Simon Elbaz's matrouz

Haïm Zafrani, professor emeritus at the University of Paris VIII, specifies: “Within the weave of Hebrew compositions in the traditional style, the Jewish poet inserts from time to time stanzas or couplets in the Arabic language. This juxtaposition, this passage from one tongue to another, is the cultural and linguistic reality of Jewish North Africa. But this linguistic fabric, this skillful gradation, also has an aesthetic value; it is not without evoking the art of embroidery, as is indicated by the very name of this poetic genre, designated by the term matrouz, or embroidered poetry ¹.”

Before analyzing Simon Elbaz’s matrouz as the most elaborate creation and affirmation of Judeo-Arabic culture, a preliminary clarification regarding the very concept of “Judeo-Arabic” seems necessary to me. Indeed, the expression “Judeo-Arabic” poses a problem with respect to the semantic field that is properly its own, but which common usage generally employs to designate a category of songs and music to which this “concept-expression” cannot apply.

It is customary to use the terms “Judeo-Arabic” to evoke, in an undifferentiated and imprecise way, an artistic tradition — songs and music — of the Maghrebi Sephardic Jewish community. What exactly do these terms cover? The synthesis that follows aims to clarify the concept of “Judeo-Arabic” by underscoring what it contains exactly, with a view to dispelling the confusions surrounding it.

This approach falls within a desire for Judeo-Arab cultural exchange, open to the universal and enriching for each party. Within this framework, I believe that clarity of ideas and of general representations constitutes a key factor in advancing the dialogue of cultures, thus contributing to a climate of true tolerance in order better to combat xenophobia, racism, and antisemitism. Tzvetan Todorov, in his book Les morales de l’Histoire (The Morals of History) ², wrote remarkable pages convincingly demonstrating that the ideal is effective only if it remains in relation with the real. It is in this perspective that a clarification of the concept of “Judeo-Arabic” becomes imperative.

The Judeo-Arabic, in its known manifestations as a cultural tradition of the Maghrebi Jewish community, is the strict combination of a song in Hebrew (whence the first term, Judeo) accompanied by Arabic music (whence the second term, Arabic).

If one relies on this definition, the most apt from my point of view, two great Masters of this tradition, David Bouzaglo and Haïm Look ³, made it known thanks to their audio recordings of Baccashots and piyutim (Hebrew liturgical hymns). These are Hebrew liturgical songs performed in musical modes proper to the so-called “Arabo-Andalusian” music ⁴. Beyond this Hebrew-language tradition belonging exclusively to the sacred, does there exist a significant corpus of secular literature in a mixed Hebrew-Arabic language that one might call the “Judeo-Arabic” language? My research has not allowed me to establish the existence of such a literary corpus, contrary, for example, to Yiddish ⁵, which is not only a vernacular language but also a language in which a written literature took fixed form.

The misunderstanding and the ambiguity set in when one transcribes texts such as that of al-Mahboub, “the lover” ⁶, as representative of “Judeo-Arabic” culture, whereas the poem is in the Arabic language, by Sidi Kaddour El ‘Alami (Meknes, 1742–1850), an illustrious Moroccan poet of the Melhûn; this poetry — the source of a major literature of Maghrebi Arab-Muslim culture — is conceived in an elaborate Arabic vernacular blending classical Arabic and the Moroccan-Algerian Arabic vernacular:

“The Lover”

1. I found nothing more to say when my companion left me.
2. My whole being collapsed in stupor, and my tongue grew heavy. Lord! Lord!
3. The nerves of my body went slack.
4. And my eyes flooded with tears.
5. Scarcely had he touched me with his fire than I was marked by a burning ardor.
6. He greeted me with wishes of peace, and I set about sweeping the places where he is wont to sit.
7. Seeing me carefree and light of heart, he lowered his eyelid and said to me:
8. “I have parted from you, O Lord, after abandoning myself to my own fate.”
9. It was thus that he possessed me; my spirit flew into a fury and he went away.
10. May I ever behold the image of my beloved in the resplendent orb of the full moon!
11. How beautiful are the features of his likeness, the form of his face, and the line of his silhouette!

This is why it is unfounded to present concerts, newspaper articles, and CD sleeve titles ⁷ under the rubrics “Judeo-Arabic” or “treasure of the Judeo-Arabic song” when these are supposed to inform about artistic events in which what is expressed is exclusively Arabo-Andalusian music and song — Maghrebi Hawzi, ‘Aroubi, Melhûn, and Cha‘bi-Melhûn. Thus when Reinette l’Oranaise sings in the Arabic language texts by Moroccan and Algerian poets, whatever their confession, she is singing a genre derived from the Arabo-Andalusian: the Hawzi and the ‘Aroubi in this instance, and not “Judeo-Arabic.” Just as Khaled is performing French song when he sings “Aïcha” in French, and not a song that would wrongly be categorized as “Franco-Arabic.”

In other words, neither the nationality nor the confession of a performer can be retained as a reference for naming the substantial economy of a culture. And as everyone knows that a culture takes root in a written and/or spoken language, it remains to answer the question of whether there exists an oral tradition whose linguistic vector — like Yiddish, for example — would be a “Judeo-Arabic” language recognizable in its specificity and whose practice would be non-fringe. Here too, there is no significant trace of such a linguistic orality.

The inclusion of a few Hebrew words in the Maghrebi Arabic vernaculars cannot rigorously ground a “Judeo-Arabic” language, just as the inclusion of a few French words in the Algerian Arabic vernacular does not ground a full-fledged language one would qualify as “Franco-Arabic.” Moreover, neither a different pronunciation — for example, the djim (Djawrhi) rendered by the “z” sound, thus transforming the spelling of this Arabic word into zwarhi instead of djawrhi — nor certain vocal inflections marked by Hebrew cantillation can represent significant criteria for naming or characterizing the existence of a language.

