Living in perfect harmony
IT IS not every scholar who can be described as a “onewoman roving museum”. But Vanessa Paloma Elbaz, who drew that plaudit from the New York Times, is no ordinary academic. Currently based at the Cambridge University music faculty, she is a remarkable mix of writer, performer, anthropologist and cultural diplomat.
Earlier this year she was presented with the inaugural Florence Amzallag prize from the American Sephardi Federation and Mimouna Association at the Center for Jewish History in New York. It is the latest in a string of prestigious awards and grants that have attended her in what could seem a niche field, yet has wider implications.
The focus of her research is music and politics in the Mahgreb, the Moroccan Jewish community and Judeo-Muslim relations through culture and cultural diplomacy. This unusual path has taken her from Atlanta, Georgia, to Puerto Rico, Morocco, Jerusalem, Paris, across the US and now to the UK, delving ever deeper into her passion for traditional musics and their significance.
Elbaz’s parents are both academic anthropologists. Her mother is from Colombia, from a family originating in northern Morocco. “She and my father met in Atlanta when he was a professor at the university and she was a postdoc,” she says. Elbaz was born there, but raised largely in Puerto Rico, where her father became vice-president of the university.
“I joined the San Juan Children’s Choir, which was modelled on the Vienna Boys’ Choir. It was a very strict musical training
— 12 hours a week by the time
I was seven,” Elbaz recounts. Later, drawn to a blend of music and anthropology, she elected to study the medieval music of Spain at Indiana University.
“I was interested in how at that time all these different cultures, languages and religions were mingling,” she says. “It was only after leaving Indiana with a Masters degree and moving to Los Angles that I started my personal Jewish practice.”
This changed her life: she won a grant to spend a year in Jerusalem and here fell in love with traditional Sephardic music. Realising that the “special” quality she loved about it had not been thoroughly researched, she applied for a Fulbright grant to go to Morocco.
“Based in Tangier, I was studying the Jewish community and their relationship to music, but from an internal point of view, instead of looking at it from the outside in.
“As I have a committed Jewish practice, I could live with the community and be part of it because I also wanted to find kosher meat, Shabbat and a synagogue. I wasn’t just there to hear the tunes.”
The “tunes” came after months of forging relationships with what remained of this small community. At the time, she says, it was roughly 100-strong; today only around 20 people remain. In Casablanca, the numbers are higher, about 1000.
“I recorded rehearsals and also at occasions like Purim or Chanukah when I could record in the synagogue, or at the Jewish schools. Besides music, I’ve been recording aural histories, talking to people about life as a Jew today in Morocco.”
The plot thickened when Morocco’s new constitution was formulated in 2011: “The Hebraic element of the secular identity of Morocco is written in,” Elbaz says. “Now the Jews are part of the national identity of Morocco, written into the constitution.”
She was well placed to observe the psychological and emotional security this brought.
“But it’s interesting that this has happened when there is hardly a Jewish community left. There’s an element of diplomacy here: it’s also a way to counter radicalism, to use this visible way of talking about our diversity even with a group that’s almost not visible. That way, the radical elements can see that they’re not welcome.”
Currently Elbaz is involved in Yallah, a Judeo-Arabic music workshop and conference at SOAS under the auspices of the Jewish Music Institute, taking place in February.
One of the first such events in the country, it is open to the public and welcomes specialists from around the world. “Judeo-Arabic music is Sephardic as well,” she points out. “People often think Sephardic is just Judeo-Spanish, but actually the Arabic element in Spain lived on in Toledo.
“The Christians took over in the 12th century, but in the 14th century Jewish scribes were still writing in Arabic, which means they were still trilingual. Arabic has been an integral part of the Jewish experience for millennia. Part of what’s so exciting about this conference is reclaiming that to be in the centre of Jewish experience.”
So we are not as separated as some make out? “We’re not separated at all!” says Elbaz. “Without losing who we are, how do we reopen that window of awareness about the deep intimacy that Judaism has with Arabic language and culture?” Music, she says, can be “a sliding door” into “a shared space.”
Elbaz has come to Cambridge on a five-year European Research Council project about music as a political and diplomatic tool to further issues of diversity within the nationalistic narratives of different countries. Additionally she is working on a book based on her PhD thesis about Jewish women’s music in Morocco.
But there’s yet another string to her bow: singing the music she researches. “I remember at graduate school thinking how great it would be if I could sing in Spanish, Hebrew and Arabic one day, and thinking it would be impossible. Well, I’m doing it!
“In Jerusalem 20 years ago, someone in the ministry of culture said to me: ‘Why do you sing?’ And I said, ‘I want to change people when I sing.’ It’s about touching them in a deep way that will evoke something they recognise of their own experience. The only way I can do that is through my own internal musical, technical, personal and spiritual work. If you’re not coming from really deep in yourself, there’s no way you can move someone so deeply.”
She does her best to integrate her faith into daily life, besides keeping a kosher home with her record producer husband and three children.
“It’s irregular,” she says, “but it’s about trusting in the goodness of the universe, your own soul, the people in front of you, and how we can move things on to a better place. The good times give you energy to deal with the trying times. In the end, everything seems to even out.”
Judaism has a deep intimacy with Arabic language and cultuere