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14 • Sol Hachuel, “Heroine of the Nineteenth Century” Gender, the Jewish Question, and Colonial Discourse Sharon Vance The execution in 1834 of Sol Hachuel, a young Jewish girl from Tangier, generated a great deal of attention and was the subject of numerous literary works and at least one French painting (Alfred Dehodencq, L’exécution de la Juive, 1852).1 Sol, or Suleika, as she was also known, was written about both in Jewish and European languages.2 There are two texts that can be considered primary historical sources because they rely on testimony from Sol’s family. They are­ Eugenio María Romero, El martirio de la joven Hachuel ó la heroína hebrea, and M. Rey, Souvenirs d’un voyage au Maroc. Except for these two books, most of the texts considered here were not based on primary sources and do not reflect the perspective of Sol’s family or her community. They should also not be interpreted as historically accurate accounts of Sol’s martyrdom.3 The Suleika texts I focus on here were selected for the light they shed on nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­ century European discourses surrounding gender, the role of the Church and the nature of government, the “Jewish Question,” representations of Muslims, and colonialism. Sometimes these issues are treated separately and at other times they intersect and overlap, as in gendered representations of Jews and Muslims in French and Spanish literature and in travel writing about Morocco.4 Yet all reflect the discursive worlds in which they were created. Suleika Texts and Contexts Most versions of Sol’s story begin when she was a teenager. The Jewish texts either play down or do not mention discord in the Hachuel household. All the European texts, however, narrate the fighting between Sol and her mother and 201 202 Sharon Vance see it as a major catalyst for the drama that unfolded. These fights caused Sol to take refuge with her Muslim neighbors, who informed the qadi that she had converted to Islam. Sol was brought before the qadi and told that she had converted and that if she denied having done so she would be subject to the laws of apostasy . After spending some time in the women’s prison in Tangier, she was sent to Fez. When all attempts to persuade her to accept a new life as a Muslim failed, she was pub­ licly executed. In European versions, the rabbis of Fez tried to convince Sol to convert in order to avoid death. The ending of the story also varies from text to text, depending on the genre and the dominant themes of the text. The conversations between Sol and her Muslim captors, in particular Sol’s speeches, allow the authors to present via their protagonist their own interpretations and messages. The European (Christian) texts differ from the Jewish texts in that their message has more to do with European politics and French and Spanish designs on Morocco than with concern for Sol’s faith.5 While these texts were no doubt motivated by humanitarian concerns over the status of the Jewish minority in Morocco and by shock at the martyrdom of a young Jewish girl because of her religious identity, they also advanced European colonial interests in Morocco. It is not difficult to detect polemics in the arenas of internal po­ liti­ cal debate and external propaganda in favor of colonialism. The first author to publish a full-­ length work devoted exclusively to Sol was Eugenio María Romero, whose El martirio de la joven hachuel, ó la heroína hebrea was published in Gibraltar in 1837.6 Romero met Issachar, Sol’s brother, in Gibraltar , where the latter settled after his sister’s execution.7 He then traveled to Tan­ gier and interviewed Sol’s parents and other eyewitnesses. Romero’s text is an invaluable historical source, given that it was published just three years after Sol’s execution and relied on the testimony of her parents. I have analyzed his version of Sol’s story as a historical source elsewhere.8 Here I wish to focus on Romero’s use of literary devices and on the po­ liti­ cal debates raging in Spain in the 1820s and 1830s, particularly the liberal po­ liti­ cal struggle against absolutism and the Inquisition. Romero provides the viewpoint of the characters, embellishes the voice of the narrator with his own literary style, and furnishes his own moral for the story according to liberal po­ liti­ cal...

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