16
Friday,
20, 1984
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
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Continued from preceding page
surface, you'll find that nearly
everyone will agree."
By "nearly everyone" he means
nearly ever Ashkenazi. But he is cling-
ing to days gone by. In a democracy,
'I-lumbers count. Israel's Sephardim
have kept the Likud in power — or,
rather, they have kept Labor out. They
have exercised what one observer calls
"the Sephardic revenge" for having
been kept out of the mainstream for so
long. As they wake to their power as
the majority they may change the
whole texture of Israeli society.
One of the people playing torn-
toms — literally — is musician and
singer Shlomo Bar, who voices the call
for a new Sephardic cultural renais-
sance. He has the face of a Giacometti
sculpture, with the thinness of pov-
erty, a far cry from the blond, blue-
eyed heroes of Leon Uris' imagination.
Yet Bar is fast becoming a new kind of
Israeli folk hero.
Six years ago he founded HaB-
reira HaTiv'it (The Natural Alterna-
tive), a group whose music sounds
dissonant and Arab to Western ears,
though it also includes Indian, eastern
Meriterranean, and even Chasidic
strains. Driving rhythms played by
Bar on congas and bongos and the
complex atonalities of the dulcimer
and sitar give it a raw, seductive qual-
ity. The lyrics, some of them tradi-
tional, celebrate Sephardic folk and
religious values. It is the first music to
come out of Israel that places the coun-
try squarely in the Middle East.
That sense of place is very impor-
tant to Bar. We go to one of his favorite
places to talk — a rise overlooking
orange groves. A mile or so to the west
there are sand dunes, and beyond
them the Mediterranean. To the east
are the Jerusalem hills in the purplish
haze of distance.
We sit beneath an acacia tree, fac-
ing east. We're not far from the transit
camp where Bar spent most of his
childhood after arriving at age five
from Morocco. Now he is 40, but the
memory of those years has helped
shape him and his music. And what he
says sends shivers up the spines of the
Ashkenazic elite.
He uses the new terminology
adopted by Sephardic activists, who re-
ject the usual labels for simpler and
more clear-cut ones: East and West.
The Zionist idea was good only for the
Westerners, never for the Easterners,"
he says as he rolls a cigarette in his
lap. "It never even mentioned them. It
never thought how it could live with
them, only how it could rule over them.
"We, the Easterners, have been
kept in a state of subcivilization. The
Westerners took our culture from us
and gave us nothing back. They were
cultural colonialists. Look at my
grandfather; he knew Maimonides by
heart, knew the songs and psalms and
ethics, vast riches — a wise man,
though by Western standards he knew
nothing of value. My father knew it,
too, but far less. I know less still. And
my son — how much will he know?"
He leans forward from the waist,
gesturing in the North African way,
with his whole body. "I want to redis-
cover myself. You wanted to build me
into something else, you the West. You
didn't. You destroyed me. Now leave
me alone. Let me do it. And when I've
done it, then I'll come to you and we'll
figure out who can give who what.
Enough promises from you!
"First of all, understand that I've
suffered a severe blow, that part of my
culture has been destroyed, that part
of my people has been put down. Ben-
Gurion said that the Easterners were
`human dust.' He saw us as 'material'
with which to build this country." One
of the earthier Arabic curses about
Ben-Gurion's mother rises into the
balmy air. "Just for that, he was never
my leader."
Bar's words are harsher than his
manner — the curse of a gentle man
with a harsh background. His speech,
like his songs, is scattered with Arabic
phrases. Sometimes he uses the word
Allah for God: "The West has to realize
that they are not Allah, they are not
the master. Enough imitation of the
West in this country! Now we have to
find ourselves, to find an authentic
Jewish culture. Now we have to draw
our own face. Up till now we've had a
Christian nose and Moslem eyes and
so on. Now we have to find ourselves
here, in the Middle East. My music is
Eastern Jewish because that's
Judaism. Judaism is Semitic. We we-
ren't given the Torah in Eastern
Europe, we were given it in Sinai, in
the Middle East!"
Moreover, he argues, if Israel
were to find its truly Semitic face, it
could live in peace with the Arab coun-
tries. It's a lie, he says, that the
Sephardim hate Arabs more than the
Ashkenazim do — an Ashkenazic lie.
"You say we hate Arabs, but who
really does? Gush Emunim. And who
are they? Americans and Russians,
new immigrants — not Easterners.
We don't shoot Arabs on the West
Bank; they do that. So it's us that will
bring peace here, and only us, because
we know the Arabs, we respect them,
we lived with them and understand
them.
"The Westerners don't want
peace, that's the truth. Because if
peace comes, they'll be wiped out,
they'll disappear, the Middle Eastern
influence will come in and we'll be
Levantine. But they don't want to be
Levantine, they want to be the
backside of the West!"
Bar readily admits that many
Sephardim are quite happy to be just
that if they can. Some 40 percent of the
Sephardic population — mainly those
from the Middle. East, rather than
North Africa — have struggled to cross
class barriers and are now comfortably
ensconced as middle-class. They have
escaped everything that Bar stands
for. But among them, a few are waking
to what they see as a fundamental ra-
cism that follows class and cultural
lines.
One of these is Vicki Shiran, an
Egyptian-born criminologist of classic
Continued on Page 26