Language ideologies: the enmity of Arabic

In numerous styles of global pop, the question of language choice is crucial. The sociolinguistic and anthropological study of language ideologies has brought forth the idea that languages carry a semiotic meaning even for those who do not command them (Berger Reference Berger, Berger and Carroll2003, p. xi). Researchers have distinguished between language as an index of group identity in its mundane operational context and language as a ‘metalinguistically created symbol of identity’ in its intentional evocation (Woolard and Schieffelin Reference Woolard and Schieffelin1994, p. 61). This difference rests on the wide bedrock of distinction between use and mention in the philosophy of language, and is reminiscent of the distinction between ‘tactics’ and ‘strategy’ (De Certeau Reference Certeau1984): while the practical function of language as a marker of identity in everyday speech calls for tactical consideration, to evoke language as a metalinguistic symbol is more of a strategy. As such, ‘language varieties that are regularly associated with (and thus index) particular speakers are often revalorised – or misrecognised – not just as symbols of group identity, but as emblems of political allegiance or of social, intellectual, or moral worth’ (Woolard and Schieffelin, Reference Woolard and Schieffelin1994, p. 61). In the course of this paper, we will elaborate on how the performance of a language in a musical setting realises, in different context-dependent ways, the tension between using language as a semantic vehicle and mobilising it as a complex sonic symbol.

Scholars of language ideologies have recently turned their attention to the potentially rich articulation of this field with the study of music. In introducing a special issue devoted to this topic, Schneider, Sippola and Levisen note that ‘studying language in music is a way of developing an understanding of the complex cultural embeddedness of language, its relationship to local histories, transnational structures, socioeconomic conditions, and cultural concepts’ (Schneider et al. Reference Schneider, Sippola and Levisen2017, p. 2). Our study of the growing trend of Hebrew-speaking Israeli Jews who sing in Arabic is congruent with the aims of this recent publication in that it seeks to expose new or shifting socialities by addressing ‘the co-emergence of linguistic patterns, cultural concepts, and ideological beliefs’ (Schneider et al. Reference Schneider, Sippola and Levisen2017, p. 3).

While the case of Hebrew speakers who sing in Arabic certainly shares many of these universal concerns, it is also shaped by a unique set of historical, political, cultural and sociolinguistic conditions. Before the beginning of Zionist settlement in Palestine, in the late 19^th century, Arabic was the prevalent vernacular there, as it remains today throughout the region. As the language of commerce and inter-community relations, Arabic proficiency (as a first or second language) was also widespread among non-Arab ethno-religious groups, including the diverse urban Jewish populations of Palestine (Talmon Reference Talmon and Owens2000, p. 209). The relationship of Zionists to Arabic was initially a complex one. Historical documents show how some settlers in the early yishuv (pre-state Jewish settlement) favoured the cultivation of Arabic competence, and demanded its instruction (Halperin Reference Halperin2006). When mutual hostility reached a critical point circa 1929 these voices were drowned out (Cohen Reference Cohen2013).

After the founding of the State of Israel and in the aftermath of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, approximately 180,000 Palestinians, native speakers of Arabic as a first language, remained within the borders of Israel. Between 1948 and 1970, over half a million Arabic-speaking Jews immigrated to Israel from predominantly Arab countries, comprising a majority of the Jewish immigrants during this period. The largest groups of Arabic-speaking Jews came from Morocco, Iraq and Yemen. By 2012 the first and second generations of these Arabic-speaking Jewish immigrants numbered 1.2 million: one in every three immigrants (The Israel Central Bureau of Statistics 2009).Footnote ² At the same time, owing to the enforcement of the ‘melting-pot’ cultural policy, the use by Jews of languages other than Hebrew, and of Arabic in particular, was repressed (Shohat Reference Shohat1999). Judeo-Arab cultures, considered by the hegemonic European-Jewish group to be both inferior and dangerous, were likewise delegitimised.

Naturally, this resulted in a sharp fall in the number of Arabic speakers among Jewish immigrants and their descendants. A 2015 report on the command of Arabic and attitudes toward the Arabic language among the Jewish population in Israel (Shenhav et al. Reference Shenhav, Dallashi, Avnimelech, Mizrachi and Mendel2015) points to what the authors call ‘the inverted pyramid of the loss of Arabic’: fluency in (spoken) Arabic among the first generation of Arab Jews (25.6%) is today almost twice that of their children (14%) and 20 times that of members of the third generation (1.3%). The report concludes that descendants of Arab Jews rejected Arabic in order to increase their social mobility, but contends that this rejection is far more prominent in public spaces, as opposed to the stronger retention of practices that pertain to private or communal spaces, such as listening to Arabic music.

