The Moroccan Sephardic Diaspora of a Canadian Ashkenazi ethnomusicologist

• In Event: The Jewish Moroccan Diaspora--ERETZ AMAZÔNIA, The Jews of the Amazon

Abstract

Just before writing this proposal, I sang at a Mimouna at the Toronto home of a Moroccan Sephardi friend whose grandfather I sang with for almost four decades as part of a Moroccan Judeo-Spanish ensemble based in Montreal. The previous week, I introduced a Moroccan version of the emblematic Passover cumulative song “Had Gadya” at my Ashkenazi family seder. Two months earlier, I’d been asked to sing traditional women’s wedding songs at a Moroccan Sephardic wedding henna party in New York City; and the previous year, I’d been asked to sing a set of songs in haketía for an online zoom of Moroccan Jews in the Brazilian Amazon, where I subsequently spent time doing in-situ fieldwork, 40 years after performing for the Moroccan community of Caracas. In 2022, I was invited to sing in a historic Moroccan synagogue of Tangier – bringing the songs back home. Moroccan Judeo-Spanish songs and diaspora urban culture were a key part of my dissertation years ago. This paper is a reflexive ethnomusicology approach to over four decades of engagement with this repertoire on both an academic and a performance level, considering the complexities of learning and convincingly presenting the songs, and of my identity as a scholar, an ethnomusicologist, a folk-revival-era singer, a Canadian, an Ashkenazi Jew, an “honorary Sephardi” as I’ve been called – and as an inveterate traveler through much of the Moroccan Sephardic diaspora, both before and after becoming aware of it. My paper will include recorded and live music examples.

Author

• Judith Cohen, York University