ABSTRACT
In the popular South African tourist destination of Cape Town, Western Cape, a vibrant Jewish community, supporting at least ten synagogues of varying sizes and affi liations,1 plays out a complex musical narrative that both represents and projects an equally complex range of identities. In this chapter, much of which is based on fi eldwork conducted in Cape Town in early 2012, I address only a small aspect of that musical narrative, the Ashkenazi Orthodox community’s liturgical choral tradition,2 but in doing so I hope to shed light for the fi rst time on some of the ways in which, through the agency of musical practice, members of this community negotiate a variety of identities as Jews, and (re)construct diverging symbolic geographies from apparently similar historical and cultural backgrounds.
