Mizrahi Jews arrived in Israel with a rich musical history and culture. In Mizrahi neighborhoods and development towns, new artistic innovations formed as Western, Mediterranean, African, and Asian urban and rural musics were reshaped and fused together in concentrated and intensified interaction. Weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, and religious holidays became occasions for musical metamorphosis, as well as community celebrations. Renowned Iraqi qanun and oud players performed at Iranian, Libyan, Egyptian, and other Mizrahi community events. Yemenite singers became fluent in Iraqi and Kurdish folk songs. However, prior to this fusing of musical styles and communities, the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa were respected and successful artists in their own lands of origin.
In this article, I will begin with a brief history on the Mizrahi community, the terms meaning both historical and its contemporary use in modern day Israel, and its relation to the Sephardic community. Using Ella Shohat's, the premier scholar on Mizrahi studies, The Invention of the Mizrahim, to frame my understanding of the position Mizrahim found themselves once in Israel. Amy Horowitz’s Israeli Mediterranean Music: Straddling Disputed Territories and Galit Saada-Ophir’s Mizrahi Subaltern Counterpoints: Sderot's Alternative Bands, will be analyzed as to how the hybrid fusion of Mizrahi Music was formed and how it has progressed, in the authors respective case studies. In my own analysis, I will examine current Mizrahi pop super star, Sarit Hadad, her contribution to Mizrahi music and her deep Arabic influences.
The term Mizrahi is a socio-political concept that describes the Jews from the Middle East and North Africa. Prior to their migration to Israel, the number of these Mizrahi Jews was numbered at approximately one million. The Ashkenazim, or European Jews, in Israel coined the term in the 1950s in response to the large wave of immigrants. The immigrants soon began to use the term to describe themselves as well.“Mizrahi” is distinct from, but often overlaps with, the term, “Sephardi,” and the two terms are sometimes used interchangeably. While Sephardim literally means Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, it has expanded to describe Jews from Africa or Asia, or to describe those who follow Sephardic, as opposed to Ashkenazic, religious practice. Following the expulsion from Spain, many Sephardic Jews immigrated to Arab countries, where they blended with the local population, making it difficult to distinguish between Sephardim and native Mizrahim. Since the expulsion of Iberian Jews in the late 15th century, Sephardim and Jews from Arab lands, were the majority of Jews in the land of Palestine, and Sephardic religious practice dominated Jewish life.
Beginning in the 1880s, Ashkenazi Jews from Germany, Poland and Russia started to immigrate to Israel in large numbers. The Ashkenazim soon became the Jewish majority in Palestine, and by 1948 they were 80% of the Jewish population. Due to modern Zionist ideologies originating in Europe (and their larger numbers), the Ashkenazim became the leaders of the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine prior to the creation of the state of Israel. Once statehood was declared in 1948, the leaders of the Yishuv continued to be the leaders of the newly established state. Sephardim and Mizrahim were almost entirely absent in positions of leadership.
Ella Shohat, a premier scholar in Mizrahi studies believes that the the Zionist ideology “urges Arab Jews (or, more generally, Oriental Jews) to see their only real identity as Jewish. The official ideology denies the Arabness of the Arab Jews, positing Arabness and Jewishness as irreconcilable opposites. For Zionism, this Arabness, the product of millennial cohabitation, is merely a diasporic stain to be "cleansed" through assimilation”. While still in the Arab World and prior to this “cleansing”, a very prominent group of Arab Jewish singers and musicians had made a name for themselves in their respective homelands. The most notable of these were Layla Murad of Egypt, Salima Murad of Iraq and the Kuwaity Brothers from Kuwait/Iraq. This was all washed away when these Arab Jews were forced to migrate to Israel. Once there, they became culturally marginalized by the Ashkenazi elites, who ruled the country.
Shohat’s article on The Invention of Mizrahim, discusses how the Mizrahim in Israel were made to feel ashamed of their dark, olive skin, of their guttural language, of the winding quarter tones of their music, even of their traditions of hospitality. Children, desperately tried to conform to an elusive Euro-Israeli sabra norm, and were made to feel ashamed of their parents and their Arab countries of origin. Occasionally they were mistaken for Palestinians and arrested or beaten. Since Arabness led only to rejection, many Mizrahim became self-hating.
