While Alexi Weingrod titled his book The Saint of Beersheba, he spends much of the text describing, discussing, and analyzing hillula. The word hillula is Aramaic and specifically refers to a wedding celebration (Weingrod 11). However, as Weingrod makes clear, the hillula plays a much greater role in Middle Eastern Jewish life than merely celebrating weddings. The elements of the hillula that I found to be particularly relevant to modern life were the prominence of women at the hillula and the ethnic tones of the event.
During the hillula, women gather together to “eat and drink together, joke and gossip, and sing traditional melodies in a loud, vibrant, exclusively female chorus” (Weingrod 80). The women form their own groups, separate from the men, where they may be boisterous and outgoing and release their pent-up tensions and frustrations. With the exception of the she-demon Aisha Qandisha, women have received little attention in this course, likely because women in traditional Jewish and Muslim communities do not participate in public religious life as much as men do, due to the way in which these societies often function.
In addition to the role of gender in the hillula, Weingrod writes also on the role of ethnicity, saying that it is a “ceremony of ethnic renewel” (81). The hillula provides an event and location where people of the same ethnicity gather together and display and embrace the culture that they share, which in the case of Rabbi Chouri’s hillula, is entirely Tunisian or Moroccan. The hillula demonstrates the strength of North Africans within Israeli society, and it allows the Tunisian and Moroccan immigrants (and/or their children) to define themselves as such, rather than as simply Israelis.
By offering an alternate form of expression for the women in attendance and by reinforcing ethnic identities, the hillula goes far beyond being a mere festival or celebration. It becomes a defining part of North African culture in Israel.
