Cheikh Raymond

Origins and early life

Raymond Leyris — Cheikh Raymond — was born on 27 July 1912 in Constantine, in Algeria, the son of a Jewish father from the Aurès and, the sources record, of a Catholic mother; orphaned, he was raised by a poor Jewish family of Constantine, in the faith and the music of the city's Jews, and this fiche states the parentage as the sources give it.

Work and career

His instrument was the oud and his art the malouf, the Andalusian music that the exiles of Granada had carried to Constantine five centuries earlier and that Jews and Muslims kept together: by the 1930s he was its acknowledged master, the cheikh, leading an orchestra in which the two communities played side by side and singing, in Arabic, the poetry of a shared civilization. His recordings, his radio broadcasts and the weddings and festivals he animated made him the most beloved musician of eastern Algeria, honored across the divide of religion.

On 22 June 1961, in the midst of the war of independence, he was shot dead in the market of Constantine, a killing attributed to the FLN — and his murder is widely regarded as the signal that set off the exodus of the forty thousand Jews of Constantine, who understood there was no place left for them. His daughter married his pupil Gaston Ghrenassia, who as Enrico Macias would carry his master's music to the world.