Jewish music in northern morocco and the building of sonic identity boundaries

Moroccan Torah Scrolls: Theorizing a Diasporic Afterlife

“…In part, this is because the chanting of the Torah represents a rupture in linear notions of time, history and memory (see Yerushalmi 1996), as when we chant from it every week and return to the beginning once a year. This article considers Moroccan Torah scrolls (or scrolls used by Moroccan congregations) from the perspective of ethnomusicology and cultural anthropology, as agents in possession of vitality and properties that have the capacity themselves to influence history (Elbaz 2021: 10-20, Goldberg 2003: 93-96, Semi 2014. But it does so in dialogue with accounts of North African Jewish trade cultures, such as Sarah Abrevaya Stein's discussions of print culture (2015) and the ostrich feather trade (2008) and Joshua Schreier's biography of merchant Jacob Lasry (2017), and in a broader context of Jewish contributions to Maghrebi musicmaking by Jonathan Glasser (2012) and Chris Silver (2020).…”