Widows, Smugglers and Caravans: Tracking the Commodity Chain of North African Torah Scrolls

• In Event: Sephardic & Mizrahi Vernacular Religion and Scholarship

Abstract

From the once-vibrant centers of Jewish life in North Africa, little remains of everyday religious and commercial practice. The Jews of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya have scattered across the Mediterranean basin, carrying with them their Torah scrolls as key objects of ritual and memory that facilitate communal worship when congregations chant from them. The scroll is not a musical instrument precisely, but like an instrument, it is a key conduit through which communal music-making takes place in the synagogue. In the mystical traditions of Morocco (KABBALAH), chanting from the Torah scroll is like standing at Sinai, re-enacting Revelation in the day-to-day. In new diasporic surroundings, North African scrolls are venerated, chanted from and collected by uprooted North African Jewish communities in France, but also by synagogues that have adopted the scrolls, and by museums that wish to adopt Jewish culture as part of their patrimony and, increasingly, by Evangelical organizations that incorporate biblical originalism into a politicized worldview. This paper tracks the complete commodity chain of a Torah scroll originating in North Africa, from the woman who commissions the scroll in lieu of progeny, to the merchant who sources raw materials in the Sahara, to the tanner who treats the animal hide, to the synagogue that uses the scroll, to the Baptist Seminary that displays it for ostensibly educational purposes. Throughout transmission across this commodity chain over continents and across centuries, the conception of the blessings (BARAKA) bestowed by the scroll is articulated in widely varying vocabulary, and the tracing of these relationships connects with linear narratives of nation and patrimony, as well as alternative histories of exile and alienation. Centering the full chain of transmission for Judaism’s holiest object, we consider North African Torah scrolls through the lenses of trade, Revelation and religious syncretism, and how the scroll disrupts the fixity of categories it encounters.

Author

• Ilana Webster-Kogen, SOAS University of London