This decline in Arabic proficiency among Jews has taken place in a state where Arabic is also an official language, and the first language of over 1.5 million Palestinian citizens, who today comprise around 20% of the population. As part of the project of asserting the dominance of the Jewish majority and de-Arabising Mizrahi Jews, the cultural value of Arabic for Jews has been radically shifted through what scholars have termed the ‘securitisation of Arabic’ (Mendel Reference Mendel2015) – that is, the instruction and use of the language predominantly in the context of security and intelligence needs, as well as the ‘Latinisation of Arabic’ (Amara Reference Amara2002), i.e. focusing on teaching literary Arabic and not the more commonly used Palestinian or historical Arab–Jewish dialects. According to Uhlmann (Reference Uhlmann2010, p. 140), ‘Arabic is approached […] as a foreign language rather than as an integral component of the local linguistic scene’. In short, in the Jewish-Israeli public sphere Arabic has been positioned as the language of an external other – the language of the enemy.

Postvernacular Arabic: performing a language

As Arabic has ceased to be a spoken language for most Israeli Jews, we seek to understand the set of relations observable through the growing engagement with this language in music and other cultural avenues as part of what Jeffrey Shandler (Reference Shandler2005) has termed postvernacular uses. Shandler coined this term in the context of Yiddish culture in North America since the mid-20^th century, where Yiddish became, rather than a means of communication, a ground for the cultivation of Jewish identities. With the destruction of its organic community of speakers in Central and Eastern Europe, where it was part of a ‘mimetic’ process of linguistic and cultural transmission, Shandler argues, the use of Yiddish became part of ‘innovative cultural negotiations’ (Shandler Reference Shandler2005, p. 132). In postvernacular uses, speaking or singing the language has intrinsic performative worth that is independent of everyday communicational utility.

Shandler's description of this phenomenon is comparable with what we have encountered in musical contexts where Arabic is performed. A concert held in Jerusalem in December 2016 by Firqat al-Nūr, a predominantly Jewish orchestra of classical Arabic music founded in 2013, yields a compelling example of postvernacular use of Arabic. The Palestinian singer Ma'moun Zyud, in the middle of singing a song from the repertoire of the famous Arab composer and singer Farid al-Atrash, prompted his Jewish audience to sing along using the Hebrew imperative of the verb ‘to sing’ (shiru).Footnote ³ He did so assuming that the audience might know the Arabic lyrics of the song, yet he evidently deemed (unconsciously) using Arabic to invite them to do so to be ineffective, inappropriate or simply unnatural. Zyud's choice effectively exposes the postvernacular status of Arabic in the context of this musical event. Singing old Egyptian classics in Arabic utilises an available competency (for some of the Jewish public) and is a welcomed practice; communicating in Arabic with an audience in the predominantly Jewish public sphere is seen as neither effective nor appropriate. Similarly, we find many of the characteristics of postvernacular uses in recent musical performances of Arabic by Israeli Jews, in contexts where Arabic is performed as part of Jewish heritage or as an object for aesthetic investment. As we will show, these latter cases (e.g. singing in English with an Arabic accent) are part and parcel of the performative repertoire of postvernacular uses of Arabic, demonstrating what Shandler has identified as the tendency to separate the semantic value of the postvernacular language from its other semiotic registers, ‘as something more akin to music […] to be appreciated as a signifier of affect or as an aesthetic experience of sound play’ (Shandler Reference Shandler2005, pp. 139–40).

While the similarities between the postvernacular uses of Yiddish in North America and Arabic among Israeli Jews are striking, it is important not to lose sight of the many and great differences between the two situations. Despite the near extinction of Jewish dialects of Arabic, other dialects are still very much alive, as are the Arab cultures of which these Jewish communities were heteronomic members. This was not the case with Yiddish, which was a fully independent language despite its Germanic origins. Furthermore, the engagement of Israeli Jews with Arabic is informed and conditioned by continuous contact with Palestinian Arabic and its speakers, as well as with persisting contact with contemporary Arab culture and music through various media. This contact has had well-documented effects on the Hebrew language (Shehadeh Reference Shehadeh2000), and on Israeli popular music (as detailed below). In many ways, therefore, the Jewish-Israeli postvernacular situation is enveloped by the vernacular Arab cultures of the Middle East, from which it is separated by the semipermeable ideological membrane of Israeli-Hebrew cultural nationalism. Although these circumstances are radically different from those of Yiddish in North America, we consider these differences an occasion to both test and extend the boundaries of Shandler's postvernacular theory, and explore its transferability to further case studies.

