Making Community and Consolidating Descent through Musical Heritage. A Transnational View on the Judaeo-Spanish World

Résumé 0

The famous Judaeo-Spanish standards are sung and heard in Paris, Tel Aviv, Istanbul or Los Angeles. This knowledge-sharing is the result of a patrimonialisation started in the 1950s in a transnational space, after the dispersal of the Judaeo-Spaniards of the Ottoman Empire. This article outlines the various stages of this heritage-making, in diachrony and synchrony, drawing from a multi-sited fieldwork conducted in France, in the United States and on the web. It shows that heritage-making can be envisaged, through the experience of migration, as a reterritorialisation movement. It allows Judaeo-Spaniards to form a community, to assert the Jewish-Spanish lineage in the family space and thus, to define a federative historical territory that heritage embodies. Beyond this example, the article shows that musical heritage, because of its intangible and easily portable nature, can lead us to reconsider heritage-making beyond the limits of the territory, as a creation and consolidation of links between individuals and groups sharing a sense of belonging.