Musical Jews: Listening for Hierarchy in Colonial Algeria and Beyond

Abstract

The scholarly literature on Muslim-Jewish relations in the Maghrib has long been divided between what Shlomo Deshen (1989:123) has called the integrationist model and the conflict model.1 The first evokes an image of Jewish integration within the Maghribi social fabric, with crosscutting person-to-person ties overcoming ethnoreligious insularity. The second evokes an image of Jewish marginality and insecurity, with ethnoreligious categories and their institutional instantiations profoundly shaping the fate of Maghribi Jewish communities living under Muslim-majority rule.2 Although more recent generations of scholars have been wary of making such sweeping judgments, the traces of such ambivalence (Bilu and Levy 1996) remain, with many contemporary researchers leaning toward a deep version of the integrationist model while positing a colonial production or intensification of Jewish marginality.3Such a state of play between two contrasting interpretations is by no means limited to scholars of Muslim-Jewish relations in the Maghrib. In Jewish Studies more generally, what Salo Baron (1928:526) critiqued as the lachrymose theory of Jewish history came to be countered by research that has highlighted examples of successful Jewish integration into a wide range of societies, eventually followed by a neo-lachrymose response that has highlighted Jewish marginality in Muslim societies in both the medieval and modern periods (Cohen 1994:9, Beinin 1998:14-19, Stein 2002:328). The Mediterranean itself has sometimes been presented as a prototypical space of contradictions, including tense cohabitation between peoples (Bromberger and Duran 2001:746 as cited in Miliani 2011:179). And in anthropology more widely, there is a lasting rivalry between interpretations of inter-ethnic relations that emphasize horizontality and symbiosis and those that emphasize verticality, with a strong temporalizing tendency in recent work that identifies the modern state as central to a shift from the horizontal to the vertical.4 Thus the longstanding debate about Muslim-Jewish relations in the Maghrib is a localized version of a broader theme.This article revisits the debate regarding Muslims and Jews in the Maghrib through a musical case study. For many contemporary Jews and Muslims living in the Maghrib and its diaspora, Jewish specialization in the musical arts in the modern period is evidence of Jewish belonging within the North African social fabric. Particularly in Algeria, where Jews tended to be conflated with the French settler population in colonial law and in post-independence nationalist and metropolitan memory (Shepard 2006, Katz 2015, Mandel 2014), Jewish musical prominence can be taken as a sign of Jews' at-home-ness in Algerian society in the not very distant past, and as the recognition of this fact by many contemporary Algerian Muslims (Bougherara 2002, Swedenburg 2005, Miliani 2011). In this way, the sound of Algerian Jews performing the Arabic-language classics conjures a picture of belonging and co-participation that counters the longstanding notion that Jews were not truly indigenous to Algerian society.Yet, there are ways in which Jewish musicality can be read along the grain of the idea of separation rather than against it. As is the case in many societies, professional musicianship has long been looked upon as a dubious occupation in Algeria, the wider Maghrib, and the Middle East and North Africa region at large (Pananti 1818:266-267, Broughton 1839:22, Nieuwkerk 1995, Racy 2003, Ciucci 2005). This is in keeping with the classic paradox pointed out by Allan Merriam (1964:133-143), who showed that for many societies, music-making is of great importance to the general population but constitutes a low-prestige occupation. Subsequent ethnomusicologists have extended Merriam's observations in several ways, including into the realm of ethnicity. Some scholars have pointed out that this low-prestige occupation is often taken up by members of outsider groups, either through a labor market mechanism (Nettle 1983:426-427) or through a projection of the sense of the collective's musical self onto its margins (van de Port 1999, Kapchan 1994). …