Arabic in popular music by Israeli Jews

Jews have been prominent participants in the making of modern musical idioms in many Arab countries (Seroussi Reference Seroussi2015; Shannon Reference Shannon and Davis2015; Langlois Reference Langlois and Davis2015; Kojman Reference Kojaman2001). With the mass migration of Arab Jews to Israel after 1948, a large number of musicians brought with them diverse musical practices from across the Arab world. In Israel they discovered that their style was not appreciated – and was even suppressed – by the receiving Ashkenazi Jewish society who sought to build a modern national culture modelled on European civilisation. Although some elements of Eastern musical styles were allowed – and even desired, as a component in the making of a new local national style – singing in Arabic was taboo, as a prime marker of the diasporic identities that immigrants were expected to leave behind, or worse, as a modern Arab identity that was taken to be contradictory to Zionism. Faced with this reality in their new ‘homeland’, some musicians switched to performing in Hebrew, or gave up on their musical careers altogether. Others confined themselves to occasional performances in familial festivities within their own diaspora. Only a few musicians, mostly from Iraq and Egypt, continued to perform modern Arabic music in small cultural enclaves, such as Café Noah in Tel Aviv, or as part of the Arabic Orchestra that operated under the Israeli Broadcasting Service (Perlson Reference Perlson2006).

The 1970s saw greater integration of Mizrahi Jews into Israeli national culture, a process echoed in the field of popular music, culminating with the popularisation of a new hybrid style known as Muziḳa Mizraḥit (‘Eastern music’) and later as Israeli Mediterranean Music (Regev and Seroussi Reference Regev and Seroussi2004; Horowitz Reference Horowitz2010). Muzika Mizrahit drew on traditional music of Eastern-Jewish diasporas, rock instrumentation and arrangements, and Arabic, Greek and Turkish popular music. While Arabic music was a constant presence in Mizrahi households and neighbourhoods, and Mizrahi singers regularly performed in Arabic, crossover success into the Israeli mainstream only became attainable from the early 1980s by singing in Hebrew. Nevertheless, singers occasionally scored national hits with Arabic songs, for example Haim Moshe's 1983 hit ‘Linda, Linda’. Eventually an unofficial ‘canon’ of songs in Arabic accumulated, which were familiar to a relatively large strata of Jewish Israelis; the most famous of these is ‘ʾInta ʿOmrī’, which is identified with its original interpreter, the Egyptian Umm Kalthoum.

Another song in Arabic which attained a strong presence in mainstream Israeli media, was the Yemenite song ‘Galbi’ (‘My Heart’), recorded by Ofra Haza for her album Shirei Teiman (‘Songs of Yemen’). When it was first released in 1984 the song was completely ignored by the Israeli media and public, even though Haza was at that time one of Israel's most popular female voices. However, a remixed version of ‘Galbi’ became internationally successful in 1988, and was a forerunner in what later became known as the ‘world beat’ marketing category (Taylor Reference Taylor1997, p. 4). The song's international success eventually afforded it the attention and approval of the Israeli media. Haza, by marking her diasporic Jewish heritage as a cache of authenticity and wrapping it in an updated pop sound, not only gained entrance into the global market, but also rebranded this Arabic song within the Israeli cultural context as a cosmopolitan product.

Haza's success spurred a surge in the perceived legitimacy of embracing Arab resources in mainstream Israeli pop, under the twin justifications of Jewish heritage and cosmopolitan appeal. The early 1990s also saw the increasing hybridisation of Eastern styles with the mainstream, with rock bands such as Ethnix and Teapacks toping the charts. The political optimism which accompanied the signing of the Oslo Accords (1993) and the realisation of the peace treaty between Israel and Jordan (1994) fortified a growing prospect of political reconciliation that would open the borders between Israel and the Arab world. The prospect of open borders helped propel the careers of two other female singers singing in Arabic. The first was Zehava Ben, who emerged from the ranks of Muzika Mizrahit but reached new audiences in Jordan and the Palestinian Territories after recording two albums of Arabic classical music in 1994 and 1995 (Horowitz Reference Horowitz, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Karp2008). The other was Dana International, a transsexual pop diva whose cassette of Arabic-language dance songs was a sensation on the Egyptian market in 1994 (Swedenburg Reference Swedenburg1997; Maurey Reference Maurey2009). The Oslo period also gave birth to a host of ‘ethnic music’ bands such as Bustan Abraham (‘Abraham's Garden’), wherein Israeli and Palestinian musicians played together under the cloak of a shared regional style, or ‘world music’ (Brinner Reference Brinner2009). All of these ‘musical bridges’ proved to be frail when the Second Intifada (2000) put an end to the optimism of the 1990s. It is therefore hard to argue for any form of continuity between these pre-millennial manifestations of Arabic in Israeli pop and the current trend, which stems from a fundamentally different situation.

Although an inherently compound, heterogenic phenomenon, the current surge in the presence of Arabic is partly embedded in a larger cultural and political Mizrahi revival movement that has reorganised the way in which ideas about the place of Middle-Eastern cultures influence popular music in practice. Broadly speaking, the main difference between the formative years of Mizrahi popular music in Israel (1970s–1990s) and the current trend has to do with the relationship between radical Mizrahi politics and popular culture. The Black Panther protest of the 1970s and its aftermath were related to the rise of a Mizrahi pop industry to the extent that they both stemmed from the coming of age of a Mizrahi generation raised in Israel, who sought to have a voice within Israeli society (Horowitz Reference Horowitz2010). However, there was hardly any personal overlap or direct exchange between the key agents behind the two developments, as they came from different milieus. This was also the case during the 1990s, when the formation of the influential left-wing movement The Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow Coalition coincided – but hardly overlapped – with the mainstreamisation of Mizrahi pop, embodied by singers such as Sarit Hadad and Eyal Golan (Kaplan Reference Kaplan2012). Today, however, the relationship between third-generation Mizrahi politics and the production of new strains of Israeli popular music in which the return to Arabic is prominent, is much closer.

