Joseph Chetrit (linguist)

• Comment: Certainly notable, but written in the format of a press release, or promotional biography.
  First, make certain absolutely none of the is copied of closely paraphrased from an yother source, because it certainly reads as it it were.
  Then describe his work concisely. Don't use academic jargon . A sentence like
  "Alongside the aforementioned monograph, the cultural duality of Moroccan Jews was examined in all of his research fields and publications, represented through his research of Judeo-Arabic oral and written liturgic poetry, a rabbinic creation which emphasises the values of holiness in Judaism, while also mirroring the fears of life in exile and the promises of redemption. " is almost unreadable. DGG ( talk ) 06:50, 3 February 2020 (UTC)

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Joseph (Yossi) Chetrit (born 1941) is an Emeritus Professor of the French language and literature department and the Hebrew language department at the University of Haifa, former head of the Centre for the Study of Jewish Culture in Spain and Muslim Countries, and founder of the Tsfon-Maarav Troupe.

Biography

Joseph Chetrit was born in 1941 in Morocco, where he completed his primary studies in Taroudant, and his secondary and education studies in Casablanca. He immigrated in 1963 to Israel, where he received his university education at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, then at the Sorbonne, where he prepared a doctorate in French grammar. From October 1972 until his retirement in October 2009, he taught at the University of Haifa French linguistics (at the Department of French Language and Literature) and socio-pragmatics of Judeo-Arabic and contemporary Hebrew (at the Department of Hebrew language). He also taught Hebrew at the Paris Community Center and Jewish Civilization in North Africa at INALCO University in Paris and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. At Haifa University, he served as director of the language and French literature, dean of the Faculty of Humanities, vice-rector and member of the management.

Research activity

For the past forty years, Chetrit has been devoting his efforts to the documentation, study, and distribution of the Jewish culture that developed and thrived In North Africa in general and Morocco in particular. His research spreads across various fields concerned with Jewish culture - linguistic, discursive, literary, religious, behavioural, and social. Furthermore, Chetrit established academic institutes, organised dozens of national and international conferences, and lectured before various audiences in Israel and abroad. As a tribute for his scientific enterprise, thirty-five of his Israeli and international colleagues in the study of Sephardic, North-African, and Eastern Jewry, dedicated a two-volume book with their research to him, edited by Prof. Yosef Tobi and Prof. Dennis Kurzon.

Research activity His research focuses on the study of Jewish languages ​​and Jewish culture in North Africa in their various aspects - linguistic, socio-discursive, socio-historical, socio-cultural and literary. He published in these different fields many books and many articles and monographs[ii], especially on Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic poetry in North Africa, on traditional and modern Jewish discourse[iii], on modernization and Haskalah in communities, on the language of Jewish women in Morocco and their proverbs, on the linguistic and sociolinguistic specificities of Judeo-Arabic and Judeo-Berber and on the musical traditions of the Jewish communities of Morocco.

At the University of Haifa, he was the director of the Center for the Study on Jewish Culture in Spain and Islamic countries and the interdisciplinary project “Mediterranean Civilizations and their significance for our time.” He is also the editor of the book series "MIQQEDEM UMIYYAM" which publishes collections of essays on history and cultural heritage of Jewish communities in Islamic countries and in the Sephardic world.

Fieldwork

Throughout his career, Chetrit has advocated for the preservation of the oral traditions and languages of North-African Jews, which face extinction. The requirement to forget the life of exile and its products as part of the melting pot policy in Israel, left no choice for the immigrants and their offspring but to learn, internalise, and conduct themselves according to the values of Israeli culture in modern Hebrew.

Chetrit started to document Judeo-Arabic and Judeo-Berber dialects. During this project, named the Shlomi Workshop, he located and interviewed in Judeo-Arabic adults who spoke these languages as their mother tongue. As part of the workshop, dozens of Shlomi's residents, men and women over forty-years-of-age, were recorded about their oral traditions and community life before their Aliyah. Later on, he broadened the first recording project of the Shlomi Workshop, and had travelled across Israel, Morocco, France, and Canada, and recorded hundreds of men and women. This documentation is used by Chetrit in his various studies about Jewish dialects, rabbinic discourse, the discourse of men and women, oral poetry of Jewish women, practices and customs of different Jewish life-stages, such as the Jewish wedding, and in the annual cycle, such as the Mimuna, and Jewish music and its affinity to medieval Andalusi music that is still used in North African countries. In this manner, he was able to document 137 Judeo-Arabic dialects spoken in the urban and rural communities of Morocco, in addition to more than 6000 different proverbs and formulae used by women as part of their linguistic traditions. He also documented hundreds of women's poetry of the ^cArubi and Mawwal genres, sung in ceremonies and family celebrations, dozens of lamentations sung on familial days of mourning, and many more songs sung in weddings and on the birth of a son.

