Philip V. Bohlman - University of Chicago/USA

Shechinah, or the Feminine Sacred
in the Musics of the Jewish Mediterranean

When I first formulated this paper and undertook research for it, I intended it quite specifically to serve as a response to the challenge of our conference theme. My strategy was one of beginning locally, that is, with a very fundamental instance of gender in Jewish music and to examine the ways it could be expanded to Mediterranean Jewish communities. Shechinah, the feminine presence of God, most familiarly represented in the metaphor of the Sabbath bride, was an obvious case, rich with metaphorical importance in the local ritual of the synagogue and its musical practices.

As the paper developed, however, it became increasingly difficult to restrain its focus on the local. What had been a metaphor became a metonym, and in turn my focus shifted to the Mediterranean in a much more complex sense. In other words, a paper that had begun as an attempt to locate gender has turned into a paper in which I am using gender to make a much more sweeping argument about Jewish music in the Mediterranean and, in fact, about the ontology of Jewish music and the metaphysics of Jewish musical thought. No, I'm not simply saying - or just saying - that gender is everywhere in the music of the Jewish Mediterranean. What I am saying - and I want to make this point as unequivocally as possible at the beginning - what I am saying is that what Jewish music is, that is, how "Jewish music" takes shape as a way of thinking about and expressing the Jewishness, results from the ways gender creates time and space in the Jewish Mediterranean, and the ways in which a gendered Mediterranean world and history become the template for Jewish selfness and lay the boundaries that distinguish Jewish otherness.

Introduction: Sephardic Romance, and the Gendering of the Mediterranean

I begin with Jewish music that embraces the Mediterranean in its most local and global forms, the Sephardic narrative genres of romance, romancero, and coplas. Expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492, Sephardic Jews sought a diaspora beyond the Jewish diaspora of separation from Jerusalem after almost a millennium and one half. The Mediterranean quickly provided the most effective landscape for the double diaspora, for it symbolically represented both departure and return, a place of more extreme diaspora that nonetheless drew Mediterranean Jews closer to the holiest of all places in the Mediterranean world.

The Sephardic narrative genres emerged during the age of double diaspora, and as they did so, they also remapped the Jewish history of the Mediterranean and beyond using gendered narratives. Through the romance and romancero gender envelops the histories of the Jewish narrative at numerous levels. First, the narrator in the Sephardic ballad tradition - the voice of Jewish history - is feminized. Second, the stories and histories of the ballads are told through the perspectives of a woman, and thus Sephardic Jewish history itself becomes extensively gendered. Third, Sephardic Jewish history is musically woven into the larger history of the Mediterranean, itself a contested history of conflict between Christian and Muslim claims for the Mediterranean. By removing the Jewish response to these centuries of conflict, Sephardic music creates a new historical space, a space of double otherness, a space marked as Other and female.

The first musical example illustrates the ways in which the romance possesses an historiography that is both Jewish and gendered from a woman's perspective, that is juifemme, to borrow from the provocative concept of Elaine Marks (1994).

Figure 1 - "Mi madre mia"

O madre mia, tu muy querida de que 'stas triste en este día.
Queridos hijicos lloro la mancilla que amargó muestra familia.
Tu hermano, el grande qu'el era soldado el fue matado en Lule Burgaz.
Es en esta guerra lo que se vidó las crueldades de la Bulgaria.
L'armada Turca era comandada por el ministro Enver Pasha.
Adelante, adelante iban gritando a Edirne iban entrando.
Maldicho seas tu Rey Ferdinan' que tu cautastes todo 'ste mal.
Gemidos amargos de criaturas iban subiendo a las alturas.

[English summary of the ladino text]

A song of the independence war of the Bulgarians against the Ottoman Empire. A mother is weeping for her song who died. It is the fault of King Ferdinand of Spain. He expelled the Jews. For this reason my son had to take part in this cruel war.

In Sephardic ballads Jewish history is mapped on the Mediterranean in distinctive ways. History itself is enacted by men, but it is narrated musically by women. A sharp wedge is therefore driven between music as a performance of Jewish history, hence Self, and music as a discourse about Jewish history, which is possible only from the distance of Other. The language of diaspora is crucial, namely ladino, a vernacular language that is at once Jewish but anchored in the culture of the Other, that is the surrounding non-Jewish world of Spain. We shall see throughout this paper that the vernacular of women's song draws about the world of the Other, and it facilitates the passage of Jewish women musicians between the worlds of Self and Other throughout the Jewish Mediterranean. The music of women, therefore, intrinsically comments upon a diasporic, Mediterranean world of otherness. Its "being" - the ontological selfness of Jewish women in the Mediterranean - emerges from its outsider status, which music should, but never quite does, diminish and eliminate.

