Imagining a sonic al-Andalus through sound, bones, and blood: the case of Jewish music in Morocco and Spain

ABSTRACT

Al-Andalus and the perception of its peacefully idyllic past currently inhabit Spain and Morocco through music. This article explores the multiple manners in which both the acoustic establishment of Jewish belonging and participation, and the reception of sonic allegiance help build a symbolic order that confirms the intrinsic relation of the Jew to the diverse nation in contemporary Spain and Morocco through the heritagization of a communal sounded voice. Finally, looking at two Jewish performers, one in Morocco and one in Spain, this article will address historical entanglements between both countries. The case studies aim to provide micro-histories of the larger conversations on Jewish belonging within each modern nation-state in the last generation through the performance of popular Jewish music as a symbol for the coexistence of al-Andalus.

KEYWORDS:

• Music
• heritage
• nationalism
• public diplomacy
• diversity
• Spain
• Morocco
• Judaism

Al-Andalus is not a time past, it is but a component … of the Europe that we know to be the matrix for the West and that jumped from the Middle Ages in Al-Andalus to live a first renaissance.¹

Historia General de Al Andalus, Emilio González Ferrín

Introduction

This article² broaches the way in which Jews and Jewishness get musically integrated into the national frame in contemporary Spain and Morocco, often even in Jews’ physical absence. Calling the use of music in reviving an idealized memory of the past a ‘sonic trope’ this article shows the use of ‘sonic tropes’ towards the creation of an emotive link between diverse components of the population which are meant to translate into their daily attitudes and lives. The relationship between the voice of the Jewish minority in Spain and Morocco and the contemporary political and diplomatic use of their voice begs the following questions: What is the relationship between Jew, voice, place, and nation in this region? What role does Jewish music have in the process of reclaiming a country’s Jewish past, if any? Should Jewish voices outside of the land be considered as a vocal exile or a sonic diaspora? My research has found that these questions are entangled with the recent process of heritagization of Jewish music in Spain and Morocco hinting to the superposition that can happen for Jews between gentile ‘place’ and makom, one of the many Hebrew names of God, which also means place.³ If God, makom, is the place of the world for Jews, then physical places such as land and nations carry elements of Godliness within the Jewish imaginary.

The recent surge in the celebration of Jewish heritage for tourism in both Morocco and Spain evokes the piecing together of remnants and fragments of what is felt to be a previous glorious history. In Spain, Kandiyoti explains:

All this remarkable heritage, commercial, and cultural activity has been taking place after hundreds of years of self-distancing from Jewish and Muslim pasts, with notable twentieth-century exceptions. These regenerating acts depend not on the recuperation of ancient identities but on the production of new affiliations and the creation of new remnants … remnants are what have survived from the past; but in acts of return to history, we do not simply find remains but produce them, resignifying as a remain what was not previously perceived as one (such as towns with dubious Jewish heritage). The Spanish state’s efforts to downplay expulsion and the Inquisition and to promote pride in Spanish Jewish history intermingles, to a limited extent, with some Sephardis’ interest in origins lost after the catastrophe of 1492, which is mourned by observant Jews every year on the fasting day of Tisha b’Av.⁴

Jewish heritage tourism in Northern and Eastern Europe, is invariably bound up with the Holocaust, as Erica Lehrer’s 2013 study analyses. In that case, the destruction of Jewish life has led to a recreation of Jewish spaces that also facilitate a new interaction between the majority culture and Jews, not as citizens, but as Jews.

As physical manifestations, heritage spaces form social catchments that are useful frames for research. Self-conscious and public Jewish spaces in Eastern Europe in particular have drawn a variety of forms of hidden Jewishness into the light, offering an opportunity to consider them. As social fields, Jewish spaces link Jews and non-Jews in generative cultural engagements and interactions that rework notions of Jewish (and majority) culture and identity, making these newly available to Jews and more accessible to others.⁵

Spanish heritage sites have shared elements with the destroyed Eastern European spaces, as an earlier destroyed Jewish world has been reconstructed since 1992 for heritage tourism. In Morocco, the Jewish presence has continuously existed, albeit living through an initial ‘muted’ period following independence from the Protectorate in 1956 and the war of 1967 between Arabs and Jews in the Middle East. This article will explore similarities and differences of the entangled relationship between Jews and the majority cultures in both countries in contemporary times.

The quasi-mythical place that Spain and Morocco inhabit in the imaginary of Jews from these diasporas evokes the ‘Makomization’ of those lands and their history, territory, music, cuisine and traditions. This can explain why second-, third- and fourth-generation performers often return to Spain and Morocco to perform these repertoires where their ancestors used to live. Towards the end of this article I will highlight two performers who ‘returned’ to perform Jewish repertoires in their ancestral lands.

In addition to Jewish ‘makomization’ of these lands, interreligious musical encounters in both countries are often performed for public representations of convivencia narratives during highly symbolic moments. Musical statements of longing for the shared cultural spaces that appear to have existed during the late Middle Ages in Abbasid and Castilian courts are used to imbue local and international audiences with an experiential moment recreating a sonic al-Andalus.⁶ During the Pope’s visit to Morocco, in late March 2019, a gala concert with the Moroccan Philharmonic orchestra accompanied a Muslim, Christian and Jewish singer in a performance for King Mohammed VI and Pope Francis.⁷ Public diplomacy, national policy and the intricacies of Jewish life entangle on the concert stage – evident to those from inside the community,⁸ however, often it is the public presence of their singing and the heritagization of their repertoires that proves they belong to the land – Nass el bled,⁹ al-Andalus, Sepharad …

Furthermore, Jewish music¹⁰ in the trans-Gibraltar¹¹ region is increasingly performed by non-Jews in a recent political push for the integration of minority voices even when the minorities themselves are hardly physically present within the country. It is as if the ‘component’ that al-Andalus embodies must be sonically deployed to confirm minorities’ rootedness to the region. In Morocco the tension between home and diaspora has been ‘unmuted’ sonically, beginning slowly in the 2000s¹² and expanding exponentially after the 2011 Constitution¹³. The sounding of Jewish music in official discourse highlights ‘their role in nation building.¹⁴

Music serves as a manner to reconnect to an idyllic past in the nation’s history, a moment remembered as diverse and exemplary in the coexistence of various religious and political groups. Music awakens sensibilities of connection, used either as ‘metonym of social interaction’¹⁵ or as elusive ‘component’ embodied centuries later. Both are used to soften the fractures of contemporary identity politics. This heritagization then ‘permits a valuing of identities. Heritagization contributes to act against the uniformization of cultures, not negligeable in the context of globalization.¹⁶ My work theorizes that the sonic heritage of Al-Andalus is evoked as a temporal disconnection to the contemporary fractured state of othering non-homogenous cultural elements in this region.

Analysis of the manners and moments in which songs are used to establish belonging responds to a semiotic complex that elucidates ‘the socially situated, relationally understood sign, be it sung, spoken, written, performed or embodied’¹⁷. In other words, it is not only the text of songs that merits analysis, but the signs of behavior and perception surrounding the song, including but not limited to the moment and context of its creation and performance, the performer, the perceived audience, the implied messages and spoken and unspoken reactions. These semiotic signs demonstrate what Suzanne Cusick has explained as ‘the acoustic as a force field of power’.¹⁸ Today I aim to demonstrate the multiple manners through which the acoustic establishment of Jewish belonging and participation, and the reception of this sonic allegiance helps build the symbolic order that establishes the intrinsic relation of the Jew to the nation, through their connection to the land. To establish the need for this entangled analysis of voice, land and nation, the next section explains the relationship of indigeneity to musical repertoire.

Repertoires which denote indigeneity (and their opposites)

Non-liturgical Jewish music has often been used as a pivotal element in the macro-conversation between the state, Jewish notables and the international community. Repertoires become a sonic index of celebrated Jewishness within the modern nation-state. The sonic index spans from Judeo-Spanish romances in traditional performances or classical arrangements such as those of Joaquin Diaz in Spain, to Judeo-Arabo-Andalusian nubas¹⁹ in matrouz,²⁰ or contemporary compositions made famous by Jewish performers such as Sami El Maghribi or Salim Halali in the mid-20^th century Morocco. Sonic existence in public spaces, and its penetration into the private through radio and television performances enable the reiteration of minority belonging within the more impenetrable micro-conversations of daily life. The delicate balancing between the macro and micro conversation establishes public perceptions of indigeneity²¹ to these lands and complicates the boundary between the powerful and the marginalized. Jewish music in the vernacular is often used as a surrogate stand in for seamless belonging to the larger nationalist project, establishing sonic belonging through melody, rhythm, language, and text. It is important to note that strict liturgical music is not represented in this public sonic indexing of indigeneity.

