Vanessa Paloma at Stern College Hungry for lost worlds, part 2: worlds, lost and found

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Vanessa Paloma at Stern College

Hungry for lost worlds, part 2: worlds, lost and found

History is always slipping away from us, but there are times that this erosion or evaporation speeds up in such a way that the absence is felt so much more keenly. The upheavals that effected the Jewish world in the twentieth century transformed deeply rooted, vibrant communities into museums, or at best shadows of their former selves. Instead of bustling “Jewish streets” there remain a few stragglers, holding on to the keys of the synagogue, washing the tombstones in the “Beit HaChaim” and welcoming intrepid visitors from the new frontiers and centers of Jewish life into their homes.

Culture and society obviously are always in flux. However, the changes, no matter how radical, are in conversation with what is being challenged and transformed. The pain of radical displacement comes from the loss of whole structures of life—languages, musical traditions, rhythms of daily life and festive moments. Often these do not travel well, and this is certainly true in our age of dizzying, often brutal change.

Last week I had the honor of having Vanessa Paloma come to my class at Stern College at Yeshiva University. Paloma has dedicated her formidable gifts as a musician and scholar to recover and uncover the power and richness of the Hispano-Moroccan Jewish musical tradition. Not only has she been lovingly collecting examples of this millennial musical tradition and immersing herself in its wider social and religious world, she is a faithful yet innovative interpreter of this music.

She began by situating this musical tradition within the layered and complex history of Moroccan Jewry, focusing in on the role of women. Using photographs from Tangiers at the turn of the century we analyzed the deep religious symbolism inherent in the “trajes de berberisca” worn at special events, especially surrounding weddings. The rays of the sun stitched in gold, the orbs of the moon embroidered around the collar, the doves facing each other on the bac of the neck or on the breast. She pointed out how the “berberisca” dress is wrapped around the woman in a way reminiscent of how a Torah scroll is dressed. In the next slide we saw a group of young ladies in up-to-date European fashions who were students at the local “Alliance” high school. It was a revelation to the students that these debonair teenagers would also suit up in their traditional dresses to celebrate their friend’s weddings or other religious occasions— were they orthodox? Secular modern-orthodox? Our hopelessly rigid (and empty) categories are in appropriate to this culturl setting—it is one in which tradition, modernity, being of the society and apart, are all organically connected, even as they are in tension. 

This is not to say that the Moroccan Jewish society was not highly aware of its minority and in many instances marginal status: there are deep anxieties running throughout the music, the stories parents tell their children and the marriage practices.  Girls are married off very young in order to avoid intermarriage or worse.

After her stimualting presentation I was left thinking of the contemporary political and socio-cultural landscape. I ask myself: Will the Muslim world, or for that matter most of Europe be a place of vibrant Jewish life once again? Will the revolutions of the “Arab spring” eventually bring a more open and cosmopolitan Islamic culture and society that can tolerate and celebrate difference? Or will the decades of absolutism insure that the strongest voices will be that of the extremists?

I am pained to say that I personally doubt that the Arab world will find its way toward multiculturalism any time soon. This despite their deep and rich heritage of doing just that!!! I also know that history –as it unfolds- is full of surprises.

In the mean time we need people working hard to capture those moments from the past that can light our way forward. For that reason we are so fortunate to have dedicated scholars and artists like Vanessa Paloma, people who not only have a keen eye and sharp ears for the details that make a great story but also a warm and open heart that can let her subjects speak for themselves, and reveal their treasures. I look forward to hearing more of her discoveries in the years to come. 

for more on Vanessa Paloma see her website:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Vanessa-Paloma/127993854399

Hungry for Lost Worlds

Last week we lost one of the great scholars of medieval Spain, Maria Rosa Menocal. I never had the opportunity to meet Menocal but I have benefited immensely from her varied collaborative scholarly projects such as The Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture (http://www.amazon.com/The-Arts-Intimacy-Christians-Castilian/dp/0300106092) and her contribution to the The Literature of Al-Andalus (http://www.amazon.com/Literature-Al-Andalus-Cambridge-History-Arabic/dp/0521030234#reader_0521030234). Her accessible and affecting The Ornament of the World was a great resource when I led a group of students through Andalucía a few years back and it is one of my favorite books to recommend to people travelling to Spain.

Menocal focused on “La España de las tres culturas”- the multicultural world created by Christians, Muslims and Jews through centuries of fighting, killing, marrying, trading, ridiculing, lusting, condemning, imitating, demonizing, and idealizing each other from the Muslim conquest of the Iberian peninsula in 711 until the conquest of Granada and the expulsion of the Jews in 1492.

I say that  “we lost” without knowing exactly who will read this, but I believe that Menocal’s work is a gift and a resource for all of us living in today’s multi-cultural world, a world of global, unmediated interconnectivity, of hybrid identities, with its  comingling of utopian and dystopian visions of our near future along with the violence, incomprehension, feral fanaticism and blind demonization of all the “others” that we can’t seem to encounter face to face. Menocal sought out the textual remnants of those moments of contact, exchange and engagement between Spain’s three main religious communities. She was able to conjure up the complexities and layers of relationship between individuals who never lose their particular identity as Jew, Chistian or Muslim. 

