Between Leave and Come: Arabesk-Mizrahi Music and the Oriental “There”

Leave, Leave, Come, Come: Arabesk Music, Mizrahi Music, and the “There” of the Orient

Most of the time, we remained here. Only rarely did we venture “there.”

A half-hour drive south from our home in Tel-Aviv brought us to “there”: the town of Bat-Yam. “There” lived our large paternal extended family. “There,” clubs, restaurants, and cafes pulsed with people eating, drinking, chatting, laughing, and singing along to music that poured from every corner in both Hebrew and Turkish. Though the food in Bat-Yam smelled and tasted like my mother’s cooking, the music—performed live and loud throughout the town—struck me as strange, yet not wholly foreign.

How can I reveal the “there” that is Bat-Yam, a place no map can capture? How can I play for you the songs I heard too rarely, melodies my memory can barely grasp?

By following the journey of a single song into and out of Bat-Yam in the 1980s and 1990s, I hope to recreate my vision of “there” for you. The pieces and performances born in Bat-Yam’s underground music scene during those years map out an alternative geography of “there.” Under the weight of oppressive national hegemonic forces, creating music about histories and feelings of powerlessness became a survival strategy for Bat-Yam’s Middle Eastern Jewish—or Mizrahi—residents, allowing them to endure in that “there.”

Erasure

"A pointless place. Really pointless! But we had the sea." So says Egyptian Israeli writer and filmmaker Eyal Sagui Bizawe about his hometown of Bat-Yam, a name that in Hebrew means "daughter of the sea."

Bat-Yam was founded in the early 1950s as a Jewish settlement and demographic buffer zone separating the newly occupied and ethnically cleansed Palestinian districts of Jaffa and Ramla. The state of Israel populated Bat-Yam—and many similar towns—with Jewish immigrants from other Middle Eastern countries. As groundbreaking cultural studies scholar Ella Shohat has shown, these immigrants faced systematic oppression and discrimination in employment, housing, and education. Their histories, written and spoken languages, and cultural productions were effectively erased from public life because of their Arab and Muslim Middle Eastern roots. Shohat illustrated in her 1999 essay "The Invention of the Mizrahim" how they—along with my family—became part of the group the state labeled "Oriental Jews," or "Mizrahi-im." We later transformed this imposed orientalizing term to "Mizrahim," adopting it as a way to reclaim our dignity through self-identification.

Bizawe recounts that since the 1970s, Bat-Yam’s diasporic Levantine musical landscape included "a mix of light and heavy Greek music," played "near Bat-Yam’s seashores," where Moroccan, Tunisian, and Egyptian Jews lived. Yet in terms of both people and music, "the boardwalk…belonged to the Turks." Boardwalk restaurants hosted celebrated Turkish singers such as Zeki Müren and Bülent Ersoy, alongside local Turkish Jewish singers. Bizawe notes that both Müren and Ersoy presented as queer and/or trans*, contributing to an inclusive Turkish Mizrahi music scene.

"The Turks" of Bat-Yam included my extended family and, at the same time, represented everything my nuclear family hoped to distance itself from. My mother taught me that the Turkish family from Bat-Yam was everything one should avoid: loud, rude, backward, and traditional. Worse still, they befriended and sometimes married their Moroccan, Tunisian, and Egyptian—indeed, Arab—Jewish neighbors.

A source of bewilderment for my immigrant mother, Bat-Yam actually nurtured a rich variety of cultural, linguistic, and musical exchanges, serving as a major incubator for Mizrahi music. My mother tried to separate us from "those Turks" by forbidding any Mizrahi tunes at home. This was easy to enforce; there were so few songs circulating in Zionist Tel-Aviv.

As scholar Amy Horowitz argues in Mediterranean Israeli Music and the Politics of the Aesthetic, Mizrahi music was banned from state-owned radio stations since the founding of the state in 1948, and from national television from its establishment in 1968. This prohibition remains common even today. Ron Cahlili’s 1998 TV documentary series A Sea of Tears details the ongoing exclusion and stigma faced by Mizrahi musicians in Israel.

Given the culturally diverse environment in which Mizrahi music developed, it is a rich mixture of sounds shaped by Yemenite, Arab, Turkish, Greek, Persian, and other Jewish and non-Jewish musical influences, as musicologists Edwin Seroussi and Motti Regev argue in Popular Music and National Culture in Israel. Yet it must also be understood politically: this multi-dimensional genre is recorded, produced, and performed by Mizrahim constantly working against their exclusion from Israeli society. Although the Zionist Ashkenazi music industry has sometimes absorbed what it considers to be "oriental" elements of Mizrahi music to manufacture a monolithic idea of "authentic" biblical Israel, Mizrahi music has mostly been silenced in mainstream Israeli society.

