Men's Folk Songs in Judeao-(sic) Arabic from Jews in Iraq.

• Author: Sabar, Yona

Iraqi Jewry is fortunate to have the Babylonian Jewry Heritage Centre, which serves as a museum, research institute, and cultural community center all combined in one. This book is the ninth in the series "Studies in the History and Culture of Babylonian Jewry," sponsored by the Centre and edited by Professor Yizhak Avishur, who is also the author of several of these monographs, including this one. It contains a selection of various types of songs which were current among the Jews of Iraq (mostly Baghdad) until their mass emigration to Israel in the early 1950s, although some of the composers/performers continued this tradition also in Israel. Avishur states that this volume is the counterpart to his previous volume on women's folk songs (1987). In addition to the sacred Hebrew songs which were typical for men (in every traditional Jewish community), Avishur states that despite some generalization, there were two separate categories of secular Arabic folk songs, one unique to men and the other to women. Typical men's songs are more literary and lyrical in style, or an amalgam of the spoken Muslim dialect (Baghdad had three Arabic dialects: Muslim, Jewish, and Christian) and literary Arabic, whereas women's songs are mostly in the colloquial Judeo-Arabic. Therefore, it seems to me that the division between Jewish women's folk songs vs. Jewish men's folk songs is misleading. The words "Folk" and "Judeo-" suit the women's volume very well, for its songs are indeed folk songs (associated with the life cycle: birth, wedding, death, and sung by ordinary women for a home audience) and are in the Judeo-Arabic dialect. However, in the men's volume, the songs are neither "Jewish," nor folk songs, but rather urban or Bedouin entertainment songs, not associated with any life-cycle event, and sung by men and women of Iraq (be they Jews, Muslims, Christians), often performed by professional singers in public places, and they are not in Judeo-Arabic, but rather in the Muslim literary dialect, as Avishur himself admits. The difference between the two volumes is not so much due to gender, but rather due to the fact that urban songs in the literary-Muslim style had a much wider distribution and belonged to the Iraqi population in general, especially after radio broadcasting became popular in Iraq. True, Jewish men such as the brothers S. and D. al-Kuweiti, S. Shibbat, and Y. al-Imari, as well as Jewish women, such as Salima Murad-Pasha (whose "concert" I...