Horizontal Realizations

Abstract

If the actualization of biblical sovereignty in the Zionist present rendered eighteen centuries of exile a nocturnal existence, art music of the 1950s and 1960s interfered with such linearity using the linear properties of non-Western Jewish musical traditions and serial compositional devices. Such a convergence rendered the objectification of non-Western Jewish musical traditions obsolete and consequently severed the exotic and territorial functions they served. By utilizing the linear properties of Arab Jewish musical traditions to animate inner semiotic occurrences, composers suspended extrovert exotic signifiers and invalidated their objectification. With no visible exoteric earmarks to transmit peripherality and Otherness, the binaries by which non-European Jewish immigrants had been perceived (primitivism/modernism, religion/secularism) were deemed progressively inoperative. Through a study on the agency of non-European Jewish musical traditions, chapter 2 uncovers the network that connects the theological grammar of Zionism with the Zionist pecking order, whose lower rungs were allocated to North African and Near Eastern Jews.