November 20th, 2020. Shabbat is almost here
And we’ll learn about an artist in whose biography myth blends with facts. Born in Algeria in 1920, settled in Paris during the occupation of the nazis, he would later be called the “King of Shaabi”: he is Salim (Simon) Halali.
Hello! How are you? I hope well. In this occasion I want to say thanks to Patricia Álvarez. She is a friend of mine from Madrid, a wonderful dancer and a culture enthusiast, especially from the Mediterranean basin, the Balkans and the Middle East. She introduced me to the work of Salim Halali. So, thank you, Patricia!
In this bio of Salim (super large, and I still would have been able to follow many more threads) there are facts and tales, that you can believe or not. I will explain the sources and you can judge by yourself but… do you know? The stories are worth of it. I hope you’ll like them.
? And remember, there are previous editions of MBS about Algerian Jews: Reinette L’Oranaise, Saoud L’Oranaise and Cheik Zouzou.
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The Algerian Jewish boy who wanted to be a flamenco singer
Shlomo or Simon Halali was born in Bône, currently Annaba, in 1920, from a family from Souk-Ahras. His father was a Turkish and his mother was a Berber-Jew. He left the country very soon, at his just 14 years old, searching for a career in music (even when he didn’t have any education in music). He wanted to be a flamenco singer.
So in 1934 he got to travel to Marseille, as a stowaway on a ship. Some time after, he went to Paris, where the International Expo would take place in 1937, with the hope to get a job at the Algerian pavilion. There, he found some compatriots, like Mahieddine Bachtarzi, who was the director of the first Andalusian music association of the Maghreb: El Moutribia.
Simon would later be renamed as Salim and he would reach high recognition.
About Souk-Akhras, in ancient time it was Thagaste, a very important Roman city, the birthland of Saint Augustine.
According to the Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World edited by Norman A. Stillman, the modern town began in the 1850s as a French military post, and by 1856 it had a permanent Jewish settlement. Some of the Jewish inhabitants were Baḥuṣim, semi-nomadic Jews from the surrounding region who adopted a sedentary lifestyle in the new town. Others were Jews of Livornese descent (from the city of Livorno, in the North coast of Italy to the Tyrrhenian sea).
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But let’s stop and hear a story. Believe it or not. You decide.
- Rebel Music: Race, Empire, and the New Muslim Youth Culture, by Hisham Aidi
- Institut Européen des Musiques Juives
The story of a forbidden love
The first tale
I found this story in the comments of the video in Youtube that you have at the bottom. And the same is in the facebook page La Page Thagastoise. Believe it or not. Salim has openly gay. But during his life he loved a woman. I believe it, as many years ago I was loved by a man who was gay some time after and now he is married with another man.
The story is translated and a little summarized by me, from the original from that mentioned page. The story is about the forbidden love between a Jewish boy and a Muslim girl from a large family of Souk-Ahras: Salim Halali (Simon at the beginning) and Ryma (that is how he nicknamed her, and sometimes he called her Fettouma too).
Simon and Ryma were neighbors and also distant cousins through the Ryma’s paternal grandmother. Indeed, the father of Ryma, a notable of Souk-Ahras was the son of a Jewish lady, converted to Islam, from the very old family of Ouled Kakou, from Souk-Ahras. These two children grew up together. They were inseparable like a brother and sister.
A few years later, having become a very beautiful and young woman, Ryma was forbidden by her father to see Simon again, who had also become a tall and charming boy. But they found a way to meet again discreetly at Ryma’s paternal great-aunt, Rimoun Kakou, who unlike her sister (the grandmother of Ryma) remained of the Jewish faith.
Made aware of this secret relationship, the father of Ryma, furious and with a great anger, hits Simon and outright forbids his daughter to go to her aunt Rimoun.
< The Great Synagogue of Marseille. The newspapers said in 2016 that it had been was sold to an Islamic cultural organization and it would become a mosque. But nowadays it is still a Synagogue and was renamed in 2018 as Breteuil-Beth Yossef, honoring the ex Great Rabbi of Marseille, Joseph Haïm Sitruk. It can be visited and it is a very recognized treasure for its historic relevance.
Far from Ryma, sad and unemployed, Simon leaved Souk-Ahras at the age of 15 (the biographies use to say at 14) and went to Marseille to look for work. Back in Souk-Ahras, two years later, and with a little money, he asks her father for Ryma’s hand, who categorically refuses to marry his daughter to a Jew. Indeed, Ryma’s father had already promised his daughter to a rich and very famous man from Souk-Ahras who ended up marrying her.