In recent years, the entry of digital representations of Jewish belonging through music videos use visual imagery to further enhance the messages embedded in the songs, proving the historic indigeneity of Jews through images of Jewish quarters, traditional costumes, food, or landscapes.²² Social media and YouTube occupy large spaces of impromptu grassroot dialogue strengthening impressions of Jewish sonic presence. Curated through music, language and historical traces, ‘the sound of political speech is as important as meaning, as is the unique ability of sound to bypass dominant modes of political containment and confinement’²³. In this manner Jewish sonic presence becomes a political voice within orderly and disorderly spaces of national composition.

Sonic self-descriptors of belonging and separation

For Judeo-Spanish identifying Sephardim in Spain and Morocco, the way they themselves name their own Judeo-Spanish repertoire, plays on the nuanced fluctuation between an inner transmissibility and the historic and traumatic relationship to the ongoing memory of the rupture in their Spanish past. The denomination given to this repertoire by the members of the Judeo-Spanish speaking community is significant because it shows the internal discourse of a connection to a long arm of history within the oral traditions of the Jews from Northern Morocco currently living in both Morocco and Spain. Using Tuhiwai Smith’s decolonial model,²⁴ the manners in which the Judeo-Spanish community itself refers to its repertoire should be determined thus:

1. Los cantares antiguos de Castilla, the ancient songs from Castile

2. Los cantares del tiempo de la Reina Isabel la Católica, the songs from the time of Queen Isabel the Catholic and

3. Los cantares de las judias antiguas, the songs of the ancient Jewish women.

These three classifications show the ongoing preoccupations within the Jewish community about the element of place, or makom. Place represented by the mythical evocation of Castilla and the temporality represented in the reification of the traumatic period of the Catholic monarchs in addition to the rupture to place created for this community by those very monarchs. Finally, their nomenclature addresses what is perceived as an unbroken transmission from older Jewish women to the younger generations. Las judias antiguas, the older Jewesses, serve as the repositories of the community’s oral traditions and Judeo-Spanish local cultural specificity in Spain or Northern Morocco. However, Castilla does not constitute a part of the ‘legendary triangle of al-Andalus symbolised by Córdoba, Sevilla and Granada.’²⁵

Morocco’s public-facing Jewish repertoire is called by the singers of the Jewish choir Kinor David Maroc as judéo-arabo-andalous evoking al-Andalus and the Jewish claim to one portion of its musical repertoire. Very often it is the matrouz or ornamental, linguistic embroidery within the music, mixing Hebrew poetry with Arabic poetry, which is the Jewish signature to this well-known repertoire. In recent years, a movement of chgoury²⁶ music, Jewish popular music has undergone a revival in Morocco through Festivals, television, cinema, and radio appearances.

The linguistic grounding of the sonic texture of Jewish music within the indigenous language of land, be it Arabic or Spanish, seems to be the most important aspect that confirms them as indigenous to the nation. In their turn, their performance of local repertoires in diaspora, then establishes the makom of the land, even when they are outside of it.

Jews: cosmopolitan or indigenous?

Jewish historical trajectories have often involved multilingualism, multinationalism, transnationalism, and displacement from ancestral lands. This quality of complexity of languages and allegiances, perceived as a Jewish cosmopolitanism, has been a source of anti-Semitic attitudes and mistrust to transnational Jews. Taking the example of the Spanish consul in Paris during the Vichy occupation, one sees how this perceived cosmopolitanism created disaster for potential war refugees. The Consul abandoned Spanish Sephardim who had incomplete papers, stating that ‘Sephardim generally have various nationalities, and they use each one according to the moment’s convenience’²⁷ (Ojeda Mata 2018: 251). However, immediately following Spain’s dramatic economic recession of 2008–2014, the law of Sephardi return was passed, with a potential interest in Jewish investment in the housing market, which had been set up by the National Bank of Spain as either a volatile or stabilizing factor of its economy.²⁸ The slippage between Jews with capital and Jewish mobility, or nomadism, with cosmopolitanism, reveals that this law of return or ‘re-encounter’ appears to replicate anti-Semitic tropes associating Jews with money, contrary to the public narratives of the Spanish monarchy declaring joy at this long-lost encounter with the descendants of previous Jewish subjects.²⁹ Gelbin & Gilman have described how ‘ … cosmopolitanism and nomadism are clearly revealed as symbolic manifestations of the antisemitic stereotype that associates Jews with capital. Over time, as we shall see, the related concept of the nomad gives way to that of the exile, the refugee the D[isplaced] P[erson]. The association with capital also wanes but never quite vanishes.’ (2017: 1)

Carlos de Nesry, an intellectual from Tangier, wrote during the transitional time of Morocco’s independence from Spanish and French Protectorates, and described a Jew from Tangier as ‘an ensemble of contradictions. Each one of their fidelities is opposed to another fidelity which is its exact opposite. Their vocations clash, their affinities contradict each other. Their double and triple allegiances are a daily dilemma. He feels completely unified within his compartments, in these separations, which are, according to the moment either tragic or fascinating … ’ (de Nesry, 1956:16).³⁰

In Morocco, especially after the founding of the State of Israel, Moroccan Jews were perceived by some as Zionists first and Moroccan second³¹. Even though Jewish presence in Morocco predates Islam, Moroccan Jews living in Casablanca today are often told by young Muslim Moroccans marhababik, ‘you are welcome here in Morocco’ stating an implicit asymmetrical relationship of national belonging. If a young Muslim welcomes a local Jew to Morocco, it means that the Jew is considered as a visitor and not an equal citizen. Jewish Moroccans find this insulting, and some retort back, in perfect darija, ‘my ancestors were here before the Arabs came.’ Immediately an apology ensues, and a murmured memory about how their parents or grandparents had a Jewish neighbor, merchant, doctor, business partner … This perception of non-belonging is often publicly countered by Jews themselves through musical performances of sonic belonging, thus proving their undeniable indigeneity to the land.³²

Contrary to the often-cited diasporic nature of Jews, the manners in which Jews in Morocco and Spain establish their sonic territoriality to both land and nation, overturn the idea of Jew as a deterritorialized, nomadic or cosmopolitan element of these societies. In establishing their sonic indigeneity, Jewish sounds, thus become of the nation. Especially when physical Jewish presence is diminishing, as in Morocco, or feeble after centuries of enforced ethnic cleansing, as in Spain, the music of the Jews of both nations have established an undeniable sonic presence in the twenty first century. Music serves as a manner to reinsert the phantoms of a Jewish presence into empty physical spaces, where the Jews are, as Rosen states ‘ … a phantom memory, the felt presence of an absent limb.’³³ (2002: 103). In fact, this confirms that “the cosmopolitan has come to be threatened by its old foe, the local, the national, the autochthonous, the indigenous.³⁴ Now the cultural capital of cosmopolitanism is replaced with a hierarchy to deeply rooted indigenous belonging to land, nation, territory, and state. However, this belonging is often grounded in an idea of capitalist contribution to the nation ‘The concepts of cosmopolitanism and nomadism take on quite different meanings when the index is Jews – in particular, when they are symbolically defined by capital.’ (Gelbin and Gilman, 2017: 30) Heritagization of Jewish sounds, and the tourism that is garnered by a visible and sounded Jewish presence serves as proxy for Jewish capital.

The indigenous as saviour?

The indigenous Jew, is thus an anchor to a time of cultural diversity, be it pre-expulsion Iberia or the heady years of the nationalist struggle in Morocco. By celebrating the entrenched indigeneity of the Jew, both Morocco and Spain are trying to address the extremely conservative religious elements in their societies as they build narratives of historical national diversity after periods of cultural homogenization thanks to nationalism. However, religious conservatives claim a need for purity, going as far back as the racial laws of pureza de sangre in 15^th century Spain or exemplified by the controversy in 2012 around Morocco’s Minister of Culture of the PJD Islamist party advocating for l’art propre, clean or pure art which leads towards a ‘pure language’ and finally, a ‘pure citizen’, as denounced in Morocco’s weekly Tel Quel magazine.³⁵

This is when the indigeneity of the Jew is brought out: to counter the homogenising forces of religious conservatism. The Jew, as indigenous religious minority, with a deep historical connection to the land, thus becomes indispensable to the diverse nation. One of the manners to establish this has become through the heritagization of the Jewish voice. The indigenous Jewish voice, be it sung, spoken, or written, then stands for the complexity of belonging to the nation, the wisdom of a longstanding history of diversity and multilingualism in the face of the reductive pull that homogenous belonging elicits amongst the masses.

The indigenous Jew in this region symbolizes wisdom, tradition, and embodiment of the nation’s diversity. Public facing Jews are expected to perform thus. This explains why the experimental jazz music of Jauk Elmaleh,³⁶ or the rebellious rap of Hoofer,³⁷ Jewish musicians from Casablanca, never represent indigenous Jewishness. In fact, the artists themselves do not present themselves as Jewish musicians, even though it is a part of their upbringing and continued lived experience. The implication that

they are expected to be embodiments of tradition, seers, perfect spiritual beings, and all-purpose spokespersons for the moral high ground … caused by the tangle of aestheticized politics and desire, which certain artists of native ancestry … contrive to make compelling … [so] there is no sharp divide between aesthetics and ethics (Townsend-Gault, 2002)³⁸.