This practice is, of course, to be distinguished from the ordinary use of word-borrowings from one language by another, from the use of neologisms, or from linguistic structures born of complex relations between a dominant and a dominated language. What is meant here pertains rather, to my mind, to a process of relative acculturation, compounded by an insufficient mastery of a vernacular language by human groups — urban ones in the case of the Maghreb — in which speakers communicate among themselves in a discursive vernacular that strings together, without quantitative or hierarchical norms, up to three languages at once (Arabic/French; Kabyle/Arabic/French in Algeria; Hebrew/Arabic in the three Maghreb countries).

A first conclusion is unavoidable: a “Judeo-Arabic” language does not exist. A Judeo-Arabic culture, by contrast, has existed for more than a thousand years; I gave a definition of it at the beginning of this article.

On the plane of song and music — the only aspects addressed in this article — it is on Moroccan soil that one finds the greatest number of its representatives, considering only those women and men who have left a body of work, audio above all, accessible to a restricted public and to informed researchers. Nourished and inspired by biblical texts and Hebrew liturgy, they sang their tradition using, on the one hand, Hebrew as a language of communication and of poetic expression, and, on the other, melodies in Arabic musical modes specifically Maghrebi and Middle Eastern.

In Jewish communal celebrations, within the synagogues of yesteryear and of today in the Maghreb — and in France itself, in the places of worship of the Maghrebi Sephardic Jewish community — these songs and this music still resound ⁸. While this culture pertains almost exclusively to the Judaic sacred, a secular literature, although marginal within this Judeo-Arabic cultural tradition, was also practiced.

This mode of Judeo-Arabic cultural expression — sacred and secular — known to specialists by the name matrouz, developed in the Maghreb, in Morocco principally, from the sixteenth century onward, and thus after the expulsion of the Jews and Muslims from Spain. It is the natural prolongation of a practice found throughout the Andalusian golden age, that of a harmonious cultic and cultural coexistence of the three principal communities: Muslim, Jewish, and Christian. It is in Muslim Iberia and in the Maghreb, in particular under the impetus of the Cordoban Umayyad Caliph of Spain Abd al-Rahman II, then under the successive reigns of the Mulûk Attawâ’if — kings of the territorial divisions — (1012–1141), of the Almoravids (1056–1146), of the Almohads (1129–1268), and of the Nasrids of Granada (1235–1491), that Arabo-Andalusian music and song perfected their contours.

Indeed, the muwashshah and the zadjal, strophic poetry (9th to 15th c.), the foundation of the so-called “Arabo-Andalusian” song and music, included final verses called khardja, written in Romance or in spoken Arabic (“Andalusian Arabic”), the body of the poem being in literary Arabic (for the muwashshah) and in spoken Arabic (for the zadjal). Only this tradition of sung poetry in the Arabic language has come down to us ⁹; from the outset it was cultivated through writing and orality in the Arabic language, and it endures to this day, having even known, for some two decades, a renewal of interest both in the Greater Maghreb and in Europe.

It is therefore no mere accident of History that the Maghreb, after having been one of the sources for the elaboration of this tradition, became in fine its receptacle of preservation and enrichment. This tradition was born and then flourished in the cultural bath of Arab-Muslim civilization, and, for five centuries, it has been specifically Maghrebi in form and substance.

Judeo-Arabic culture is thus inscribed, in space and time, within a twofold filiation: that of Hebraic cultural civilization, with Hebrew as the language of reference and of identitarian expression, and that of Arab-Muslim civilization, with Arabic as the principal language of universal communication.

Today it is through Simon Elbaz’s matrouz that the revived Judeo-Arabic culture finds its most faithful expression.

Simon Elbaz has reappropriated this tradition in its twofold authenticity — sacred and secular; he is the first to broaden its field of audience, since he offers to all publics a Judeo-Arabic culture that was practiced solely within the Maghrebi Sephardic Jewish communal milieu. More important still, nourished from his childhood in Morocco on the traditional oral teaching of Hebrew cantillation and faithful to his origins, his entire creation is imprinted with this cultural identity, which he communicates with talent, thereby opening it to an absolute universal. Nourished at the same time on Arabo-Berbero-Muslim culture and on French republican values, borne by a profound humanism, Simon Elbaz succeeds — thanks to an artistic research carried out over more than twenty years — in achieving a harmonious marriage of the three Judeo-Islamo-Christian cultures.

Actor and musician, he introduces this art of the matrouz into his theatrical plays ¹⁰ and his tales. Likewise his musical compositions are interlaced with Oriental musical modes (maqâm, pl. maqâmât), with musical modes (tab‘, pl. tubû‘) and Maghrebi rhythms, as well as with musical aesthetics borrowed from medieval song and Hebrew liturgy. These are happy innovations that open to the listener, simultaneously, the magical space of the musicality of the Hebrew, Arabic, Spanish, Latin, and French languages in particular, ¹¹ the better to make him journey through a rainbow of melodic colors.

Through his Hebraic identitarian and cultural affirmation, through the valorization of the Arabo-Berbero-Muslim popular tradition, through the savory intermingling of languages, musics, and songs emblematic of the Judeo-Islamo-Christian civilizations, Simon Elbaz’s matrouz represents a vector of communication that takes part in a fruitful dialogue of cultures.

July 1999

Rachid AOUS — music critic —

Notes