The great Egyptian singer and actress Leila Murad
On the eve of a festival to celebrate their music in Israel, fascinating Haaretz article about the great female Jewish singers of the 1920s and 30s who dominated the Arabic music scene but whose fortunes plummeted on arrival in Israel. In its zeal to condemn Israeli society's 'contempt' and 'humiliation' of these 'bimbos' and their culture, the article fails to make clear that these Jewish women became prominent because Arab Muslim society was even more protective of its women. (With thanks: Orna)
They scorched the stages of Algeria and Tunis, in Casablanca and
Baghdad, and also in Berlin and Paris. With bobbed hair − a daring style
for the time − a thin cigarette in a holder between their fingers, they
were among the leaders of the musical and cultural scene in their
countries and even became international stars. They are the great Jewish
female musicians and singers who were active in North Africa and the
Middle East in the mid-20th century: Leila Mourad, Faiza Rushdi, Zohra
El Fassia, Habiba Msika, Louisa Tounsia, Reinette L’Oranaise, Line Monty
and Raymonde Abecassis. Msika, a Tunisian Jew, was an actress in the
Arab world’s most prominent theater. El Fassia, a Moroccan Jew, was the
first woman from that milieu to release a record album. Like many
others, she too wrote the lyrics and music of the songs she performed.
Abecassis,
the last of the giants of that generation, will be appearing Thursday
with the Mediterranean Andalusian Orchestra of Ashkelon in a concert
titled
Ki Kolech Arev (For Your Voice is Beautiful), conducted by Tom
Cohen. The concert, which will be part of the Heart at the East Festival
in Tel Aviv, will be dedicated to the women who were singing stars in
Arab and Maghreb countries.
Why
were Jewish female singers so prominent among the pioneers of modern
Arab music? And how did it come about that in Morocco and other places,
they are engraved in the collective memory and remembered with esteem −
yet most Israelis never heard of them?
Shira
Ohayon, the education director of the Mediterranean Andalusian
Orchestra and a prominent Mizrahi feminist researcher and activist,
conceived and produced the concert. She is researching the singers’
histories, has written essays about them on the Cafe Gibraltar website
and plans to publish a book containing her findings. She says she
started researching their stories when she started wondering why there
were no female singers in the Andalusian Orchestra in Israel. Her
father, who was born in Morocco, told her about the great singers of the
past. The discovery that there were quite a few Jews among them
surprised her. “I asked myself, Why Jewish women, specifically? After
all, I know the conservative Moroccan Jewish way of life from home,” she
says.
It
turns out that the picture is a complex one. “Our knowledge here about
Jews in Islamic countries is nourished by Zionist stereotypes that spoke
about absorption by modernization, and portrayed the Jews who came from
those backgrounds as coming from the back of beyond,” says Ohayon. “But
of course, they didn’t all come from the same mold. They went through
profound processes of secularization starting in the 1920s. Our history
doesn’t start at the moment the Zionist movement discovered that it
needed ‘natural workers’ and population distribution,” she says.
“These processes
affected the women a great deal. Women began to study. In 1886 the first
Alliance school for girls was established in Tetouan, the city my
mother came from. The legal age at which girls could marry was raised.
The development of colonialism at the time strengthened the financial
position of the Jews, many of whom were merchants and had connections
overseas, and increased their openness to new ideas.”
It
was in this atmosphere of mixed cultures and languages that the female
singers appeared. Their successful appearances in Europe also exposed
them to the feminist ideas of the period, says Ohayon.
“Habiba
Msika became a legend. She was an admired artist, a hot subject of
conversation during the 1920s in the Maghreb, France and the Middle
East,” musicologist Mohammed Emskeen writes in an essay published in
honor of the Atlantic Andalusian Music Festival held in Essaouira,
Morocco last October. The festival was dedicated to the female singers
and their contribution to Jewish-Arab music and culture. Msika was the
first Arab woman to perform onstage, in 1911. She appeared throughout
Europe and the Maghreb, living and loving freely. Coco Chanel described
her as having “a fiery temperament under her Eastern graces.” She met a
tragic end: In 1930, a jealous lover murdered her by setting her ablaze.
Books were written and films made about her life.
Another
superstar was Leila Mourad, the daughter of a well-known Jewish family
of cantors and liturgical poets. “To the Egyptians, she’s an Egyptian in
every way, a cultural icon, alongside other stars of Arab music such as
Umm Kulthum and Asmahan,” says Ohayon. The Jewish community distanced
itself from Mourad when she converted to Islam to marry the well-known
actor Anwar Wagdi. Other Jewish stars in Egyptian film and theater such
as Raqia Ibrahim, Camelia (Liliane Levy Cohen), Nagma Ibrahim and
Nagwa Salem also won recognition from the musical establishment and the
audience, even though they remained Jewish and some even expressed
solidarity with the State of Israel and the Zionist movement.
Ohayon
says that in addition to these stars, “in Iraq there was Salima Pasha, a
hugely popular star, who was the wife of Iraq’s greatest singer, Nazem
al-Ghazali. There was Maya Casabianca, a native of Morocco, who was the
wife of Farid al-Atrash. We can wonder how that could happen. After all,
she was a Jewish woman who went with a Muslim man. In those
communities, families sat shiva for women who did that, mourning them as
if they had died. But these women had a different status. They were
already deeply involved in Arab life, and here, too, they crossed
boundaries.”
There
were also Line Monty, “the Algerian Edith Piaf”; Reinette L’Oranaise, a
rabbi’s daughter who became blind and became a virtuoso oud player;
Louisa Tounsia and others.
But Zohra El Fassia was fairly well known in Israel, if only because of the poem by Erez Biton lamenting her fate here.
El
Fassia, who died in 1994, is a cultural heroine in Morocco. In the
Atlantic Andalusian Music Festival in Essaouira, an evening was held in
her honor, says Ohayon. “Among the Muslim leaders of culture in Morocco,
she was seen as an integral part of Moroccan culture and collective
memory, and her contribution to folk music (the chaabi and malhun
styles) is held in high esteem there.
“Erez
Biton described the collapse of these stars here in Israel very well,”
Ohayon says. “The poem ‘Zohra El Fassia’ is an excellent allegory for
the culture of Morocco’s Jews, which was an object of mockery. It seems
some of the singers realized what was in store for them here and didn’t
immigrate to Israel. Line Monty moved to France. Salima Pasha stayed in
Iraq. She never came to Israel, so she avoided that fate.
“In
the case of the musicians, in addition to the contempt for Mizrahi
culture, which the Zionist movement regarded as an inferior subculture
or folklore at best, Israeli society held the Mizrahi women in contempt
as well,” Ohayon continues. “The society regarded them as frehot
(bimbos) − in other words, as women who were cheap, vulgar, flighty
and uneducated.”
Today,
Ohayon says, Jewish Mizrahi women are humiliated twice: once by Israeli
society, which was built on an ethos of a rejection of the East in
general and rejection of Arab culture in particular, and again by
Mizrahi men, who use religious or other explanations to exclude them
from the field of culture and song, in direct opposition to what is
transpiring in their countries of origin.
But
the development of Jewish musicians will not be severed so easily.
Young Israeli singers who did not grow up listening to Arabic music are
returning to their roots, or embracing the genre as a kind of rebellion.
Read article in full
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