Forbidden Melodies: Music and Arab-Jewish Identity in Contemporary Mizrahi Cinema

Abstract

This article explores the role Arab music has played in forming Mizrahi identity in contemporary Israeli cinema, focusing on the films “The Ballad of the Weeping Spring”, “Testimony” and “Three Mothers”, which second and third generation Mizrahi filmmakers born to Jewish immigrants from Arab and Muslim countries made in Israel. Using Arab music, these films display the vast array of historical and imaginary relations between the Jew and the Arab, West and East, Israel and the Middle East. Memory of the Arab-Jewish past is a place that cannot be revisited, even if one can travel to the geographical territory that appears to be a place of ‘origin.’ As members of the second and third generations born in Israel, these Mizrahi filmmakers cannot reclaim the Arab-Jewish past of which they never really were a part, and so they try to trace musical routes that will take them to places, histories and encounters with people they have not known before. The grounded certainty of their Mizrahi roots is replaced in the films by the contingencies of the routes that the music enabled.

Key Words:

• Arab-Jews
• Arab Music
• East/West
• Israeli Cinema
• Mizrahim
• Zionism

Disclosure Statement

The author did not report any conflict of interests with respect to the research for and writing of this article.

Notes

1 On Mizrahi cinema see Ella Shohat (1987) Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation (Austin: University of Texas Press); Yaron Shemer (2013) Identity, Place, and Subversion in Contemporary Mizrahi Cinema in Israel (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press); Ella Shohat (2015) The Mizrahi Cinema of Displacement in Soraya Altorki (ed) A Companion to the Anthropology of the Middle East, pp. 329–337 (Sussex: Wiley, Blackwell); Merav Alush Levron (2020) Under Eastern Eyes: Identity and Self-Representation in Israeli Documentary Cinema [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved); Shirly Bahar (2021) Documentary Cinema in Israel-Palestine: Performance, the Body, the Home (London: I.B. Tauris).

2 Ella Shohat (1999) The Invention of the Mizrahim, Journal of Palestine Studies, 1(1), p. 11; see also Ella Shohat (2006) Rupture and Return: Zionist Discourse and the Study of the Arab-Jews, Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices, pp. 330–358 (Durham: Duke University Press).

3 Ella Shohat (1997) Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish Victims in Anne McClintock, Amir Mufto & Ella Shohat (eds) Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Postcolonial Perspectives, p. 47 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).

4 Yehouda Shenhav & Hannan Hever (2012) ’Arab-Jews’ after Structuralism: Zionist Discourse and the (De)formation of an Ethnic Identity, Social Identities 18(1), p. 114.

5 Gil Anidjar (2003) The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy, p. xviii (Stanford: Stanford University Press).

6 Gil Z. Hochberg (2007) In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination, p. 39 (Princeton: Princeton University Press).

7 Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, p. 60.

8 For further discussion on these films from different perspectives see Raz Yosef (2022) Contemporary Israeli Cinema: Trauma, Ethics and Temporality (London: Routledge).

9 James Clifford (1997) Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press).

10 Inbal Perlson (2006) Great Joy Tonight: Arab-Jewish Music and Mizrahi Identity [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Resling).

11 Motti Regev (1995) Present Absentee: Arab Music in Israeli Culture, Public Culture 7(2), pp. 433–445.

12 Amnon Shiloah & Erik Cohen (1983) The Dynamics of Change in Jewish Oriental Ethnic Music in Israel, Ethnomusicology, 27(2), pp. 227–252.

13 Ibid, p. 247.

14 Yochai Oppenheimer (2011) Arab Music and Mizraḥi Poetry, CLCWeb 22(1), p. 5.

15 Yehouda Shenhav (2006) The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Religion, and Ethnicity, pp. 140, 143 (Stanford: Stanford University Press).

16 On the reception of Mizrahi music by the Israeli Ashkenazi establishment see, for instance, Erik Cohen & Amnon Shiloah (1985) Major Trends of Change in Jewish Oriental Ethnic Music in Israel, Popular Music, 5, pp. 199–223; Jeff Halper, Edwin Seroussi & Pamela Squires-Kidron (1989) Musica Mizrakhit: Ethnicity and Class Culture in Israel, Popular Music, 8(2), pp. 131–141; Motti Regev (1996) Musica Mizrakhit, Israeli Rock and National Culture in Israel, Popular Music, 15(3), pp. 275–284; and Motti Regev & Edwin Seroussi (2005) Popular Music and National Culture in Israel (Berkeley: University of California Press).

17 On Mizrahi ethnic melancholia see Raz Yosef (2006) Restaging the Primal Scene of Loss: Melancholia and Ethnicity in Israeli Cinema, Third Text 20(3/4), pp. 487–498.

18 Shohat Ella (1992) Reflections of an Arab-Jew, Emergences 3(4), p. 40.

19 Homi K. Bhabha (1994) The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 2.

20 The Palestinian testimonies were documented by B'Tselem: The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories while Breaking the Silence organization collected and documented the testimonies of the Israeli soldiers.

21 For example, the testimony of a Palestinian woman detained by female Israeli soldiers at a roadblock, who was subjected to their cursing, spitting and humiliation; the testimony of a Palestinian student who described how soldiers carved a Star of David on his body with a broken bottle.

22 Such was the testimony of an Israeli soldier who befriended a Palestinian boy and gave him sweets when hours later he saw the same boy frightened and terrorized as he entered his parents’ house to search it in the middle of the night; or the testimony of a soldier telling of the emotional obtuseness over the suffering of the Palestinians during his service in military checkpoints.

23 Shoshana Felman & Dori Laub (1992) Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge).

24 Bill Nichols (2008) Documentary Reenactment and the Fantasmatic Subject, Critical Inquiry 35(1), p. 74.

25 Shohat, Sephardim in Israel, p. 65.

26 Ibid, p. 48.

27 Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, p. 60.

28 Robert Stam & Ella Shohat (2012) Race in Translation: Culture Wars around the Postcolonial Atlantic, pp. 156–157 (New York: NYU Press). See also Ammiel Alcalay (1993) After Jews and Arabs: Rethinking Levantine Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).

29 Roland Barthes (1977) The Grain of the Voice in Image – Music – Text, Stephan Heath (trans), p. 188 (New York: Hill and Wang).

30 Julia Kristeva (1980) Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, Leon S. Roudiez (ed and trans) (New York: Columbia University Press).

31 Barthes, The Grain of the Voice, p. 182.

32 Hanan Hever (2000) We Didn’t Come from the Sea: Outlines for Mizrahi Literary Geography [in Hebrew] Theory and Criticism, 16, pp. 183, 182.

33 Kaja Silverman (1988) The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema, p. 86 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).