116 r Juliette Hassine
have turned out differently if the matter had been treated with discretion?
We can never know. There are no grounds for the claim that the family’s
activity caused the publicity. One may claim that from the moment the
witnesses testified that Sol was an apostate Muslim, the matter became
public, and within the Moroccan context of 1834, such publicity served
to warn others, viz., death is the appropriate treatment for apostates from
Islam. Discretion, therefore, was not in Islam’s interest or in the interest
of the young Jewess.
The authors of the piyyutim about Sol, who were leading rabbis in Fez at
that time, saw the sultan as the highest authority, capable of saving the
young Jewess from a bitter end. In their opinion, if the sultan refused
to postpone the death sentence indefinitely after an unjust trial, it was
because of arbitrariness and cruelty and not because of loyalty and com-
mitment to the laws of Islam.
In Hayyim Haliwa’s piyyut about Sol, the Muslims who tortured and
condemned her to death are characterized as lions and bears, members
of a false religion, unclean water, sexually perverted, brave as dogs and
Datan and Aviram, who rebelled against Moses.^20
The sultan’s servants and advisors and the sultan himself are described
in a somber way without any restraint or fear, for these texts were only
comprehensible to the Jews and were passed from hand to hand within
the community. Rabbi Shmuel Elbaz in his Shimekha yah qiddesha (Your
Name, Almighty, she sanctified) describes how she was brought to the
sultan’s palace in Fez:
To the criminal city
She was sent with zeal
To lie among the uncircumcised
Where she would forget God’s service.”לעיר הפלילים / שלחה בחמדה
תשכב בין ערלים / שם תשכח עבודה^21Rabbi Elbaz, a resident of Fez at the time, called the town in which the
sultan lived a “criminal city.”
In this context, focusing on the relations between Jews and Muslims in
Morocco in 1834, we would like to bring attention to another salient point