When a Jewish musician does not represent tradition or spirituality for the larger national needs, they fall outside of the required purview.

The example of Sharouh,³⁹ a young French-Tunisian Jewish DJ living in Madrid from 2015–2021, collapses the sonic complexity of Jew and Arab in Spain, through her remixes of Maghrebi women singers in Judeo-Arabic for young Madrid clubgoers. In perfect Spanish, she DJs Maghrebi Divas such as Habiba Messika⁴⁰ with loops and beats, weaving her contemporary aesthetic with rhythms, claps and Messika’s nasal Judeo-Arabic. However, official representation of the local indigenous Jew in both Spain and Morocco, favor a traditional sound, representative of local indigeneity: Sephardi ladino music in Spain and classical arabo-Andalusian or chgoury music in Morocco. Sharouh’s music engages not with Jew as indigenous to Spain, but with the Jew as foreigner and exotic. In Morocco, Jauk Elmaleh’s experimental jazz dakka⁴¹ uses traditional Amazigh rhythms for free rhythmic exploration of freedom, the politically correct word for Berber, Amazigh, free men.

Space & makomization through burial vs. early music sounds and the revival of Nazi symbols

The idea of space as a critical category arises precisely out of an argument with history, a desire to critique normative notions of Jews as a ‘people of history’. Space may be analyzed not as only one pole of the space-time dyad, but as an entity that is itself given to change and flux. This theorizing of space, makom, emerged out of a contentious relation to history, a condition that is integral to the Jewish engagement with modernity.⁴²

Michel Serre has stated in Le mal propre that one of the fundamental forms to establish the right to ownership is to pollute or mark one’s space⁴³ In other words, only by leaving an individual marking or ‘pollution’ is full ownership established. The marking of ownership is shown in its most extreme animalistic manners through bodily fluids – however, according to Serre, the ‘polluting’ of a land for ownership can be done through bones, the buried bones of ancestors, which ‘pollute’ the land, but also mark it as a sacred space of belonging for generations to come.

This aspect of ‘owning’ the land through the buried bones of the community’s deceased comes through in the hundreds of celebrations of pilgrimages throughout Morocco. Pilgrimages are an occasion to reiterate historical Jewish presence, and to invite members from the government to celebrate and receive the Jewish Baraka (blessing) for the Royal family and the whole territory. In Morocco, communal pilgrimages to the sites of burial of holy men (and in rare cases women) are called hillulot, and are celebrated in urban and far-flung mountainous areas. Some of the hilloulot are in centers of political power, such as the hilloula of Salé honoring Rabbi Raphael Encaoua. Others are in the desert or in the High Atlas Mountains, claiming distant outposts of Jewish belonging throughout the Moroccan land.

These celebrations include a grand festive meal and live musical entertainment as well as speeches from rabbinic leaders and descendants of the Rabbinic line being celebrated. The hillulot celebrations that happen around the country, year-round bring a Jewish presence to areas that often have no active Jewish community. The celebrations which are often for days on end, include, food, music, prayer, and the fire of devotional candles, expected to awaken the Tsaddik’s intervention for the pilgrim’s plight directly with God.⁴⁴ Practically, they infuse pilgrim’s cash into the local economy, helping boost the finances of local communities.

Contrarily to the unbroken presence of Jewish bodies in Morocco, Spain’s relationship to Jewish presence and its intrinsic belonging to the land is complicated by five centuries of systematic official excision of Jewish bodies from the territory. Taking Serre’s idea of belonging to the land through the burial of ancestral bones, Spain’s dearth of historic cemeteries seems to show that ancient Jewish ‘ownership’ of the land through burial was eradicated following the expulsion and centuries of Inquisition. Even though Jewish structures such as ritual baths and synagogues have reappeared inviting Jewish tourism through the government’s Red de Juderías project, the oldest cemetery in Spain seems to be that of Madrid, established in 1922. The medieval cemetery of Montjuïc in Barcelona was excavated in the 19^th century during an archaeological dig but does not exist as such any longer. Today, some of these medieval tombstones are in the History Museum of Barcelona, others can be found as stones for construction in some city walls.⁴⁵ In 2015, a Jewish ‘necropolis’ of 3,000 tombs from the 10th century was excavated in Lucena, hoping to draw Jewish tourism to the area.⁴⁶ A direct connection of Jewish bones to the makomized Spanish land reappears in 2019, when a messianic Christian author published a book using the imagery of the valley of dry bones, and its messianic implications, for Sepharad itself: Sefarad Tierra de Huesos Secos: Judíos Mezclados en Apellidos JudeoEspañoles (Sefarad Land of Dry Bones: Jews intermingled in Judeo-Spanish Surnames). This obscure publication carries the symbolic implication of Sepharad, bones, belonging, lineage and Judeo-Spanish language. Folding the five hundred years of normative Jewish absence from Spanish land into a metaphor of messianic revival from the dead, which is implied by Ezequiel’s prophesy of the dry bones, the author, Luis Hernando Quiceno Sánchez,⁴⁷ appears to evoke Sepharad as a land which has been waiting for Jewish return. Similarly to the manner in which return to Morocco has been viewed by émigré Moroccans: ‘ … the concept of homeness involves the conceptual quality of establishing a base that one can leave and desire to return to, the creation of a sense of home that exists beyond national borders and territories … ’ ⁴⁸ In this case, Spain’s Catholic core might expand to reabsorb Jewish bodies into its land. However, the heritagization of Jewish spaces, traditions and music are primarily done by Spanish non-Jews, not needing, and maybe not desiring actual Jewish bodies to intervene in this process. The legal establishment of 2015’s ‘reencounter’ between the Spanish nation and the Jews shows that

“the actual Jews, their presence and their role in contemporary Spanish society are only secondary because the object of analysis is an intellectual construction elaborated by non-Jews in a country with almost no Jews, Sephardic or non-Sephardic” (Aragoneses, 5).

The performance of the Sephardi romancero⁴⁹ has become the embodiment within Spain of disembodied Jewish presence. The building of Jewish sounds within the empty spaces of Spanish juderías has often been done through Early Music,⁵⁰ or as it is called in Spanish, Música Antigua. The stars of the Sephardi early music Spanish nexus were Hesperion XXI, whose 1999 Diáspora Sefardí was a world hit. Their performances within Spain and to global audiences cemented the early music sound to Sephardi repertoire in Spain. Others, operating more locally within Spain and neighboring countries, perform both arabo-Andalusian and Sephardi repertoires. Eduardo Paniagua’s 2003 recording Morada Del Corazón (Sefarad En Al-Andalus, Siglos XI–XII)⁵¹ roots Sephardism into the medieval convivencia narrative. More recently, the official International Festival of Sephardi music, set up by the Red de Juderías themselves, is held in Córdoba’s Botanical Gardens, a neutral religious space, but one evoking the lush gardens of Spain’s Muslim past. Another Early Music festival, the Festival de Música Antigua has often invited Mara Aranda, a Spanish singer of Sephardi repertoire, bringing Sephardi music into a mainstream Early Music context.

It appears that for all the celebration of an integrated Jewish past, the performance of an indigenous Spanish Judaism is not well integrated into the current social fabric of the country, as exemplified by the Nazi symbolism and trivialization of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust found in the pre-Lent carnival dances of Badajoz and Campo de Criptana in 2020.⁵² Anti-Israel rhetoric, which is often found in Spanish towns through graffiti, echo historic tropes about Jews and toxic power similarly to during Nazism’s political rise: ‘“Jerusalem”, he [Hitler] argued, should not be regarded as an area of Jewish national settlement, but rather as ‘the headquarters for Jewish world power plans for exploitation and nefarious activity.’⁵³. As often happens in carnivals, such as those of Badajoz and Campo de Criptana, one can observe the ‘mutual influence – the confrontation – of official and unofficial culture as an ambivalence, a duality. In which the oppositions are dialectically connected, mutually changing places and retaining their polarity.’ In these carnivals of 2020 a continued accepted societal anti-Semitism.⁵⁴ escaped through the cracks of official culture and presented an alternate view of many Spanish people’s current relationship to Jews demonstrating the simultaneous contradictions between the century-long official efforts to repair Spain’s relationship to the Jews and the general population’s long memory of institutional anti-Semitism.

Erasing Jewish invisibility through curated sounds in Spain

The excised belonging to Spanish life shows that Jewish silenced and excluded voices⁵⁵ form part of the core of belonging. This exemplifies what Jacques Lezra describes in public social media post from 2017.⁵⁶ Declaring the invisibility and what amounts of a public voicelessness of the Jewish community in Fascist Spain:

The Comunidad Israelita de Madrid, to which my parents, sisters and I belonged, where I prepared my Bar Mitzvah and heard the shofar sound once a year, worked hard at invisibility. The synagogue is hidden to this day in a dead-end street behind a church. You put the kippah on behind closed doors, as hidden Jews for centuries had lit Sabbath candles after closing the window shades. We explained to visitors who asked what the mezuzah on the inside of our doorway meant. A friend of a friend bought matzah abroad and brought it to Madrid in suitcases or in boxes, and we’d drive to an apartment before Passover and buy our supply and return home with it in the trunk of the car. For some things—fabric, electrical equipment—you shopped at Salama’s store, or at Bensadón’s. We turned inward.

