| Another type of Mediterraneanism in
Israeli music, that had fewer repercussions in the
literature than the former one, is an instance of the
model that we named "Orientalist". According to
this model, the new Israeli folksong, a crucial component
in the Zionist cultural enterprise (see Eliram 1995 and
2000), has to lean on an authentic form of Jewish music,
e.g. on the music of the Jews who dwelled in the Middle
East since times immemorial. The best exponent of such a
type of authentic Judaism was, as already recalled, the
Yemenite Jewry whose impact on Israeli crafts, design,
food and music is remarkable (on the early 20th-century
Yemenite Jewish settlement in Palestine and its relation
to the Zionist establishment see Druyan). Indeed many
composers of Israeli songs such as Menashe Ravina (Ravinovitch),
Moshe Vilensky, Sara Levy-Tanay and others found
inspiration in the Yemenite Jewish musical heritage.
Moreover, Eastern European Jewish composers from the 1930s
to the1950s were particularly attracted to the unique
"color" of the vocal style of Yemenite women
singers, such as Bracha Zefira, Shoshana Damai, Esther
Gamlielit and Hana Aharoni, and wrote special works for
them. Yet, for the past five centuries there were other Jews who merged in their cultural heritage Western and Eastern features and were therefore a convenient model for Israeliness. These Jews were the Sephardim, i.e. the Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal at the end of the 15th century who settled in the rims of the Mediterranean Sea. The chief exponent of this second style of musical Mediterraneanism was the Sephardi singer and folksong collector Isaac Levy. Born in Turkey in 1919, Levy immigrated as a child to Palestine. He attended the Academy of Music in Jerusalem. In the early 1950s, Levy became interested in his own cultural roots and became a systematic collector of Judeo-Spanish folksongs. In the mid-1950s he started to broadcast the Judeo-Spanish program at the Israeli state radio. In these programs he broadcasted Judeo-Spanish folksongs from his original field recordings as well as arrangements of the same songs that he commissioned and sometimes performed. In 1959, Levy published the first of his influential four-volume anthology of Judeo-Spanish folksongs (see Seroussi 1995). In the introduction to this first volume Levy exposed his vision of Mediterraneanism in Israeli culture. He predicted that Israeli culture would transform itself from a European-oriented culture into a Mediterranean one. He vaguely explained this adjective as the juncture of the "ancient Eastern civilization of Israel and early Christianity" with contemporary Western culture. The Sephardi Jews were, according to Levy, the natural carriers of this legacy because they
Therefore the future of Israel should be linked to this synthesis:
Levy’s concept of an Israeli
"national music" should be understood in the
historical context of the 1950s. This was a period when
the Eastern European Jews dominated, through the Israeli
Labor movement, the cultural institutions of the new
country in accordance to secular Zionist ideology. During
the same decade, masses of Jews from Islamic countries
arrived to Israel. The governmental policy of absorption
set the basis for an ongoing process of political, social
and cultural confrontation between the leadership of the
state and the new immigrants. At this juncture, Levy was
ambivalent. As a musician trained in the Western
tradition and a state radio employee, he was a member of
the establishment. At the same time as a proud Sephardi
Jews from Turkey he became, from within the system, an
advocate of Mediterraneanism.
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