💙🧿🪬⛰️⚡️📜🇲🇦✡️

Shavuot begins Sunday at sunset. It’s one of my favorite holidays.

This is a Shavuot song from the Moroccan Sephardic tradition.

In December of 2021, I learned that I am Sephardic on my father’s side.

In September of 2023, I came to Morocco as a Fulbright scholar to explore Haketia and the Moroccan Sephardic Women’s Romancero.

Contrary to popular propaganda, the holocaust was not limited to Germany and Poland. It expanded throughout Europe and beyond.

Around 90% of the 77,000 Jews in Greece were slaughtered, for one example.

Jews were targeted in countries as far flung as Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, Iraq, Japan, and China.

In 1940, The Nazis were conquering territories left and right. After France fell, the Vichy regime, in collaboration with the Nazi Party, came for the 250,000 Jews of Morocco.

Sultan Mohammed V refused their demands. He responded, “There are no Jews in Morocco. There are only Moroccans.”

He continued to piss off the Vichy—they were livid at the sight of rabbis and other Jews in the royal court. He refused to meet with the Nazis, full stop. He said, “I absolutely do not approve of the new antisemitic laws, and I refuse to associate myself with a measure I disagree with. I reiterate as I did in the past that the Jews are under my protection, and I reject any distinction that should be made among my people.”

Today, there are about 1,000 Jews in Morocco.

Of that small number, an infinitesmally smaller number remembers the songs. They are women in their 80s. They are the ones who never left. I am very honored to have been taught these songs from these precious few.

Though I am no singer, and though my heart is heavy with grief in our broken world (as well as outsized apportions of shame and fear), I am a humble and fallible keeper…of a Jewish life in a Muslim kingdom, of this history, of these memories, of these songs.

There is much more to say.

Shabbat Shalom.

Shavuot Sameach.