Journal of Women of the Middle East and the Islamic World 10 (2012) 37–58 brill.nl/hawwa Space and Place: North African Jewish Widows in Late-Ottoman Palestine* Michal Ben Ya’akov Efrata College of Education Jerusalem, Israel
[email protected] Abstract During the nineteenth century, the number of Jews in Jerusalem soared, including Jews in the North African Jewish community, which witnessed a significant growth spurt. Within the Jewish community, the number of widows, both young and old, was significant— approximately one-third of all adult Jews. This paper focuses on the spatial organization and residential patterns of Maghrebi Jewish widows and their social significance in nineteenth-century Jerusalem. Although many widows lived with their families, for other widows, without family in the city, living with family was not an option and they lived alone. By sharing rented quarters with other widows, some sought companionship as well as to ease the financial burden; others had to rely on communal support in shelters and endowed rooms. Each of these solutions reflected communal and religious norms regarding women in general, and widows in particular, ranging from marginalization and rejection to sincere concern and action. Keywords Widows, Jews, North African Jews, Moroccan Jews, Palestine, Jerusalem In the nineteenth century, an enormous number of Jewish widows— approximately one-third of all adult Jews—lived in Palestine. This social and demographic phenomenon was characteristic of the Jewish communi- ties in the Holy Land for several centuries,1 with the proportion of Ashkenazi * Work for this study was undertaken with the generous support of the Hadassah Research Institute on Jewish Women at Brandeis University and the Maurice Amado Research Fund from UCLA.