Unhappy, Simon leaved Souk-Ahras permanently at the age of 17 for Paris. And he would come back just once, in 1958.
Ryma’s husband died two years after her marriage in a traffic accident. Widowed, Ryma was forced by her father to marry a cousin of his, 25 years older than her. She moved with him to Annaba and later to Tunis. They had two daughters. Upon the death of her second husband, Ryma left Tunis and moved with these two girls to Bordeaux where they successfully completed their brilliant medical studies. In Tunis she got closer to her great-uncle Joseph Kakou, who was a soldier.
In the meantime, Simon moved to Paris, where he sang in cabarets. France was under the colaborationist Vichy government. Fleeing the pro-Nazi French police, Simon took refuge in the great Mosque of Paris for several months. At this time, his name would be changed for Salim. Learn more on the next story, below.
And still in love with Ryma, Simon only sang her name. He dedicated his first and famous song, “Mahani Ezinne” to her, but also “Rimoun Rmetni”, “Fettouma taaz alaya” and many other hits.
In 1958, Salim returned to Souk-Ahras where he gave a concert in Thagaste Square. There he was finally given news of his beloved. He followed her footsteps to Tunis where he learns from Joseph Kakou that she has gone to Bordeaux. He immediately left for Bordeaux to find her but she had left with her eldest daughter for the United States after her marriage to a wealthy American.
In 1982 Salim installed in Casablanca in Morocco. There he finally had news of his beloved Ryma by a Souk-Ahrassien (Ex Minister and ex Ambassador) married with his young daughter. Note that Salim was already 62 years old and they hadn’t meet each other since he was 17. The daughter organized a meeting between Salim and Ryma in Paris in a famous restaurant. The reunion between the two old lovebirds of Souk-Ahras was sad and very moving.
Salim had improvised while weeping a song for Ryma who was also very moved, the famous Alach Ya Ghzali. He learnt from Ryma that she knew everything about him and his singing career: she listened to him every day and she knew all his songs by heart.
Ryma died in Bordeaux in 1986 at the age of 66, where she is buried. Salim travelled from Morocco especially to attend her funeral where it seems he had read aloud the Fatiha (the first chapter, or sura, of the Quran) in her memory.
The sources mentioned by this person, who doesn’t identify his/herself are:
- Kamel M
- Brahim Merakta from Casablanca, close friend of Salim
- Ryma’s little daughter (now in Bordeaux)
- Old testimony from one of the sisters of Ryma’s first husband
- Joseph Kakou’s daughter (Cannes)
The Jews and the Great Mosque of Paris at the Vichy period
About this story there is some controversy. Some state that the rector of the Great Mosque of Paris saved thousands of Jews, providing them documents with Muslim identities. Others say they might be around 100.
On the occasion of the release in 2012 of the film Les Hommes Libres by Ismaël Ferroukh, the newspaper Haaretz made a interesting review of the available positions and evidences. Find it complete, here. And I summarice here below. But, before, I quote a paragraph that is specially meaningful:
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- Robert Satloff, director of the Washington Institute for Middle East Policy: “uncovered the most important written evidence to date relating to the subject: a note from a bureaucrat in the French foreign affairs ministry to the foreign minister, dated September 24, 1940, which describes the Germans’ activity against the mosque, that says “The occupation authorities suspect the personnel of the Mosque of Paris of fraudulently delivering to individuals of the Jewish race certificates attesting that the interested persons are of the Muslim confession. The imam was summoned, in a threatening manner, to put an end to all such practices. It seems, in effect, that a number of Jews resorted to all sorts of maneuvers of this kind to conceal their identity.”
- Albert Assouline, North African Jew who fled from Germany to France and found shelter in the Great Mosque: “no fewer than 1,732 Resistance fighters found refuge in the cellars of the mosque”.
- Dalil Boubakeur, head of the Mosque in 2012, estimated that the Mosque supported around 100 Jews, supplied them with Muslim identity certificates that enabled them to survive.
- Dr. Simcha Epstein, a Paris-born historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who studies anti-Semitism and the Holocaust: “The doubt is not about whether the mosque aided or did not aid Jews, but rather regarding the number of Jews the mosque helped.”
- Prof. Renee Poznanski,of Ben-Gurion University, specialist on French Jewry during the German occupation: “I have not come across any such thing in the documentation and testimonies. If it indeed happened, we are talking about a historically minor phenomenon, of very small dimensions, but important of course.”
