72
| THE CHRONICLE
EXCERPTS OF NEW BOOKS BY HUC-JIR FACULTY | EXCERPTS OF NEW BOOKS BY HUC-JIR FACULTY |
library alone contains approximately forty
Provençal liturgies ranging from the fifteenth
to the eighteenth century, and each one trans-
mits a history, not always originating in
northern France but eventually tumbled
together with French Jewish history and trav-
eling with it through the centuries.…
The survivors of the great expulsion from
France in 1306…did not often surface in the
same communities in numbers that would sup-
port the use of traditional commemorative
laments…even where they did cluster in some
strength, fragmentary communities of exiles
were rapidly struck by new disasters and
dislocations, ranging from famine, violence,
and plague to new expulsions. If at the end
of the century what remained of earlier com-
memoratives tended to the generic, this is really
no surprise.
Whether the direct victims of expulsion
and terror wanted to record their experience in
writing – or whether they found the stability
and leisure to do so – is a factor to consider
as well. It is not accident, I think, that two
of the extant prose accounts of the 1306
expulsion were written by physicians; whatever
their personal misfortunes, this group pos-
sessed unique skills and connections to start life
anew and to regain status, renown, and ease
they had formerly known at home. From this
vantage, writing comes considerably easier, and
past terrors can be integrated into a longer nar-
rative of misfortune nobly suffered until
patience and virtue find their merited reward.
Two notable examples, Qalonymos b. Qalony-
mos and Estori HaParhim both included
autobiographical reminiscences among secular
writings dedicated to other themes entirely.
In general, the intellectual French exiles
encountered in the Midi preferred different
ways of “remembering” from the conventional
forms of liturgical verse. Yedaiah Bedersi in
Perpignan, a physician, philosopher, and wit-
ness to the 1306 expulsion, chose to embed the
traces of this event in an allegorical treatment
of spiritual disorder and alienation from God.
Twenty years later, Crescas Caslari refracted his
historical judgments through the prism of
romance narrative in Hebrew and Judeo-
Provençal. Even Isaac HaGorni, a Gascon exile
writing before the expulsion of 1306, conveys
the pervasiveness of rationalist thinking and
attitudes in his secular verse…
For all these writers, though, expulsion
is more oftenmentioned indirectly than directly.
In a sense, it is memory repressed – recalled de-
spite itself and unsummoned, peeking though
walls built to bar it from conscious recall….
In modern times, perhaps as early as
1493,
the story of French Jews in exile was
rapidly overshadowed by the catastrophe of
the Spanish expulsion in 1492. From a histo-
riographical perspective, Western scholars
since the Enlightenment have privileged a bi-
naristic reading of the European Jewish past,
dividing its communities by sweep-
ing them grandly under the umbrellas of
“
Sepharad” or “Ashkenaz.” This construct,
too, clouded and eventually eclipsed the wider
variety of community identities around the
Mediterranean basin and particularly that of
Provençal Jewry, which received so many of
the French exiles and integrated their stories
into their own….
When I first began this project, I inno-
cently expected the literary remains of the
French expulsions to announce themselves
obligingly from a conventional series of texts –
less than popular texts, certainly, but straight-
forward and identifiable once sought…. I
could not have imagined at that moment that
the ensuing journey would take me through as-
tronomical texts, theological texts, medical
texts, and papal depositions….
In sum, I have tried to convey in these
pages that there is a way to read a series
of forgotten texts and detect within them the
echoes of expulsion’s trauma. I hope also to have
raised some questions about why these echoes
were eventually silenced, to ask who is respon-
sible for forgetting, how historical amnesia
happens, and how we smooth over the gaps to
restore a sense of a continuous past….
[
Reprinted with permission of The University of
Pennsylvania Press]
Maqam and Liturgy: Ritual, Music,
and Aesthetics of Syrian Jews in
Brookyn
Mark L. Kligman,
Wayne State University
Press, 2009
S
yrian Jews in Brooklyn, NY, number more
than 60,000 and constitute the largest sin-
gle group of Jews from Syria in the world. Their
thriving community includes fifteen synagogues
in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, where the
practice of singing Arab melodies is a corner-
stone of their religious services. In
Maqam and
Liturgy,
Mark L. Kligman investigates the multi-
dimensional interaction of music and text in
Sabbath prayers of the Syrian Jews to trace how
Arab and Jewish traditions have merged in this
particular culture, helping to illuminate a little-
known dimension of Jewish identity and Jewish-
Arab cultural interaction.
Based on fieldwork conducted in 1990–91,
Kligman worked closely with the leading Syrian
cantors who maintain the community’s tradi-
tional practices and pass them on to the next
generation. Kligman’s research demonstrates
that Arab culture is manifest in the liturgy of
Syrian Jews on many levels. Namely, the
maqam
system, the modal scales of Arab music, organ-
izes Syrian liturgy through the adaptation
not only of Arab melodies but the aesthetics of