The new Mizrahi Renaissance exceeds its predecessors in serving as a conduit between national politics and popular culture. Its battle-cries are today present in mainstream cultural arenas including stand-up comedy, television series and pop music. In some cases, actors in the field of popular music (composers, DJs, music journalists, etc.) themselves play leading roles in activist initiatives. Yet even more significant than the existence of activist musicians is the fact that activists and musicians now breathe the same social and ideological air. Third-generation Mizrahi activists and intellectuals brew their ideas in their own milieus, but at the same time also have a broad social and social-media interface with a larger ‘second circle’. In these social circles, ideas such as the revival of Arab–Jewish identities are ‘translated’ from radical intellectual agendas into trendy pop-culture forms that are valued for their political, formal or aesthetic novelty effect upon larger audiences. In short, there is now a synergetic continuum, which has not existed before, between the radical Mizrahi thinker and the new agents of Mizrahiness or Arabness in popular music.

Unmuting Arabic: Arabic as heritage

The mode of performative engagement with Arabic as ‘heritage’ is concerned with Arabic dialects as centrepieces of Jewish diasporic culture, to be rediscovered, remembered, revitalised and celebrated. Performing Arabic for its heritage value, among the new manifestations of Mizrahi culture, means enacting, displaying and publicising Jewish identities for which Arabic is a sine qua non. This trend is present in the work of many artists, but central to the work of only a few.

Singer Neta Elkayam and her artistic partner, composer and pianist Amit Hai Cohen, were both raised in the town of Netivot, which is populated overwhelmingly by Jewish immigrants from Northern Africa. Today, they identify first and foremost as Moroccan Jews, and value this identity above being Israeli, a label which they carry with mixed feelings. ‘We are very happy to be here today, to bring you some Jewish-Moroccan heritage from Jerusalem’. With this statement, as intended as it is entangled, Neta Elkayam opened her concert at the 2014 Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow. Heritage, as Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (Reference Kirshenblatt-Gimblett1995, p. 369) suggests, is ‘a mode of cultural production in the present that has recourse to the past’. Its business is the ‘transvaluation of the obsolete, the mistaken, the outmoded, the dead, and the defunct’, achieved through a process of performance or exhibition, which ‘endows it with a second life’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett Reference Kirshenblatt-Gimblett1995). As will become clear, this definition is particularly adequate for Elkayam and Cohen's project. Like most of her generation, Elkayam (b.1980) was not taught Arabic at home or in school. Her closest experience with the language was trying to communicate with her grandmother, who barely spoke any Hebrew. She received a formal music education which had, as she puts it, ‘a completely European narrative’ (Elkayam and Cohen Reference Elkayam and Cohen2017). It was at the late age of 28, following a trip to Morocco, that she began the quest for her Moroccan heritage through Arabic language and music. Throughout our conversation, Elkayam refers to the Palestinian dialect as ‘regular Arabic’ or ‘the Arabic-of-here’. This was the first form of Arabic she learned systematically. ‘It was important for me because I understood that this would be the key to my roots’, she says. The Judeo-Moroccan dialect that she sings in, she refers to as ‘my Arabic’ or ‘my Moroccan’. While the distinction between the two is clear for her, she admits to speaking a Palestinian–Moroccan mix.

Elkayam and Cohen's musical career is inseparable from an identity quest that involves a deep political awareness. They reject the strategic essentialism prescribed by radical Mizrahi thinkers of the previous generation: ‘Moroccans are not Arab Jews in the deep sense of the term’, Cohen emphasises, ‘it's not like Iraqis or Egyptians. We, Neta and I, have stronger Berber roots, and politically it's not exactly the same’ (Elkayam and Cohen Reference Elkayam and Cohen2017). Yet despite this nuanced approach and their awareness of political complexities, the couple's musical pursuits do not fall short of a project of reclaiming a Jewish-Moroccan identity. This project calls for various musical and extra-musical acts of identification. For instance, when attending the birthday party of a Palestinian friend in Jericho, Cohen recalls how he spontaneously decided to speak the Moroccan dialect, although he could also speak the Palestinian one. ‘If an Arab from Morocco will come here, he won't start talking in the local dialect. So I speak your language, but I have my own identity’ (Elkayam and Cohen Reference Elkayam and Cohen2017). Things do not get any simpler abroad. When performing in the USA, the couple are repeatedly being asked whether they are ‘really’ Jewish, because, as Elkayam believes, ‘they are not familiar with this concept [of an Arabic-speaking Jew]’ (Elkayam and Cohen Reference Elkayam and Cohen2017). In Morocco, however, they are immediately identified as Jews because of the way they speak. The linguistic apparentness of their Judaism is enhanced by the notion that, as Cohen puts it, ‘even our music is Jewish’ (Elkayam and Cohen Reference Elkayam and Cohen2017).

