Funerary, Burial, and Mourning Practices and Lines of Rhymed Prose Make It His Longest Funerary, Burial, and Work

82 funerary, burial, and mourning practices and lines of rhymed prose make it his longest Funerary, Burial, and work. *Ḥanukka-nāma (The Book of Hanukah), Mourning Practices his other long narrative, is an account of the Maccabees’ successful military campaign against the Seleucid dynasty in the second In the Talmud and the Midrash, death and century B.C.E. The extant manuscript copies birth are viewed as parallel processes, and are incomplete; in the introduction, however, the way a person died and the day of the Ben Samuel expresses his desire to continue death were thought to be significant as good in the tradition, begun by *Shāhīn in the or bad omens for the deceased. Many of the fourteenth century and *ʾImrānī in the fif- death, burial, and mourning customs of the teenth to sixteenth centuries, of composing Jews of the Islamic world were closer than versified Judeo-Persian versions of biblical their Ashkenazi counterparts to the practices and other narratives. He was unaware that in of talmudic times. Jewish custom everywhere 1524 ʿImrānī had in fact composed Ẓafar- insists on prompt burial as a matter of respect nāma (The Book of Victory), a versified ren- for the dead, and this is considered to be the dering of the First Book of the Maccabees). duty of the heirs and the entire community. Most of Ben Samuel’s Hebrew composi- The departure of the soul (Heb. neshama) tions were hymns (Heb. piyyutiṃ ) emulating makes the body impure, which means that it the style of the Jewish poets of medieval has to be purified before the burial. Many Spain. He also wrote a prose commentary on Jewish communities under Islam believed *Solomon ibn Gabirol’s liturgical poem that one’s death day (Ar. ajal) was fixed at *Sheteṛ ʿAlay be-ʾEdim ve-Qinyan, tradition- birth, an idea common in Muslim theology. ally read on the eve of the Day of Atonement, The rituals surrounding death, as with birth and a versified commentary to the introduc- and marriage, were based on the halakha, but tion of the same author’s Azharot (Heb. in some places were combined with local Admonitions), hymns expounding the 613 Arabo-Berber and Muslim *folklore and positive and negative commandments. *magic. In other places, such as *Kurdistan, as the anthropologist Erich Brauer noted, Bibliography Jews “have taken over scarcely anything from Abraham ben Ḥasday, Ben ha-Melekh veha- the death customs of the people around Nazir, ed. Abraham M. Haberman (Tel Aviv: them, so that their death customs remain Mosad Harav Kook, 1950). fundamentally Jewish” (Brauer, p. 190). The Azharot leha-Gaʾon R. Yi sḥ ̣aq ben Reʾuven ha- obligatory laws of burial and mourning sym- Niqra Albar seloni;̣ kolel Azharot leha-Gaʾon bolize the fact that all people, irrespective of Shelomo ben Gabirol (Jerusalem: Sifriya ha- socioeconomic status, are equal at the time of Sefaradit, Mekhon Bene Yisakhar, 1992). burial and during the mourning period. Benyahu, Meir. “Meshorerim u-Mepazmenim However, despite the fact that their earthly be-Paras u-be-Bukhara be-Meʾa ha-Shevʾa ʿEsreh,” lives had ended, the hierarchical division Sinai 87 (1980): 135–149. between men and *women remained as dif- Ḥakham, Shimʾon. Sefer Sharḥ Shāhzadah va ferentiated as ever. Most Jewish books of the Sūfị̄ (Jerusalem: S. Ḥakham, 1907). ill and the dead (Heb. holiṃ u-metim) in the Yasharpour, Dalia. “Elīšaʾ ben Šemūel’s Šahzādeh East (and also in the West) make no special va Sūfī:̣ The Judeo-Persian Adaptation of the reference to women’s death and burial, for Buddha Biographies” (Ph.D. diss., University women were excluded from many of the of California, 2005). public manifestations of religion because of the centrality of the patriarchal-gendered Dalia Yasharpour worldview. EEJIW_BatchJIW_Batch 22_1-145.indd_1-145.indd 8282 88/7/2009/7/2009 22:45:18:45:18 PPMM funerary, burial, and mourning practices 83 In Jewish communities, as in many other part of the ḥevra qadisha (sacred society; societies, the symbols and metaphors for Maghrebi Jud.