who suffers by virtue of his "otherness." But maybe this multiplicity could also be explained in a different way. According to Eliany, his grandfather and his grandfather's community stopped telling these stories when they emigrated to Israel in the middle of the twentieth century, turning instead to the heroes of the Bible and the rabbinic legends. In other words, Seha was a part of Jewish life in Morocco – the life of a poor, sometimes persecuted minority struggling to survive. It may be, as Eliany suggests, that Seha's freedom and his ability to overcome his enslavers from both within and without were a source of solace to this community. Another possible interpretation, inspired by Dina Stein's discussion (2019) of a different corpus of Jewish-Moroccan tales told in Israel, is that Seha's multiple identities constitute symbolic capital. This capital is based on the simultaneous affinity to both Morocco and Israel, to the royal court and to the mellah, to civic life and to religious life, to local tradition and to modern rationalism which trickled into Morocco after its occupation by France. This symbolic capital is as important to Eliany as it is to his grandfather. After all, the legacy of Jewish Moroccan culture in Israel has until recently suffered a "devaluation," as Eliany himself puts it. Through his Seha stories, he thus hopes to present and solidify the status of an ethnic tradition, rich in both its aesthetics and its morals, a tradition that has been pushed to the margins of the literary canon.

The difference between the many photographs that appear alongside the tales, images of everyday life among the Jews of Beni Mellal, and Eliany's later, abstract drawings of his memories remind us that the storytelling traditions found in the book have at least two "owners": Eliany's grandparents, who told him of Juha in their own language, and Eliany himself, who thinks back on the tales and tells them as he remembers them in English. Mediated by Eliany, Juha is not only instructive and entertaining, but is also a peacemaker – between nations, religions, genders, and social classes. The contrasts between the characters in Eliany's versions are more moderate than they are in the tales found in other corpuses, and his tolerant, humanistic values are also emphasized in the conclusion. And so, for example, in chapter 18 Eliany offers his own distinctive version of the well-known story of the rabbi and the sailor. This story, found in several Jewish Turkish and Moroccan versions at the IFA, and known to us from other collections as well, describes the conflict between a religious leader and a simple sailor during a storm at sea, when the practical knowledge of the sailor (i.e., his ability to swim) proves more useful than that of the rabbi. In Eliany's telling, the novella takes on the tone of a legend, since the role of the religious leader is played by Rabbi Haim Ben Atar, a well-known Moroccan rabbi. His conflict with the sailor (in this case, Seha) happens not during a random journey but in the course of Ben Atar's historic eighteenth-century travel to pre-state Israel. Thus, the story opens with an account of Moroccan Jewry's longing for the land of their ancient ancestor, and with their journeys there, on foot or riding on camels and donkeys, even before the State of Israel came into being. Given the context, the story cannot end as it does in other versions, with Seha – the sailor who can swim and thus survive a storm – gaining the upper hand. Instead, Eliany concludes his tale with Seha's realization that God watches over those who believe in him and will not let Ben Atar's boat sink. Thus, the storyteller imbues a well-known storytelling tradition with a distinct Jewish context and a new didactic role: to establish the status of the Jewish-Moroccan rabbi and to celebrate his contribution as both a religious and a national leader. Eliany expounds on the story's contemporary significance in his conclusion, claiming that the substantial contribution of Moroccan Jews to Jewish culture has not been recognized in Israeli society, represented in this story by Seha. This storytelling tradition is meant, therefore, to reflect on this cultural injustice and perhaps also to rectify it.

And so Seha continues to assume and shed his multiple forms in Eliany's memory as well. The stories, which have dwindled with time, are given new life and meaning, no less compelling and relevant than their previous incarnations.

Works Cited:

Alexander-Frizer, Tamar. 1999. The Beloved Friend-and-a-Half: Studies in Sephardic Folk-Literature. Jerusalem: Hebrew University, Magnes Press. (Hebrew)

Bar-Itzhak, Haya and Aliza Shenhar. 1993. Jewish Moroccan Folk Narratives from Israel. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Ben-Ami, Issachar. 1975. "Moroccan Jewish Humor". In his book Moroccan Jewry, 127-135. Jerusalem: Reuven Mas. (Hebrew)

Chetrit, Joseph. 2013. "Humor, Irony and Satire in the Proverbs of the Jews of Fes and Other Communities in Morocco: A Socio-Pragmatic Study". In Fes and Other Moroccan Cities, edited by Moshe Bar-Asher, Moshe Amar, Shimon Sharvit, 119-154. Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University. (Hebrew)

Elfassy, Yaakov. 2002. From the Alleyways of "The Melach": Folk tales of Moroccan Jewry. Jerusalem: Yarid Hasfarim. (Hebrew)

Koén-Sarano, 2003. Matilda. Folktales of Joha, Jewish Trickster. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society.

Marzolph, Ulrich. 2017. "Juḥā." In Encyclopaedia of Islam, 3rd ed., edited by Kate Fleet, Gudrun Krämer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, Everett Rowson, 139-141. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers.

Noy, Dov. 1967. Seventy Stories and a Story from the Jews of Morocco. Jerusalem: Bitfuzot Hagola. (Hebrew)

Pinto-Abecasis, Nina. 2014. The Peacock, the Ironed Man and the Half-Woman: Nicknames, Humor and Folklore in the Day-to-Day Speech of Tetuan's Haketia-Speaking Jews. Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Institute and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. (Hebrew)

Stein, Dina. 2019. "Diaspora and Nostalgia: Travelling Jewish Tales in the Mediterranean," Mediterranean Historical Review 34: 49-69.

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[Review length: 1302 words • Review posted on October 7, 2022]