KHOYA: Jewish Morocco Sound Archive: Sounds, Voices, Memories, and Cognitive Rupture

Abstract

ABSTRACT KHOYA: Jewish Morocco Sound Archive is a pioneering project to repatriate, digitize, record, and classify the remaining sonic memory of Morocco's dwindling Jewish community. This article probes into the necessary sociological cognitive rupture that either allows or disallows the formation of archival repositories of minority memory. Stemming from interventions since the eighteenth century, Morocco's Jewish archives have mainly been kept in the diaspora by Jewish communities and higher education institutions. Contextualizing them within the long durée of Jewish presence in Morocco, this article develops the challenges posed by efforts toward establishing centralized digital archival repositories of the Jewish minority within Morocco itself. This case study proposes a shift into crowdsourced archiving, thus allowing for the alternate grassroots history of Morocco to be maintained and told by intersectional minority actors themselves, while simultaneously engaging with the sonic role, gender, and memory of nonhegemonic and grassroots members of this minority community until today with the formation of an other-archives.