TANGIER, Morocco — They sang to put their babies to sleep, or in the kitchen preparing Purim cakes. They sang in the courtyards at night while the men were at synagogue to pray at evening, sing songs of love, loss and religion, and make Purim cakes.
Today, most of those women, members of Morocco’s dwindling Jewish population, are gone. However, they left behind a rich historical trove northern Judeo-Moroccan Sephardic cultural heritage that has been passed down from generation to generation through oral history. Scholars in Judaism want to preserve it before its disappearance.
These fragments tell powerful stories about times past, before the Moroccan-Jewish community that once numbered over 250,000 dwindled down to just a few hundred people after several waves emigration.
For centuries, the women lived in Jewish quarters. They were captivated by a distant world and began to sing ballads that became central elements of their culture. They used music to preserve their identity and traditions.
The songs, known as “romances,” are a heritage of the Reconquista, or Reconquest, when Christians in medieval Spain waged a centuries-long battle against Muslim occupation. The Reconquista was coming to an end in 1492. Jews who refused conversion to Christianity were expelled. Many of them ended their lives in Morocco, taking with them their Spanish heritage.
Many songs are a taunt to the Spanish rulers and priests that drove them out. Despite the fact that northern Moroccan Jews spoke a mix of Hebrew, Spanish, and Arabic, the songs are in Spanish.
They are more than just political statements. They are songs and lullabies that are filled with metaphorical lyrics. These songs are not only historical, but also deeply connected to personal memories and cultural customs.
Oro Anahory-Librowicz, a Moroccan-born expert in Judeo-Spanish music, who donated 400 recordings to Israel’s National Library, says that the songs weren’t originally Sephardic but were learned from Spaniards and retained in the culture even as they disappeared in mainland Spain.
“It’s a way of preserving something,” she said over a Zoom interview from Montreal, where she moved in 1973. “Natural transmission isn’t possible in a community that is dispersed all over the world. It has become a symbol of identity. Women recognized themselves in this Hispanic heritage and it allowed them to retain a dimension of their Judeo-Hispanic identity.”
Three friends gathered together on Friday, February 5, just before sunset and Shabbat, at the apartment of Sonia Cohen Toledano (pillar in the community), which overlooks Tangier in the northern tip, just a few miles from Spain.
In animated conversation, they interrupted one another frequently, often finishing the others’ sentences. They looked through a stack of old black and white photographs and thought back to happy times.
These women are among less than 30 Moroccan Jews living in Tangier.
They end up singing romances at many of their gatherings.
They clapped and held hands while singing, and music rose in the air. The Spanish words were sometimes joyful and at other times deeply romantic. The women sat on a couch sipping Moroccan mint tea in a moment that felt like they had traveled back in time.
“We heard them at weddings all the time,” said Julia Bengio, 83. “My mother sang in front of me, but I never thought about telling her, ‘Come here, let me write the lyrics down.’” But she did find cassette recordings of her mother singing and has transcribed the lyrics so they won’t be lost.
“We were never explained what it was, but later in life we looked into it and I want to preserve them,” she added. “Simply not to forget.”
Sometimes, the women would refer to YouTube videos of the music to jog memories or read handwritten notes.
One song mocks a priest that impregnates 120 women. All the women in the song give birth to girls except the cook (from a lower social group), who has a son. It happened that she asked the priest to get pregnant. This story is related to some Talmud interpretations, which state that when women experience sexual pleasure, they conceive boys.
Todas paren niñas, la criada varón.
Ciento veinte cunas, todas en derredor,
Menos la cocinera que en el terrazo colgó.
(“They all give birth to girls, And the maid to a boy. One hundred and twenty cradles, all around, except the cook’s child who hung on the terrace.”)
The central message is: Husbands who want boys should first give pleasure before taking pleasure.
Mrs. Cohen Toledano, dedicated to keeping connections with the past, is a treasure trove of everything related to northern Morocco’s Spanish Judeo culture.
“Before we had aunts, cousins, family here,” said Mrs. Cohen Toledano, 85, who is the only one of 16 children in her family who stayed in Morocco. “Slowly, everyone left. We are so small that we are very close. We see each other all of the time. It’s hard, but we get used to it.”
Her home is a mini-museum of Spanish-Judeo culture, a mix and match of embroideries, artwork, photos and a collection of ancient dresses, some over 150 years old — pretty much anything she could get from departing Jews or that she could dig up in flea markets. “Every time someone died, they left me something,” she said.
Vanessa Paloma Elbaz (an American scholar of Judeo-Spanish musical history at Cambridge University) has spent 15 years collecting and documenting the voices of the elderly Moroccan Jews. She has accumulated more than 2,000 entries (mostly recordings and some videos), and a pilot archive is online. Paloma has five generations of Moroccan family roots.
When she was a child living in Puerto Rico, she learned her first romance while singing in a children’s choir. This experience sparked her interest in Judeo-Moroccan history. She no longer lives in Morocco but still visits and records as much as possible.
“If we think we have no written text from the women, we are wrong,” she said. “Some archives were sitting in Spain and nobody was paying attention to them.”
“It’s about learning how to read them,” she added. “They sent all kinds of messages. If they were sad about something, they would sing some of these songs to pass a message on to their husbands.”
One winter she met with Moroccan Jews in Casablanca at a kosher market and later backstage at a concert to record them all. She also sought out the children of Alegría Busbib Bengio, a prominent figure in the city’s Jewish community, who spent the last years of her life handwriting family genealogies and making dresses. Her 91-year-old daughter died a few months back, leaving her children to preserve everything she had collected.
“It would mean betraying her to not share her legacy,” her daughter, Valérie Bengio, told Dr. Paloma Elbaz in the apartment where her mother lived from 1967 until her death. “To leave things untouched is to let them die.”
Mrs. Cohen Toledano’s daughter, Yaëlle Azagury, 51, now lives in Stamford, Conn., but her connection with Morocco remains strong. Music is the link that connects her to her childhood in Tangier. In an interview, she said she used to sing lullabies to her children that she remembered from her mother, but she doesn’t think her three American-born children will carry on the legacy.
“It’s a lovely heritage,” she said. “The songs need to be heard. These ballads are often deeply moving and part of the world’s heritage. I feel like I am the last chain of a history that ends with me.”
Source: NY Times
