Women, Tradition, and Leadership

Songs. Ladino song was mainly a women's repertoire. Women sang long ballads called romances while nursing, rocking babies, cooking, and sewing; in Morocco, girls sang them on courtyard swings. Wedding songs are the largest group, and women also sang birth songs and laments called endechas. In Ottoman lands, a lead wedding singer called the cantadera was joined by women playing tambourines. In Arabic speaking lands, women sang Judeo Arabic wedding songs such as the Moroccan “Abyadi Ana,” and in Baghdad women once played the drums at henna celebrations.

Healing and protection. Among Ottoman Sephardic families, women performed home rituals to prevent and cure illness, including remedies against mal ojo, the evil eye, and espanto, fright. They used herbs, oil, and sugar, a practice that scholars Isaac Jack Lévy and Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt describe as “sweetening the spirits.” These customs complemented the prayers men led in the synagogue.

Lifecycle. Ottoman Sephardic families welcomed baby girls at home with a ceremony called las fadas or la fijola, whose blessing names heroines such as Miriam and Queen Esther. At funerals, some Ottoman Sephardic communities hired women mourners who sang laments.

The tree and the web

In an essay for JIMENA's journal Distinctions, scholar Vanessa Paloma Elbaz describes two ways Sephardic culture survived centuries of dispersal. “The tree” is knowledge handed down through family lines and the synagogue. “The web” is knowledge shared through homes, gatherings, and women's songs and proverbs.

Her sound archive, KHOYA, records Moroccan Jewish elders with special attention to women's oral traditions. She notes that the division is not strict: women take part in the tree, and men in the web.

Rosh Chodesh, the new month

Jewish tradition has long linked the start of each Hebrew month with women. The Jerusalem Talmud records women's custom of not working on Rosh Chodesh, and a midrash explains it as a reward for the women who refused to give their jewelry to make the golden calf. Since the 1970s, Rosh Chodesh women's groups have spread widely. Two Sephardic and Mizrahi women's celebrations fall on Rosh Chodesh.

Chag HaBanot (North Africa)

The “Festival of the Daughters,” Eid al Banat in Judeo Arabic, falls on Rosh Chodesh Tevet, during Hanukkah. Best preserved in Tunisia and Djerba, it was also known in Libya, Algeria, Morocco, Istanbul, and Thessaloniki. Women lit the candles, gathered, sang, and refrained from work; mothers gave daughters gifts, and women who had quarreled made peace.

Bsisa (Tunisia and Libya)

On Rosh Chodesh Nisan, two weeks before Passover, families gather around a bowl of grain, date honey, almonds, and spices. The head of the household, traditionally the mother, turns the house key in the mixture, and a blessing is said in Judeo Arabic. The mother then blesses each family member.

Leil Purim (Kurdistan)

On the eve of Purim, Jewish women in Zakho, Amedi, and other towns gathered by the river. Mothers bathed their daughters so they would be as beautiful and brave as Queen Esther, and women sang wedding songs, danced, and decorated one another with henna. The custom continued until the mid twentieth century. Its surviving descriptions were written by outside ethnographers, not by the women themselves.

Doña Gracia Nasi (about 1510 to 1569)

Born in Portugal to a family forced to convert to Christianity, she ran her family's great trading firm and used its wealth to help other conversos escape the Inquisition. She lived openly as a Jew in Ferrara, then settled in Constantinople, where she founded a yeshiva and a synagogue. The famous Ferrara Bible of 1553 was dedicated to her.

Asenath Barzani (about 1590 to 1670)

Her father, a Kurdish rabbi, founded a yeshiva in Mosul. She taught its students, and after her husband's death she headed the yeshiva. Her surviving letters show mastery of Talmud, Midrash, and Kabbalah. She is often called the first woman rabbi, though she was not formally ordained, and many legends grew around her.

Zohra El Fassia (1905 to 1994)

Born in Sefrou, Morocco, she was a master of malhun, sung Moroccan poetry, and made records from the 1930s. She sang at the royal palace for Mohammed V. After settling in Israel in the 1960s she never regained her fame, but her recording of the henna song “Abyadi Ana” survives, and Israeli artists recorded a tribute to her in 2016.

Flory Jagoda (1923 to 2021)

Born in Sarajevo, she lost much of her family in the Holocaust and brought their Ladino songs to the United States. She composed new songs too, including the Hanukkah favorite “Ocho Kandelikas” (1983), and became a National Heritage Fellow in 2002. She is often called the “nona,” or grandmother, of Ladino song.

Schools for girls. Before modern times, many Jewish girls in the region learned at home from their mothers; records of girls' schooling are scarce. In the late 1800s the Alliance Israélite Universelle, a French Jewish organization, opened schools for girls as well as boys, from Morocco to Iraq. By 1872 women were teaching for the Alliance, often far from home in cities such as Fez, Tripoli, Alexandria, and Rhodes. Historian Frances Malino describes how these teachers championed girls' literacy and worked against child marriage.

Mizrahi feminism. In Israel in the 1990s, Mizrahi women within the feminist movement began to organize on their own, holding their first Mizrahi feminist conference in 1995. Scholars and activists in this movement study how gender, ethnic background, class, and immigration shape women's lives, and work to recover Mizrahi women's history and heritage. One leading figure was criminologist and filmmaker Vicki Shiran (1947 to 2004), born in Cairo. Participants hold a wide range of political and religious views. JIMENA explores these themes in its guide Chag HaBanot and Mizrahi Feminism.

Common misconceptions

• “Women had little role in religious life.” Women led home ceremonies such as Bsisa, kept songs and prayers alive, and in some cases taught Torah.
• “Asenath Barzani was ordained.” She taught and led a yeshiva, but “first woman rabbi” is a modern description, not a formal title.
• “‘Ocho Kandelikas’ is an ancient folk song.” Flory Jagoda wrote it in 1983.
• “Rosh Chodesh for women is new.” Modern groups began in the 1970s, but the custom is recorded in the Jerusalem Talmud.

In the public school classroom

• Compare women's roles as keepers of family tradition across many cultures, including students' own.
• Read short biographies of Doña Gracia Nasi and Asenath Barzani, and place them on a world timeline.
• Listen to Ladino and Judeo Arabic songs by women such as Flory Jagoda and Zohra El Fassia, and discuss how songs carry history.
• Describe customs such as Bsisa or Chag HaBanot; do not hold a ceremony or have students light candles or recite blessings.

In Jewish schools and communities

• Celebrate Chag HaBanot during Hanukkah, or hold a Rosh Chodesh gathering that honors women in students' families.
• Read Osnat and Her Dove with young children and study Asenath Barzani's letters with older students.
• Use the Sephardi & Mizrahi Education Toolkit to weave women's stories into the school year.

At home and with family

• Ask the women in your family: What songs did your mother sing? Which recipes or blessings came from her?
• Record a grandmother or aunt singing or telling a story, and share it with JIMENA's oral history project.
• Write down family remedies, sayings, and customs, with who taught them.

Watch and listen

Read

From Distinctions, JIMENA's journal

Explore online

From JIMENA