The Kuwaiti Brothers, Salima Murad and Iraqi Jewry in the Twentieth Century
Nassim Rejwan opens his memoir, The Last Jews in Baghdad, with a powerful comparison, “It has often been said that New York is a Jewish City. I think one can safely say the same about Baghdad of the first half of the twentieth century.” An Ottoman census in 1917 numbered Baghdad’s Jews at 80,000 out of the city’s 202,000 residents. By 1947, according to the national census, the Jews were numbered at 118, 00 of Iraq’s population of 4.5 million. Unofficial sources estimated the number as high as 130,000. While smaller communities resided in provinces all over the country, communities were highly concentrated in the largest cities with 77,500 in Baghdad, 10,500 in Basra and 10,300 in Mosul. Nassim Rejwan notes that “[i]n 1904, the French vice-consul of Baghdad gave the number of Jews in the Ottoman vilayet as forty thousand, out of a total population of 60,000.” In Rejwan’s memoir, he divides the Jewish community into four economic classifications: the rich class mainly made up of merchants and bankers, composing 5% of the population; the middle class consisting of petty traders and employees at 30%; the poor that made up of about 60% of the population and the remaining 5% composed of beggars, mostly from the north.
Iraq’s Jewish history dates back to 4,000 years to the time of the Patriarch Abraham in Ur, and several generations later when the Jews were sent to exile in Babylon. In more contemporary history, The Sabbath and Jewish holidays brought commerce and trade in the city to a standstill. Not only did the Jews, who owned the majority of the shops, close their businesses and refrain from shopping, but so did the non-Jews. “Visiting Kazimayn in 1934-1935, the Lebanese Shi’a scholar Mohsin al-Amin noted the practice of the Shia merchants of Baghdad of visiting the shrines of the imams in Kazaimayn on a Saturday instead of a Friday,” the official Islamic holy day and day of rest. “He explained that the business activities of the Shi’a merchants depended on the service of the Jewish merchants who dominated trade in Baghdad”, henceforth having the Shi’a take their weekly day off on Saturdays as well. The use of language in Iraq was less diverse for the Jews, in comparison to Egypt or other parts of North African or the Levant.
Joel Benin writes that “Iraqi Jews spoke the Baghdadi Jewish dialect of Arabic at home, and from the late nineteenth century, adopted Standard Arabic as their language of culture. . . Many Iraqi Jews developed a fondness for French and English and sometimes positioned themselves as translators from these languages into Arabic. By and large the Jewish communities rejected the Alliance (Israelite Universelle) policy of adopting French as the sole language of instruction. Most Jewish schools retained Arabic as the language of instruction and their students attained high levels of mastery”. Despite being more cosmopolitan as a result of their exposure to French and English, vis-a-vis the French Alliance school system (which secularized the Jewish community and gave them better educational opportunities then their Muslim neighbors in the early twentieth century), the vast majority of Iraqi Jews remained in the Arab-Muslim cultural sphere.
Amongst this backdrop of Arabic cultural integration, Iraqi Jews played a disproportionate role in music. Although there were Muslim and Christian practitioners of music and singers of all faiths, the Jewish community ensured high standards of musical instruction. Of all the instrumentalists in 1930s Iraq, 250 were Jews and only three were Muslims. In 1932, all the Iraqi musicians who attended the first Arabic Music Congress in Cairo were Jews, although the singer was a Muslim. At that conference the Iraqi ensemble received the first prize from King Fuad. In the years 1950-51, as Iraqi Jewry was being airlifted to Israel, a limousine drew up to block the departing plane’s path at Baghdad airport. The Kuwaiti ruler had sent his emissaries to persuade the Jewish musical duo, Salih and Dawoud al-Kuwaiti (known as the Kuwaiti Brothers), to move back to Kuwait with a guarantee that they would be treated there with great respect.