I think about growing up Jewish in Fascist Spain. Why did Jews return to Madrid? The Sephardim were expelled from Spain in 1492 and followed the dreary, hard paths of exile to Turkey, Cyprus, Salonika, Italy, Morocco … Some Jews, after centuries in Casablanca or Fez or Tangier, returned to Spain after 1956, when Morocco became independent. Tangier, which in 1924 had been declared an international city and was the home of a small but active Jewish community, lost that status in 1956; a law passed requiring that businesses be principally Arab owned; Moroccan Jews left for Canada, Venezuela, the United States. My father and mother left Tangier and tried the US and Caracas, and then just before I was born joined the group of Moroccan Jews who returned to Spain four and a half centuries after being expelled from Sefarad, Jewish Spain. A thousand, maybe, in Madrid, and perhaps about the same number in Barcelona.

The excluded, then can form part of the societal core through a transfer into a disembodied participation. Their physical exclusion and subsequent inclusion as part of heritage maintains their presence without their bodies. This process is exemplified through the heritagization of the Sephardi romancero as mentioned earlier in this article. The century-long process of heritagization of the Sephardi romancero, established early on by Ramón Menéndez Pidal as a core Spanish legacy within the Jewish voice, wherever it may be preserved throughout the Sephardi diaspora, was as a component of Spanish literary and cultural heritage.⁵⁷ The process of gathering the Sephardi romancero in the early 20^th century has evolved in recent generations into performance of Sephardi repertoire as part of Spanish musical revivals.

In 2015 Spain offered the possibility to apply for citizenship to the descendants of those who had suffered the expulsion.⁵⁸ Thousands of Sephardim applied, as well as Crypto-Jews from the Americas and Israeli Sephardim who wanted a passport to travel easily into countries where Israelis are not welcome. Soon after, in October 2019, the Real Academia Española voted to create an Academia Nacional del Judeoespañol based in Israel. This Academy joins 23 other similar academies based in countries where Spanish is spoken, setting up Spain as the central hub and ‘mother’ country for their linguistic and literary culture. The Judeo-Spanish academy voted in Emeritus Professor Ora Schwarzwald, a linguist, as president, thus closing the circle of establishing philology as the way into claiming Sephardim as Spanish cultural subjects, even in the Holy Land. In April of 2021, Paloma Díaz Mas, was elected to a recently vacated chair in the Real Academia de España, the nation’s highest body of intellectuals. Sephardi oral and written literature – its voice – has thus, entered the shrine of Spain’s cultural elites.

Non-Jewish voices in Spain

However, even today the sung voices of Jewish music in Spain are still most often performed by non-Jewish Spanish women, such as Mara Aranda, Ana Alcaide, Rosa Zaragoza and Begoña Olavide. Their performances, drawing heavily from medieval music performance practice, reiterating the ‘sonic trope’ of Jewish belonging in the medieval past. The performances are generally in historic spaces, further equating the Sephardi voice with a medieval space and a historic polity. Contemporary Sephardi performers of Judeo-Spanish ancestry are rarely seen in Spanish Festivals and concert halls. A recent headline says ‘Descendant of Sephardim performs in Spain 500 years after the expulsion.’⁵⁹ However, a Sephardi singer that while having ancestry from Sepharad, travels to Spain from Israel for the performance and leaves soon after, does not represent a reintegrated presence within the nation.

This void echoes the maintenance of a non-indigeneity of peninsular Jews, while claiming non-peninsular Jews as connected to the Spanish nation, as seen with the zarzuela El Niño Judío from the early 20th century, which will be discussed further in this article. If the Red de Juderías tourism project would include a Sephardi singer from Spain in their Sephardi Festival, the heritagization of Judeo-Spanish voices might revert to a contemporary lived experience of Jewish life in Spain breaking with the medieval convivencia trope. This, to date, does not appear to happen.

The Spanish colonial project used this tradition and its linguistic connection to Spain to buttress their colonial expansion in various geographic locations, most notably in northern Morocco, in the interest to expand the Spanish nation.⁶⁰ However, Sephardi Jews were considered foreign in peninsular Spain and indigenous in the Spanish enclaves of Northern Morocco (Ojeda Mata: 159). This perceived foreignness was further supported by music and theatrical entertainment such as the previously mentioned popular 'El niño judío' zarzuela which premiered February 5, 1918, in the Apolo Theatre of Madrid. Its orientalist plot takes a Jewish family from Madrid to Aleppo to India in search of a long-lost father. It is important to note that the Jewish names used in the plot correspond to Moroccan names (Barchimor and Barchilon), which would be familiar to the Spanish during these early years of the Protectorate, and not Syrian Jewish names. But the librettists’ choice of making neighboring Moroccan Jews distant and exotic, and thus placing them in Syria and India, creates an interesting dynamic of distance between the ‘Spanish’ Jew in Madrid and the Spanish Madrileño audiences. The ambivalent relationship towards Jews in Spain oscillated during this period between philo-sefardism, with the embrace of Spanish cultural elements within local Judaism and anti-Semitism for any Jew that did not present clear Spanish cultural traces.

In November of 1940, Franco established the ‘Consejo de la Hispanidad’ establishing a cultural policy of hispanidad, a term coined by the Fascist Falange in 1931. Hispanismo, its predecessor, was based on ‘Spain’s cultural contributions extolled; public education advocated; anti-Semitism denounced, and a conscious pro-Semitism practiced.’⁶¹ (Diffie, 1943: 458). Hispanidad contrasted this by rooting itself in Roman Catholic traditions and modern Fascism. It is telling, that the next year, in 1941 the Instituto Arias Montano de Estudios Hebraicos y Oriente Próximo was created in the CSIC. Much of its early work related to Judeo-Spanish texts of songs and romances. By the 1980s, the Arias Montano Institute was renamed into a philological institute, the Instituto del Lenguas y Culturas del Mediterráneo y Oriente Próximo dejudaizing the earlier title. Since 2006 a major project on Sephardim and their relations with Spain (and not vice versa) Los sefardíes ante sí mismos y sus relaciones con España, is significantly based within the Research group of Heritage and Popular Culture of the Language, Literature and Anthropology Institute within the Humanities and Social Sciences Center of the CSIC.⁶² The gradual movement of research on Sephardim in Spain’s main national research institution from a Hebraic centre through one focusing on philology to a research group on heritage and popular culture points to the slow movement towards heritagization of Sephardi cultural contributions within the Spanish nation.

Today, the Fundación Tres Culturas has been set up to create cultural content embodying the diverse links between Morocco and Spain, through its Andalusian, Jewish and Muslim cultures. Very often these connections are done through concerts. On their website they say

This foundation [Tres Culturas] is called to continue growing, to keep on consolidating in the Euromediterranean panorama. To make its strategic role in Spanish-Moroccan relations be stronger and to walk together with sister institutions to quickly advance its original guiding goals: to promote dialogue, peace and tolerance amongst the people of the Mediterranean; to keep this space of convivencia in which cultural and religious diversity don’t only separate us, but unites us and helps us grow.⁶³

Jewish voices and the post-colonial Moroccan nation

The establishment of a Moroccan national identity, which brought all Moroccans under one banner, went through various stages. The relationship of Morocco’s Jews to the national identity and its construction has been written about most recently from historic and political angles⁶⁴. Even though a few Jewish performers have continued working in the years between 1970 and the 2000s, the Jewish soundscape goes almost silent with the emigration of many of the most famous performers. Only after the ratification of the new constitution is there an accelerated national official comeback of Jewish sonic presence. It is as if the nationalistic inclusion from the 1950s could only be upheld in contemporary Morocco by legally ratifying diversity within the Moroccan fabric after the Arab spring revolutions throughout the Maghreb and Middle East. In the 2011 constitution, the diverse elements forming Moroccan identity-composition are thus specifically named and ratified plunging Morocco into a new self-definition of what and how to construct marocanité, or intrinsic Moroccanness.

Morocco’s national anthem finishes with the same words that are carved into mountainsides throughout Moroccan roads: Allah, Al-Watan, Al-Malik (God, the Nation, the King), denoting the tripartite pillar of belonging and allegiance in Morocco. This triple description of the foundations of the Moroccan nation first made an international musical hit in 1956 with Sami ElMaghribi’s 45 rpm Allah, Ouatani ou Soultani, placing the Jewish voice at the center of a crucial juncture in the declaration of allegiance to God, King, and Nation.⁶⁵ This performative sonic allegiance during independence shows how Morocco’s Jews have multiple manners of performing and ensuring their intrinsic belonging to the nation-state, even while keeping clear boundaries around religious practice and family. Their simultaneous belonging and externality has also helped the creativity that is described as ‘revolutionizing Moroccan music by fusing the rhythms of the gharnati qsida with Moroccan popular musical art, all without losing its original flavor’⁶⁶ (El Haddaoui, 2014: 91).

