328 r Contributors
Jessica is the recipient of a number of fellowships, including the Fulbright Fellow-
ship and the Wexner Graduate Fellowship.
Merav Rosenfeld-Hadad recently completed her PhD in the Faculty of Music and
the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge
on the Paraliturgical Song of Babylonian Jews in the context of Arabo-Islamic
culture and religion. Her work was supported by the Cambridge Overseas Trust,
the ORS Award Scheme, and the Wingate Scholarship. Rosenfeld-Hadad spe-
cializes in religious and secular musical genres of both Jews and Muslims in the
Arabo-Islamic cultural domain in the past and in modern time. She is also inter-
ested in the role and function of this culture in the life and identity of Arab-Jews
in the past, in their original Arab countries, and at present in the West. This is
her first publication. It will be followed by a publication on aesthetic similarities
between the text and music of the Classical Paraliturgical Song and the Quranic
narrative.
Amnon Shiloah, PhD, is emeritus professor of the Department of Musicology,
Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Born in Argentina in 1928 to parents of Syrian
origin, he immigrated to Palestine in 1941. He studied music and flute in Jeru-
salem and Paris. He earned a master’s degree at the Hebrew University (Hebrew
and Arabic literature and biblical studies) and was awarded a PhD in musicology
and oriental studies from the Sorbonne in Paris. His research interests involve
history and theory of Arab and Jewish Near-Eastern musical traditions and me-
dieval writings. His numerous publications include his magnum opus: the two
volumes of The Theory of Music in Arabic Writings published in the framework of
the RISM (Repertoire International des Sources Musicales) and two volumes of
essays (Arabic and Hebrew Writings on Music) published in the Variorum series.
In 2003 the French translation of his book Music in the World of Islam, won the
Grand prix de l’Académie Charles Cros: Littérature musicale.
Shimon Shtober holds a PhD degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
He served as a senior lecturer in the Departments of Arabic and Middle Eastern
History at Bar-Ilan University for many years. His main fields of research are
medieval Egyptian social history, Islamic historiography, and biblical exegesis in
medieval Spain and the eastern Mediterranean written in Judeo-Arabic. Publica-
tions include The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann, vol. 7 (Jerusalem, 1977);
The Historical Digest of the Responsa Literature of Spain and North Africa, vols. 1
and 2 (Jerusalem, 1981–87); and Sefer Divrei Yosef: Eleven Hundred Years of Jewish
History under Muslim Rule (Jerusalem, 1994).