I am, perhaps, ahead of my own story today. Before I expand my own analytical narrative about the Jewish Mediterranean, it is necessary to begin at a deeper level of gender in Jewish sacred and religious practice, the level occupied by shechinah, the feminine sacred. Shechinah, literally defined as "the Divine Presence of God," possesses specific archetypal characteristics, or sefirot in Hebrew. Shechinah exists primarily as metaphor, as the Sabbath bride who arrives in the Jewish community at the beginning of the Sabbath on Friday night and whose presence embodies the union of the Jewish community during the course of the Sabbath. The ritual of the synagogue service that opens the Sabbath employs shechinah as a root metaphor for union itself. With ritual and song the men praying in the synagogue welcome the Sabbath bride, turning toward the back of the synagogue at a specific moment in ritual and escorting her with their songs, notably with "L'cha dodi," to the front of the synagogue, where they themselves gather at the moments of most intense prayer before the Torah.

The Sabbath is the moment in the week when the sense of Jewish community is most intensive, and it is noteworthy that it is the moment in which gender distinctions and the musical expression of these distinctions are most extreme, in both the home and the synagogue. Prayer in the synagogue, of course, is not relegated only to the Sabbath, but in fact is a daily component of community life. During the week, however, shechinah occupies a ritual space outside the community; indeed, shechinah lives in exile during the week. The Friday Sabbath rituals in the synagogue only highlight this outsider status during the week. First of all, shechinah must enter the synagogue from the outside. In so doing, she enters into a space that has, during the week and literally at the moment of her entrance, been occupied exclusively by men. During her entrance shechinah comes from the West and moves toward the East, for the Jewish synagogue is oriented toward the East, toward mizrakh, toward Jerusalem and the in-gathering after diaspora. We witness, then, a much larger historical significance for the ritual of shechinah's arrival and transformation of masculine ritual space into feminine sacred and narrative space.

Musical Example 1 - "L'cha dodi"

The arrival of the Sabbath bride has sweeping metonymic significance, for she gives meaning to the community itself and to its sustenance over time. Her arrival is the moment of hopefulness, of the reimagination of Jewish history in the land of Israel. In traditional interpretations, shechinah also occupies a metaphoric domain connected to rituals of reproduction. Her arrival and departure - and by extension her demarcation of domains of selfness and otherness - are ritually performed in the wedding ceremony. Shechinah, in this sense, further accrues the symbolic meanings of selfness through the community's in-gathering in the home, synagogue, and wedding, many of them iconographically represented on your handouts.

It is extremely significant that the symbolism of schechinah is that of the wedding, which therefore ritualizes the arrival of the Sabbath bride in preparation for union with the masculine sacred in the space and time of the synagogue. The Sabbath, beginning on Friday night at sunset and ending on Saturday night, also at sunset, is rich with these metaphors of wedding, union, and the reproduction of the community. The Sabbath, thus, is temporally and physically the space in-between, a time of ending and beginning, of arrival and departure, of celebrating the Self as distinct from the Other. The music of the Sabbath, both in the synagogue and in the home, celebrates and ritualizes the union in these spaces cohabited by the feminine sacred and the masculine sacred.

Concepts of the feminine sacred contrast with those of the masculine sacred, and these take metaphoric form, for example, on the Sabbath with the welcoming of the Sabbath bride in different ways into the home, a feminized space, and into the synagogue, a masculinized space. The ritualized arrivals of the feminine sacred draw attention between secular and sacred worlds. But it also draws attention to the distinctions between Self and Other, for shechinah resides normally in exile, and among the historical conditions for which she serves as a metaphor is the diaspora itself.

If we think of the sacred as having two genders, then, the model of selfness - rituals of reproduction, where all is timeless and placelessness - seems to collapse. In my reflections today, however, I concern myself with the ways in which (1) the shechinah actually confirms the conditions of otherness, and (2) the Sabbath bride further comes to represent the historical condition of exile and diaspora, and the ways they dialectically map Jewish history on the Mediterranean.

Both time and place gender the musics of the Jewish Mediterranean. The gendering impact of time is the product of and the basis for history, that is, for Jewish history as a composite thread within and inseparable from the larger history of the Mediterranean as a whole. The gendering impact of place maps that history on the musical landscape of the Jewish Mediterranean. History and geography coexist on this Jewish musical landscape, but they do so only in a contested relation, and Jewish music, because of its inextricability from the secular and sacred presence of gender, undergirds that relation.

