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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.

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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

9Introduction

liturgical practices of Muslims and non-Muslims worshipping in Sufi lodges, churches, and synagogues of the empire, including gatherings of Maftirim groups. The Ottoman court suite, or fasıl, arose within a longtime regional environment of suite forms in the Near East, Persia, and North Africa, developing a specific Ottoman style, distinctive from Arab and Persian predecessors, by at least the seventeenth century. As a chamber music form, the court suite was generally performed in intimate settings (palace, homes) by an ensemble of instrumentalists and singers, showcasing a series of compositions of distinct genres in the same makam. Similar and contrasting, the sacred suite of Maftirim pieces translated court musical forms into Jewish religious space through Hebrew-language pieces performed a capella by a male choral ensemble in synagogues on Shabbat.14 This vocal ensemble presented original compositions by Jewish composers, as well as adaptations from non-Jewish Ottoman pieces with Hebrew poems or scriptural passages as lyrics. Historically, Maftirim singers performed one suite in one makam before weekly prayer services, and by the nineteenth century established a tradition of early morning performances in Otto- man cities with significant Jewish populations (Edirne, Salonika, Izmir, and Istanbul).

Textual sources point to a measure of interaction between Jewish and Mevlevi (“whirling dervish”) musicians, suggesting clear avenues of musical contact and confluence. Originating in Konya in the thir- teenth century, the Mevlevi gradually became the most prominent Muslim Sufi order connected to the sultan and Ottoman ruling class, establishing lodges in 1436 in the second Ottoman capital of Edirne and in 1494 in the third capital of Constantinople. Developing a distinctive musical form, the ayin, to accompany their religious choreography, the order played a central role in court music culture through the pres- ence of Mevlevi musicians at the palace, the significant role of Mevlevi lodges in music education, and the further development of the ayin as some of the most complex compositions related to Ottoman court music. Meetings between Mevlevi and Jewish musicians are reported from the early empire in biographical accounts of sixteenth-century Edirne religious scholar R. Joseph Caro and composer R. Avtalyion ben Mordechai, and in contemporary times in life stories from Jewish urban centers. For example, Mevlevi musicians attended synagogues in

10 Introduction

Izmir and Salonika to hear renowned hazanim (prayer leaders, or can- tors) like İsak Algazi (1889–1950), and Samuel Benaroya (1908–2003) visited the Mevlevi lodge in Edirne as a boy to learn Ottoman music.15 As mentioned earlier, it is significant that the city of Edirne figures in these reports since it was the Ottoman capital (1402–1453) before the taking of Constantinople and a default royal residence at least until the eighteenth century. Given the Mevlevis’ historical linkages with the Ottoman ruling class and musical education, interactions with Jewish musicians—especially in Edirne and Istanbul—would effectively spell the latter’s active participation near or at the very center of religious and musical crosscurrents in Ottoman imperial culture. Ongoing visi- tations until the end of the twentieth century, moreover, suggest a historically multifunctional dimension to Ottoman and Turkish syna- gogues for learning, making music, and socializing—a dimension that has progressively narrowed and been reduced exclusively to Jewish re- ligious practice today.16

According to the textual source of the güfte mecmuası (song-text collection), Jewish composers documented music in ways similar to their non-Jewish counterparts and participated in contemporaneous developments in court music. From an early Ottoman Jewish güfte mecmuası (Israel Najara, 1587) to later collections starting in the sev- enteenth century, Jewish composition and documentation of religious pieces correlated more and more with pervasive Ottoman practices, incorporating lyrics, makam, usul (rhythmic patterns), and genres in use in the Ottoman court suite.17 Developing into the Maftirim reper- toire, the non-notated compositions confirm performance and educa- tional practices in common with Ottoman musical culture. Until the twentieth century, oral learning through master-pupil apprenticeship relationships (meşk) predominated in the empire, taking place within such venues as the palace music school (Enderun), Mevlevi lodges, private homes, and later music schools and societies of the early twen- tieth century. The well-documented historical employment of Jewish, Armenian, and Greek Orthodox composers at court suggests another avenue for the sharing of such musical practices through active involve- ment of Jews in palace culture.

