Tara Leigh Jordan, Ph.D. 2024

Advisor: Michael A. Figueroa

Dissertation Title: “Mi, Monastir”: Remembrance and Reconstruction of Interwar Monastir’s Jewish Musical Life

Find it in the library here.

Dissertation Abstract:

On March 11, 1943, Monastir’s Jews were forced from their homes and deported to Treblinka, where they were all killed in the gas chambers on the morning of April 5, destroying a Jewish community that had been established nearly 500 years prior. Today, the remaining communities of Monastirli Jews can only be found in New York City, Rochester, Indianapolis, and Jerusalem. These small pockets of Monastirli immigrants spread throughout the world are all that remains of the formerly thriving Jewish community of Monastir (today known as Bitola, North Macedonia). Doubly exiled, from the Iberian Peninsula and from the city of Monastir, where 300 Sephardim began to rebuild their lives following their expulsion from Spain and Portugal, these Monastirlis are forced to contend with the legacy of the near-total destruction of their Jewish community by the mass deportations of Jews under the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia. How do historians study these destroyed societies, and, specifically for my research, how do we recover cultural artifacts, like music, that have overwhelmingly been lost to time? My dissertation grapples with this historiographical question by reconstructing the musical life of Monastir after the city left the Ottoman empire (1912) until its destruction, revealing larger linguistic, religious, and secular trends of this formerly thriving Sephardic center that remains at the fringes of Jewish Studies scholarship.

Through a combination of historical, archival research and ethnographic interviews with members of the Monastirli diaspora in the United States and Israel, I aim to rebuild the musical life of Jewish Monastir during the interwar years, once it was no long under Ottoman control. Areas of focus include the romance tradition of the city, featuring such songs as “Espinelo” and “El Cid en las Cortes,” the musical practices of Monastirli synagogues, and the revolutionizing of Monastirli musical life after the founding of Zionist groups following World War I led to the creation of Zionist brass bands, youth orchestras, and choirs. In so doing, I will contribute to the growing body of scholarship on Sephardic musics prior to the second World War and the subsequent founding of the State of Israel, filling in the margins of the field by focusing on this small yet flourishing community.