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October 27, 2006
Shabbat Music Friday: Back to Babylon
Back to Babylon: 2000 Years of Jewish Life in Iraq is a conference being held at Sephardic House in NYC the first weekend of November. It is inexpensive for a 4-day conference, so if you are in the NYC Metro area, and have an interest in Middle East Jewry, please consider attending at least one day. Among those presenting will be lawyer Carole Basri, who has advised Iraqi officials on legal matters under the auspices of the Coalition. Yair Dalal will perform. There will be a Shabbat dinner with Iraqi zmirot.
Since today is Shabbat Music Friday at Kesher Talk, I have a medley of Iraqi versions of Shabbat favorites for you, all from the Hibba music site:
Ki Eshmera Shabbat.
Tsur Mishelo.
Ashir Lael.
The photo is from a collection of classic Iraqi music of the 1920s:
Shbahoth is the Babylonian (Iraqi) Jewish term for songs of praise. This anthology presents for the first time on CD the greatest of the Iraqi Jewish singers accompanied by the finest instrumentalists in historical recordings from the 1920s. This reissue, in carefully remastered sound, echoes two millennia of tradition.
The Sephardic House posted a short history of Jews in Babylonia (now Iraq) as a PDF. Did you know that until the 1930s the population of Baghdad was one-fourth Jewish?
Bernard Lewis, in his speech at the recent conference on the UN (which I had to take down as per the wishes of the Hudson Institute), spoke about the little-known infiltration of Nazi ideas into the Arab Middle East during the 1930s, and how that shaped the character of some of the regimes which followed, such as the fascist Ba'ath movement which produced Saddam Hussein and Hafez Assad. In Iraq, Jews found themselves increasingly discriminated against in public life, culminating in extortion and pogroms after the founding of Israel. Most fled to Israel in the early 1950s (partly aided by an airlift sponsored by President Truman), and Babylonian Jews in Israel now number 300,000.
Of course the heyday of Babylonian Jewry was 1500 years earlier, when the Amoraim and Geonim redacted the collected legal code and lore which became the Talmud. And the Jewish community of Babylon began 1000 years before that, when they were taken in chains to Babylon after the destruction of the first Temple. The prophets Ezekiel and Ezra are buried in Iraq.
An Iraqi congregation in Toronto.
Iraqi Jews in the New York area. (Including a friend of mine.)
Judith | 10/27/06 at 05:17 PM | Categories: - Jews in odd places
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Two weeks ago I featured Mizrachi versions of well-known Shabbat songs, from the former Iraqi community (driven out in the 1950s after a residence which goes back 2500 years). One being Ki Eshmera Shabbat. This Ashkenazi version is by Rahel... [Read More]
Tracked on November 10, 2006 05:48 PM
