Songs of Translation: Bene Israel Performance from India to Israel
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Book Talk
Produced by the American Society for Jewish Music’s Jewish Music Forum Co-sponsored by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research Admission: Free Registration is required. |
The Bene Israel are a Jewish community from western India who, over centuries, developed a distinctive identity in relation to other Jewish and non-Jewish communities, translating their sounds, words, and practices to have uniquely Marathi Jewish meanings. Some men sing Marathi Jewish songs, but over the past half century, women have assumed the important cultural role of stewarding these songs for the future. As author Anna C. Schultz demonstrates in her new book Echoes of Translation: Audibility and Relationally in Indian Jewish Women’s Songs, the Bene Israel women are translators who creatively mediate the worlds around them through song; while they may not always be visible, they are audible, and this book amplifies their relational soundings.
Schultz explores sonic translation among the Bene Israel through the metaphor of the echo: a resonant, transformative, relational phenomenon. The voices of Bene Israel women today, like Ovid's Echo, resonate empathically with loved ones they have survived, and, faintly, with those they never knew. Singing this repertoire teaches singers and listeners not only how to be Jewish, but also how to be Bene Israel. It also fosters sociality, providing a medium through which women echo one another, sharing cultural expertise while securing affective ties. But women also echo with one another; that is, they collectively and audibly translate sacred texts as embodied experience in the here and now. Women's repertories and practices were shaped in a richly diverse context, colored by interlinguistic translation between Hebrew, Marathi, Hindi, and English, as well as by other forms of cultural translation: translations from Cochin and Baghdadi Jewish to Bene Israel practice, Christian and Hindu religious discourse to Jewish religious discourse, from one ritual context to another, from men to women, from the written page to embodied performance, and from the past to the present.
About the Speaker
Anna C. Schultz is Professor and Chair of Music at the University of Chicago. As an ethnomusicologist and cultural historian, the twin issues animating her research are music’s power to activate profound religious experience and suture communities, and music as power, that is, music’s role in structuring and dismantling caste, race, gender, nation, and class. Her first book is Singing a Hindu Nation: Marathi Devotional Performance and Nationalism (Oxford University Press, 2013), and her second book is Echoes of Translation: Audibility and Relationality in Indian Jewish Women’s Song (Oxford University Press, 2026). Schultz also writes on race, place, and gender in American country music. With Sumanth Gopinath, she was awarded the H. Colin Slim Award by the American Musicological Society, and she received Honorable Mention for the Society of Ethnomusicology’s Jaap Kunst Prize. Dr. Schultz’s research has been supported by Fulbright-Hays, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Association of University Women, the Franke Institute of the Humanities, and the Neubauer Collegium, among other organizations.