Most distinguished of all Arab Jewish artists of the twentieth century were the Kuwaiti Brothers, Salih and Dawoud. The Brothers were born in 1908 and 1910 in Kuwait to an Iraqi family from Basra. Their father, Ezra Erzoni, a trader, moved to Kuwait at the end of the nineteenth century with fifty other Jewish families. When Saleh was ten and Dawoud was eight, their uncle returned from a business trip to India and presented a violin to Saleh and an oud to Dawoud. In Kuwait, the boys were child prodigies. They blended the traditional Arabic maqam style with European influences, under the guidance of their teacher Khalid al-Bakir, who discovered their exceptional talent and taught them the elements of Kuwaiti, Bahraini, Yemeni, and Hijazi music. They took the name al-Kuwaiti in honor of their biggest fan, the Emir of Kuwait, for whom they would give private performances.
During this period, they began to make records for Baidaphone, a Lebanese recording label, which came especially to Kuwait for recordings. In 1928 this stopped, and they had to move back to Basra to record. After performing in night clubs and concert halls all over the country, they finally settled in Baghdad in 1930. In the thirties, they became favorites of King Ghazi of Iraq, performing at the funeral of his father King Faisal and at Ghazi’s coronation. In 1936, the Minister of Education approached them to assemble an orchestra for the new Iraqi broadcasting service. Saleh and Dawoud worked for the broadcasting station until 1945.
A legendary career moment for the Brothers in the early 1930s was working with the two great Egyptian legends, Umm Kulthum in 1931 and Mohammed Abdel-Wahab in 1932. Umm Kulthum asked what the most popular song in Iraq was and was told that it was "Galbak Sakher Jalmud," written by Saleh. She wanted to learn the song, so Saleh (and Salima) taught her the words and the music. She sang the song with the oud for an entire month of performances. In 1932, Abdel-Wahab came to Baghdad to perform. He showed great interest in Iraqi and Kuwaiti music, and sat after his performances with Saleh, playing and learning from one another. Working in parallel with the Brothers and often singing their compositions was Salima Murad.
The most famous Iraqi female singer of that era was the Jewish Salima Murad. However, little has been written on Murad and her significance, leaving a great deal to be explored in the field. She later married Iraq’s most prominent tarab singer, Nazim Al-Ghazali. In 2013, the Israeli film, Farewell Baghdad, was produced based on the novel by the same name, written by Iraqi-born Jewish author Eli Amir. The film was directed by Nissim Dayan and released in 2014. The story depicts the Jewish exodus from Iraq to Israel in the early 1950’s. This is the first film in the history of cinema to be produced in Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic. However, the Jewish characters switch to Baghdadi Muslim Arabic when speaking with non-Jews. Mira Awad, the Israeli Arab actress plays Salima Murad and sings her iconic, “Galbak Sakhar Jalmud", written and composed for her by the Kuwaitis.
In the film Salima is portrayed by singing with her takht in a cafe filled with hookah smoking and arak drinking men. Sadly, she is presented as a lounge singer and a sexual object, as the ex-lover to Kabi’s father, the main protagonist, rather than a legendary singer that demands respect. It was said by Shlomo Al-Kuwaiti, Salih’s son, that when the Kuwaiti Brothers had to made the decision to immigrate to Israel and they asked Salima to join them, Salima told Salih, ‘Who will I sing to in Israel? My life is singing and in Iraq people know me. No one knows me in Israel.” She never immigrated to Israel and stayed in Iraq until her dying day in 1974. A television series was produced and broadcast during the Ramadan 2012 season depicting her life and love with her famous husband, Nazim al-Ghazali.
Whereas Salima stayed behind and died in her homeland, the Kuwaiti Brothers were airlifted to Israel in 1950 with the majority of Iraqi Jewry in Operation Ezra and Nehemiah. Once they arrived there, their artistic careers took a turn for the worst. They arrived to a state where the majority of the population came from the West and had no interest in Arabic music. When the Arabic extension of Kol Israel, the official radio station of the Israeli broadcasting authority, expanded to include more programming, Saleh and Dawoud received their own weekly program. Nevertheless, outside that program they were treated with condescension and were reduced to catering for a niche market of a few hundred thousand in Israel, when they had had seven million listeners in Iraq. Dawoud died of a heart attack in 1976 and Saleh in 1986.
