Lost Music of Istanbul's Sephardic Jews
How a Panoply Sounds Scattered to a New Diaspora
By Alexander Gelfand
‘It’s really changed.”
My wife, Ingrid, and I were sitting in the lobby of the Hotel Residence in Istanbul, listening to an Israeli historian named Daniel wax nostalgic. Daniel’s mother, a native Istanbulu, had taken him there on frequent childhood visits in the years before the varlik vergisi, or “wealth tax,” of the 1940s and the Istanbul pogrom of 1955 — an attack aimed primarily at the city’s Greek population that spilled over onto its Jewish and Armenian ones, as well — persuaded many in its once-thriving Jewish community to leave. (Many had already left by the early decades of the 20th century, spurred by the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of Turkish nationalism.)
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