- Yad Vashem: “Yad Vashem made a supreme effort to locate survivors who Benghabrit saved at the time of the Holocaust, and went to great lengths to gather archive material pertaining to the rescue operation at the Mosque of Paris, including applying to the mosque’s archive. Every effort was in vain. No testimonies from survivors or relevant documents were found.”
I strongly recommend you to check the complete report in Hareetz, that has much more interesting facts about the mentioned film and other relevant issues.
What is the relationship between Salim and the Great Mosque of Paris?
The second tale
Salim Halali is one of the characters in the film Les Hommes Libres. Remember he set in Paris in 1937. There, he performed at the Maure café of the Great Mosque of Paris. Kaddour Benghabrit, the founder and first rector of the Mosque, who was a musician himself, became friend of Salim and, during the German occupation, would help to hide his Jewish origins by providing him with a false Muslim certificate and engraving the name of his late father on an anonymous grave of the Muslem cemetery of Bobigny (Seine-Saint-Denis).
At this moment I would like to introduce the other tale. It is also from the Facebook page The Page Thagastoise.
In 1942, an Algerian young man from Oran, Younès, came to Paris to earn money to send back to Algeria. He decided to make the black market. One day, he was arrested by the French police. The intelligence officers then proposed to him to cooperate: they will allow his illegal trade but in exchange, he must go to the Paris Great Mosque to spy on the rector, Si Kaddour Benghabrit, and report to them.
The French police collaborator of the Nazis though the rector was providing counterfeit papers to the Jews and to the resistance. Younès accepts the deal. But very quickly, he got deeply in love with a singer from Souk Ahras, a certain Salim Halali, who had found refuge at the Grand Mosque in Paris and had to pass for a Muslim. To remove any doubts, Salim prayed five times. Younès believed that Salim was not a Jew.
The rector had give Salim counterfeit identity documents, changing his name from Simon to Salim, saving him from a certain death. He would keep that new name until his last day.
What happened with Salim after the World War II?
According to the Institut Européen des Musiques Juives, his music became quite popular. In 1947 and in 1948 he set two entertainment venues (cabaret).
In 1949, Salim moved to Morocco and bought an old café in the mellah* of Casablanca, which he transformed into a prestigious cabaret: “Le Coq d’Or”. This venue was visited by the rich families of the country and celebrities. But the cabaret was destroyed in a fire and Salim then returned to France at the beginning of the 1960s. He was known for his extravagant parties, in which he even took elephants (and he had two tigers as pets) to the garden in his villa, as well as for his artistic work.
He stopped singing in 1993 (but made one occasional concert in 1994) and left for a retirement home in Vallauris. He died on June 25, 2005 in Antibes (Alpes-Maritimes) and his ashes are scattered in Nice in a garden.
According to the same story as before, from The Page Thagastoise:
Salim confided in this doctor, Dr. Abdallah Khémis, that he had given all his copyrights to the disabled of Algeria and offered to the Algerian embassy in Paris a “great value” carpet, according to his own terms. This physician, who practiced at Larcher Hospital in Nice, confirmed that Salim Halali had never forgotten Souk Ahras and that he had dedicated to the city his celebratory songs El Forga Morra and Ya Ghorbati.
* The mellah is the Jewish quarter of the cities in Morocco, usually surrounded by a wall with a fortified gateway.
Picture of public domain available in Wikipedia. Find more here.
Listen to Ya Qalbi Khali Hal by Salim Halili
Listen to the rendition by Salim Halali of this poem, Ya qalbi khali hal, in an Arabo-Andalusi style. Lyrics in English, below.
Click the picture to listen to the recording:
LYRICS:
Oh, my heart, let the situation continue on its way.
Leave all the words and listen carefully to what they say.
Slow down, don’t hurry, the one who waits wins.
Deliverance comes in its own time, from the lord to his creature.
Sadness as well as comfort, all come from God.
Be patient during the tests, until God delivers you.
Judgements are established in advance, God’s verdict is inevitable.
Be patience with me, sorrow is never eternal.
Such is this earthly life, it raises some people and sets others down.
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Araceli Tzigane | Mapamundi Música
To know more about our artists, click here.
Cheikh, or Sheikh, Zouzou, whose real name was Joseph Moise Benganoun, was born in Oran in 1862. Or somewhere else in the province of Ain Témouchent in 1890? There is controversy. According to the first data, he would have lived 110 years, until he died in 1972! According to the second, he died in Nice on March 18th of 1975, at his 85 years old. Which one do you believe? 
