Historicizing the Concept of Arab Jews in the Maghrib

Gottreich, Emily Benichou

doi:10.1353/jqr.0.0022

Cited by 23 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 22 publications

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“…Today, by contrast, performing Jewishness in Arabic is seen as controversial, involving political and identity claims. Indeed, the emergence of Arab and Jewish nationalisms led to a reinvention of the past in light of current political tensions as well as precipitated the delineation of new ethnic categories linked to the experience of exile (Gottreich 2008).…”

Section: Performing Jewishness In Arabic: Decline Recognition and Politicizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Home beyond Borders and the Sound of Al-Andalus. Jewishness in Arabic; the Odyssey of Samy Elmaghribi

Roda

Schwartz²

2020

Religions

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In their conversation about music, Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim discuss a process of seeking home in music and literature. For Moroccan-Jewish superstar Samy Elmaghribi (Solomon Amzallag), who migrated to France and Israel and then settled for most of his life in Montreal, Canada, the reference to Al-Andalus through the sound of the nouba became his home. Beginning his career in his native country of Morocco as a singer and composer of modern Moroccan music, in Montreal, Samy Elmaghribi became the cantor in the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, the oldest Jewish congregation in Canada. Based on ethnographic research and investigation within the archives of the artist, the authors suggest that Samy Elmaghribi created a sense of home in music, a homeness, one that transcends our present understanding of Arabness and Jewishness, religiosity and secularism, tradition and creativity. Focus on Samy Elmaghribi, an artistic persona emblematic of his generation, demonstrates how the contemporary reassessment of renowned Jewish artists’ North African heritage is often misread in light of the political present. This example encourages us to rethink the musical legacy to which these North African Jews contributed beyond what is labelled Judeo-Arabic, traditional, religious, or secular.

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Section: Performing Jewishness In Arabic: Decline Recognition and Politicizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Home beyond Borders and the Sound of Al-Andalus. Jewishness in Arabic; the Odyssey of Samy Elmaghribi

Roda

Schwartz²

2020

Religions

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Colonial and Post-Colonial Jewries

Tsur¹

2017

The Cambridge History of Judaism

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A Jewish Riot against Muslims: The Polemics of History in Late Colonial Algeria

Schreier

2016

Comp Stud Soc Hist

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On Rosh Hashanah, 1961, six months before the conclusion of the Evian accords promised independence for Algeria, riots broke out in the city of Oran. Surprisingly to many, the aggressors were overwhelmingly Jews, while those injured or killed were largely Muslims. The events—widely covered in the media but since forgotten—were a product of Oran's particular social chemistry, but were also shaped by far wider set of debates about a chasm that was growing between Jews and Arabs in France, Algeria, and the wider Arab world. This article focuses on responses to these riots, especially how they drew on polemical renderings of a shared Muslim-Jewish history. I make two interrelated arguments based on printed matter of the period, French government archives, and memoirs. First, Algerian Jewish observers and pro-FLN nationalist writers, groups that only rarely agreed on the question of Algerian independence, both recalled that the two groups' shared a largely harmonious history. They vehemently disagreed, however, on what this shared, harmonious history meant in terms of political obligations. The article's second argument is that the Israel-Palestine conflict helped sour relations between Jews and Muslims in Algeria, as well as historical renderings of these relations, during the Algerian War of Independence. Specifically, the question of Palestine frequently appeared as a reference when interpreting the riots. Together, the two arguments demonstrate how international issues helped occlude the particular, local stories and belongingness of Algerians, while they defined the future, religio-ethnic contours of the Algerian nation.

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Historicizing the Concept of Arab Jews in the Maghrib

Cited by 23 publications

References 22 publications

Home beyond Borders and the Sound of Al-Andalus. Jewishness in Arabic; the Odyssey of Samy Elmaghribi

Home beyond Borders and the Sound of Al-Andalus. Jewishness in Arabic; the Odyssey of Samy Elmaghribi

Colonial and Post-Colonial Jewries

A Jewish Riot against Muslims: The Polemics of History in Late Colonial Algeria

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