The Story is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground

By an odd chain of events, I'm realizing my childhood dream of becoming Indiana Jones.  No motorcycles or gunfights with Germans yet (I'm watching you Julian.  No sudden movements.), but this past week I joined in a French-led archaeological expedition at the Jewish cemetery in Tunis.  At the synagogue last Saturday, some French-Tunisian and French-French Jews were visiting.  Chatting over stiff drinks in a religious space, an activity that is rapidly becoming far too common for me, they asked what I study and why I'm in Tunis.  After telling them my interests and what I'm doing here, one told me that he is a historian of Tunisian Judaism.  In fact, he literally wrote the book on Tunisian Judaism and its identity crisis during the last century, stuck between assimilation and Zionism.


Their visit to Tunis wasn't just for fun; they were leading a team of historians, art historians, archaeologists, and architects in recording and restoring the Jewish cemetery on Rue du Kheireddin Pasha outside Tunis's center.  They invited me to join their team.  I was a little bit speechless.  Imagine playing some sport on a playground and some professional athlete of that sport invited you to play with him and his professional athlete friends.  Well, this is the nerd equivalent of that.

An overgrown path in the cemetery

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Day 1: I'm pretty sure that's just Jesus


On the first day of restoring/recording the cemetery, a group of Tunisian Jews came to visit the tomb of a famous rabbi (from the 1700s, I believe).  His grave had been relocated from the old Jewish cemetery, which was urban renewal'd into a park near La Passage and Place Republique, to the "new" one  from the 1800s, which we are now excavating.  According to the legend, the rabbi performed miracles, cured diseases, and received visits from people across the country who wanted to pray with him. He said he could not die, so when he, y'now, died, on his tomb his followers wrote "lo met", which my rudimentary Hebrew (really just Arabic with an accent) tells me means "did not die."


I didn't have the heart to tell them that there's a whole religion based around a rabbi who performed miracles in the Middle East and didn't, but quite possibly did, die, and may or may not have remained dead.

Pilgrims at the Rabbi's grave lighting candles, eating trail mix, and drinking aquavit

Day 2: When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that's a mitzvah


As I wheeled a wheelbarrow (in Arabic, barriweel) filled with brooms, trowels, toothbrushes, and acid towards the section of the cemetery on which we were beginning on Monday, one of the leaders of the project, whose grandparents emigrated from Tunisia to France, lamented the state of the area.  "It is a great tragedy that the community left here hasn't taken better care of it.  It will make it easy for the government to annex the land when they want it.  It is a great mitzvah what we are doing."


The second day followed the first, with digging, scrubbing, and brushing a century of dirt and refuse off of the stones.  It is a great lesson in humility to clean a grave with a toothbrush.  It's humiliating in the positive sense of the word.  One might ponder the questions of life, the universe, and everything.  However, in my case, it made me realize that in my rush out the door at the crack of dawn, I had forgotten to brush my teeth.  Brushing old stones with a toothbrush for a few hours perhaps was Jewish-karma getting me back.


Just before I left to go study Arabic in the afternoon, we found a very damaged, but quite interesting grave.  It was one of the few we've seen in Italian (most are in Judeo-Arabic, Hebrew, or French).  The man's name was Aron Bdusa, and he died in the late 1800s.  Working in the graveyard has brought to light so much about Tunisia's diverse and polyglot Jewish community.  In addition to Berber and Arab converts to Judaism who had lived in Tunisia for centuries, Tunisia received refugees from the Reconquista in 1492 (with names like Perez and Castro), expulsions from Italy and France, and even secondary immigration from the Ottoman Empire (including one family named Constantini, not a common Jewish surname. and Stambouli, which is a bit more common).



Day 3: Live Long and Cohen


Over the course of the project, I learned a few things about Tunisian Jewish funerary decoration.  Along with  classical frames, Ottoman decorative styles, and symbolic decorations like broken columns and fallen trees for those who suffered violent deaths, on the graves of all Kohanim (which interestingly, is related to the Arabic word for priest, kahin), are a pair of hands in benediction position.  I watched a great deal of Star Trek as a kid, so I knew this better as the Vulcan greeting.  A little bit of homework revealed that Leonard Nimoy was raised in Orthodox Judaism, and thus, my world was rocked.  [Shatner is Jewish too, but we all know that he was far inferior to Patrick Stewart in his command of the Enterprise.]

