Writing Against Loss

Writing Against Loss:Moroccan Jewish Book Culture in a Time of Disaster Yigal S. Nizri (bio) The walled Mellah (Jewish Quarter) in the Medina of Sefrou was destroyed by water from the seasonal river (Oued) Aggaï on Friday, May 16, 1890, in an overnight flood that killed over ninety people and also caused significant property damage. According to the report of Moïse Nahon, a teacher at the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU) school in Fez, the total number of victims was revealed only on the following day: about 50 Jews and 40 Muslims had lost their lives. By Sunday, May 18, Nahon sent an urgent telegram to the AIU president in Paris: "The small town of Sefrou, located twenty kilometers south-east of Fez, was flooded on Sabbath by a sudden overflow of the river that runs through it. A considerable number of houses and shops were carried away." This disaster, he added, "has left most of our unfortunate coreligionists living in Sefrou in utter destitution." According to Nahon: The river accumulated a massive amount of water, mainly due to snow melting, and carried branches of trees, leaves, rocks, and sand. Soon, all this debris clogged the little opening of the walls of the town. The water amassed behind the fortification walls, and when it reached the top, it destroyed the wall and gushed with overwhelming violence through the unfortunate little town. In Sefrou, where various tributaries of the river surround many homes, houses were swamped from within and without. [End Page 91] Taken by surprise, before these poor inhabitants realized what was happening, they were besieged from all sides by water and rubble. Those who could found refuge immediately in the high terraces. Those whom the swiftness of the flood did not allow enough time to leave their basements, perished miserably. The majority of those who survived remained in profound misery. The water devoured a lot of the supplies of flour, wine, mahia (eau-de-vie), and butter. The Jews of Sefrou are actively involved in the trade of olive oil, and since it was the season of collecting the oil from the presses, they had large quantities of oil in the Mellah. It was all carried away with the flood. The Arabs plundered the stores of Jews that survived the flood. The unfortunate Jews have cried in vain from the roofs of their houses where they took refuge; no one came to stop the looters.1 This traumatic event in Sefrou led an eyewitness by the name of Raphael Aharon Ben Shimon (1847–1928) to contemplate the unpredictability of history and the fragility of the human condition. Ben Shimon, a rabbinical emissary and a manuscript enthusiast who traveled from Jerusalem to his native Morocco in the late nineteenth century, had been in Sefrou that moonless night. Although their hotel was located in the area that was severely flooded, Ben Shimon and his companions were attending Friday night service at a synagogue located in the upper part of the Mellah at the time and were therefore saved. Ben Shimon later offered an eyewitness testimony to the deadly flood in his introduction to Et Lechol Hefets [A time for every purpose (Alexandria, 1893)], the first printed collection of piyutim (liturgical poetry) by Yaacoub ibn Zur (1673–1752). Several weeks after the flood devastated the Jewish quarter in Sefrou, Yaacoub ibn Zur's descendant, Shlomo ibn Zur, had asked Ben Shimon to write about that day in detail—to commemorate the miracle of their survival of the flood. It was Shlomo ibn Zur who funded the printing of the liturgical book. Thickly described in a first-person account, the flood scene was thus memorialized in a collection of piyutim originally written in a different city (Fez) some 150 years earlier by a different author. According to Ben Shimon, the small group of men who gathered in the synagogue to pray that evening felt "fear, anxiety, and an awful horror" due to the noise that came out of the roof pipes. "The sound of the rains roared like heaven's thunder," he recalled, pointing out that, "in most of the roofs, pipes have joined together, from one roof-corner to another

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