In the Jewish historical imagination spawned by diaspora the journey to the East, to the Eastern Mediterranean, produces the return to a timeless past, that is, an unchanged and unchanging world of Jewishness and a Jewish music that embodied timelessness and placessness (cf. Bohlman 1997). This is what ethnomusicologists hoped to find when they began to collect Jewish music in the Mediterranean during the era of Jewish music collection at the turn-of-the-century. By returning to and gathering up Jewish music in Mediterranean communities, A.Z. Idelsohn, Robert Lachmann (Lachmann 1976), Karl Salomo Krauss, and Alberto Hemsi (see Hemsi 1995), believed they might suture the diasporic gap between Jewish music as it was at a moment of biblical authenticity and as it remained, always already Jewish in the Mediterranean world. Instead, when they bounded Jewish music in traditional terms (e.g., in the synagogue, connected to Jewish practice and in Hebrew), they found that women's music failed to confirm the survival of an authentic Jewish music. Undermining theories about the unity of the Mediterranean was gender, more specifically, the reality that women's music, though clearly anchored to local Jewish communities and ritual, failed to possess the criteria of Jewishness. To remedy this dilemma, women's music received its own space in the geography and history of Mediterranean Jewish culture, a secular space, indeed, an exotic and sensually orientalized space.

I should like to turn briefly to a case-in-point, in fact, the classic Jewish community imagined musically to connect the past to the present: the Yemenite community and Yemenite-Jewish music. In the modern Jewish imagination of the diaspora, Yemen - both because of its isolation at the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula and because of it location on significant trade routes between Europe, Africa, and Asia - has been the site of a type of authenticity that draws sharp lines between Jewishness and otherness.

Early ethnomusicologists and music collectors, for example Abraham Zwi Idelsohn in the first volume of his Thesaurus of Hebrew-Oriental Melodies (1914), devoted the collections primarily to the music of men, drawing attention to the repertories of the synagogue, to the boy's school, or cheder, and to the diwan, a secular space in which repertories with classical Hebrew and Arabic genres are performed, often woven into the same songs. Yemenite Jewish women sang in the vernacular, that is, in Yemenite Arabic or in the Judeo-Arabic of Yemen. Women did not sing in the synagogue, cheder, or diwan, but rather used song in ritual settings, especially those in rites of passage - notably weddings - and in the liminal spaces community spaces between Jewish and Muslim cultures.

The world of male song is that of the sacred and the spiritual self. The world of women's music is that of reproduction and the physical body. The music of men is expressive through prayer and poetry. The music of women is expressive through social intercourse and dance.

These distinctions, canonized at the time of the first encounters with Yemenite-Jewish music, are no less vivid and evocative in postmodern iconography and representations of Yemenite-Jewish music today.

Music marks Mediterranen Jewish women as extraordinary and exceptional, but it does so by bounding an everyday world of difference. I realize, of course, that this statement is deeply paradoxical, for we are accustomed to define the everyday as that which is not exceptional. The everyday in Mediterranean Jewish society is nonetheless a domain of contact, exchange, and movement away from a presumably authentic core. The everyday also forms as a cultural zone of transgressing the borders between self and other.

Quite specific genres of Mediterranean song emerges from the language practices of women and depend on the everyday, quotidian nature of those practices. A central practice in Iraqi-Jewish women's music, for example, is the embodiment and musical enactment of genealogies through pilgrimage (see Avishur 1987). Moroccan-Jewish women, too, are extraordinary for their worship at shrines to women saints, yet the veneration of these saints crosses gender lines, becoming normative (see Ben-Ami 1998). For Robert Lachmann, studying the Jewish communities on the island of Djerba off the coast of Tunisia, the discovery of "women's songs" the fundamental paradigm of otherness within Djerba society, but it eventually led him to critique and dismantle the historiographical paradigm of authenticity (Lachmann 1976).

The geographical and historical spaces of Mediterranean Jewish musics are therefore sharply gendered, but that sharpness belies the crucial contestation of those spaces. Specific genres come to represent those spaces and their contestation, for example, ballads and the narrative language of the Sephardic diaspora, ladino. A distinctive musical language takes shape within these spaces, as in the male religious education of the Yemenite cheder. The gendered nature of sacred musical practices, such as the network of pilgrimage shrines and routes, remaps the Mediterranean itself as a gendered, Jewish landscape.