Today, Jewish voices in Morocco are often highly choreographed, appearing as representatives nationally and internationally of Morocco’s commitment to diversity and religious tolerance. The Andalusian choir Kinor David Maroc is formed by a group of liturgical poetry synagogue singers, many of whom are also a part of Casablanca’s Hevra Kadisha, the group who ritually prepares the bodies of the deceased for burial. The intermingling of Jewish representative voices with their commitment to proper burial rites exemplifies the deep symbolism in their representation of Morocco in national and international stages, reminiscent of Serre’s concept of ownership, linking burial and voice as binaries of ‘polluting,’ owning and belonging.⁶⁷

In a televised interview from 2021 with local Moroccan Jewish star Maxime Karoutchi we hear him answer the questions what is Judeo-Moroccan music? He answers:

It’s our accent, a bit like Yiddish … Except that we add a little of everything [implying Arabic, Hebrew, French, Spanish] we sing it with love … we took the music which is originally Andalusian music and we added our voice which is sung from the depth of our gut, with a mawwal and that is a bit our voice, our style⁶⁸

However, one viewer’s comment on YouTube says that Moroccan Jewish music is simply Algerian music that was brought to Morocco and that is sung by Moroccan Jews,⁶⁹ erasing the validity of an owned Jewish Moroccan voice through his comments, especially considering the tensions between Morocco and Algeria surrounding the Western Sahara. This opinion is widely held amongst a segment of the population that is not aligned with the government’s official reintegration of diversity into Moroccan’s national identity.

Jewish music, sung by Jews and non-Jews continues to be included in Festivals, movies, television, and radio throughout Morocco with increasing visibility since the establishment of the post-arab spring Constitution in 2011.⁷⁰

Case studies: Mor Karbasi and Coco Diams

The last section will focus on two case studies of Jews who returned to Spain and Morocco to live and perform, Karbasi connecting to the blood of her ancestors and Diams to their bones. According to the Talmud, in Niddah fol. 31, the female contribution to the formation of a baby is everything that is red, in other words: blood. The male contributed everything white, from the sperm, which creates the bones.⁷¹ Both performers analyzed below, moved to Spain and Morocco from Israel to engage in the active process of heritagizing a contemporary sonic al-Andalus. Karbasi, states her connection to Spain from her blood line; Diams [Jacob Tordjman], has actively been involved in the support of Jewish bones, the rebuilding of the resting places of Tsaddikim.

Sevilla as Jewish home: song and blood, the case of Mor Karbasi

A Sephardi Israeli singer, Mor Karbasi born in Jerusalem in 1986, to a Moroccan mother and an Iranian father is based in Seville after living in London for the first years of her performance career. In 2012, she performed at the Fundación Tres Culturas at an event to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day, and to bring Sephardi songs, symbolizing living indigenous Jewish culture on Spanish soil, to what is often a sober affair of memorial prayers and candles. The local newspaper presented her concert as ‘a voice against the horrors of war’.⁷² The semiotic superposition of the hope of a Sephardi voice to the horrors of the Holocaust, and implicitly of the Inquisition, reiterates to deployment of sonic tropes as reinsertions of Jewish life. The use of a voice to implicitly connect the Holocaust to the Spanish history of Inquisition, reminds us of Lehman’s analysis of the construction of Jewish space in Poland (2013).

In 2013, to mark the launch of her CD La Tsadiká, entitled in reference to Sol Hachuel, a Jewish adolescent from Tangier who was tried and killed for apostacy in 1834, Karbasi performed in the gardens of the Alcazar’s festival Noches en los jardínes del real Alcazar. Establishing herself in Seville, and primarily singing Moroccan Judeo-Spanish repertoire, Karbasi’s career can be read almost as a vocal activism to reinscribe al-Andalus and its Jewish music in the region. She did not choose to live in ‘Castilla’ as Moroccan matriarchs have called their repertoire of Judeo-Spanish songs, as explained earlier (los cantares antiguos de Castilla, etc.), but to a city which was previously in the heart of al-Andalus, and which has a parallel tower, known as la Giralda, to the Muslim Koutoubia in Marrakesh.⁷³

Tellingly, her wikipedia page describes her connection to Spain through her paternal grandfather’s words:

… and according to her Moroccan Jewish grandfather, ‘the blood remembers,’ meaning that before this her ancestors came from Spain. Her connection to this culture is expressed passionately through her music.⁷⁴

Karbasi’s desire to sing this repertoire in Spain, is hinted to as a calling from her bloodline. She also declared on her social media feed that going back to Sevilla from Jerusalem feels like she is ‘home again’.⁷⁵ Turning the normative Jewish idea of diaspora [outside of Israel] and belonging [inside Israel] on its head as she leaves Jerusalem, the heart of traditional Judaism, for Spain, she creates a makom of Sephardi belonging that reinscribes Jewish bodies to a land of historic belonging.

Spain’s history with pureza de sangre laws and the tracing of Jewish bloodlines into Inquisitional proceedings centuries after conversion make the evocation of her own Sephardi blood calling to her to sing even more significant. Exclusion in Spain because of ancestry through ‘impure’ blood signified that ancestral contagion and the inheritance of error and treachery through Jewish blood was a metonymy for lack of catholic belief.⁷⁶ The confluence of Israeli female Sephardi singers as the contemporary representative of sonic vocal Sepharad carries deep symbolic weight and hearkens to the idea of exoticized foreign Jews as being celebrated while the voice of local Spanish Jews, is less visible, as in the previously mentioned zarzuela, El niño judío, the early 20th century zarzuela. The fact that Spanish-born Sephardim living in Spain do not perform Judeo-Spanish repertoires in the public sphere, hints that those voices are still invisible.

Most dramatic of all, especially contrasting to Diams’ example of comfortable inscription into Moroccan landmarks that follows, is that Karbasi’s music videos do not show Spanish historical sites or spaces. Karbasi’s videos that show her in historic landmarks were filmed in Greece,⁷⁷ or in an undistinguishable garden, where the only semiotic hint of a Sephardi al-Andalus is the pomegranate⁷⁸ which is read by Jewish viewers as a confluence of Granada and the Holy Land, a makomization of Sephardi presence in al-Andalus.

Integrated Jewish Marocanité: song, landmarks, and bones, the case of Coco Diams

A recent example of public-facing marocanité is that of Coco Diams, a Moroccan Israeli businessman turned musical public symbol who presents his urban Moroccanness in a popular music video medley produced in 2018.⁷⁹ Diams, whose birth name is Jacob Tordjman, was born in Bzou, a small rural town in the Middle Atlas Mountains in the 1960s. He made his Aliyah⁸⁰ to Israel as a young man, and in recent years has traveled between Casablanca and Tel Aviv to manage his in-law’s jewelery business. As a demonstration of his commitment to his marocanité, Tordjman built the shrine of Rabbi Yehuda Ben Israel HaLevi in Netifa as well as the two-story lodgings at the pilgrimage site of Bzou, reconnecting to the bones of his region’s Tsaddikims. Coco Diams began singing semi-professionally in 2013, when he integrated the Kinor David Maroc choir, discussed earlier in this article.

Diams’ medley video, produced by the Moroccan Jewish director, Reine Danan, has garnered over 100,000 views on YouTube. In this video, Coco sings from his apartment on the seafront of Casablanca singing Tetuani composer Abdessadek Chekara’s popular song Ya Hbib elQalb, while looking out towards the Hassan II Mosque. The next scene shows him relaxing in the Saharan Tuareg traditional clothing, while being served Moroccan tea and dates. The superposition of these elements: a popular song with the iconography of Moroccan Islam and Saharan belonging shows the use of a popular music video to establish Jewish viability in contemporary Morocco. These decisions are showing not just the sonic and aesthetic similarities of Jews with Muslims, but the political and socio-religious understanding and intimacy that Jews have within the Moroccan nation. By minute 3” of the video, Diams is driving his convertible BMW on the Casablanca seafront, obviously comfortable with his life in this city. By minute 5” Diams is back inside, cradling a portrait of his wife, who lives in Israel, and which he hangs next to a portrait of himself, as he sits on the sofa, plays the ‘oud and sings into the camera.

