Maqam and Liturgy: Ritual, Music, and Aesthetics of Syrian Jews in Brooklyn (review)

There is a growing body of literature concerning Jews from the non-Western world, but few works deal with communities who immigrated and settled in the Americas. Even fewer are devoted to specific cultural expressions. Maqam and Liturgy: Ritual, Music, and Aesthetics of Syrian Jews in Brooklyn provides a strong and important contribution to this relatively meager corpus of literature by focusing on practices of liturgical music. Serving as a second volume to Kay Shelemay's highly acclaimed Let Jasmine Rain Down (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), Kligman's interpretive study shifts the focus of inquiry away from the para-liturgical, marginally secular practice of pizmonim (tributary song poems) to the predominantly male, liturgical world of musical performance in the Syrian synagogue. Building upon the ethnographic research begun during his tenure working with and assisting Shelemay, Kligman utilizes his connections with informants and his ability to penetrate the religious world of the Syrian Jews to shine an important light on the liturgical music outside the purview of Let Jasmine Rain Down. In doing so, Kligman addresses multiple audiences—ethnomusicologists, historians, and scholars of cultural studies and migration. Fully capitalizing on oral history methodology, Kligman goes beyond interviews with informants by documenting important historical information embedded in oral musical expressions as well as pertinent information from earlier forms of documented Jewish oral history—the Talmud, rabbinic responsa, and published commentaries on Jewish law.

Kligman divides Maqam and Liturgy into three parts: Background, Sabbath Morning Service, and A Judeo-Arab Synthesis. He devotes the first part to background information on the Syrian Jewish community—the history of Arab and Jewish cohabitation in Syria, the waves of immigration and settlement in Brooklyn during the twentieth century, and peculiarities of Syrian Jewish liturgical texts. The second part uses the Sabbath morning religious ritual as a frame to explore liturgical music and specifically the oral performance of maqamat-based music without any accompaniment from musical instruments. Maqamat (pl.), crudely defined, are melodic modes or scales that follow specific rules for melodic invention. After a theoretical explanation of maqamat, showing synonymity between Jewish and Arab approaches in the Levant, Kligman includes informants' explanations about aesthetic qualities of different maqamat (beauty, sadness, and happiness), choices for melodic repertoire, performance transcriptions, and discussions of how nonmusical factors affect performance to compile ample oral evidence to support his thesis. In the third part, he uses this evidence to support his thesis, that a Judeo-Arab synthesis between Hebrew text and maqam-based musical practices governs the performance aesthetics central to defining a uniquely Brooklyn approach to Syrian Jewish identity. He suggests that the "adaptation of Arab musical aesthetic desires within a Jewish religious context" (207) not only reproduces the historic cultural contact between Arabs and Jews in Syria but also encourages the codification of a "Brooklyn system" (202) of liturgical musical practice.

The notion of a synthesis posited by the dichotomous appellation "Judeo-Arab" suggests that these communities operate distinct from one another, synthesizing new expressions only through contact in certain arenas of cultural expression. In discussing what Kligman refers to as "reassociating meaning through maqamat" (214), he relies upon an explanation of saltana, or modal ecstasy, as described by Ali Jihad Racy in reference to Arab music from the Levant rather than delivering more of Cantor David Tawil's own reflections on the ability of maqamat to induce ecstasy in Jewish prayer. While this correlation is important, the suggestion that Jewish conceptions about maqamat are simply incorporated through contact or reassociation with a majority Arab culture encourages a perception that such clear communal boundaries exist and that a synthesis is bringing together two distinct cultures along these lines. Focusing instead on liturgical performance as a means for Jews to distinguish themselves from a common culture would perhaps be more intriguing and historically accurate. Instead of the use of maqamat being indicative of a Judeo-Arab synthesis, I...