Where Lineage Fails: Reorienting Diasporic Memory in Israel

Tamar Bloch never thought she would be a singer. Yes, she sang in the music program in high school. Yes, she was accepted into the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance to study opera. But she never thought making music was a real possibility as her central occupation in life. Then one day, during her early twenties, Tamar heard Rabbi Haim Louk sing in a performance in Jerusalem. Tamar was wearing a long black dress with small red and green flowers on it, sitting on the floor cross-legged, when she overflowed with tears at the sound of Rabbi Louk’s voice. At that moment, she knew two things: one, she had to start making this music; two, she would have to find her own path.

Haim Louk was singing Andalusian piyyutim, liturgical Jewish poems from Spain and North Africa set to melodies by various payy’tanim over time. Rabbi Louk, who was born in Casablanca in 1942 and immigrated to Israel in 1964, is perhaps one of the most prominent contemporary payy’tanim of Moroccan liturgy.¹ Throughout his career, he has sustained and developed North African musical repertoires that have been silenced under social and cultural marginalization in Israel. Hearing him sing that evening was a defining moment for Tamar, whose mother was born in Morocco but who grew up as a secular girl and woman in Israel. Tamar’s relationship to various aspects of Moroccan life was strained and complicated. She had vague memories of hearing her grandfather singing piyyutim at Shabbat dinners. In hearing Haim Louk, Tamar was overwhelmed by a sensation of remembering something that she once knew but had lost or forgotten. This overpowering sensation would shape the following years of her life, in musical pursuit of a stifled diasporic memory. But the path to get to where she wanted to be was unclear: “I looked for teachers in the field, and I understood that they are men who will not teach me. . . . My family is very religious, so it didn’t even occur to me to try to approach Rabbi Haim Louk and tell him, ‘Listen, I want you to teach me.’ Because that was what I wanted. To study with him.”²

Piyyutim are transmitted through patrilineal lineages. These lineages, linking student to teacher back to Morocco, are also a way of tracing memories back home.³ Rabbi Haim Louk himself is one of the students of the famed Rabbi David Bouzaglo, a master payy’tan who revived the widespread singing of piyyutim throughout Moroccan communities in Israel and transformed Moroccan Jewish liturgy in the twentieth century by, among other things, using melodies from popular music of the time. In Morocco, Rabbi Bouzaglo studied with Rabbi Haim Attar, one of the people to have put together and published Shir Yedidot, the compilation of piyyutim that would become the widely used standard text for Shirat Habaqqashot, a significant religious practice for Moroccan Jews.⁴ Referring to her own entry into this lineage, Tamar said, “I already knew it was a ‘no,’ so I kept searching, just next to it, just around it.”⁵ This lineage offered a crucial way into the diasporic memory, occluded by cultural marginalization in Israel, to which Tamar aspired to return. But she did not feel that she would fit comfortably within it. Tamar wanted to seek a different path.

I bring up Tamar’s story not to illustrate gendered boundaries. There have been many inventive ways in which women have participated in religious musical life and in its transmission both in and outside of the synagogue in Morocco, Israel, and beyond.⁶ Rather, I bring up Tamar’s story because it illustrates a re-orienting that happens in and through the failure of lineage. By lineage I mean the fantasy of the propagation of lineal descent from one generation to the next, which I consider to be an arm of the logic of reproduction. Reproduction operates under heteronormativity, organizing social life through a variety of means, such as, for example, lineage or kinship, institutions, and the concept of time. Queer...