By Miri -
In a previous article on this blog we already outlined the historical roots of the
socio-economic marginalisation of the Mizrahi (lit. “Eastern”
Jews, stemming from Middle East, North Africa and the
Caucasus) communities by the dominant Ashkenazi
(usually understood as European Jews) elite.
The subordination of the
Mizrahim also included the forced erasure of those communities'
cultural origins and the adoption of a Western Israeli culture as
constituted by the Ashkenazi ruling class. Like many other cultural
practices, popular music also serves as a central means of
demarcating national borders and during the first decades of the new
Israeli state the music by Mizrahi artists was considered culturally
inferior and “too Arab” and was therefore marginalised. Yet like
in many other settings where subaltern groups do not feel represented
by the sanctified musical genre, Mizrahi musicians in Israel also
created new hybrid musical styles, which are now commonly subsumed
under the term Musika Mizrahit. This article attempts to outline the
rise of this genre from the margins to one of the most popular music
styles in Israel today.
Between 1948 and
1953, the Jewish population in Israel more than doubled from 650,000
to 1,500,000, with the overwhelming majority of those new immigrants
coming from Arabic speaking, or Muslim majority countries. The
absorption of those large numbers of people by the new state proved
to be highly problematic and most of the new immigrants were
placed in tent cities or development towns at the peripheries of
Israel.
Through the new proximity as well as the
common experience of being marginalised by the Western Ashkenazi
establishment, these places became soon the settings for intensified
musical interactions between North African and Middle Eastern Jewish
musicians, who created new styles that were rooted in both Arab and
Jewish cultures. Those musicians, some of who used to be well-known
in their countries of origin, were eager to contribute to the
national task of formulating a new Israeli musical style, yet their
lack of Western training and notation skills were often used as a
justification for their exclusion. At the same time, within their
own neighbourhoods, new Mizrahi music styles kept flourishing and became
more and more popular.
The new styles
typically featured Western elements, such as electric bass, guitar
and synthesizers which were arranged around a Middle Eastern vocal
centre, an ornamented vibrato invoking the characteristic Middle
Eastern quarter tonality, which lies between and is absent from
Western scales.
Those same scales, known as “maqamat”, are also
used in Jewish Middle Eastern liturgy, and since many Mizrahi
musicians came from traditional families, they were used to listen to
and chant those scales since their childhood. In addition, they were
accustomed to listening to Arabic music in their homes through their
parents and grandparents.
The lyrics were sung
in a combination of literary and biblical Hebrew, modern Hebrew slang
and a number of other languages, including Arabic, Persian, Turkish,
Greek and Kurdish languages. According to Amy Horowitz this new style
clearly revealed the "ingathering and subsequent blending of
Diaspora Jewish communities as a patchwork or overlapping
neighbourhoods rather than a homogeneous national whole” as planned
by the early Zionist leadership.
Throughout the 1950s
and 1960s this music was mainly played live during Mizrahi
neighbourhood celebrations, such as weddings, births, bar mitzvahs,
and religious holidays. During the 1970s however this should change.
On the one hand, Mizrahi neighbourhood youth started to become more
politically conscious and, inspired by the African American civil
rights movement in the US, also more active. Radical political
movements, such as the Israeli Black Panthers, mobilised to challenge
the hegemonic state policies by the Ashkenazi ruling class, and
instilled a new pride in the Mizrahi communities, which in turn also
influenced Mizrahi artists and eventually led to a Mizrahi cultural
renaissance, which would redefine the boundaries of Israeli society.
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A Yemeni wedding in Kerem HaTeimanim, the Yemeni neighbourhood of Tel Aviv, 1979 |
Equally important to the
rise of Mizrahi music was the invention of the cassette. In Israel
like in many other places the cassette's affordability and plasticity
facilitated “commercial and musical growth, empowering
community-based music and altering local soundscapes forever".
Mizrahi musicians were thus enabled to sidestep the state-controlled
media and other mainstream channels that had rejected their music and
started selling hundreds of thousands of cassettes in their
neighbourhoods and among the vegetable and household appliance stalls
in Tel Aviv's central bus station marketplace. Ashkenazi radio
editors, record companies and listeners however still refused to pay attention to this “culturally inferior” music.
In the 1980s Zohar Arhov,
a musician of Yemeni descent finally managed to infiltrate national
airwaves. Through the singer's immediate success Mizrahi music was
for the first time aired on mainstream Israeli radio stations,
however only in specific programmes that would usually be broadcast
late at night.
Finally by the end of the
1980s Haim Moshe, another son of Yemeni immigrants made a
breakthrough into Israeli mainstream and appeared on prime time
television, in music festivals and in official state and religious
celebrations. Moshe's hit single “Linda”, became also immensely
popular among Israel's enemies and he received tons of fan mail from
Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. In one letter a young
Syrian girl wrote to him:
"If the Syrian people requested, do you think Israeli singers would come to perform for us personally? I am trying to learn Hebrew so I can understand the words to all your beautiful songs. I ask God that an agreement can be reached between our two countries so that we will be able to see you."
In the following years
even established Ashkenazi singers started quoting the Mizrahi style
and thereby added to its acceptability and popularity. By now most
Israeli mainstream nightclubs play Mizrahi pop and the above
mentioned Zohar Argov was postmortem declared an Israeli cultural
icon.
Amy Horowitz asserts that
music is a “kind of territory where incongruent and contesting
cultural forms can meet. This convergence could produce a healthy
coexistence whereby diverse forms flourish in mutual respect and
creative interaction." Mizrahi music managed to incorporate
elements of the Middle East into the otherwise so Western Israeli
culture and succeeded in blurring the borders between Arab and Jewish
Israeli culture. However, the fact that Jews from Middle Eastern
origin are referred to as “Mizrahim”, and not as Jewish Arabs,
already hints at the dichotomy and the inferred antagonistic
relationship between the two groups. Until today Jewish and Arab
cannot be thought together in Israeli national culture.
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