The moment the Kuwaity Brothers came to Israel, their artistic careers’ took a turn for the worst. They arrived to a state where the majority of people came from Western backgrounds and Western cultural heritage, who had no interest in Arabic music. Even the Jews who came over from Iraq and other Arab states, did not show a great interest in music, primarily due to issues of work and immigration. From performing for royalty and adoration by millions, to owning a hardware store in the Hatikvah market, a run-down district of Tel Aviv, and playing weddings and bar mitzvahs. Directly quoting Shlomo al-Kuwaity’s speech given at the 100th anniversary celebration of his father Saleh in London, “In those days the Hatikvah neighborhood was similar to little Baghdad. It had shops, bakeries, cafes, and all the things that Baghdad had. The language used was Jewish Arabic, and only Arabic, mainly Egyptian, music was played on the radio.”
When the Arabic extension of Kol Israel, the official radio station of the Israeli broadcasting authority, expanded to include more programming, Saleh and Dawoud received their own weekly program. Nevertheless, outside that “ghetto” they were treated with condescension and were reduced to catering for a niche market of a few hundred thousand in Israel, when they had had seven million listeners in Iraq. But it was not half as painful as the brothers hearing their music played on the radio stations of the Arab world attributed to Muslim musicians, or labelled ‘of folk origin’.
During Saddam Hussein's rule there was a special committee appointed to ‘re-arrange' the Iraqi musical archives. Saleh's name was hard to get rid of, and as it turned out his songs were still being played - only without the mention of his name. Students of music at the time still recall today that mentioning his name was forbidden even when his work was being discussed and taught. Today, this situation has changed dramatically and the issue is being discussed over the internet and in the media. In 2006 the television station, Al-Hurra, broadcast a program about Iraqi music in the 20th century. Saleh was chosen by a panel of experts on the show as the definitive Iraqi composer of the 30's and 40’s. Dawoud died of a heart attack in 1976 and Saleh in 1986. In 2009, a street in Tel Aviv was named after the Brothers.
In the late 1960s, Mizrahi musicians began creating a hybrid musical genre, blending both Arab and Jewish cultures. Israeli Mediterranean music challenged the dominant form of national music designated to Shirey Erez Israel ("Songs of the Land of Israel”). Israeli Mediterranean musicians confused the cultural terrain in Israeli society by juxtaposing the repertoire of state-sponsored Shirey Erez Israel with vibrant Middle Eastern rhythms. They reconfigured the dominant Euro-Israeli music with marginalized Arabic aesthetics, “straddling the disputed territory of Israel and, to a degree, redrawing its cultural and historical map” .
While Mizrahi musicians were keen to contribute to the national task of formulating an Israeli musical identity, their lack of Western training was regularly used as the justification to exclude them. Only Middle Eastern Israelis with European training entered the mainstream music establishment. The Mizrahi cultural renaissance and social revolution attempted to redefine the artistic, as well as political boundaries of Israeli society during a period of deep national and international transformations. The 1967 and 1973 wars altered the balance of power in profound ways. As the Mizrahi youth began to challenge hegemonic state policies, the music became more visible.
These state policies attempted to forge a coherent national identity, by denying diasporic ethnic traditions. Furthermore, Arabic and other Middle Eastern sounds were relegated to limited radio broadcasts and holiday performances by official folklore groups. Following the Yom Kippur War in 1973, the Ashkenazi power grip was shaken by an anti-Labor Party outcry from Israel's Mizrahi underclass. The Mizrahim allied themselves with the right-wing Likud Party, although seemingly contradictory, they were voicing their decades of frustration with the Labor Party's discriminatory policies.
