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For the past five years, Vanessa Paloma, a scholar and Sephardic singer, has been pioneering the way for the first ever Jewish Sound Archive to be housed in Morocco. JN1 sat down to speak with Paloma in Casablanca about her historic preservation project.
Vanessa Paloma has dedicated most of her career to researching Sephardic Jewish music in Haketia, and has immersed herself in collecting oral histories and field recordings from across Morocco. Paloma explains how her research and work expanded from collecting materials to the idea of starting the Jewish Sound Archive in Morocco that she aims to open to the public in the next year.
Vanessa Paloma, Director of the Jewish Sound Archive:
“So, I think that the first time that I started really thinking about the archive was in 2008, actually, when I had the idea of talking with the people at Library of Congress and bringing the collection of Paul Bowles that he had recorded all over Morocco to Morocco. Like repatriating these materials to Morocco. Then I started thinking about all the other materials that exist outside of Morocco of recorded archival sound materials. It actually turned into not just an idea of helping to bring the materials and then put them in a library, or something like that, but actually really it crystallized as an idea of creating an archive and having that in Casablanca available for Moroccan students, Moroccan researchers.”
One of the many aims of the Sound Archive is to not only introduce and make available hard to access historical documents that most are unaware exist, but also help foster new research and dialogues with the current communities that still exist in Morocco today.
Vanessa Paloma, Director of the Jewish Sound Archive:
“So, one of the first collections that I thought was really important to actually have available in Morocco was a recording done in 1929 in New York by a woman from Tangier of songs in Haketia, in Judeo-Spanish from Morocco. And this is only available at the archives of traditional Music in Indiana University and hardly anybody ever listens to it and here it is. It’s like almost 40 minutes of sound from 1929 Tangier. You know the way that they speak, these women speak exactly the same way as people in the Jewish community in Tangier speak today. Exactly. And for me that was a revelation because I thought that maybe it had changed but absolutely not. Here we see that there are still huge similarities. It’s almost a hundred years ago.”
In addition to oral histories and music recordings, other types of materials of interest include photographs, home videos and letters like those that music producer Maurice Elbaz is working to record and preserve. Currently working with musical legend Haim Botbol, Maurice Elbaz is helping to archive and digitize rare photographs of Botbol that are not online and in some cases have taken years to unearth.
Maurice Elbaz, Music Producer:
“This one is a photo. We see him playing the guitar. A semi-hollow guitar. So this is a photo that was taken in Tangier in 1985. These are photos that hardly anyone knows. So we have forty such pictures that we worked with, we retrieved from the archives and we restored. And we are putting captions and putting them in the context of the time period.”
As Vanessa Paloma explains, preserving these materials for the future is both important to Jewish and Muslim Moroccans.
Vanessa Paloma, Director of the Jewish Sound Archive:
“These are really important historical documents, they’re people that have lived the history of Morocco and that are Jewish and that have an experience of the history of Morocco through a Jewish lens also. It is really really important for this memory to remain accessible, to remain alive for young Moroccans, for young Jewish Moroccans and for young Muslim Moroccans.”
The Jewish Sound Archive in Morocco is currently working on a physical location but is open to submissions from the public. To contact Vanessa Paloma further, you can find her at www.VanessaPaloma.com.
Michelle Medina, JN1, Casablanca
