Bibliographie complète

On their arrival in Montreal, Moroccan Jews established themselves as a community and created a festival in order to promote, gain recognition of, and institutionalize their culture and identity into the broader Jewish community of Montreal. In this article, I propose to analyse the festival as a “thing” (Kopytoff 1986), the biography of which will give us information about its transformation, in terms of representation, through time. From ethnography and historical analysis of the festival, as well as an examination of cultural policies in Canada, Quebec and Montreal during the last decades, we will discover that Sephardic musical heritage, which was initially used for community celebration, was progressively transformed into a marketable product embodied by international pop stars. The representation of Sephardic identity transitioned from a specific cultural reference to Morocco, to Judeo-Spanish and Judeo-Arabic songs, to a plethora of references promoted by Sephardic pop stars, mainly from France and Israel. More broadly, this study will illuminate issues surrounding strategies implemented by the community leaders to be part of these cultural policies and gain visibility in the public sphere.