Amy Horowitz’s article, Israeli Mediterranean Music: Straddling Disputed Territories, applies Bernice Johnson Reagon’s notion of musical straddling to describe the hybrid form of Mizrahi music that would be formed in Israel. Horowitz analysis, by applying Reagon's notion of straddling, states that North African and Asian Israeli musicians struggled against cultural hegemony in Israel by formulating Israeli Mediterranean music. The hybrid music genre that made its commercial cassette debut in the 1970s on cassettes sold ‘among the vegetable and household appliance stalls in Tel Aviv's central bus station marketplace’. This hybrid form of music was labeled as culturally inferior and ‘too Arabic’ by the Ashkenazi elite of the state, whom also ran the radio stations and record companies. Despite this, the Mizrahi musicians continued to produce the music, which sold by the hundreds of thousands in their neighborhoods in the 1980s. By the 1990s, they finally infiltrated mainstream cultural and were present on national airwaves.
The use of language in Israeli Mediterranean music is no less problematic, drawing from Arabic, Hebrew, Mediterranean, Eastern European, and Western sources. Its lyrics combine literary Hebrew with Hebrew and Arabic slang. “The multi vocal combination of archaic Hebrew literary forms and current street language diverges from usage in previous genres such as Shirey Erez Israel or even recent Mizrahi genres”. The fusing of multiple kinds of texts, tunes, and themes on a single record is a distinctive feature of the genre. Songs in Arabic, Persian, and Kurdish languages evoke nostalgia, touching parents' and grandparents' or in some cases the composer's own memories of daily life in Yemen, Morocco, Kurdistan, or Iran. Greek, Turkish, Spanish, and Italian influences, reference Israel's Mediterranean location. The site for musical straddling, sitting between Europe and the Middle East and mediates Eastern and Western music styles.
Galit Saada-Ophir’s article on Mizrahi Subaltern Counterpoints: Sderot’s Alternative Bands, discusses the construction of Mizrahi identity in Israel, focusing on the Mizrahi balance of power in the city of Sderot through popular music. This process illustrates the spiral structure of accumulation of power characteristic of the vertical dialectical model, by demonstrating the ways in which subalterns' resistance may comprise a partial reconstruction of hegemonic order. She begins by drawing parallels between Rai Music in Algeria and Arabesk music in Turkey. The Moroccan sub-genre of Mizrahi music that developed in the town of Sderot, followed a similar path, blending a variety of musical components selected from different times and places, to create a musical language that reflects the group's current identity.
Sderot is an urban settlement in the arid Negev region in southern Israel and is mainly populated by Mizrahim, especially from Morocco. This city became a unique site in the Israeli music scene as a result of the intense re-socialization process its Mizrahi residents underwent at the hands of their near by Ashkenazi kibbutzim neighbors. Through various re-socialization programs aiming at erasing the residents' Mizrahi cultures of origin, they tried to detach them from Moroccan Jewish religious culture, abolish their Moroccan accent of Arabic, and expose them to Zionist ideology and culture.
The hegemonic Zionist ideology saw this culture as the culture of the Arab/Muslim enemy, and henceforth unacceptable. This led to an initial equivocation of Arabic cultural components by the Mizrahim. This complex sociopolitical situation resulted in a unique situation where the Mizrahi subversion of Israeli hegemony through music contains the hegemony that subordinated it. The formation of the musical scene in Sderot presents not simply the Mizrahi resistance to Ashkenazi hegemony, but also a partial reconstruction of Ashkenazi hegemony through this resistance. The Mizrahi pop music genre was shaped out of struggles between hegemonic styles, conducted mainly by Ashkenazim, and through internal struggles between different Mizrahi sub-genres, initially led by the Yemenites.
The activity of Sderot's youth in the 1970s and 1980s was the base where, in the 1990s, various forms of Mizrahi music could enter the mainstream Israeli musical scene. Saada-Ophir classifies three forms of spawned Mizrahi identity, all of which demonstrating an ambivalent feelings towards the musicians' Moroccan past as well as the Orientalist discourse directed at them by hegemonic Zionism: "electrifying the past,""re-Orienting the mainstream,"and "rocking hegemonic hybridity.”
