Execution of Sol Hachuel, seventeen-year-old girl accused of apostasy

Sol Hachuel, a young girl from Tanger, was accused of having pronounced the Islamic declaration of faith and then returned to Judaism — which, under Muslim law, makes apostasy a capital crime. She always denied having converted. Taken to Fès and brought before the sultan, she refused to the very end to declare herself Muslim, despite offers and threats, and was publicly beheaded. Her tomb, in the Jewish cemetery of Fès, immediately became a place of pilgrimage, and her story one of the rare female martyrdoms in Sephardic Memory, sung in Judeo-Arabic and Spanish, printed as early as the following generation. The fact is dated and documented by witnesses to her trial; it is her reported words that have carried the greater part of her legacy.