As this last quote implies, a continuity between linguistic and musical practices of identification exists in a postvernacular condition. Within this continuum, choices of repertoire are central in the curation of a musico-linguistic corpus, in the full sense of the word: sonically embodying one's self-realised identity. To date, most of Elkayam's performances are homages to Jewish-Maghrebi artists who were closely associated with the development of urban Shaʻbī (‘popular’) music around the mid-20^th century in the Maghreb. These musicians, such as the Moroccan singer Zohara Al-Fasiya (1905–94) or the West-Algerian pianist Maurice El Mediouni (b. 1928), often performed in genres that were not specifically Jewish (such as malḥūn and gharnaṭī) and were celebrated by Muslim audience. This said, Elkayam suggests that they do have a distinct Jewish style: ‘When we listen to all the Shaʻbī pop from the 50s, we can easily tell you what is Jewish and what is not. In Morocco this [Jewish] genre is called Shgūrī’ (Elkayam and Cohen Reference Elkayam and Cohen2017).Footnote ⁴

Elkayam and Cohen understand their project partly as a salvage mission for music that has been largely forgotten both in Morocco (because it was mostly recorded in France and Israel during the 1960s) and in Israel (because it was in Arabic). Their work is thus also archival, dedicated to locating, studying and re-dressing this music, to make it accessible again as a cultural resource for a new generation. As such, their homage concerts amount to an inherently transnational project of heritagisation. At the same time, this project subverts the logic of institutional exclusion by focusing exactly on that repertoire which national projects were bound to ignore: hybrid mid-century urban music that moved away from traditional genres yet fell short of mass-mediated commercial pop. An associated choice is to emphasise the ‘secular’ Arabophone repertoire over the Hebrew piyyut (liturgical Jewish song), which has been a major site for reviving Eastern diasporic music in Israel (Marks Reference Marks2016). In these choices they also depart from past initiatives by the previous generation to reclaim the dignity of Jewish-Moroccan culture in Israel, such as the foundation of the Andalusian Orchestra in 1994 (Wasserman Reference Wasserman2012) and the Al-Maghreb Theatre in 2001 (Maman Reference Maman2014).

Seeking to revive rather than commemorate this music, Cohen's compositions and arrangements for Elkayam draw on myriad styles, carefully balancing Maghrebi instrumentation, rhythms and playing techniques (Cohen's own pianistic style owes much to that of Jewish-Algerian master Maurice El Mediouni), with electronics, jazzy chords and a feeling of harmonic directionality. In this particular mix of styles, Cohen tailors his music to sound a contemporary cosmopolitan identity that is nonetheless in intensive dialogue with a plurality of Moroccan pasts and presents. At the same, in the face of a resurgent ‘world beat’ scene (under the new title of ‘global bass’), with its ‘voracious (and/or promiscuous) appetites for “new” genres from the Global South’ (Font-Navarrete Reference Font-Navarrete, Veal and Kim2016), Cohen is also concerned with the ethics of approaching traditional musical materials. He contends that to make music that appears exotic to the Western ear is today ‘a cultural danger’. Against the ailments of ‘world music’, he therefore prescribes a cure concocted from the discourse of heritage and roots:

In Cohen's choice of words we can trace a symbolic topography according to which sonic phenomena are merely a foreground, and (he believes) could lose their true meaning if recontextualised without care. In a way, Cohen demands of musicians that they ‘learn the language’ also when it comes to musical style: respect it as text and thus avoid fetishising it as sound.

Despite her international success as a performing artist, Elkayam has yet to release an album. The reason for the delay is that she wishes her first album to feature original songs in Arabic, with her own lyrics. This task has proved to be a big challenge for a non-native speaker. Elkayam's initial approach was to write in Hebrew and then translate her lyrics into Moroccan-Arabic, with help from elders from the Moroccan community in Israel, such as social activist Reuven Abergel (b.1943). Later she realised that the dialect spoken by Moroccan-Jewish immigrants is not entirely intelligible to the young Muslim audience in Morocco. Therefore she is also consulting Muslim native speakers of her generation in Morocco. Then, she says,

As this quote demonstrates, the task of communicating one's inner world in a postvernacular language brings into focus many of the complexities that underline the current trend of Israelis returning to Arabic, especially regarding questions of identity. While these complexities are far more explicit in Elkayam's case than with the artists we focus on in the next sections, Elkayam and Cohen's reflexive project of heritagisation highlights the dilemmas and pitfalls that other modes of approaching Arabic might seek to circumvent.