The reference in my title to the "Jewish Mediterranean" is not simply a distinction and description for this conference, but rather a means of drawing our attention to a series of histories that intersect in and around the Mediterranean, and convey those histories as fundamentally gendered and musical.

The feminine sacred embodies a remarkable degree of agency, so remarkable, indeed, that I do not wish to pass over it in my paper today without remark. The agency of the feminine sacred, moreover, serves me today as a means of making a transition from the sacred to the secular, from the traditionality of the past to the break with tradition from which the modern and postmodern Jewish Mediterraneans have formed. The feminine sacred, as we have experienced her here and as the Kabbalists imagined her, was always active and never passive, as one might have expected a metaphor for the feminine to be. Not only does shechinah enter the ritual spaces of the Sabbath, but she transforms them. Not only does her presence serve as a catalyst in the community, but it comes to embody the community, giving it new identity. This active presence and agency have become even more intense in the Jewish Mediterranean at the end of the twentieth century, where the feminine presence have opened new spaces and identities in the popular musics of the entire Mediterranean, but especially in Israel.

For reasons that are well known to the participants in this conference, Mediterranean popular musics play a powerful role in the confusion of gender categories. The unraveling and complex reformulation of gendered presences in popular music generally draw attention - from ethnomusicologists and a consuming public - because of the ways they defy convention, particularly religious restrictions on sexuality and on the presence of women in the public sphere. Women singers and musicians are at once embraced and scorned, and their subversion of religious and national identities is at once welcomed and feared. Women pop stars are able to contribute to the reconfiguration of religious, ideological, and national identities in the Mediterranean not least because of their active reconfiguration of traditional gender and sexual identities. Women may sing from the margins of Mediterranean society, but their song is heard most profoundly at the center.

It is hardly surprising, then, that women singers dominate some of the most significant moments in the formation of modern Mediterranean popular musics. Here, of course, I think of singers such as Umm Kulthum and Warda, but also of the women whose presence was inseparable from the earliest stages in the histories of raï and zemer ivri (literally, "Hebrew song"). Jewish women singers, because they occupied positions at several margins away from the center - that is, as public musicians, as well as non-Muslims and non-instrumentalists - contributed most actively to the confusion of gender and tradition at the center.

The first modern Israeli popular singer was Beracha Zephira, who was born into a Yemenite-Jewish family in Jerusalem in 1911. Zephira's career as a singer, which took various detours through ethnic and art musics, expressed a sort of national dialectic, even conflict, with her traditional Yemenite identity on one side and an extraordinary level of cosmopolitanism on the other other. In her songs Beracha Zephira drew upon her "own" Eastern and Yemenite traditions, but she also engaged in collaborations with the most distinguished European immigrant composers during the early years of Israeli statehood. Her modern Jewish identity, therefore, depended on both her classical training - she studied drama with Max Reinhardt in Berlin - and the expectations that Yemenite music embodied something classically Israeli because of its ancient modernity. It is precisely this conflict and the musical identity it opens up that are of greatest interest for us in this conference. Beracha Zephira, together with Shoshana Davari, was the first in a line of female popular singers who opened up this space and problematized the ways in which gender took its presence in the public sphere of Israeli society.

These women singers acquired the power to open up this space because of their double otherness, or even a double doubleness, if I may be permitted to draw upon the W.E.B. DuBois's provocative modeling of the African presence in America. It would not be enough simply to be Yemenite or to participate in the resistive Easternness of Israeli popular musics, such as musica mizrakhit (literally, "eastern music"; see Halper, Seroussi, and Squires-Kidron 1989, and Regev 1996). Musica mizrakhit integrates both male and female imagery, and it includes its own brand of bounded Mediterranean internationalism. Male singers, such as Zohar Argov, sometimes win considerable fame in musica mizrakhit, albeit within a prescribed Israeli context. In my remarks today I wish to suggest that the Yemenite-Jewish singers who have most problematically opened public spaces for the feminine presence in Israeli popular music have done so because of a more transcendent cosmopolitanism, transcendent, that is, because of gender in the Jewish Mediterranean.

The first of the two Yemenite-Jewish singers I should like to place in the modern genealogy initiated by Beracha Zephira is Ofra Haza. In her meteoric worldbeat career, Ofra Haza has done, one might argue, a little bit of everything, ranging from straightforward authentic Yemenite songs to stylistic compromises of musica mizrakhit to recent explorations of religious and Holocaust themes. It is not the details of this cosmopolitanism that interest me, but rather the way an overt gendering of these issues functions, a gendering that juxtaposes them in a particularly contested public space that speaks to Israeli national identity.