At the same time, Chetrit examined manuscripts and archival sources originating in North Africa. These documents include manuscripts preserved in national and public libraries in Israel, France, New-York, and Canada, and manuscripts located in private homes, which he photo-copied.

Research and published work

Chetrit has begun his academic career with the study of the syntax of the compound time sentence in modern French, as well as other essays in French lexicology. His primary research work, however, is devoted to various fields of North-African Jewry as follows:

Jewish languages in North Africa

Chetrit's research includes the characterisation and categorisation of the hundreds of Judeo-Arabic dialects from North-Africa. He categorised these dialects into four groups based on phonetic and phonological structure. In addition, he characterised and described the Berber that was used among the Jews of Moroccan rural communities, the influence of French on Judeo-Arabic dialects, and the linguistic relationships between Judeo-Arabic and Judeo-Spanish in Morocco. Furthermore, he devoted many studies to the description of the Hebrew component of the lexical and structural foundations of Judeo-Arabic, including the Jewish secret languages based on Hebrew lexical elements and formulae.

Hebrew poetry and music in Morocco

Chetrit's research and publications are also concerned with the Bakashot and Piyutim (liturgic poetry) of Moroccan. He discovered Hebrew  poets in Morocco, as well as unique poems which shed light on events and processes that have little or no other documentation. Thus, he uncovered dozens of Hebrew poets who were unknown in the scientific literature, including the distinguished poets Rabbi Shlomo Haliwa, Rabbi David Elkaim, Rabbi David Bouzaglo, Nissim Naqqab, as well as the unique female Hebrew poet Friha bat Rabbi Avraham ben-Adiba.

Through his interest in the affinities between liturgic poetry and Andalusi music and the Arabic Qasida poetry in Morocco, he also described the cultural and practical components that led Jews to collaborate with Muslim musicians throughout the generations.

Judeo-Arabic poetry in North Africa

Chetrit's research portrays the content, forms, and structures of hundreds of Judeo-Arabic poems. So far, Chetrit has published a central essay in literary studies of the trends and patterns of this poetry. He also dedicated many essays to the presentation and interpretation of unique poems of historical or cultural importance for the study of Jewish life in Morocco, and the various contents and forms common in this Jewish North African poetry.

Proverbs of Jewish women in Morocco

Chetrit's fieldwork enabled him to document more than 6,000 Judeo-Arabic proverbs and idioms spoken mostly by older women and in part by men. These proverbs and their linguistic and cultural status were published in several collections. Chetrit's edited collections are innovative in form, as each proverb is presented thrice - in Hebrew letters, in Arabic letters, and in universal phonetic-phonological letters, and each entry is translated into Hebrew and French. This form of presentation is designed to serve not only Hebrew or French-speaking readers, but also Arabic speakers of the Arab countries, and mainly Morocco, a country which gained increasing interest from researchers of the field.

The traditional Jewish wedding in Morocco

Chetrit has devoted an extensive volume to the research of the values, practices, and ceremonies of the traditional Jewish wedding as it was conducted in various communities in Morocco. Through the presentation of the different processes and ceremonies constituting the Jewish wedding before the Chuppa and after it, he demonstrated how cultural tradition is passed on within the Jewish family in various Moroccan communities and described the social-discursive networks which operate and guide it.

The rabbinic and folk culture of Moroccan Jews

Chetrit has also studied the general position and status of Jewish tradition in determining the life-practices and social orders in various communities. Thus, he described the discursive strategies and content of the traditional communal discourse, which was conducted according to the teachings and writings of rabbis. He also described the changes that took place in the discourse in the end of the 19th century, and more specifically, the new linguistic uses in Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic, which led to the formation of a new middle Judeo-Arabic in Tunis. In another study, Chetrit characterized the dual culture of Moroccan Jews. This duality included, on the one hand, the learned rabbinic culture and on the other hand, the mixed popular culture. This popular culture includes core values derive from practical Halacha and Jewish tradition and ceremonies, practices, and forms of life that deviated at times from the purely Halachic canon, for example, the beliefs in magic, demons, fortune, evil eye, and so forth. The folk communities that practised such beliefs did not view them as contradictory to the basic beliefs that define their distinct Jewish identity, but as an existential need that cures their physical and mental ailments, due to the lack of medicine and physicians as they operate today. Chetrit sees this duality between learned rabbinic culture and syncretic folk culture as the core which granted them the mental strength and stable Jewish identity that enabled their survival despite the persecutions under Islam.

Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic enlightenment in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire

Chetrit has focused his research on additional aspects of the development of Jewish culture in North-Africa and beyond this region. Thus, he uncovered the Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic enlightenment movements that developed during the second half of the 19th century in North-Africa. These movements were influenced by the Hebrew harmonious enlightenment movement of Eastern Europe that sought to integrate rabbinic tradition and biblical culture with the European values of enlightenment. In his studies, he also shed light on the characters of the enlightenment movements' leaders, such as Rabbi Shalom Flaḥ, Rabbi David Elkaim, Isaac ben Yaish Ha-Levy, Rabbi Baruch Mitrani, and more, and described their positions, struggles, and literary and journalistic creation.

History of Moroccan Jews

Another field of research illuminates various issues in the history of Moroccan Jews, among other things through special poems written by poets who experienced the historical events and described them through the perspective of their community members. These poems are frequently the primary documentation preserved relating to the matter.

In an extensive study, Chetrit examined a document from the middle-ages that described an alleged growth, power, and destruction of the old Jewish community of Dar^ca in south Morocco which had a supposedly powerful army. He showed that the document was written by Muslim scholars at the end of the 13th century, and not by Jews. The erudite authors fabricated this Jewish history in order to retroactively legitimise the extermination of the Jewish community of Dar^ca in 1145 or 1146 by the Almohad Caliphate. Another research is dedicated to Morocco's Jewish communities during WWII.

Cultivation and distribution of North-African and Eastern Jewish culture

Chetrit established an academic unit in the Faculty of Humanities, University of Haifa, dedicated to the legacy of Sephardic and Eastern Jews. As part of this unit, he established new courses in various university departments, with partial funding from the Centre for Sephardic and Eastern Heritage. The academic unit has operated for more than twenty years. In addition, he initiated and organised dozens of seminars, national, and international conferences.

In addition to his lectures to the wide public and his fieldwork, he initiated and edited the series Miqqedem U-Miyyam, which nine volumes so far were all dedicated to the study of various aspects in the history and cultural heritage of Jewish communities in the Middle East and North Africa. Furthermore, in 1998, he established in the University of Haifa's Research Authority the Centre for the Study of Jewish Culture in Spain and Muslim Countries, and was its head until it closed on December 2018.

Tsfon-Ma^carav Ensemble

Chetrit established the Tsfon Ma'arav ensemble in 1979, and he manages and guides it to this day. The ensemble aims to raise the Israeli audience's awareness to the various musical traditions and poetic creation of North-African Jewry in general and Moroccan Jewry in particular, in the two original languages of the various communities - Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic. The ensemble's material originates in Chetrit's research about the literary creation and linguistic and musical traditions of North-African Jews. The concerts include presentations of the Jewish life in Morocco in sayings, sounds, acting, dancing, singing, and music, as well as sets of liturgical poems and Andalusi music and poetry.

The band is the only one in Israel and abroad to integrate women in the performance of the liturgic poetry of Moroccan Jews.

The ensemble has recorded so far four sets of tapes, CDs and DVDs. The King of Morocco sent Chetrit a letter of appreciation, thanking him for this work of cultivation and distribution of the musical and cultural tradition shared by Jews and Muslims in Morocco.

Books Published

1.       Syntaxe de la phrase complexe à subordonnée temporelle. Paris: Editions Klincksieck, 1976. 226 p.

2.       The Piyyutim and Baqqashot of the Moroccan Jews. Tel-Aviv: Moreshet Dorot Press, 1991 (Hebrew).

3.       The Written Judeo-Arabic Poetry in North Africa: Poetic, Linguistic and Cultural Studies. Jerusalem: Misgav Yerushalayim Press, 1994  (Hebrew).

4.       Hebrew Poetry in Morocco: Studies on Poems and Poets. Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1999 (Hebrew).

5.       (main author), Traditional Jewish Wedding in Morocco: Interpretive and Ethnographic Studies. Miqqedem Umiyyam VIII, Haifa 2003 (Hebrew).

6.       Diglossie, Hybridation et Diversité intra-linguistique. Etudes socio-pragmatiques sur les langues juives, le judéo-arabe et le judéo-berbère. Paris-Louvain: Peeters 2007.

7.       Linguistic Treasures and Textures. Socio-Pragmatic Studies on Judeo-Arabic in North Africa and its Hebrew Component: Articles, Poems, Tales and Proverbs. Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 2009 (Hebrew).

8.       Paroles exquises. Proverbes judéo-marocains sur la vie et la famille, en transcription phonético-phonologique, arabe et judéo-arabe et en traduction francaise et hébraïque. Collection Matanel. Waterloo : Avant-Propos, 2014.

9.       Paroles affables. Proverbes judéo-marocains sur l’hospitalité et l’amitié. Collection Matanel. Waterloo: Avant-Propos, 2015.​