Benedict Anderson has said that the nation is ‘an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign … because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.’⁸¹ (Anderson, 1983: 6) Many younger Moroccans today take Morocco’s Jewish community’s communion with the nation for granted, a ‘component’ of the legacy of the diversity lived in al-Andalus. Morocco’s integration of Jewish bodies and sounds into the nation and land strongly counters characteristics of anti-Jewish ideology. Diam’s comfortable, inner sphere video representation of a lived marocanité is reinforced by the repertoire he sings, his dress, food, and his gendered representation of women in the video medley.⁸²

Conclusion

Jews are often represented in the empty spaces that they once inhabited. Spaces like mellahs, juderías, empty synagogues, abandoned ritual baths, or renovated cemeteries throughout Morocco and Spain resound in the silence of previously heard Jewish languages and music, re-enacting an aspect of makom through memory. This spatial vacuum is only recently being filled in sonically, thus giving a sonic embodiment to the absence that the Jews’ departures created. The sounds of Jewish music performed by Jews and non-Jews then, begin to clear what Rosen has called a ‘a fog of unremembrance.’ This fog ‘had become to cloud any specific way of recalling the Jews. They have begun a phantom memory, the felt presence of an absent limb’ (2002: 103). Spain’s Juderías, devoid of physical markers of Jewish life, except for the occasional street sign showing where the Jewish quarter was, often find tourists searching for something more. They find it in Granada, Seville, and Toledo, where the non-Jewish owned tourist sites and businesses sell cuisine, objects, and an impermanent feeling of lost history. In recent years, similarly to Berlin’s brass markers throughout city sidewalks that commemorate dead Jewish bodies from the Holocaust, Spain has included markers in the Jewish quarter of Toledo with symbols to mark the disembodied Jewish neighbourhoods.⁸³ The Jewish Quarter of Marrakesh was renovated and officially renamed in 2017 to great pomp with an official visit of the King Mohammed VI, highlighting how street names were renamed to their original, Jewish ones.⁸⁴ As for sounds, if tourists are lucky, they could come through the city the same day as a Sephardi or Judeo-Moroccan concert, or find an active synagogue service in few Moroccan cities, which can then offerthem the idea of an embodied presence of Jewish sound within these echoing empty spaces, either in Spain or Morocco. The ’component’ of al-Andalus and the re-enactment of historic convivencia narratives is thus brought back to life through performed voice and the sonic embodiment of what has been accepted as indigenous Jewish sounds, the contemporary sonic al-Andalus heritagized to buttress a national brand of diversity which supports international diplomacy and tourism in both countries.

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge the members of the MESG Research Team who have heard and read many portions of this material as I have been developing it. I am also immensely grateful to the two anonymous reviewers whose suggestions have helped refine the final article. Finally, I must acknowledge the invaluable trust put into me by my informants, whose candid conversations during rehearsals, dinners and impromptu moments as well as during recorded interviews have given me the ability to understand the unspoken dynamics here analysed.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Vanessa Paloma Elbaz

Vanessa Paloma Elbaz is a Research Associate based at the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Music and affiliated with Peterhouse. She is part of the ERC-funded research team Past and Present Musical Encounters of the Strait of Gibraltar (MESG_785622). A former Senior Fulbright Research Scholar, Posen Scholar, Broome and Allen Fellow and TALIM Fellow amongst others, she received her Ph.D. from the Centre de recherches moyen orient méditerranée of the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales, Université Sorbonne Paris Cité in 2018. Currently a Board member of the Tangier American Legation Institute for Moroccan Studies and the Jewish Music Institute, she also serves as Vice-Chair of the Mediterranean Music Study Group of the International Council for Traditional Music. Her research has been supported by the American Institute for Maghrib Studies, H2020 Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions, Cambridge University Arts and Humanities Impact Fund and others. She founded KHOYA: Jewish Morocco Sound Archive in 2012, recently launching its online pilot on yalalla.org.uk. Her research focuses on Sephardi and Judeo-Spanish music and sound, gender, and issues of power and minority politics. Dr. Elbaz’ monograph on Judeo-Spanish women’s songs from Northern Morocco is due for publication in 2022 with Brill.

Notes

1. Al Andalus no es un tiempo pasado, sin más; es un componente … de la Europa que conocemos como matriz de Occidente y que en Al Andalus saltó del Medioevo para vivir un primer Renacimiento. Author’s bold (Emilio González Ferrín, Historia General de Al-Andalus, Almuzara, 2007)), 11.

2. This work was researched and written while funded by the European Research Council under grant MESG_758221, Past and Present Musical Encounters Across the Strait of Gibraltar and based at the Faculty of Music of the University of Cambridge.

3. “Why is the Holy One, blessed be he, called makom? Because he is the place of the World,” Genesis, Rabbah, 68, 8. Barbara Mann, Space and place in The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Jewish Cultures, Routledge, 183-194.

4. Dalia Kandiyoti, The Converso’s Return: Conversion and Sephardi History in Contemporary Literature and Culture (Stanford University Press, 2020), 125–126.

5. Erica Lehrer, Jewish Poland Revisited: Heritage Tourism in Unquiet Places, Indiana University Press, 2013:2.

6. One example in Spain is Anna Alcaide’s 2018 concert Otoño Sefardí en Córdoba which was held in the ancient convent of Santa Clara, breaking down boundaries between Church spaces and Jewish sounds, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QscKE2Qwgs (accessed May 24, 2021).

7. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYIdvqo2dWQ, starting at minute 28ʹ (accessed May 24, 2021).

8. On repeated occasions informants have expressed their ambivalent feelings on the public display of affection for Jews by fellow non-Jewish musical collaborators or concert and festival producers in both Spain and Morocco, expressing that they are afraid that it may often simply be done for political purposes and not because of a true friendliness or interest in Jewish culture in itself (Private conversation with AS, Tangier, August 2021; PE, Benalmádena, December 2016; BA, Rabat, October 2016; RA, Barcelona, October 2012).

9. People of the land in Moroccan Arabic, an equivalent to Landsman from German.

10. I am defining Jewish music as repertoires that are deemed by Jews and non-Jews as belonging to Jewish liturgical or vernacular traditions. These repertoires may not have anything ‘explicitly’ Jewish about them but are used in identity transactions about representation of Jewishness or Sephardiness.

11. I use the term trans-Gibraltar throughout this article because of the importance of the cultural interaction between the northern and southern coasts of the strait of Gibraltar. Not only is there a visual contact between the two coasts that impacts the sensorial relationship to the ‘other’, but the visual connections experienced by the citizens of both coasts creates a sense of unity which is often also experienced through music.

12. Aomar Boum “Unmuted Sounds: Jewish Musical Echoes in Twentyfirst Century Moroccan and Israeli Soundscapes” in Jewish-Muslim Interactions: Performing Cultures between North Africa and France, Liverpool University Press, 2020: 181-200.

13. Vanessa Paloma Elbaz “Connecting the Disconnect: Music and its Agency in Moroccan Cinema's Jewish Muslim Interactions” in Jewish-Muslim Interactions: Performing Cultures between North Africa and France, Liverpool University Press, 2020: 201-221 and “Common Language: Popular Music in Morocco” in Jews and Muslims in Morocco: Their Intersecting Worlds, Lexington Books, 2021: 189-216.

14. The conservation of Jewish heritage sites including synagogues and cemeteries was the first phase of a long-term official discourse about Moroccan Jews and their role in nation building. By the early 2000s, a culture of festivals spread through the country as each region or city began to capitalize on its cultural and musical traditions, and organized festivals in accordance with its local heritage. Moroccan festivals featured Jewish and Muslim singers such as Rabbi Haim Louk and Mohammed Briouel, and events honouring Muslim and Jewish singers such as Rabbi Samy El Maghribi, Zohra El Fassia, and Abdessadeq Chaqara (Boum, 2020), 194.

15. Nicholas Cook, “Anatomy of the Encounter: Intercultural Analysis as Relational Musicology,” in Critical Musicological Reflections Essays in Honour of Derek B. Scott, Routledge, 2012:196.

16. Le capital culturel est celui qui est le plus directement touché par la stratégie de patrimonialisation. En permettant une valorisation identitaire, la patrimonialisation contribue à contrer l’uniformisation des cultures. Cette contribution est loin d’être négligeable dans le contexte de mondialisation. https://www.cairn.info/revue-societes-2014-3-page-137.htm (accessed June 3, 2021).

17. Paja Faudree “Music, Language, and Texts: Sound and Semiotic Ethnography” Annual Review of Anthropology 41, 2012: 519-536.

18. Suzanne Cusick, “Towards and acoustemology of detention in the 'global war on terror'” in Music Sound and Space: Transformation of Public and Private Experience ed. Georgina Born, Cambridge University Press, 2013: 275-291.

19. Musical mode of Arabo-Andalusian or ’ala music.

20. A weaving of Hebrew and Arabic texts on a traditional Andalusian nouba melody performed commonly in Moroccan performances of musical diversity.

21. I use the term indigeneity in this article to reference the acceptance of Jews as having established a long-standing ancestral belonging to the land, thus being intrinsic to the contemporary nation, contrary to being seen as ’other’ or as liminally connected to the nation.

