382 maria couroucli
for a very long time before entering the church, where they light a candle and
eventually kiss the saint’s icon before they are ushered to the exit on the opposite side.
Since the early 2000s the pilgrim trail has become more constrained: with larger
crowds present the day of the festival, visitors are allowed inside the church just long
enough to light a candle and walk through to the exit, and the holy fountain is now
out of bounds (Couroucli, 2012a).
The third contemporary ethnographic example comes from Morrocco, where
Henk Driessen worked in the 1970s. He writes about the legend of Rabbi Saadia,
belonging to the lore of the Jews of Melilla, whose forebears constituted the small
Jewish communities of the eastern Rif (Driessen, 1992: 80–82). The historical point
of reference is the 1490 s, when Jews were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula. The
legend is about a learned and pious Rabbi, Saadia ed-Dati, who fled from Spain by
boat together with six other rabbis and their families. They were shipwrecked but
finally reached the shore and started searching for a place to settle. They arrived at
Farkat, a Berber village near Nador. Rabbi Saadia tried to offer his services to the Jews
of nearby Melilla but they declined. So he returned to Farkat where he fell ill from an
epidemic disease. Dressed in a shroud, he lay down in his tomb and awaited death. He
told the villagers that there would be a tempest and that a huge rock would cover his
tomb after his death. One night, a huge rock was indeed brought down by a storm
upon his tomb and people believed it had been sent from heaven. Rabbi Saadia has
been venerated as a holy man and a patron saint of the Jews of the eastern Rif and of
the Melilla Jews since the 1860 s. He is also venerated by Berber villagers, who come
to pray and ask for his help for healing illnesses.
The many pilgrims came from often distant places to put themselves under his
protection. They kneeled in front of the rock, kissed it, lighted candles, read parts from
the Talmud and made gifts to the mqaddim. Muslim pilgrims mainly came to the
shrine because of the rabbi’s reputation to heal fever (of animals included). They tied
pieces of cloth to the branches of the carob tree. The Muslim mqaddim who acts as
the servant (“slave”) of the rabbi, a hereditary office that belongs to his lineage since
the rabbi’s miraculous death, is also the owner of the plot on which the shrine is
located. (Driessen, 2012: 142–143)Cosmopolitanism and “multiculturalism”The populations involved in sharing holy places, on both the eastern and western shores
of the Mediterranean, belong to all three monotheistic religions—Judaism, Christianity
and Islam—while the time-span runs from late antiquity to modern times, especially
at sites along the south-eastern shores of the Mediterranean. Often situated in past or
present frontier zones, these shared sacred places also reflect the ways in which
religious boundaries have shaped cultural and political entities. Like other syncretic
practices, they are evidence of intercultural transactions such as accommodation,
appropriation or indigenization (adoption of local, indigenous ways) (Stewart,
1999: 55). The examples above show that grassroots ethnographic observation of
shared sacred places and ritual practices associated with them reveals that they primar-
ily concern local populations who do not consider their ritual ways either as exclusive
or as involving actual mixing of faiths. Local actors acknowledge and welcome the