The Popular Rise of Mizrahi Music

Although Mizrahi music from Bat-Yam was absent from my childhood, today it has become like a familiar friend I turn to for comfort, easing the heartbreak brought by the women who storm in and out of my life. Through my YouTube Heartbreak Songs playlist, I travel back "there," absorbing the sad yet sweet melody of "You are not Worthy of this Love: Leave, Leave, Let My Soul Be," in its many renditions by Turkish-Israeli singer Linet, Israeli singers Sarit Hadad and Sharif, and Turkish singers Bülent Ersoy and Zeki Müren.

Had I heard this song growing up? Possibly. In the 1970s, Mizrahi music began gaining popularity through underground clubs in Bat-Yam and on the outskirts of Tel-Aviv. Pirated cassettes were sold in the millions around the old central bus station in southern Tel-Aviv. By the early 1990s, small regional radio stations, challenging the cultural dominance of national TV and radio, started playing Mizrahi music. Against this backdrop, songs like "You are not Worthy of this Love" became mega-hits not only in Bat-Yam but in other peripheral, mostly Mizrahi-populated towns.

This particular song was part of a wave of Turkish pieces that began influencing Mizrahi music from the 1980s onward, emerging and flourishing in the Bat-Yam music scene while also reaching audiences beyond Bat-Yam.

These songs were linked to a specific genre of Turkish music known as Arabesk, which blended strong Arabic elements with Turkish folk music while also borrowing aspects of Western pop. Made by immigrants for immigrants, Arabesk became deeply admired by migrant diasporic Turkish communities outside Turkey. In the 1980s, for instance, Mizrahi music producers, musicians, and performers in Israel began covering Arabesk songs, while some also wrote new Hebrew lyrics for melodies originally set to Turkish words. By 1989, Hebraized Arabesk had become the hot new trend in Mizrahi music.

In the early 1980s, non-Turkish Mizrahi singers such as Ofer Levy and Eli Luzon were already covering songs of Turkish Arabesk stars Ferdi Tayfur and Ibrahim Tatlises in both Turkish and Hebrew, in underground Mizrahi clubs. In 1989, however, Moroccan Israeli songwriter Dani Shoshan wrote new Hebrew lyrics for an Arabesk song, adapting Orhan Gencebay’s "The Wound of the Tongue" ("Dil Yarası") into "A Drop of Luck" ("Tipat Mazal"), creating an instant hit. Zehava Ben, the Moroccan Israeli singer who performed it, immediately became the new mega-star of Mizrahi music, and "A Drop of Luck" sold an astonishing number of cassettes. Fans began calling national radio, demanding that the hit song they heard everywhere be played on air as well.

Quick to respond to the unprecedented success of the Arabesk-Mizrahi wave, proponents of Israel’s Ashkenazi cultural dominance fiercely rebuked it. As quoted in Horowitz’s book, Yehonatan Geffen, a celebrated Ashkenazi writer in Israel, dismissively proclaimed in 1992 that "after 44 years of solitude [Israel has] returned to the roots of Istanbul. The Turks have conquered the city." Geffen and others’ harsh condemnations and fear of "Turkish" and "Ottoman" sounds shaped prevailing perceptions of Arabesk-Mizrahi music as "Turkish-Turkish"—that is, overtly and excessively Turkish, as opposed to "authentically" Israeli.

Translation Renders New Meanings

"Is she the one?" I asked YouTube. YouTube asked back: "Is this heartbreak song the one?" In Turkish, the song I listened to is called "Akşam Olmadan, Güneş Batmadan, Gel," which translates to "Before the Evening Dawns, Before the Sun Sets, Come." As various YouTube suggestions reveal, since Zeki Müren first released it in Turkey in 1991, this song has been covered multiple times in Turkish and Hebrew, most famously by Bülent Ersoy in 1997 and by Sarit Hadad and Sharif, marking a transnational lineage of queer and trans* voices. The Hebrew version translates to "You Are Not Worthy of this Love" (originally "Ata lo raui la’ahava hazot"). A cover of the original Turkish piece, the Hebrew lyrics—"leave, leave, let my soul be"—resonate differently from the Turkish: "come, come, don’t leave me all by myself."

Feeling at home in both Hebrew and Turkish, I agonized over the tangled mixed messages of the two versions. YouTube, once again, responded, showing me several special live performances of the song combining both Turkish and Hebrew lyrics, delivered by Turkish-Israeli musician Linet for both an Israeli Mizrahi music reality TV show and a Turkish nighttime live music TV program. Like my paternal cousins, Linet Menashe was born in Bat-Yam to parents who had emigrated from Istanbul. Growing up, Linet sang with her mother Leila, who had been a famous singer in Istanbul, at Bat-Yam clubs in the 1980s and ’90s. They were known as the duo "Leila and Linet."