It should be noted that Elkayam and Cohen are only one example of a group of musicians who approach Arabic or Judeo-Arabic heritage in comparable ways. These include, for example, Rabbi David Menachem, Ziv Yehezkel and members of Firqat al-Nūr: all fascinating case studies in their own right, the discussion of which is beyond the scope of this article. What all these have in common, and what sets them apart to some degree from those artists discussed in subsequent sections, is their command of Arabic.

‘Kuwaiti reggae’: Arabic as style

While artists such as Elkayam and Cohen are part of an influential avant-garde milieu, the majority of Israeli musicians who draw on their Middle-Eastern ancestry do not engage methodically in the study of Arabic. Instead, they concentrate their efforts on taping musical repertoires that appeal to their aesthetic sensibility, and (at best) on decent pronunciation in Arabic dialects which they do not speak. The most successful artist mobilising this approach is the Israeli rock guitarist and singer Dudu Tassa. Tassa is the grandchild of the Jewish-Iraqi oud player Daoud al-Kuwaiti, who together with his violinist brother Saleh el-Kuwaiti laid the foundations for modern Iraqi music in the early 20^th century (Kojaman Reference Kojaman2001). After establishing himself as an original rock auteur, Tassa released the album Dudu Tassa and the Kuwaitis in 2011, comprising entirely new arrangements of the songs of his grandfather and great-uncle. Some of the songs in the album feature sampled sounds from recordings made in the 1960s, while others feature leading Israeli rock artists, such as Berry Sakharof and Yehudit Ravitz, who sing in Arabic for the first time. The album was in the making for 10 years, during which time Tassa undertook a personal journey to reacquaint himself with the legacy of his grandfather, who passed away four months before he was born.

In the documentary Iraq ’n’ Roll (dir. Gili Gaon Reference Gaon2014), Tassa is seen sitting in the living room of his Tel-Aviv apartment, pen and paper in hand, transcribing in Hebrew script the lyrics of ‘Ya Nab‘at al-Rīḥan’ (‘Oh, Spring of the Basil’) written by his great-uncle. He does this not from the original recording of the song, but using his mobile phone to play a recording of his uncle Shlomo al-Kuwaiti (Saleh's son) slowly reciting the lyrics with exaggerated diction for Tassa to learn. In the next scene Tassa describes the process:

In this account, the foreignness of the musical style, alongside the recording's age, which adds further distance, seem inseparable from that of the language. Coming from the world of rock, Tassa's reference is the art of the singer-songwriter, where the song is a vehicle for the creativity and subjectivity of a single author, and in which text, music and performance are (in theory, at least) inseparable components of meaning. Therefore, the language barrier is enough to colour the entire recording as strange. Through all this, external socio-political taboos regarding Arabic appear to some degree as internal and personal:

Even after finding this ‘confident place,’ Tassa sings in Arabic on only eight out of 20 tracks of his two Kuwaitis albums (the second, ʿ Ala Shawaṭiʾ (On the B eaches), was released in 2015).

Coupling the opacity of a forgotten language with a desire to reconnect with old materials often leads Tassa and other musicians to focus on relatable musical elements, as concrete as a specific rhythm or as abstract as a musically articulated emotion. These serve as anchoring points for identification and appropriation. Take for example this exchange between Tassa and one of his mentors, second-generation Israeli-Iraqi musician Yair Dalal:

In Tassa's final album version of the song discussed in the above quote – ‘Walla ʿAjabnī Jamālek’ (‘I Swear I Like Your Beauty’) we can see that this rhythmic association that Tassa had from the Kuwaitis’ old recording permeated his creative process, having a discernible effect on the final product. His version of the song really is a ‘Kuwaiti reggae’. This type of inquisitive listening, searching for anchoring points of intuition and identification, is the hallmark of how we listen to someone singing or speaking a language that we do not know. We look for cadences, inflections of the voice or the odd familiar word to serve as guidelines for making sense of sounds that we wish to understand.

Later, Tassa plays a sketch recording of himself singing ‘Tʿādīnī’ (‘Fight Me’), accompanying himself on acoustic guitar. Dalal, sitting with his oud, can hardly contain his excitement and is driven to join in certain points. ‘It suits you this song …’, he says, waving his finger at Tassa. To which Tassa reacts by turning down the volume and excitedly asking ‘Why? What do they mean?’ Dalal translates the lyrics: ‘I'm always confused, and all my life I am sleepless.’ ‘Really?!’ Tassa retorts, with a surprised smile on his face (Gaon Reference Gaon2014).

While Tassa's older collaborators (such as his uncle Shlomo al-Kuwaiti and Yair Dalal) stress the historical significance of reviving the Kuwaiti's music, Tassa is much more reserved in ascribing a political agenda to what he does. ‘I don't like the word “roots” […] beyond the fact that it interests me on the musical level, and my own personal and emotional level, I don't feel as if I'm coming to rectify anything’ (Gaon Reference Gaon2014).