22. In Spain https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADC0W-ji-ik Mara Aranda has recorded a Sephardi song video in the Cordoba Mosque, as a collapsing of all non-Catholic diversity from al Andalus. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdN6CCktSSU this example is named Diaspora and is recommended by the Red de Juderías, a tourism organization promoting Jewish tourism in Spain. In Morocco, a recent example by Mike Chriqui https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2mXsvJwKGs has his face superposed on the Moroccan flag as he extolls police and medical reaction during the coronavirus pandemic (last accessed October 9, 2021). Further down in the article I will discuss in detail, Coco Diam’s use of music and imagery in the establishment of his undiscussed indigeneity to Morocco, even as an Israeli citizen.

23. Gracia Ouzounian

24. Linda Tuhaiwai Smith Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, Zed Books, 2021: xii.

25. Junto a personajes legendarios en el ámbito literario y musical, irrumpe el triángulo de al-Andalus simbolizado por Córdoba, Sevilla y Granada y sus monumentos principales dejando a otras tan relevamntes como Toledo, Almería, Zaragoza o Bajadoz, fuera de juego (Virginia Luque Gallegos El legado de Al-Andalus: La herencia andalusí y morisca en el Maghreb, Almuzara, 2017) 216.

26. Chgoury appears to be a word of recent invention, denoting Jewish chaabi or popular music. Increasingly employed after the 2011 Constitution which inscribed the Hebraic element as one of the affluents of Moroccan identity. For more on this see (Vanessa Paloma Elbaz “Connecting the Disconnect: Music and its Agency in Moroccan Cinema's Jewish Muslim Interactions” in Jewish-Muslim Interactions: Performing Cultures between North Africa and France, Liverpool University Press, 2020: 201-221 and “Common Language: Popular Music in Morocco” in Jews and Muslims in Morocco: Their Intersecting Worlds, Lexington Books, 2021: 189-216).

27. Maite Ojeda Mata, Identidades Ambivalentes: Sefardíes en la España contemporánea, Sefarad Editores, 2018: 251.

28. https://www.bde.es/f/webbde/SES/Secciones/Publicaciones/PublicacionesSeriadas/DocumentosOcasionales/12/Fich/do1201.pdf (accesed May 27, 2021).

29. “El rey a los judíos sefardíes: “¡Cuanto os hemos echado de menos!”” La Vanguardia, November 30, 2015, https://www.lavanguardia.com/politica/20151130/30493169893/rey-judios-sefardies.html (accessed June 7, 2021).

30. … un ensemble d’antinomies. A chacune de ses fidélités s’oppose une autre fidélitΩé exactement contraire. Ses vocations se heurtent, ses affinités se contradisent. Ses allégeances doubles ou triples sont pour lui un dilemme de tous les jours. Il est tout entier dans ces partages, dans ces écartelements, qui ont, selon le cas, leur tragique ou leur guignol … (Carlos de Nesry, Le juif de Tanger et le Maroc, Editions Internationales, 1956: 16).

31. Sami Ben-Layashi and Bruce Maddy-Weitzman “Myth History and Reapolitik: Morocco and its Jewish Community” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 9, 2010:89-108; Aomar Boum Memories of Absence: How Muslims Remember Jews in Morocco, Stanford University Press, 2014; Jonathan Wrytzen Making Morocco: Colonial Intervention and the Politics of Identity, Cornell University Press, 2015; Alma R. Heckman, The Sultan's Communists: Moroccan Jews and the Politics of Belonging, Stanford University Press, 2020.

32. For a longer exploration of this concept of Jews as ’outsiders’ see Elbaz, 2020: 205.

33. Lawrence Rosen, The Culture of Islam, University of Chicago Press, 2002: 103.

34. Cathy Gelbin and Sander Gilman “How did We Get Here from There? in Cosmopolitanisms and the Jews, University of Michigan Press, 2017: 2.

35. Marocain(e)s libres … les interdits vous guettent, May 2, 2012, https://telquel.ma/2012/05/02/Marocaines-libres-les-interdits-vous-guettent_518_2275 (accessed May 28, 2021).

36. Jauk Elmaleh was born in the mellah of Casablanca in 1946 and after his father’s early death was raised by a French Catholic stepfather whom his mother, of Sephardi ancestry married. He lived in Paris and later Marseille, only returning to Morocco in the early 2000s.

37. Stage name for David Benezra (1970, Casablanca), the adopted son of a Turkish Jewish family living in Casablanca. His birth mother, a young unmarried Moroccan Jew, gave him up for adoption to avoid social ostracism. He has been married multiple times, most often to non-Moroccans and is currently married with a French Moroccan with interreligious ancestry.

38. Charlotte Townsend-Gault “Have We Ever Been Good?” in Rebecca Belmore: The Named and the Unnamed exhibit catalogue, The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia, 2002, http://www.ccca.ca/c/writing/t/townsendgault/ tgault013t.html accessed May 19, 2021.

39. Sarah Perez describes herself on her website sharouh.com as: Sarah Perez (Sharouh) is a french musician, dj, producer and sound designer based in Madrid. Appart from her personal productions and djing (electronic world music), she designs sound for artistic installations, audiovisuals, theatre or dance shows. She is also involved in several community music projects in different parts of the world such as Lebanon, Ecuador and Spain, some experiences that deeply influenced her creative process. In the past years, she has been performing as a dj in some of the best places and clubs in Madrid, such as Conde Duque cultural center, sala Caracol, sala El Sol, Siroco, Café La Palma, Tabacalera … .

40. Sharouh lauds Messika as a forward thinking free woman who was openly bisexual in Tunisia in the 1920s https://soundcloud.com/sharouh/habibi-lawel-habiba-msika-sharouh-remix (accessed October 9, 2021).

41. A term coined by Elmaleh as the rhythm of amazighness, to create what he terms as choreosophie – a knowledge based on movement.

42. Mann, 190.

43. Michel Serre, Le mal propre, Poche - Le pommier, 2012: 9.

44. For an extensive study on Jewish pilgrimages in Morocco see Issachar ben Ami. 1990, Culte des saints et pèlerinages judéo-musulmans au Maroc, Maisonneuve et Larose.

45. https://www.urbancultours.com/MONTJUIC/lapidas.html (accessed May 28, 2021).

46. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNvlfy78mmo (accessed October 9, 2021).

47. In 2020, this author published another sensationalist book entitled “La verdad sobre Hitler,” The Truth about Hitler.

48. Roda, J. & Schwartz, S.T. 2020. Home beyond Borders and the Sound of Al-Andalus. Jewishness in Arabic; the Odyssey of Samy Elmaghribi, religions, 11, 2020: 2 Retrieved April 8, 2021 from http://doi:10.3390/rel11110609

49. Corpus of Spanish folk ballads transmitted orally, some texts originally from the Middle Ages have been transmitted through oral tradition, with changes, omissions, new creation and elisions until contemporary times. Sephardim have maintained a large corpus of ballads from this tradition, which established them, in the eyes of early 20^th century philologists as culturally indigenous to Spain, albeit the century-long rupture of their presence in Spain.

50. this musical category spans Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque western classical music.

51. Pneuma-PN-540.

52. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/25/parade-of-nazis-in-spanish-carnival-sparks-furious-criticism and https://www.timesofisrael.com/at-spanish-carnival-dancers-equate-jews-and-nazis-alongside-auschwitz-floats/ (accessed May 28, 2021).

53. Brendan Simms, Hitler: A Global Biography, Basic Civitas Books, 2020, 45-46.

54. Aron Gurevitch, Medieval Popular Culture: Problems of Belief and Perception, Cambridge University Press, 1988: 179.

55. Voice is divided in political philosophy into phone and logos (Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer, Seuil, 1997: 15-16) separating sounded voice from language, one animalistic, the other political.

56. https://www.facebook.com/jacques.lezra/posts/10106266244941787 (accessed May 28, 2021).

57. Abad, F. 2008. “La escuela de Menéndez Pidal y la tradición del krausismo español” a distancia Cuaderno de Cultura, 1, 207-2011. Díaz-Mas, P. 2019. “El Romancero, vínculo entre sefardíes y españoles”, en Rostros judíos del occidente medieval. XLV Semana Internacional de Estudios Medievales Estella-Lizarra, Pamplona, Gobierno de Navarra, 29-52. Díaz-Mas, P. and Elisa Martín Ortega. 2017. “Romances y Canciones Sefardíes en la colección de partituras en la biblioteca Tomás Navarro Tomás” Actas del XVIII Congreso de Estudios Sefardíes, Madrid: CSIC, 55-74. Frenk Alatorre, M. 1975. Las Jarchas Mozárabes y los comienzos de la lírica románica, Guanajuato: El Colegio de México. Menéndez Pidal, R. 1919. “La primitiva poesía lírica española” Estudios Literarios, 255-344. Menéndez Pidal, R. 1956. Los Godos y la Epopeya Española: “Chansons de Geste“ y Baladas Nórdicas, Madrid: Espasa Calpe. Menéndez Pidal, R. 1973. Estudios sobre el Romancero, Madrid: Espasa-Calpe. Ortega, ML. 1919. Los Hebreos en Marruecos, Málaga: Algazara, [1994]. Romero, E. 1988. Coplas sefardíes. Primera selección, introducción de Iacob M. Hassán, Córdoba: Edicones El Almendro. Weich-Shahak, S. 1989. Cantares Judeo Españoles de Marruecos para el Ciclo de la Vida. Jerusalem: The Jewish Music Research Center. Weich-Shahak, S. 1995a. “Canciones acumulativas sefardíes y congéneres hispánicas,” Revista de Dialectología y Tradiciones Populares, 50: 73–91. Weich-Shahak, Susana. 1995b. Un Vergel Vedre. Zaragoza: Ibercaja. Weich-Shahak, Susana. 1997. Romancero sefardí de Marruecos. Madrid: Alpuerto. Weich- Shahak, Susana. 2009. “No hay boda sin pandero. El rol de la mujer en el repertorio musical sefardí: intérprete y personaje.” In El Prezente Studies on Sephardic Culture Gender and Identity, Vol. 3. Beer Sheva: Moshe David Gaon Center for Ladino Culture, 273– 91. Weich Shahak, Shoshana. 2011. “Migration in the Twentieth- Century Sephardic Song Repertoire” European Judaism, 44, 143.