The practice of "electrifying the past" was forged by Sfatayim and Renaissance. These two bands expressed the internalization of the Orientalism they had experienced by creating a musical style that Saada-Ophir refers to as Israeli Moroccan, and by proclaiming its legitimacy in the Israeli musical field. Initially they adopted the Orientalist perspective toward their culture of origin, performing well-known Israeli pop and rock songs, ignoring the Moroccan music they grew up with. The inclusion of Sammy Lazmi in the group changed this, and the band was convinced to sing in the Moroccan dialect of Arabic. They sang old Moroccan songs played at home by the older generation. Later on, the band was exposed to pop songs produced in Morocco, Algeria and France. The band built up a repertoire of songs that reflected their location, in-between their culture of origin and the hegemonic Israeli identity. They sang songs in the Moroccan dialect of Arabic and Hebrew. In addition, some lyrics describe a longing for Morocco and the marginality of Mizrahim in Israel. The internalization of Orientalism that caused the members of the bands to feel shame toward their Moroccan origin eventually led them to try to reinvigorate their "forgotten" music and struggle for its legitimacy.
The practice of "re-Orienting the mainstream" was fashioned by Teapacks and Tanara. These groups take part in partial acceptance of the Orientalist perspective regarding Mizrahim, bringing them closer to the Israeli musical mainstream. They called for an affirming of the ‘melting pot’, advocating for the formation of a unified national musical style. Teapacks was established in 1988 by teenagers from Sderot and the Shaar Hanegev kibbutz. Kobi Oz, the leader of the band, was born in Sderot to Tunisian parents and as a youth was a central figure in the town's musical progression.
The mixing of contemptuous lyrics, cheery musical beats, a strange sense of style, a plethora of jewelry and "unacceptable" conduct, Oz "carnivalizes" the prevailing Israeli. Furthermore, he faces Orientalism by seeking to create a common Israeli culture that uses Oriental discourse while challenging its oppressive meanings. Saadi-Ophir's second form of “re-Orienting the mainstream”, presents a desire to reshape the Israeli mainstream. The internalization of Orientalism that caused the band leaders to harbor conflicting feelings toward their culture of origin led them to reinvigorate the national discourse, challenging its Orientalist nature.
The last of Saadi-Ophir’s forms of Mizrahi musical identity is the "rocking hegemonic hybridity" forged by Knessiat Hasekhel. It presented conformism to Orientalism, and is closely tied to rock yisraeli, the prevailing musical style in Israel. The rock albums of Knessiat Hasekhel include musical elements defined as "Oriental,"missing from most Israeli rock albums, such as the use of the Moroccan dialect of Arabic, melodies classified as "Orientals" and the "undulant" "Middle Eastern" voice of Yoram Hazan. The band composes its own music, singing mostly about love affairs and issues of loneliness and alienation. This more hegemonic style reflects the alienation of Sderot’s youth from the Arabic Jewish identity of their parents and grandparents and their impulse to conform to the prevailing culture.
Galit Saada-Ophir concludes her article that the Sderot musical scene presents a unique power struggle between Israeli hegemony and its, Mostly Moroccan, subaltern group. Furthermore, the residence struggle of acceptance between their culture of origin and Zionist ideology, makes the city a fascinating site, where ambivalent and conflicting attitudes come to ahead, particularly regarding music. The historical process that crystallized in Sderot resulted in three different musical articulations of Mizrahi identity, which range from ethnic separatism, to a desire to reinvigorate the mainstream to an almost total adoption of hegemonic Israeli practices. Each of these practices simultaneously confronts Orientalism while accepting it in varying degrees of intensity. This case study highlights not merely the formation of Mizrahi identity through music but also the dialectical course of power struggles between the rules and the ruled in different social arenas.
Contemporary Mizrahi youth in Israel no longer speak Arabic or have any deep connection to the land of their origins, the way their parents and especially grandparents, had in decades past. While many Mizrahi singing stars include some Arabic lyrics, and certainly Arabic musical instruments and aesthetics, Mizrahi music has now crossed over as a Israeli mainstream style, while still being looked down upon. Ella Shoat mentions that, in the early years of immigration to Israel in Mizrahi neighborhoods, “we listened to Umm Kulthum on the radio, as well as to Arab music from our various countries of origin. The Iraqis, for example, continued to listen to Nazim al-Ghazali” (The husband of, prominent Iraqi Jewish singer previously discussed, Salima Murad.)
