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. 1 From the sixteenth century on, literary references abound attesting to the overwhelm- ing number of widows in the Holy Cities, and numerous listings of widows on charity lists for these periods have survived. As such, references to widows have been noted in research © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012 DOI: 10.1163/156920812X627731 38 M. B. Ya’akov / HAWWA 10 (2012) 37–58 widows from Europe similar to that of Sephardi widows from the greater Mediterranean Basin. Many of these women were widowed long after arriving in Palestine as girls or young married women. Older widows migrated together with the families of their married sons and daughters. Others arrived individually or in small groups.2 Major changes in both geographical location, as the result of migration, and in family status, as the result of widowhood, present unique circumstances for studying the character of women in traditional society and their reformulations of social relationships and societal constraints on space. As such, the changing land- scape of late-Ottoman Jerusalem, with its ever-increasing and diversifying Jewish population due to migration, as well as its perceived spiritual quali- ties of being the Holy Land, created propitious opportunities for redefin- ing, re-imagining, and relocating physical and social identities, particularly for women and, most significantly, for widows. In this paper I focus on the spatial organization of Maghrebi, North African Jewish widows in late-Ottoman Palestine, and its social signifi- cance. These widows who settled in the Holy Cities of Jerusalem, Safed, and Tiberias had the opportunity and the challenge of relocating them- selves in their new communities, both geographically and socially. The vast majority of these women did not immigrate to Palestine for material gain on the various periods, but their lives are only now being examined in depth. For examples, see Jacob Barnai, “The Names of Jews in Jerusalem (1760–1763),”Cathedra 72 (1994), 163–168 [Hebrew]; Ruth Lamdan, A Separate People: Jewish Women in Palestine, Syria and Egypt in the Sixteenth Century (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2000), 196–201; Uziel O. Schmelz, “Some Demographic Peculiarities of the Jews of Jerusalem in the Nineteenth Century,” in Moshe Ma’oz (ed.), Studies on Palestine During the Ottoman Period ( Jerusalem: Magnes and Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1975), 131–136 et passim. On Ashkenazi widows in nineteenth- century Jerusalem, see Margalit Shilo, Princess or Prisoner? Jewish Women in Jerusalem, 1840–1914 (transl. by David Louvish), (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2005), 186– 190 et passim. 2 The differential patterns of migration for men and for women settling in the Holy Land are beyond the scope of this article. For a discussion of this topic, see Michal Ben Ya’akov, “Women’s Aliyah: Migration Patterns of North African Jewish Women to Eretz Israel in the Nineteenth Century”, in: Ruth Kark, Margalit Shilo and Galit Hasan-Rokem Eds.), Jewish Women in Pre-State Israel: Life History, Politics and Culture (Brandeis Univer- sity Press and University Press of New England, 2008); idem, “Aliyah in the Lives of North African Jewish Widows: The Realization of a Dream or a Solution to a Problem?”Nashim 9 (Fall 2004): 5–24. For a discussion of distinct characteristics of Ashkenazi women migrat- ing to the Holy Land, see Margalit Shilo, “Self-sacrifice, National-historical Identity and Self-denial: The Experience of Jewish Immigrant Women in Jerusalem, 1840–1914,” Women’s History Review 11, no. 2 (2002): 201–229..