Not all Israeli musicians are so focused on using their Arab ancestry as a point of departure for aesthetic innovation as in Dudu Tassa's case, where the repertoire of a single composer is reworked through the prism of another. More often, ancestry serves as a pretext, used to hold together an eclectic exploration which otherwise would appear neither rooted nor coherent. This is the case with the internationally successful group Yemen Blues, led by Ravid Kahlani, a descendant of Yemenite Jews. While Yemen Blues resorts to Yemenite roots as a point of departure, and as a framework for how they present themselves, their final musical and performative product often relates to the ‘world music’ phenomenon, with little footing in either Middle-Eastern styles or Jewish diasporic traditions.

The marketing strategies of world music often hinge on selling local ‘authenticity’ to global (read: Western) audiences. At the same time, it is a field where creativity is constructed as drawing on diverse styles which culturally point in different directions, offering a unique or new hybrid. Under these conditions, notes Veit Erlmann (Reference Erlmann1996, p. 479), ‘Locality itself becomes a fetish which disguises the globally dispersed forces of production’. Yemen Blues is an artistic vehicle for Ravid Kahlnai's creativity and performative abilities, which answer to world music imperatives. This logic reveals itself first in the name of the group, which takes the concept of ‘Desert Blues’, and replaces the Saharan component with a Yemenite one. Yemen Blues has released two albums – Yemen Blues (2011) and Insāaniyya (‘Humanity’, 2014). Kahlani composed and wrote lyrics for almost all of the songs on both albums. Kahlani writes the lyrics in Hebrew, and later has them translated into Yemenite Arabic by his father and by Zion Golan, Israel's most prominent performer of Yemenite songs. As far as the music and arrangements are concerned, however, distinct Yemenite influences are hardly discernible, or are limited to the Da ʿ sa (a slow 7/8 dance rhythm), used in the song ‘ʾUmm min al-Yaman’ (‘Mother from Yemen’), and the presence of the oud, which is common throughout the Middle East. Far more prominent are Afrobeat influences in the vein of Fela Kuti, as well as North-African and Saharan influences in the vein of Tinariwen. Kahlani himself regularly takes the stage wielding the guembri, a bass lute used in the Gnawa music of West and North Africa. Within this eclectic musical context, Arabic often appears as one adopted stylistic element among many, rather than the centrepiece of an identity-driven project of reconnecting with one's roots. At the same time, it is also the primary marker of Yemenite-ness, doing most of the heavy lifting in delivering on what the name ‘Yemen Blues’ promises.

Arguably, no Jewish diaspora has left a more distinct mark on Israeli popular music than Yemenites, from the prominent place of female singers such as Bracha Zfira and Shoshana Damari in the era before the establishment of the State of Israel (Flam Reference Flam1986; Regev and Seroussi Reference Regev and Seroussi2004) to their overwhelming domination in the early stages of Muzika Mizrahit. It should come as no surprise therefore that Yemenite songs occupy a central place in the recent wave of Israeli Jews singing in Arabic. Along with Yemen Blues, A-WA has recently established itself as an international Yemenite-Israeli sensation. A-WA is a vocal trio comprising the sisters Tair, Liron and Tagel Haim, whose career took off with the release of their first album Habib Galbi (‘My Heart's Beloved’, 2015), featuring 12 songs from the secular tradition of women's songs, arranged in a contemporary beat-based eclectic style rife with electronic drums, heavy bass lines and a marked reggae offbeat. The sisters found these songs in commercial recordings made in Israel in the 1950s and 1960s by Yemenite singer and oud player Shlomo Muq'a (1930–84). As they do not speak Arabic, the sisters’ path to understanding the lyrics and pronouncing the words correctly was through advisors such as Itamar Pinhas (b. 1951), a connoisseur who has devoted his life to the study and preservation of Yemenite-Jewish song.

At a public talk and concert they gave at Beit Avi-Hai in Jerusalem in August 2017, the discussion between the audience and the sisters gravitated to the question of Arabic lyrics. One member of the audience suggested projecting translations of the song lyrics, an element that she believed would enhance the experience of the audience. Tair Haim, who often speaks for the sisters, replied: ‘that would be like they do at the opera […] it's not done in pop music concerts’. The host of the evening, Yoav Kutner, prodded the reluctant Haim to consider at least telling the audience what each song is about. Finally, Haim said: ‘but there's something we love about saying little, and simply letting the audience feel; this is music with a lot of emotion, and it also makes your body move, it has a lot of groove’. In Haim's reluctance to explain what the lyrics actually mean we can identify the postvernacular tendency of separating the semantic value of language (Arabic, in this case) from its other semiotic registers, and relishing it as a signifier of affect or as an aesthetic experience of sound play. At the same time, this view also repeats the logic of world music, whereby it often utilises languages unintelligible to audiences, thus teasing out the ‘musicality of language’ both as a listening strategy and as a marketing strategy (Kheshti Reference Kheshti2015, pp. 62–3, 79, 115).