-Ar. al-ḥebra; Neo-Aram. ḥav- death express the passage from the material rāye), which also included the grave-diggers to the spiritual through the use of images of and those who carried body. The ḥevra rebirth and the resurrection of the dead into qadisha was a basic charitable society in a new world where there is both spiritual and every Jewish community. Women members material compensation. Funeral ceremonies of the society heated the water for the wash- provide the living with a ritual of departure ing and sewed the burial clothes. In Iranian from the dead, and the ritual treatment of the and Afghan cities only the corpses of upper- body by relatives suggests a halfway situation class Jewish men were purified with water for the deceased, who is located between the scented with roses, myrtle, and other flowers two worlds. An example is the washing of the and herbs. In *Iran, a venerable and pious body and the use of perfuming materials, all individual received a “great washing” (Heb. typical of life, as opposed to the sealing of the reḥisạ gedola) that included many prayers body’s orifices. and more elaborate washing. In Kurdistan, if the deceased was a youth or a maiden, Preparation for Burial betrothal songs would be sung by women as Preparing the body for burial had three the body was washed. major stages: (2) Dressing. The body was dressed in (1) Washing and ritual purification t( aharạ ). burial clothing (Heb. takhrikhim), the style The body was stripped of clothing and cov- of which varied in different times and places. ered with a sheet, then thoroughly cleansed According to *Cairo Geniza documents, the of dirt. All jewelry was removed and then the profound reverence for the sanctity of the body was purified with water. It was custom- Sabbath found its expression in the wish to ary in Jewish communities under Islam for be buried in one’s Sabbath clothing. Consid- the body to be placed on the ground in the ering the attitudes toward nakedness, cloth- deceased’s house and covered with a sheet ing the dead body in several layers of until the purification. In *Tunisia a loaf of garments, including undergarments, but with bread or a piece of bread and a nail were put no jewelry was common among Jews and on the body. In Kurdistan a piece of iron was Muslims alike. Jewish men of higher status placed on it. Several customs were intended were buried in two cloaks, three robes, a to frighten the evil spirits, such as breaking washed turban of fine linen, new underdraw- an earthenware jar in front of the house of ers, and a new waistband?, all from the the deceased, pouring out water from the deceased man’s possessions. If the dead man house, and lighting a candle or an oil lamp belonged to the lower middle class, the cloth- (Ar. qandīl). Candles were also customarily ing was commonly a tunic, two robes, a lit at the head and foot of the body. In *Yemen cloak, and a scarf which also covered a large the shofar was blown several times and all part of the body. Wuḥsha, a successful and the windows and doors in the deceased’s independent Jewish businesswoman (late room were opened, with no one entering 11th–early 12th century), ordered for her until the departure of the neshama. burial a dabīqī (fine linen) robe, a mulāʾa The bodies of both women and men were (cloak), a talī (very fine linen) skullcap, a purified by laying them out on a wood plank wimple, a dabīqī kerchief, a veil, and a Tustari or a stone slab and washing them with per- kisāʾ (cloak) (Goitein, vol. 4, p. 188). The fumes, soap, rose water, or orange water. This corpses of both sexes were wrapped in white was done by members of the society of wash- sheets, and white strips (Ar. kafan or madraj) ers (Heb. ḥevrat roḥasiṃ , Ar. ghassālin, Pers. were used to tie the bodies. Shrouds were morde shūrhā and morde shūyhā) of the same a part of women’s trousseaux in upper- sex as the deceased. The ḥevrat roḥsiṃ was a class families in the Middle Ages, and their EEJIW_BatchJIW_Batch 22_1-145.indd_1-145.indd 8383 88/7/2009/7/2009 22:45:19:45:19 PPMM 84 funerary, burial, and mourning practices decoration was similar to that of the wedding communities sons were not allowed to par- dress. Linen shrouds served as protection ticipate in their father’s funeral. The funeral against the evil eye and magic in some com- procession in Libya used to pass through the munities, and the remainders of rabbis’ synagogue, where the Qaddish prayer was shrouds were used by women to sew amulets said. In Yemen the mourners walked bare- for their children. In Judeo-Maghrebi soci- foot during the funeral procession and wore ety, the various items of clothing were usu- a black taliṭ . In both Yemen and *Baghdad, a ally made of linen or cotton fabric, and men’s *piyyut ̣by *Ibn Gabirol, Shokhne batte ḥomer corpses were dressed in them in a precise lamma tisʾu ʿayin (O dwellers of homes of order: the headdress (Jud.-Ar. ʿaraqiyya), clay, why do you raise your eye?), was trousers (Ar. sirwāl), an undergarment (Jud.- chanted as the body was brought into the Ar. qemizza), jacket (Jud.-Ar. qssot), head- graveyard. In Iran, dirges were sung in the band (Jud.-Ar. ʿ amāma), ritual prayer shawl funeral procession, and the anthropologist (Heb. taliṭ ) with the fringes often removed, Laurence Loeb observed in *Shiraz that “if and overcoat (Jud.-Ar.

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