In this episode of Hebrew Voices #238 - The Jewish Girl Who Died for Her Faith: Part 1, Nehemia speaks with history professor Dr. Sharon Vance about a 19th-century Moroccan Jewish girl who was murdered for her faith and explores the broader history of how Jews were treated under Muslim rule.

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Hebrew Voices #238 – The Jewish Girl Who Died for Her Faith: Part 1

You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Nehemia: When you call her a martyr in the title of your book, that’s how the Jews viewed her.

Sharon: Yes.

Nehemia: What did that mean to the Jews?

Sharon: That she died be’kiddush Hashem. She died sanctifying the name.

Nehemia: Which means what? For my audience, who may not be familiar with that terminology…

Sharon: Okay. So, that she died because she refused to convert, because she stayed faithful to her religion. And in a lot of the Jewish sources, she died while saying the Shema.

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Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I’m here today with Dr. Sharon Vance, who’s an associate professor at Northern Kentucky University, in the History and Geography Department, where she teaches courses in Middle Eastern and North African history, Jewish history, the Holocaust, history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, world history, and US history. She received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2005 from the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. After working on anti-Semitism in France, in colonial Algeria, her current research now focuses on anti-Semitism in the US. Some of her publications included… and there’s a bunch of publications here. We’ll put links on the website.

The one we’re going to talk about today is a book she wrote called The Martyrdom of a Moroccan Jewish Saint. And I heard about this relatively recently, and I was very surprised. I have a PhD in a field of Jewish studies, and I’d never heard of this person. I went to 12 years of Jewish school, day school, right? It wasn’t just the afternoon Hebrew school, and I’d never heard of this person. And there were Moroccan Jews in my school. I would imagine they might have heard of her, but I had not.

So, tell us about this Moroccan Jewish martyr. I hope I’m pronouncing her name right; Sol Hachuel? Or how do you say her last name?

Sharon: That’s okay. Sol Hachuel.

Nehemia: All right. So, tell us about Sol Hachuel.

Sharon: Okay. Well, she was born in Tangier, perhaps in 1817, and she was martyred in Fez in 1834, because her neighbor stated that she converted to Islam and she denied having converted. And so, she was first brought before the governor in Tangier, and then word got out that she was there and she was refusing, basically, to convert. And then the Sultan, who at the time was Mullah Abdul Rahman, demanded that she be brought to his court, where they tried to persuade her to convert, and she refused. And so, therefore, she was publicly executed by beheading in Fez in 1834. And she’s buried in the Jewish cemetery in Fez, and the book contains a photograph of her gravesite with a description on the tombstone of her.

Nehemia: So, I think we have to set some context for the audience here, because, let’s say she had converted to Islam and changed her mind; why would that get her executed in Fez in 1834? I feel like the general audience is missing a piece of the picture.

Sharon: Oh, yeah.

Nehemia: Especially coming from America. Like, how is this possible? You get executed because… Explain, please.

Sharon: Okay. So, a couple of things. There’s the fact that Jews had the status of dhimmah, which means they were a protected minority. So, they had autonomy within their community, but they were subordinate to Muslims, and that included subordinate to Islamic courts. So, for example, if there was a dispute between two Jews, it would stay within the Jewish court and the Jewish community. If there was a dispute between a Jew and a Muslim, it would go to Islamic courts, and Jews weren’t allowed to contradict Muslims. That was part of the subordination.

Nehemia: Subordination is a really big word. Give us a more, like, regular English word. What do you mean by that?

Sharon: Okay. So, that meant that there were restrictions. Jews were legally inferior to Muslims.

Nehemia: By law. They were legally inferior before the law.

Sharon: Yes, yes, yes.

Nehemia: I know we talk a lot in America about systemic racism. This is systemic; maybe it’s not based on race. It depends what Jews are, right? That’s complicated.