One small example: When the Bishop of Córdoba complains that all the brightest and most accomplished Christians have turned their back on Latin and only want to write their poetry in Arabic we can appreciate the complicated ways that culture and language can blur the boundaries between communities.  These Christians were not becoming Muslims, they were “Arabizing”.   

Her vision was optimistic; I often felt it was a rose-colored, favoring a narrative of easy commingling and often eliding the harsher realities of interethnic violence and demonization that many of the texts also point to. But perhaps her emphasis and her framing of the question of “Convivencia” is what we need more of today! More ideal models of learning from those who are different than ourselves, more romanticized visions of Jews, Christians and Muslims imitating and reinterpreting each other, shaping a shared culture out of the proximity of people of flesh and blood living next to each other, shopping in the same market, defending the same city walls; of individuals who are open to the foreign without losing their own particular identity.

Menocal’s project (and she was/is by no means alone in her quest for conjuring the convivencia of Sefarad/Al-Andalus/España) is ultimately an attempt at recovering a lost world—or capturing that “ornament of the world” in order to share it with your friends, to hold it up as a model to the wider public, to preserve its memory for our children and grandchildren.

(A conjecture that I only allow myself as the child of Cuban exiles: Could her longing for the lost world of medieval Spain come out of her own experience as a Cuban exile, mourning the island of her youth and the distance that exiles from that enchanted place feel in a myriad tiny ways- everyday of their lives.  )

This week I came across another project in search of a lost world of Jewish-Muslim coexistence, this time through music. I stumbled across Chris Silver’s digital labour of love, “Jewish Morocco” http://jewishmorocco.blogspot.com/, a blog dedicated to documenting as much of the Jewish presence in Morocco as Chris Silver can locate and photograph. He went to dozens of small villages and photographed their (mostly) abandoned schools, graveyards, synagogues, etc. It serves as a testament to one of the great Jewish communities – with over a millennium in the country, a rich and varied history comprising multiple regions and languages/ethnicities and a proud history of religious piety and socio-economic and cultural distinction. Hearing Silver interviewed on Vox Tablet (www.tabletmag.com/podcasts/.../moroccan-grooves-blogged) my heart broke.

Nostalgia/añoro flows thick in my veins, but I was caught off guard by my reaction—there was a distinct pang of loss and regret, of lost worlds, lost possibilities and a sense that we are today more impoverished and weaker because we have lost these communities- they have found their way into the homogenizing machine of global Jewish sameness. Jewish life in the Muslim world was not all rosewater and na’na! What I am struck by is that Jews were so rooted in these places— I am pained at how quickly their languages, their music, their religious sensibilities have been swept away, too often twisted into fetished kitsch, or submerged by the demands and expectations of the dominant culture. 

To think of a stark contemporary example: Jews in France, another zone of rich Jewish life in an uneasy but dynamic relationship with its “host society”, are under attack and looking to seek their lot either in Israel or the United States—our world is shrinking by the day. And with this shift we need projects like Silver’s and Menocal’s to remind us of different horizons, different modes of being and imagining.

One other point of light—of past glory re-emerging even at the present moment of deep anxiety, violence and confusion in the Arab world. This was an exciting story of old men rocking out!! (Tunisian Buena Vista Social Club?)

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/13/arts/music/algerian-chaabi-musicians-reunite-in-the-band-el-gusto.html?smid=pl-share

Long live “El Gusto”! 

a link to an obituary and resources about Maria Rosa Menocal

http://medievalnews.blogspot.com/2012/10/maria-rosa-menocal-medieval-historian.html

Make my heart stop

Make my heart stop

The first gallery of the new Islamic wing at the Metropolitan Museum is like a bazaar- a collection of stunning, eye-opening objects from across the temporal and spatial expanse of Islamic civilization. It is – to use another metaphor- designed as a plate of hor d’ovres, designed to whet our appetite. My eye first noticed some lines of Koranic verse, in an elongated script which contorted the usual flickering of Arabic into an almost block like solidity. The caption explained that these early Koranic texts were rendered into this unusual script in an attempt to fit each verse into the length of a line. At its earliest moments, this religion which was so concerned with the temptation of images reflects a deep and pervasive aesthetic sensibility.

I turned around and saw a pitcher of painted blown glass. The horses (were there cavalrymen on their backs?) racing across the belly of the pitcher were painted in alternating blues and browns. However, for a moment, it seemed like these rushing steeds were floating, timeless, translucent. They existed in the here and now and yet felt ephemeral, like a dream. My heart stopped, for a split second. I thought of the care and grace –the hours and the technique-- that went into this one pitcher!

A similar aesthetic informs the lattice-work windows inviting the visitor, almost coquettishly, to peer through unto another gallery, another world. 

I continued into the next gallery dedicated to Al-Andalus, Moslem Spain. Familiar and foreign. There were some beautiful bowls in the mudéjar style with the coat of arms of Castille and León in the center. Is there a better testament to the complex exchange of ideas, people and goods within the context of the bloody wars of conquest and re-conquest that marked the Spanish middle ages?  There was a beautifully written Chumash, turned to its last page. The writing after all these years is so clear that my daughter was able to make out the last line- be’eynei qol Yisrael. That was another electric moment- to stand before an object that flows backwards towards the past and into the future at the same moment; a book which is like so many millions of others and at once is unique, with its elegant geometric lines framing and adorning the columns of text.

http://www.metmuseum.org/collections/galleries/islamic/450