Arguably the most famous “folkloric” Iraqi songs, “Fog al-Nakhal” and “Mayḥāna" are attributed to the Kuwaiti Brothers, something that is not extensively known, due to the fact that Nazim Al-Ghazali sang them as well. These songs are continuously sung all over the Arab world as the most popular and prevalent examples of Iraqi folklore. Many influential contemporary artists have their own renditions of these legendary anthems. The Lebanese Myriam Fares incorporated “Mayḥāna" into her show when singing live in Iraqi Kurdistan for Norouz. The Iraqi singer and composer based out of the Emirates, Walid Al-Shaami, sang “Mayḥāna” at his concert in Qatar. “Fog al-Nakhal" is perhaps even more famous then “Mayḥāna” with countless renditions, particularly for musical talent shows, which are always tied to Iraqi national pride.
During Saddam Hussein's rule there was a special committee appointed to‘re-arrange' the Iraqi musical archives. Despite Saddam's attempts, Saleh’s name was hard to get rid of. His songs were still being played - only without the mention of his name. Students of music at the time still recall today that mentioning his name was forbidden, even when his work was being discussed and taught. Today, this situation has changed dramatically and the issue is being discussed over the internet and in the media. In 2006, the television station, Al-Hurra, broadcast a program about Iraqi music in the 20th century. Saleh was chosen by a panel of experts on the show as the definitive Iraqi composer of the 30s and 40s.With the downfall of Saddam a renewed sense of interest has taken place in Iraq and Kuwait in the last decade. The cultural climate has since changed in Iraq, and researchers and media people are now trying to restore its musical heritage. As a result of the Al-Hurra broadcast, the Brothers’ names began to appear once more, attributing the credit to them.
Moreover, the restoration of their name has aroused a public debate in Kuwait and Iraq, with each of the countries attempting to claim ownership of their legacy. Shlomo al Kuwaiti told Haaretz in 2006 after the production of the greatest hits album, “Their Star Will Never Fade.” Although the CD is not being distributed in either country, he sent it to journalists and scholars, who are arousing renewed interest in the Al Kuwaiti legacy. Interestingly, Kuwait is arguing that even though they worked mainly in Iraq, the establishment should recognize their work as part of the national heritage. Furthermore, Shlomo states that in Lebanon an article was published that proves that many of the songs that are considered Arab masterpieces, and have been adopted by the Islamic world, are in fact the work of Arab Jewish artists. He states, “[i]n this context, it should be pointed out that my father was always opposed to mixing politics and art, although he took advantage of his status in Iraq in order to help the Jewish community in its ties with the government.”
Despite Saddam’s attempt to wipe the Kuwaiti Brothers’ presence from Iraqi memory, people still utter their names and countries still argue over their legacy. Dudu Tassa is Dawoud's grandson, and has tried to reinvent the Brothers’ songs in Israel for a new generation. Dudu Tassa is a major figure in the Israeli rock scene. The singer-songwriter and guitarist released his first album when he was just 13. He produced the album, “Dudu Tassa & The Kuwaitis” in 2011, his first attempt at restoring his family’s rich musical legacy, while giving it a modern makeover. In the Kuwaiti album and show, Tassa argues that “with his powerful voice and innovative musicianship, salutes the Al-Kuwaitis, [Tassa] sings their songs in Arabic and Hebrew, and integrates Iraqi, Middle-eastern, and Israeli rock music, in his unique style known as “Iraq’n’Roll” (also the name of the documentary film made about Dudu Tassa)”.
While much can be said regarding the treatment of the Brothers’ legacy and work, both inside Iraq and Israel, that is beyond the scope of this paper. However, purely based on identity, I believe that the Kuwaiti Brothers and Salima Murad demonstrate the integration of Iraqi Jews into greater Iraqi society. This proves that they were considered by the people and they considered themselves, at least culturally, as Arab Iraqis who happened to be of Jewish faith and heritage. Regardless of the political turmoil that caused widespread Jewish migration from Iraq, this cultural heritage still lives on today and is constantly being reinvigorated. With the opening of the Jaber Al-Ahmad Cultural Centre in Kuwait, a tiny hall has been present in honor of the commemoration of the the 90th anniversary of the first recorded Kuwaiti song. The honorees are the Kuwaiti Brothers.
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