May the Lord bless you and guard you

May the Lord make his face shine upon you and be gracious unto you

May the Lord lift up his face onto you and give you peace

- The Priestly Blessing

Live long and prosper.

-The Vulcan Benediction

Day 4: I want to ride my bi-cy-cle

While wandering the cemetery to catch my breath, I found a broken tablet with a curious carving.  The man who lay beneath died young, only 22 at his death in 1907.  Across the top of his tombstone was a turn-of-the-century bicycle.  Marc speculated it was possibly the instrument of his death, as we had previously seen guns and knives on the graves of murder victims.  Is it a fixie?

Day 5: Why did Constantinople get the works? 


We found many signs of Tunisia's place in the Ottoman Empire and the intra-Mediterranean contact of the Jewish community.  In addition to names like Constantini and Stambouli, decorations included Ottoman-style rose engravings, mosque motifs, and even a star and crescent.

Ottoman Rose and Dove bearing a leaf that reads "Mordechai"

Star and Crescent

Day 6: Allah the ladies in the house say yeah.


Our final day was a bit easier than the rest of the week.  We had finished the oldest section of the cemetery, which featured long poetic inscriptions and more intricate designs, and we had begun work on the less-decorated women's tombs.  


It struck me that no matter how big the Jewish community once was, and some estimates put its pre-war zenith at 80,000, I kept seeing the same dozen names like Bismuth, Perez, Maarek, and Lumbroso.  In the women's division, we found graves that connected those families.  In a hundred years, a vibrant community had become just a bunch of tomb stones.  A ghost.


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On the 7th day, I rested.



What I heard time and time again from all involved was not that this was some sort of sectarian project, but rather that it was Tunisian history and deserved preservation.  In addition to the French and Tunisian-French Jewish academics on the team were several Muslim Tunisian professors and students of history, preservation, and Hebrew.  The guardians of both the Jewish and Christian cemeteries of Tunis are a Muslim family who have taken care of them for a few hundred years.  


I don't think Tunisia's Jewish community or the other Jewish communities of the Middle East and North Africa were ever the happy-fun-diverstravaganzas that some might claim, but the fact remains that Arab Muslims and Jews lived side-by-side in close communities for hundreds, and sometimes more than a thousand years (with institutional biases like jizya and dhimmi, but not the communal enmity and pogroms that were so prevalent in Europe).  Only the last century of British and French meddling in these regions has really changed that. I have a political agenda as much as anyone else, but it's really heartbreaking to histories and memories erased in favor of a more combative narrative that makes conflict seem inevitable.  When the question of Israel/Palestine is brought up, people both in the West and here fall back to old platitudes about age-old enmities.  "They've been killing each other for thousands of years" and so forth.  When Likud and Hamas agree on something, maybe that should be a red flag that they're just trying to rile people up to hatred.

I think what excited me so much about this project and the people with whom I worked was their pluralism, diversity, and openness.  I didn't have to feign religiousity in order to take part; I could just be myself and believe what I believe.  Reading old things remains an exciting experience for me, which is a good thing with six or more years of grad school upcoming.  While my reading material usually comes in printed form, having to dig it up was incredibly thrilling.  I love history because I love stories, and trying to piece together a person's life from their grave stone was a challenge and a joy.  And it forced me to buckle down and learn a bit of Hebrew finally.

[A few notes: I didn't even think about the zombie implications over digging up a cemetery until the 4th day on the project, but while I'm on the topic, "zombie outbreak on an archaeological dig" is an excellent film premise.  There are so many incredible things I learned this week that didn't make it into this post like about this guy and the Jews who fled to Malta and became British soldiers.  Finally, for my own thoughts on the matter, I uploaded my cover of John Prine's "Please Don't Bury Me" at drop.io/tedssongs.]