In 2012, a ceremony was held in Jerusalem, dedicating a street in the memory of the illustrious, Umm Kulthum, by the Mayor of Jerusalem, Nir Barkat. The Al-Madina newspaper published in Jeddah Saudi Arabia, ran a story in June 2014 that accused several Mizrahi singers for plagiarizing many Arab hit songs without giving the due credit. This list included Sarit Hadad, one of the biggest female stars in the Mizrahi music scene. She is accused of stealing the track “Aa Bali Habibi” from the Lebanese pop star Elissa and having sung Inta Omri, arguably the greatest hit of the legendary Egyptian Umm Kulthum.
Hadad’s interpretation of Inta Omri is not one in parallel with her Arabic counterparts like Asalah Nasri or Sherine Abdel Wahab, who have also sang this monumental hit. It is evident that she is attempting to pay respect to the Diva by her modest dress, large orchestra, and the camera paying great attention to the instrumentalists, particularly the qanun. The video clip is also of a live performance, not a music video, in line with Umm Kulthum’s own legacy of grand concerts. Thats were the connections stop. The most visible difference is Sarit’s clapping, dancing, and smiling; an alien concept to the legendary Tarab persona of Umm Kulthum, who would stand on the stage with her scarf in hand, belt out her lyrics and then stand quietly again for the next verse. Inta Omri is not intended on being a cheerful song, it is one of yearning and lost love.
Hadad was born Sarah Hudadatov, her father came from a large traditional Mountain Jewish family and her mother, from Tunisia. When she was ten years old, she participated in a contest for young talent, where she performed on the piano. She also plays the organ, guitar, accordion and tabla. In 2010 she released a new song, a cover of a Lebanese pop hit of the 1970s, called “Do You Love Me”. Many in Israel were using that very question about Sarit and it seems that the answer is, “Some of us do, but a lot of us really, really don’t.” For every fan who praised the song, there is someone who says it’s awful for one or all of the following reasons: “it sounds Arab; it sounds Mizrahi; it’s a pathetic rip-off of an old Lebanese pop song and what’s wrong with Hebrew music.” The original version of “Do You Love Me” was composed and performed in 1978 by the Bendaly Family, the Lebanese version of the ‘Partridge Family’.
Despite such reactions by some Israeli’s, Hadad’s version was very powerful in how she self-Orientalized herself in a society that looks down upon Middle Eastern culture. She begins the video clip driving through the desert and singing in the Arabic mawal style in Hebrew. Although she does have other tracks where she sings in Arabic, Hadad sings this cover in Hebrew and English, where as the original is in Arabic and English. Whilst in the initial scene her backup dancers are dressed in scantly clad western attire, a moment later it is as if she is in a dream. She ends up in a Bedouin style tent with Belly Dancers, Arabic men in traditional Bedouin garb playing traditional Arabic instruments. She does seem to be sending a message to the establishment that she is proud of her Oriental background.
The pathetic thing is that while the dancers are dressed in Bellydance fantasy costumes, they are not dancing Oriental at all, rather jazz and ballet, and the music played by the instrumentalists does not come across in the track either. The even more comical part is that many of the dancing scenes are durning the House music breaks in the track and not the Arabic instrumentals. In fact, when Sarit goes into a tabla solo, the scenes of the dancers goes back in fourth between the Arabian and Western sets of costume. I would applaud her however, for taking such a stance with the blatant use of Arabic imagery, music and cultural symbols. I would also argue that this track could be described as passing through all three of Saada-Ophir’s musical discourse "electrifying the past,""re-Orienting the mainstream,"and "rocking hegemonic hybridity.
Today over 50% of Israel's 5 million Jewish citizens are of Middle Eastern and North African ancestry. Many are mixed and of multiethnic heritage today. Socio-economic discrimination coupled with cultural affinity gave rise to a loosely bound and not universally accepted North African and Middle Eastern pan-ethnic marker, Mizrahi ("Easterner"). The Mizrahi construct can be partially understood as a consequence of the unanticipated mass encounter between East, Eastern European, and West in the newly formed state. Middle Eastern and North African Jews arrived in Israel with a rich musical history and expanded upon it. In Mizrahi neighborhoods and development towns, new innovations emerged as Western, Mediterranean, African, and Asian urban and rural musics were reshaped through concentrated and intensified interaction which brought about the Israeli Mediterranean or Mizrahi style of song.
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