Shared Soundscapes in Ottoman Safed

In this paper I chose to focus on the musical repertoire and performance practice of Safed-‎born Naftali Zvi Margolis Abulafia , and to argue that his emigration to New York in the 1910s ‎allowed him to persist as a “living snapshot” of the interfaith and inter-cultural musical ‎exchange in Ottoman Safed (Upper Galilee). The rare ethnographic recordings of Margolis Abulafia’s singing, ‎made in the 1950s by ethnomusicologist Harry Smith, narrate the relationship between ‎different groups inhabiting the city before the rise of nation-states altered them dramatically. ‎

In his research of Klezmer music, Yaacov Mazor presents case studies in ‎which Arabic melodies were incorporated into a largely Jewish repertory revealing cross-cultural connections in the Galilee before 1948. The ‎newly-discovered recordings of Margolis Abulafia show, much as his name exemplifies, how ‎the meeting of two geographically distant traditions can culminate in musical symbiosis, in this ‎case- in pre WWI Safed. Arabic melodies, Hassidic nigguns, Iraqi piyyutim and ‎Greek popular melodies, exist side by side in the repertory of this unique individual. Music ‎narrates how the musical exchange of traditional and popular music from Ashkenazi, ‎Sephardic and Arab traditions was possible and perhaps even matter of fact in this era ‎preceding national dichotomies of Arab and Jewish cultures. ‎