The Music of Kurdistan Jews - a Synopsis of their Musical Styles

Kurdistan never was a region that developed an independent statehood, defined by physical frontiers and political or educational institutions, and guaranteeing an historical continuity of national schools of thought in sciences or arts. Its more recent political history has demonstrated the inevitable results of decentralization under the sovereignties of several foreign neighbouring countries, including a strong tendency towards linguistic as well as musical dialect formation. It is only natural that the musical traditions of Kurdistan Jews should also have been conditioned by this long historical process, by the multinational and multilinguistic character of their host country. On the other hand, this insecure political condition undoubtedly helped to stabilize and even to heighten the differentiation of variants of musical styles, forms, and melodical intonations.

On the whole, Kurdistan is known as a territory of cultural regression where residues of archaic languages and, parallel to them, of archaic singing and playing have survived the vicissitudes of history. It is certain that many aspects of their expression in speaking as in song preserve some remnants of an early pre-Christian style; in other words, here we seem to have some samples of a living antiquity, doubly interesting in that it is to a considerable extent connected with Jewish history of the biblical period.