Far from being a static tradition, Ottoman court music changed and developed over the centuries, and as it did so participating Jews and

11Introduction

other minority composers infused such developments into their own religious music. Ottoman innovations included new instrumentation, complex or new makams and usuls, development of the vocal and in- strumental taksim (improvisation), and changes in fasıl genres, such as the nineteenth-century light classical şarkı (literally, “song”) that popu- larized the fasıl cycle in the twentieth century.18 European genres and instruments, as well as notational systems, presented further musical choices to Ottoman composers, especially by the nineteenth century; however, oral transmission and performance dominated the musical scene through the early twentieth century. With the advent of records and growth of gazinos (nightclubs) at the turn of the century, fasıl music found a popular, commercial stage—an early entertainment industry often owned and operated by minorities, including Jews, and showcas- ing vocalists who may have also sung religious songs in synagogues. Maftirim music shared in such musical crosscurrents of the time, and by the early Republic boasted big audiences and a repertoire that included contemporary composers and topical subjects. In the 1920s, as Turk- ish Jews from the provinces increasingly congregated in Istanbul, local Maftirim singers joined Edirne émigrés to perform at numerous syna- gogues in the city, providing a popular, weekly venue to hear Ottoman court music forms in an era of political and cultural reform.

In the course of the twentieth century, as Jews gradually vacated their neighborhoods in Istanbul, whether through emigration or up- ward mobility, the historical practice of Maftirim gatherings on Shab- bat diminished into today’s single secured session, together with one public performance group. By the 1990s, three male vocalists were considered the last remaining masters of the genre in Istanbul: David Behar, İsak Maçoro, and David Sevi. Recently, the Ottoman- Turkish Sephardic Culture Research Center completed a major proj- ect remastering their recordings together with notation and historical background of extant Maftirim compositions. Taken as a whole, the evidence of the century appears to match a story of increasing cul- tural reduction, isolation and, ultimately, preservation. As we shall see, however, behind this apparent decline lies a more complex history of music-making across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as Jew- ish and non-Jewish musicians continued to network together to pro- tect endangered Ottoman musical forms in a republican era of cultural

12 Introduction

reform. More recently, amid diverse sociopolitical tensions, synagogue security and enclosed Maftirim sessions resemble a kind of second- stage, internal emigration of the religiously observant—a departure from the street into secured space. As such, Maftirim performance today continues to have much to tell us about the urban landscape of music-making, intercommunal relations and tensions, and the place of Jews in contemporary Turkish society.

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The thematically based chapters of the book interpret music-making in Ottoman-Turkish synagogues, with particular reference to the Maftirim repertoire, as a part of a shared imperial and national his- tory, even as the Jewish population in Turkey significantly decreased over the course of the twentieth century. Understudied in comparison with Ottoman Jewry and locally settled and self-sustaining today, the Turkish Jewish community, though small, is worthy of scholarly atten- tion. In order to do justice to contemporary life and write against the grain of a narrative of decline, each chapter begins with ethnographic historical traces located in the present. The traces not only serve as a springboard for the historical discussion of the chapters, but also suggest a contemporary mixture of tenses more aligned than linear decline to a lived experience of an Ottoman-Turkish-Jewish musical culture today. To hear the historical and contemporary music behind the lines of this cultural history, a discography is provided at the end of the book.

Taken as a whole, the five chapters move chronologically from the turn of the twentieth century to the present day. At the same time, each chapter focuses on a specific theme significant to this changing histori- cal period. Through the life stories of four Ottoman-born Jewish com- posers living in the early twentieth century, Chapter One explores how Jews in linked roles of religious vocalist and leader (from hazan to con- gregation head to chief rabbi) as well as popular artists facilitated cul- tural flows by circulating in musical urban spaces of which synagogues were a part. Framing music-making within the urban environment as- sists in examining the precise places and people participating in com- mon patterns of patronage, aesthetic conventions, and apprenticeships