"You Are Not Worthy of this Love" was first recorded in Hebrew in 1991 by "Leila and Linet," with lyrics rewritten by Linet’s sister, Sima Menashe. In 2003, Linet recorded it once more, this time reincorporating the Turkish stanzas, and went on to perform it on both Turkish and Israeli TV. A permanent migrant-resident of Israel, Linet grew frustrated with the exclusion of Mizrahi music and eventually left Israel to build a successful career in her homeland, Turkey, visiting Israel on rare occasions.

"You are not worthy of this love, leave, leave," the Hebrew lyrics declare, as if echoing Mizrahi resentment toward hegemonic Zionist cultural institutions. Yet in the very next line of the same stanza, Linet pleads, "before the evening dawns, before the sun sets, come, come, don’t leave me all by myself." How should listeners interpret lyrics that ask the lover to leave and then to return?

In considering this, it is essential to remember the context in which Turkish Arabesk developed—a context consistently overlooked by critics, fans, and scholars of the Mizrahi-Arabesk wave. The histories and circumstances of musical and cultural creation in Turkey are precisely what Linet’s singing urges us to reconsider. By incorporating Turkish lyrics into the song, Linet brings back the layer of the Arabesk version and the labor of its rendition. This recovery, in turn, highlights how the politics of Arabesk in Turkey’s cultural sphere parallel its production, reception, and impact in Israel.

As in Israel, Arabesk music in Turkey is disparaged and silenced for the same reasons Mizrahi music is denigrated in Israel. As Turkish studies scholar Iren Özgür describes in her article "Arabesk Music in Turkey in the 1990s and Changes in National Demography, Politics, and Identity," many musicians who created Arabesk typically migrated from rural Anatolia to the outskirts of Istanbul. In some Anatolian regions, these musicians grew up listening to Egyptian radio, absorbing tunes by singers such as Um-Kulthum and Mohammad Abdel-Wahab, and incorporating those elements into their own work. As literary critic Nurdan Gürbilek wrote in The New Cultural Climate in Turkey, "Arabesk owed its power to the existence of [this] mass of people cut off from their traditional culture but not yet part of urban culture," enabling Arabesk to foster new diasporic communities.

For many Turkish critics, however, this inclusivity "expresses a negative and essentially ‘eastern’ aspect of the Turkish psyche about which something has to be done if the Turks are to be saved from themselves," as musicologist Martin Stokes notes in his book The Arabesk Debate: Music and Musicians in Modern Turkey. Arabesk in Turkey has thus been associated with "a timeless expression of an Eastern passivity and pessimism" and "considered to be the music of the labor migrants from the south-east of the country, a backward and exotic orient existing as an anomaly in a Westernized and secular state." So like Mizrahi music in Israel, Arabesk was historically excluded from national television and radio broadcasts in Turkey, as the Kemalist state tried to become more European-oriented, or "Western," and rejected any traces of what it deemed "oriental."

Comparing the Turkish and Israeli contexts reveals the nationalist, secularist, and orientalist anxieties of two states struggling to appear "Western" against the diverse and overlapping cultural and religious histories of their Ottoman pasts. Both Turkish and Israeli nationalism oppress marginalized immigrant communities and cultures in similar ways. Against these repressive state forces, however, these diasporic cultures continue to survive, sharing sounds, trends, and inspiration across borders while employing a range of tactics for underground cultural production and distribution.

Empowering the Powerless

In her chapter "Singing the Unspeakable, Resisting Power" from Resistance in Contemporary Middle Eastern Cultures, Turkish gender studies scholar Levent Donat Berkoz argues that Arabesk "makes love, powerlessness, and stoic resignation to fate its predominant themes." Harnessing a "discourse of sentiment," as Stokes calls it, Arabesk-Mizrahi music makes personal feelings public and therefore political. Linet’s conflicted longing for the fierce yet tender touch of the lover in "You Are Not Worthy of this Love," for instance, eases the pain of oppressive love. As queer and sexuality studies scholar Ann Cvetkovitch points out in her book An Archive of Feelings, inducing this sense of vulnerability through song enables listeners to reclaim their traumatic experiences of living under systemic, structural oppression. As Gürbilek noted, "it is the music of those who cannot return."

Communicating tunes and themes of powerlessness is precisely how Mizrahi-Arabesk music empowers its listeners, offering us migrants and children of migrants a place to go as we sing along, "leave, leave, come, come." Populating the sub-national layer of the oriental "there" of Bat-Yam and the outskirts of Istanbul, the music effectively politicizes and alleviates the pain of being marginalized as "Orientalized" Jews within Israel.

For the always-migrating bilingual listener, this music represents a home that national narratives often fail to provide.