58. However, the preamble of the actual text of the law presented the expulsion not as an expulsion but as a ‘drastic’ decision taken by those Jews who chose to not convert to Catholicism: ‘According to the preamble, then, Spain bore no responsibility for the expulsion of Jews; the liberal Monarchies were Jewish-friendly and Spain was on the side of the good guys during the Holocaust. No reference was made to the royal decree expelling the Jews in 1492 or to the fact that Spanish Constitutions in the 19th century both defined Spain as a Catholic country and banned other religions. Interestingly, neither are there references to the period between 1868 and 1874 when liberal and republican politicians like Emilio Castelar publicly defended the Sephardic Jews. The preamble does not mention the efforts of the Second Republic in Spain that helped thousands of Jewish refugees from Central Europe. Most important, however, is the lack of any reference to the complicity of Francisco Franco with Adolf Hitler and Spanish cooperation in the deportation of Jews from Spain to concentration camps until at least 1944.’ (Alfons Aragoneses, Convivencia and Filosefardismo in Spanish Nation-building, Max Plack Institute for European Legal History Research Paper Series 2016-05: 3).

59. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UE93ymy48Zw (accessed May 28, 2021).

60. Vanessa Paloma Elbaz “Looking at the 'Other' through the Ear: Contemporary Traces of Protectorate Politics through Music” in Mélanges Festschrift for Professor Mohammed Kenbib” Faculté de lettres et sciences sociales Mohammed V Rabat, 2021: 401-427.

61. Bailey Diffie, The Ideology of Hispanidad. The Hispanic American Historical Review, 23(3), 1943: 457-482. doi:10.2307/2508538

62. Grupo de Investigación de Patrimonio y Culturas Populares (GIAP) del Instituto de Lengua, Literatura y Antropología del Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales del CSIC.

63. ”Pero esta fundación está llamada a crecer aún más, a seguir consolidándose en el panorama euromediterráneo, a hacer valer con más fuerza su papel estratégico en las relaciones hispano-marroquíes y a caminar del lado de instituciones hermanas para avanzar más rápido en los objetivos que la guían desde sus orígenes: promover el diálogo, la paz y la tolerancia entre los pueblos del Mediterráneo; mantener este espacio de convivencia en el que la diversidad cultural y religiosa no solo no nos separa, sino que nos une y nos engrandece http://tresculturas.org/fundacion/bienvenida/ (accessed May 19, 2021).

64. Daniel Schroeter, “The Shifting Boundaries of Moroccan Jewish Identities” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society, 15:1, 2008: 145-164. Jonathan Wrytzen, ‘Colonial Legacies, National Identity and Challenges for Multiculturalism in the Contemporary Maghreb’, in Multiculturalism and Democracy in North Africa: Aftermath of the Arab Spring, ed. Moha Ennaji, Routledge, 2014: 17-34. Eric Calderwood, Moroccan Jews and the Spanish colonial imaginary,1903–1951, Journal of North African Studies, 24, 2019: 86-110. DOI: 10.1080/13629387.2018.1459261. “Jewish Radicals of Morocco: Case Study for a New Historiography” Jewish Social Studies, 23: 3, 2018: 67-100. Christopher Silver, “Nationalist Record: Jews, Muslims, and Music in Interwar North Africa” in Jewish-Muslim Interactions: Performing Cultures between North Africa and France, ed. Sami Everett and Rebekah Vince, Liverpool University Press, 2020: 61-80.

65. Christopher Silver, “The Sounds of Nationalism: Music, Moroccanism, and the making of Sami El Maghribi, IJMES, 52:1, 2020: 23-47.

66. Mohammed El Haddaoui, La musique judéo-marocaine: Un patrimoine en partage. 2014: La Croisée des chemins.

67. In 2012, the chorale performed the opening gala concert at the International Book Fair of Geneva, representing Morocco, who was the guest of honour that year. The timing of the chorale’s public representation of Morocco’s diversity on an international stage, the year after the Constitutional referendum of 2011, further confirms the importance of sonic musical presence to establish diversity. In 2014, Kinor David Maroc performed at the Institut du Monde Arabe with the arabo-Andalusian orchestra from Fez, directed by Mohammed Briouel, as part of a series accompanying a large-scale exhibit on Morocco’s history and cultural traditions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s84ieUpTlxk (accessed May 28, 2021).

68. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zu2gZr9xhA0 (accessed May 28, 2021).

69. la musique judéo marocaine, anciennement appelée dziri n’est rien d’autre que la musique algérienne d’ailleur il est tres facile a distinguer le dialect et l’action algerien quand ces juifs marocains chantes ce qu ils appellent eux chgouri https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JK9YXxk-WYM&t=20s au maroc il yavait le dziri, la musique algérienne qui a été justement importée par des musiciens juif au début du 20ime siècle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JK9YXxk-WYM&t=300.

70. For an in-depth study on this please see: Elbaz, VP 2021 “Popular Music in Morocco: A Common Language,” in Jews and Muslims in Morocco: Their Intersecting Worlds (Lexington Books).

71. Le texte (Guémara, Nidda fol. 31) dit ceci: Trois êtres s’associent pour faire l’homme: le Saint, béni soit-il, le père de l’enfant et sa mère. Le père donne ce qui est blanc (le sperme) d’où viennent les os, le ghidim (tendons, nerfs …), les ongles, l’encéphale et le blancs des yeux. La mère donne ce qui est rouge (le sang) d’où viennent la peau, la chair, les cheveux et le noir des yeux. Le Saint, béni soit-il, donne le ruah et la neshamah (âme), le khlaster panim (l’expression et la forme de la figure, la vision, l’audition, la parole, la marche et les mouvements, l’intelligence et les aptitudes intellectuelles). David Rouah Imma ou, Rites, coutumes et croyances chez la femme juive en Afrique du Nord, Maisonneuve et Larose, 1990).

72. https://www.diariodesevilla.es/vivirensevilla/voz-horror-guerra_0_554644754.html (accessed October 9, 2021).

73. Moroccan Muslims are proud of these ’sister’ towers in Seville and Marrakesh and the incomplete third in Rabat. Today La Giralda graces the Cathedral of Seville, and is neighbouring to the Alcazar, where Karbasi performed in the gardens in 2013.

74. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mor_Karbasi (accessed October 10, 2021).

75. October 5, 2021 Facebook feed Mor Karbasi, https://www.facebook.com/morkarbasi (accessed October 9, 2021).

76. Race and blood in the Iberian world / edited by Max S. Hering Torres, Mará Elena Martáńez, David Nirenberg, Lit Verlag, 2012: 18.

77. La galana I la mar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGdTrXKa3jQ filmed in 2012 in Thessaloniki, as a counter weight to the erradication and murder of the thriving Jewish community during the holocaust. Last (accessesd October 10, 2021).

78. Ladrona de Granadas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ihJVkdMkvA (accessed October 10, 2021).

79. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBf78ddq-4U (accessed May 19, 2021).

80. Aliyah, literally means to ascend, and is the term used in Jewish circles referring to an immigrant’s ’ascent’ from the diaspora to the Holy Land.

81. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 1983: Verso.

82. an analysis of the gendered representation of women in his video requires a study in itself. Throughout the three songs in the montage there is: a belly dancer, a portrait painting of his wife, a flamenco dancer, behind a veiled filter, possibly symbolizing the connection to Spain, and finally an Amazigh woman dressed in a sensual traditional dance dress.

83. https://saltaconmigo.com/blog/2014/08/juderia-de-toledo-historia-monumentos/ (accessed June 7, 2021).

84. https://www.francetvinfo.fr/monde/afrique/maroc/le-roi-mohammed-vi-rebaptise-un-quartier-de-marrakech-de-son-nom-juif-dorigine_3058289.html (accessed October 10, 2021).