This folio was one of hundreds of similar pamphlets that were published at this time in Morocco. These were not the feuilletons that appeared in the Judeo-Arabic press but rather individual sheets of paper that writers produced, printed, and published on their own. This phenomenon is not unique to Morocco; it has parallels in Jewish communities in North Africa at that time. Loose folios were also common in Jewish communities in Europe, but there the phenomenon waned as the Jewish press evolved.

I propose that these stand-alone folio publications be attributed to the feuilleton genre because their characteristics overlap those of feuilletons. The word feuilleton in French means “leaf” or “folio” because the first feuilletons were printed on a separate page attached to the newspaper; only later did they appear inside the newspaper, and even then, in a separate section. The stand-alone folios were produced by writers who printed and distributed them independently and in bookstores. In the first half of the twentieth century, most Jewish newspapers in Morocco were published in French; few appeared in Judeo-Arabic due to difficulties that the colonial authorities placed in their path. One may regard the individual folios as manifestations of resistance and of a cultural product that circumvented the government’s oversight. Fear of the authorities prompted some writers to publish their works anonymously or to identify themselves only by their initials.

The folios addressed themselves to the public at large, comprised of readers who were fluent in Judeo-Arabic. Since relatively few North African Jews read Judeo-Arabic, the folios were not only read by individuals but also read aloud to groups of listeners. The language used was colloquial Judeo-Arabic rendered in Hebrew characters and not literary Arabic, in which the Jews of the Maghreb were not proficient. Until these single folios were printed, such texts were composed and preserved as part of an oral culture or within a culture of manuscripts that were now widely printed and distributed for the first time.

All the works were written in a maqam form that presents diverse poetic-literary works in a combination of rhymed prose with rhetorical flair and metered poetry. The singular style of the poetic works that were published on these single folios is unsurprising because the predominant literary endeavor in North Africa, among Muslims and Jews, was poetry in all of its forms. This poetry, passed on by oral tradition, was written down once printing had become widely available in Morocco.

The contents of the folios are highly diverse. In some, the writers express an opinion about current affairs or use the literary genre as an instrument of direct or satirical criticism. Some works recount a fictional tale and others a historical event. Some of the works resemble a lamentation or eulogy, describing someone who has died, others deal with issues of modern society. In the feuilleton presented here, as stated, the writer describes an epidemic of typhoid fever in Morocco.

Further Reading:

• Yosef Tobi and Tsivia Tobi, Judeo-Arabic Literature in Tunisia, 1850-1950 (Detroit, 2014).