Tue Feb 11th, 2025

Edwin Seroussi, brilliant Uruguayan-Israeli musicologist

January 21, 2025 ,

by Dr. Israel Jamitovsky

Dedicated  to evoke the memory of my late paternal grandmother Judith Jamitovsky (of blessed memory), a symbol of Jewish strength and identity, on the anniversary of her death these days.

On May 21, 2024, the Israeli National Academy of Sciences incorporated the Uruguayan-Israeli musicologist Prof. Edwin Seroussi into its prestigious space. It was another link in his brilliant academic and artistic career.

Seroussi was born on December 26, 1952 in Montevideo, Uruguay to a Sephardic family with deep Jewish and Zionist roots. His family's origins date back to Libya, and they later moved to Alexandria, where they happily migrated to Uruguay in 1926. His late grandfather, Elías Seroussi, was a leading figure and leading personality in the Sephardic Community of Uruguay and the Uruguayan Jewish community, while his mother was a pianist and opera singer.

In Uruguay Seroussi studied violin with Maestro Miguel Szilágyi and musical composition with Héctor Tosar Errecart.

In 1971, Seroussi moved to Israel and studied at the Department of Musicology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He obtained his first two degrees, and his master's thesis was on the songs and petitions of the Jews of Morocco. At the same time, he studied musical composition with Prof. André HaJdu. In 1987, he obtained his doctorate at the University of Los Angeles in California. His doctoral thesis was entitled: Shir Hakavot (Honor Song) in Reformed Liturgical Music in the Sephardic Community in Vienna, 1881-1925: A Study of Change in Religious Music.

                      Innovative in multiple spaces

Upon his return to Israel, he began teaching at the Music Department of Tel Aviv University and at the Levinsky Academic and Educational Center. In 1990, he went on to teach at Bar Ilan University and from 1994 to 1998, he headed its Music Department. During this period, he promoted the Department of Musical Composition, the musical variant in therapy, and the Music and Computer Laboratory at this higher education institution.

Professor Emeritus of Musicology, He is a prominent researcher of Jewish and Israeli music, specializing in the study of music of North African Jews, and a prominent ethnomusicologist who addresses different approaches to the study of music, emphasizing, among others, its cultural, social, material and other contextual dimensions. This discipline constitutes a kind of anthropology of music.

He is the author of seven volumes and numerous articles on music in the Sephardic and Oriental space, focusing on the tradition of the Jews of North Africa, the Ottoman Empire and the Marrano community in Western Europe. His works cover a wide and rich spectrum, from the music of Moroccan Judaism, in which he specialized, to the music of the Viennese Jews, to the religious chants (piutim in Hebrew) of Israel Najara - a 17th century Rabbi and Kabbalist from Safed - as well as the modern Hebrew songbook and popular Israeli music.

In 2000 he began teaching at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and from 2009 to 2013 he founded and directed the College of Arts at the university. In this area he chairs the academic committee of the Jewish Music Research Center.

His prestige transcended borders and he taught at the Universities of Toronto, Berkeley, Moscow and others, earning him the Sephardic Jewish Heritage Award in New York. Since 2008 he has taught at Dartmouth College.

Among his most notable books, we can mention: The Spanish-Portuguese Synagogue, Musical Reform, Sources of Hamburg (1996), Sephardic Songbook together with Alberto Hemsi (1995) in which he addresses an extensive Sephardic songbook prior to World War II. In that same spirit, enter the volume Sephardic Incipitious poured in collaboration with Rivka Havassy (2009).In turn, a series of articles on the Judeo-Spanish songbook led to the volume Sound ruins of modernity: Sephardic folk song in the post-traditional era (2024).

                 Deployment for the sake of Israeli popular music

In parallel to his important academic work, Prof. Edwin Seroussi was very active in the field of Israeli music both in Israel and abroad, as an advisor to music festivals, a member of state commissions for music and art, and a producer of music programs. In this context, he made an in-depth analysis of Israeli popular music, and his research was reflected in the volume he produced with sociologist Motti Regev entitled Popular Music and National Culture in Israel (2004).

In 1995, he launched the idea, crystallized and directed an important undertaking. It is a series of concerts labeled Musical Dialogue of the Mediterranean in which musicians from Türkiye, Azerbaijan, Greece and Armenia took part. In addition to this and among so many activities carried out, it is worth mentioning that he also erected the School of Roots Music at Bar-Ilan University just like the Musical Dialogue of the Mediterranean Sea from the Mishkenot Shananim Cultural Center in Jerusalem. In all this dedication, the family's worthy tradition of service continues.

For all this, it is not surprising that in 2009, Prof. Edwin Seroussi deservedly and with great success, was awarded the   prestigious Toledano Prize for his contribution to Sephardic culture, the Joel Engel Prize awarded in 2017 by the Municipality of Tel-Aviv in recognition of his contribution to Hebrew music and, in particular, the coveted Israel Prize in Musicology received in 2018 and awarded by the Israeli Ministry of Education in a ceremony held on Independence Day.

 It is certainly a point of pride and satisfaction for the Latin American space in Israel and especially for the large Uruguayan-Israeli community.

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