Revitalization of Iraqi-Jewish Instrumental Traditions in Israel: The Persistent Centrality of an Outsider Tradition

style, structure, and motivic material of the professionally performed music of Fars and, conceivably, even the folk music of the region" (Loeb 1972:11). He strongly recommended the long overdue investigation of a uniquely Jewish element in non-Jewish Near Eastern art music. Tsuge, who compared the components of al-maqgm al-'Irdqi, the Iraqi maq~m, with Turkish and Persian vocal art-music tradition, alluded in passing to the role of Baghdadi Jewish musicians in perpetuating Iraqi traditions, while calling for continued study of the Iraqi maq~m. In this article I briefly explore the Jewish majority of instrumentalists in Muslim Baghdadi society and the transfer of their Arabic-based classical Iraqi repertoire to Israel in the 1960s.1