ABSTRACT
Emigration and immigration movements provide rare opportunities to examine changes in the making. Social scientists can sometimes observe and trace the small, incremental acts that are the stuff from which larger-scale trends and processes subsequently grow. This chapter concentrates upon one such series of acts: the mass migration of Jews from North Africa to Israel, and particularly the ways in which new North African Jewish saints and shrines have been created in the fertile soil of the Holy Land. Compressed within a brief span of years, this latter process is packed with irony, volatility, and paradox. It is one of those occasional “ripe events” that invites a clearer glimpse into the dynamics of culture.
