In scholarly and popular conversations about Muslim-Jewish relationships in Algeria and its diaspora, music seems to challenge discourses that emphasize conflict and otherness. Yet on closer inspection, Muslim-Jewish musical interactions and the conversations about them rarely escape tropes of rivalry, marginality, and ambivalence that have suffused discourse about the Muslim-Jewish interface in the Maghrib. While these interactions and conversations are closely connected to wider political conditions, they also point to the way closeness intertwines with separation in notions of relatedness. I propose that to make sense of this intertwining we should approach Muslim-Jewish musical intimacy via multiple theories of relatedness.
Jonathan Glasser is Associate Professor of Anthropology at William & Mary, where he is also part of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies, Judaic Studies, and the Middle Eastern Music Ensemble. His first book, The Lost Paradise: Andalusi Music in Urban North Africa, received the L. Carl Brown AIMS Book Prize and the Mahmoud Guettat Prize from the Tunisian Ministry of Cultural Affairs. In 2019-2020, he was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Paris. His shorter work has appeared in numerous venues, including American Ethnologist, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Hespéris-Tamuda, Anthropological Quarterly, and Anthropology & Humanism.
Sponsor(s): Center for Near Eastern Studies, UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies