write a paper

8 Introduction

to categorize descendents of Iberian Jews exiled by the Spanish Inqui- sition in the fifteenth century, and currently to define Ladino-speaking Ottoman and post-Ottoman worlds. Scholars have also debated the utility of “Sephardi” as a broad category of identification in Jewish his- tory today.9 Despite the term’s usefulness for a variety of scholarly foci, the intercommunal and musical dimension of the present study begs for language reflecting the ethno-religious breadth and interactivity of Ottoman and Turkish music-making, however contentious and chang- ing over time. Indeed, this varied, shifting collectivity included a wide swath of Jewish individuals, not only so-called Sephardi composers, for example, but also Arabic-speaking instrumentalists from Ottoman Arab territories, Jewish gramophone entrepreneurs from Eastern Europe and Russia, dönme composers from Salonika, and Jewish émigrés from Nazi Germany, Austria, and Hungary.10 These Jewish musicians and busi- nesspeople also interacted closely with Greeks, Armenians, and diverse Muslims straddling the worlds of their coreligionists and the surround- ing urban musical spheres. Whereas highlighting the ethno-religious distinctiveness of any one of these musicians risks over-accenting Ot- toman religious communities or retroactively imposing contemporary ethnic boundaries, language reflecting the interactive cultural realm of music-making elucidates aspects of individual and communal identifi- cations transcending the so-called millet system and at times opposing it.11 By speaking of “Ottoman Jews” we can capture the social and musical milieu of which musicians were a part, and “Turkish Jews” follows them into the Republic, reflecting new national identifications and citizenship as well as the disjunctions and transitions from what might be called their Ottoman culture area.

❊

Let us briefly survey Ottoman court music as the historical foundation for the Maftirim repertoire at the core of this cultural history.12 Based on compelling and well-documented textual analysis by music histo- rians,13 the current study investigates the social and urban contexts of this historical record. Patronized by the palace and cultivated in a va- riety of urban settings over time, Ottoman court music shares musical structures—compositional, rhythmic, melodic, poetic—with historical