ABOUT ILANA WEBSTER-KOGEN

Ilana Webster-Kogen is the Joe Loss Reader in Jewish Music at SOAS University of London and a Visiting Associate Professor at Yale University. She is author of the award-winning book Citizen Azmari: Making Ethiopian Music in Tel Aviv (Wesleyan University Press, 2018), and has published articles about the Ethiopian diaspora and Palestinian listening publics. She is spending 2023/24 at Yale’s Institute for Sacred Music completing her second book, entitled Traders, Chanters and Mystics: the Networked Afterlives of North African Torah Scrolls. 
 

"On Aura, Baraka and Organology: the Mystical and Reciprocal Lives of Sephardi Torah Scrolls"

From the once-vibrant centers of Jewish life in North Africa, little remains of everyday religious and commercial practice. The Jews of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya have scattered across the Mediterranean basin, carrying with them their Torah scrolls as key objects of ritual and memory that facilitate communal worship when congregations chant from them. The scroll is not a musical instrument precisely, but like an instrument, it is a key conduit through which communal music-making takes place in the synagogue. In the mystical traditions of Morocco (kabbalah), chanting from the Torah scroll is like standing at Sinai, re-enacting Revelation in the day-to-day. In new diasporic surroundings, North African scrolls are venerated, chanted from and collected by uprooted North African Jewish communities in France, but also by synagogues in the USA that have adopted the scrolls, and by museums that perceive themselves to be the guardians of a lost culture. This presentation considers the different ways that Torah scrolls originating in North Africa are perceived by chanters, collectors and communities to possess Baraka, a term borrowed from Sufism that conveys shared Jewish-Islamic veneration practices. We consider the relationships that chanters and collectors develop with scrolls and the way those relationships connect with linear narratives of nation and patrimony, as well as alternative histories of exile and alienation. Centering the mystical practices that ascribe them near-magical powers, we consider Sephardic Torah scrolls through the lens of heritage and belonging, and of organology (the study of musical instruments) and its categoric limitations.