The most complex gender issues in Israeli popular music are those raised most recently, indeed, in the past several months by Israel's entry in the "Eurovision Song Contest," Dana International, a singer of Yemenite and Sephardic ethnic heritage. Dana is a transsexual, born a male and now a woman. In the paradox of tradition, of course, she embodies very consciously a male and a female presence, and even this is not lost in the controversies surrounding Dana's representation of Israel in the most important popular-music contest in the world. In her public statements, she herself admits to the opening of a new space in Israeli society: "We have become two nations and, it's true, for many people I have come to represent freedom, democracy and the right to live how individuals want to live" (Sharrock 1998: 22). In the following signature tune, Dana International musically represents this new public space - this new site for a Mediterranean Jewish community - through an extreme hybridity of styles, ranging from musica mizrakht to the unison sounds of an Arab takht in musika al-'arabiyyah, perhaps of the sort in which her ancestors may have played.

Women musicians, indeed, women performers, have framed my paper today. I think it important, nonetheless, to observe that these women singers are not necessarily, or even primarily, performing "women's repertories" or "women's music." Instead, they are performing as historical narrators, if you will, as the chorus in a Greek drama, or, in keeping more specifically with my subject matter today, as the singers at narrative moments in the Torah, that is in the Pentateuch or Five Books of Moses in the Old Testament. The narrative presence of these women singers lies "outside the historical text," on the other side of Jewish history itself, but it is precisely this position that endows them with their keen knowledge of the whole. It empowers them, moreover, to map Jewish experience on the history of the Mediterranean itself.

There is also a masculine sacred in the Mediterranean, though its presence in my paper has been more implicit than explicit. The ontology of the masculine sacred, or tiferet, is that of an uninterrupted presence, which insistently occupies the musical practices of the synagogue and the religious education of boys and men. Its historiographic tropes are those of continuity and unbroken tradition. It is the imagination of a cultural Self beyond the influences of others. The masculine sacred, as Elaine Marks might put it, is the Jewishness that is "seen" rather than the Jewishness that is heard, the Jewishness that is "just there," rather than the Jewishness that must be performed into existence (Marks 1996).

The point of my paper, however, is not to privilege the feminine over the masculine. Instead, I am most interested in using my reflections and our conference to draw attention to the space in-between. The space in-between, as we have seen, is a space of union and community, in which Sabbath ritual creates a space for both shechinah and tiferet. It is this boundary region or space in-between that music instantiates the time and place of the Mediterranean (cf. Bhabha's "third space" in Bhabha 1994). Most important, the space in-between possesses the qualities of transit: one gains entrance to it or crosses a threshold at its boundaries; exchange - of language, of song, of culture - defines those boundaries by transgressing them; it is at these boundaries that gender gives meaning to the histories and boundaries on both sides.

The complex gendering of Jewish music narrates an equally complex gendering of Jewish history. The teleology of a history motivated by return to the Eastern Mediterranean, to Jerusalem and to Zion, conflicts with one marked by exile and the timeless repetition of acts of return, such as those ritualized through the musical practices of the masculine sacred. One Jewish history derives from the confrontation with otherness, with the interaction with non-Jewish cultures and the performance of everyday culture through hybridized musics. The other Jewish history spawns the imagination of selfness through music and ritual in the spaces of authenticity.

Shechinah, the feminine sacred, fails to represent the continuity suggested by a teleological history of return; indeed, she herself must return again and again, arriving each week as the Sabbath bride. Forgotten in the historiographical and theological tropes of tradition and authenticity is that shechinah also exits, that her bridal entry is somehow interrupted, if not deliberately left unconsummated. At the end of the twentieth century, in fact in 1998 as the modern state of Israel celebrates its fiftieth year of existence, the question is no longer whether diaspora, as a condition of Jewish history will dissolve or exit as the Sabbath bride that symbolizes diaspora. Diaspora represents the hybridity that now occupies the spaces of modern and postmodern Jewish history.

The metonymic world of gendered Jewish historical narratives is fraught with disjuncture, which necessitates the constant attempt to integrate the feminine and masculine sacred in the spaces of union themselves, those spaces I have described as having a metaphysics of "in-betweenness." If indeed the discontinuity of encountering one's own cultural otherness engenders the music of the Jewish Mediterranean, it also drives its history, with each departure of shechinah creating the space for and return of the next Sabbath bride.