The Oufran "Letters of Tzaddikim Burials": Cross-Translations between Charms, Epitaphs, and Historiography

In this article, I focus on two themes connected to the Jewish community of the southern Moroccan town of Oufran and its place within conceptions of Moroccan Jewishness and Jewish Moroccanness. The first theme is the story of Oufran’s burned martyrs—ha-nisrafim in Hebrew—and the second, the topos of this community’s antiquity. I analyze the intertextual creation, circulation, evolution, and use of the stories of Oufran by Jews, Muslims, and French-Christian colonial agents and discuss how these stories derive from and have sustained Judeo-Muslim imaginings and shared experiences. I also claim that Oufran’s story and history are deeply affected by “translations” between different realms of knowledge.