The ‘No word project’: Arabic as sound

Alongside the examples discussed above, there are a number of musicians who have taken the investment in Arabic to an extreme reduction or distillation of the language to mere sound. Shefita, the stage persona of Israeli actress and singer Rotem Shefi, is a robust example of this approach. In 2013, Shefi scored an unintended hit on YouTube with a cover version of Radiohead's ‘Karma Police’, delivered with an adopted heavy Arabic accent. The musical arrangement featured the oud and Middle-Eastern percussion instruments, as well as a cello, and was embellished with ululations and Arabic exclamations like ‘yallah’(‘come on’).

Shefi took the success of the song seriously, and developed an entire musical-comedy performance based on the character of ‘Shefita’, an Arab women who tells the audience, in between songs, about her imaginary adventures with famous international artists, politicians and sportsmen (Shefi Reference Shefi2017). The core of the show, however, is cover versions of 1990s rock hits, such as ‘Lithium’ by Nirvana, ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ by The Verve and ‘You Oughta Know’ by Alanis Morissette, which Shefi calls the musical diet of her youth, all delivered with a thick Arabic accent. It is interesting to compare this aesthetic experimentation with Arabic accents with cases where Arabophone musicians such as Rachid Taha self-consciously exaggerated their own Arabic pronunciation, as a poignant commentary on the ‘foreignness’ of its sound for non-Arab audiences (Lebrun Reference Lebrun2012, p. 335). Shefi revels precisely in this quality of accent as a marker of difference, yet without Taha's critical intention.

The Shefita show has been a great success in Israel and provides Shefi with full-time employment. Often the story she built for her invented character is taken at face value. In 2015, a mini-festival entitled ‘Feminine Rhythms’, held at the Museum of Islamic Arts, featured Shefita as an ‘Arab diva’ next to Arab–Israeli singers Mira Awad, Nasreen Qadri and Lubna Salame. Even more telling is the fact that it landed Shefi a lucrative appearance on a TV commercial for the Israeli hummus brand Tzabar (‘Sabra’). As Daphna Hirsch shows, this brand was influential in ‘re-Arabising’ hummus – previously marketed as a quintessentially ‘Israeli’ food – by employing Arab presenters in its advertisements (Hirsch Reference Hirsch2011). However, not everybody likes Shefita, and Shefi has come under fire from Palestinians, the Israeli left-wing and Mizrahi activists, who consider what she does an offensive appropriation. ‘Someone should stop her …’, said one of our interviewees, half-jokingly. ‘If she had a Mizrahi grandma, she wouldn't dare make fun of her accent’, they added, unaware that Shefi actually does have a Yemenite grandma, and that as a child she used to make fun of her accent with her cousins.

Despite its controversial nature, the practice of singing in Hebrew or English with an Arabic accent (usually coupled with some Middle-Eastern elements in the music itself) is another postvernacular strategy of performing Arabic, which, rather than tackling the barrier of proficiency directly (by learning the language) or indirectly (by using translators and pronunciation coaches), revels in the experience of opacity by treating the sound as essential. Alongside Shefita, this practice has been utilised by several mainstream Israeli musicians, such as singer Dikla (in her cover of the 1983 Eurythmics song ‘Here Comes the Rain Again’) and the rapper Tuna (in his music video ‘Sereṭ ʻaravi’ (‘Arab Movie’)).

However, adopting an accent is not the only approach that reduces Arabic to its sound. A second, even more striking approach is evident in the work of Zafrir Ifrach, a music producer who since 2010 has been releasing YouTube videos featuring electronic arrangements of ‘world music combining Mediterranean and ethnic influences’ (as defined on his professional website). In 2016 Ifrach scored his first national radio hit, when his track ‘No word no. 5’ made it to the daily playlist of Galgalatz. This track features Israeli vocalist Inon Ben David in a performance of Jamaican-Patois-sounding gibberish, alongside Zion Golan, the aforementioned Israeli-Yemenite music veteran, who is singing gibberish approximating the sound of Yemenite Arabic. Especially with the presence of Golan (a musician whose work was largely absent from Galgalatz before this entry) at the front, the success of the song is inseparable from the trend of singing in Arabic on the Israeli airwaves, and from the larger trend of mainstreaming Mizrahi styles. Clearly, when Golan decided to collaborate with Ifrach in singing Yemenite-sounding gibberish, the reason was not linguistic incompetence. Rather, it may have been the desire to connect with broader audiences, who are by now primed to consume Arabic as a sonic component of contemporary popular music in Israel and abroad. There is perhaps no stronger illustration than the success of this quasi-Arabic gibberish for the transformation of the place of Arabic in the Israeli sonic space.