Paroles affables: Proverbes judéo-marocains sur l’hospitalité et l’amitié (Gracious Words: Judeo-Moroccan Proverbs on Hospitality and Friendship) is the second volume in a series devoted to the proverbs of Moroccan Jews. Since 1978, Joseph Chetrit, himself a Moroccan Jew and an emeritus professor of linguistics at Haifa University, has recorded over 7,000 proverbs from increasingly elderly informants now living in Israel, France, and Canada who were born into families across Morocco and spent their childhoods in various communities there. This excellent book is an invaluable contribution to the study of Arab popular culture, particularly in Jewish North Africa, and it will also be important to scholars of Jewish studies, oral literature, linguistic anthropology, and folklore/folklife.

The first section of the book presents proverbs on hospitality, and the shorter second section presents proverbs on friendship. In all, 540 proverbs are presented without commentary in three languages: French, Judeo-Arabic, and Hebrew. The French translation comes at the top. The Judeo-Arabic original is then presented in three different scripts: International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), which uses mostly Latin characters; Arabic script; and Hebrew script. A Hebrew translation follows. [1] Judeo-Arabic is the variety of colloquial Arabic spoken in Jewish communities, in a similar way that Yiddish is a variety of German. Moroccan varieties of Judeo-Arabic are easily understood by speakers of Colloquial Moroccan Arabic, also known as Darija.

Each proverb also identifies the speaker’s origin. This might already be evident to someone well trained in reading IPA who can discern regional variation in the pronunciation of colloquial Moroccan Arabic. In the prologue to volume 1, Chetrit (2014) identified informants who came from Taroudant—“Tar” in the text—as the source of the greatest number of proverbs, followed by Rissani and other Tafilalet communities (Taf), Meknes (Mek), Sefrou (Sef), Fes (Fes), Oujda (Ouj), Casablanca (Casa), Essaouira (Ess), El Kelaa des Sraghna (Qal’a), and Marrakech (Mar). The book is well laid-out and presented, and its greatest strength resides in the good humor and wisdom of its source material.

The proverbs are grouped under common themes: Guests who Linger, Guests who Drop In, etc. For example, under Hospitality and Its Paradoxes: “If you invite a dog, he’ll answer that he doesn’t have the time” (53) and “The cat might not have a place to sleep, but he’s already invited a camel as a house guest” (56). There is plenty of wry humor! Under The Etiquette of Guests: “Guests remember only their last meal” (78). In a saying that reveals the importance of knowledge of Islamic hadith among this minority group, “Even the Prophet’s hospitality lasted only for three days” (80).

Occasionally, the translation suffers a bit. For example, “To enter a house causes inconvenience; leaving doubles the inconvenience” (82). This is my translation of “Entrer dans une maison occasionne une gêne; en sortir, c'est une double gêne,” glossing gêne to imply inconvenience or bother. The Arabic phrase—“dkhul al-dar ‘ar wa khrujha ‘arayn” (“entering the house is a shame, and leaving it is two shames”)—shows the key word to be ‘ar, which is stronger than gene in meaning. In fact, ‘ar literally means “shame,” but it’s one of those untranslatable words heavy with meaning for Moroccan spiritual practice, which anthropologists since Westermarck have translated as “conditional curse”—an attempt to manipulate God or the spirits into meeting one’s requests or demands.

Of course, reading a proverb out of context is not the same as hearing it used by a wise and adept elderly woman as she is instructing a younger family member (most of Chetrit’s informants are women). In the previous volume (Chetrit 2014), Chetrit himself notes the shortcoming inherent in any attempt to take the living context, where the “natural performance” of the proverb took place, and transform it into a “frozen mini-text” that gives the proverb an “autonomous and seemingly disembodied character” (2014: 21). In other words, we should view each mini-text in these books as indexing a living, contextualized speech performance that can be fully understood only after studying the concrete situation of the performance.

The most glaring shortcoming of this 2015 volume is that it lacks an adequate introduction. The first volume in the series, Paroles exquises: Proverbes judeo-marocains sur la vie et la famille (Exquisite Words: Judeo-Moroccan Proverbs on Life and the Family) (Chetrit 2014), has introductory material that is far superior to that of the 2015 volume. In the 2014 edition’s seven-page prologue, Chetrit explains his larger mission of gathering and documenting proverbs as well as his methods. In a 24-page essay, Chetrit demonstrates how the use of Moroccan Arabic helps immigrants cope better with the stresses of living in a new country. Moreover, within such discourse, proverbs are inserted in subtle and sophisticated ways to create and manipulate meanings. A deftly applied proverb can prove its wisdom, puncture self-righteousness, curb excessive behavior, or expand on the significance of someone’s actions. Proverbs are a key means of preserving social norms and values (Chetrit 2014: 19-43).

Overall, Chetrit must be lauded for documenting and preserving the speech of ordinary Moroccan Jews, whose numbers in Morocco have dwindled from a peak of around 400,000 in 1940 to just a few thousand in 2012. The book will be of most use to scholars, who will be able to fill in the cultural details necessary to explain why a proverb is particularly witty or profound. Additionally, ordinary Moroccans, Judeo-Moroccans, and their descendants will find this book to be a great resource as they seek to reconstruct a world that has largely disappeared.

[1] I cannot read Hebrew script. My thanks to Hila Hillary Katz, Jewish Agency Israel Fellow at the Beerman Jewish Student Center in Oxford, Ohio, for confirming the details concerning the Hebrew script.

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[Review length: 948 words • Review posted on December 1, 2016]