The Convergence of Judaism and Islam. Religious, Scientific, and Cultural Dimensions

294 r Efrat E. Aviv

Ladino. Around 1908 Shir ha-geula (Song of Redemption) was written by
a teacher in the Jewish school in Silibri, in honor of Dr. Theodor Herzl’s
visit to Sultan Abdülhamit in Istanbul and was considered “a national
song of our own.”^35

The Rabbis’ Response

As discussed earlier, music and theater affairs provoked the rabbis’ con-
cern more than once. Like in formal Judaism, Islam places certain re-
strictions on the use of music in religious worship. Quranic recitation is
viewed by Muslims as reading (okumak in Turkish) rather than singing,
as often perceived by Western scholars.^36 Indeed, some sources describe
close relations between rabbis and Muslims, such as rabbis who taught
Muslims Torah and Muslims who taught rabbis Islamic sources.^37 An ex-
ample is Rabbi Avraham Mandil (1820–83), known as Haham Aga, who
was a very talented composer and performer rumored to have sung with
Dervishes (Sufi order members) at the Galata Tekke (lodge) and even to
have been the teacher of şeyh Ayatüllah Efendi, leader of the Kulekapı
Mevlevis.
Yet at special times of the year the singing of highly melodic religious
songs within the religious service in either mosques or synagogues was
permitted. In Islam, it was mostly manifested by the Sufi brotherhoods
(Tarikatler).^38
Despite the aforementioned, the Ottoman rabbis strongly opposed the
theater and secular songs, especially those that dealt with love or foreign
songs, since they lacked praise of G-d. Nonetheless, their main concern
was directed at songs of love and lust, the melodies of which were used for
the singing of prayers, or vice versa—the use of the melodies of religious
songs to express the lyrics of love songs. For example, Rabbi Eliezer Papo,
who lived in Sarajevo in the nineteenth century, expressed his repugnance
at the fact that cantors sang selihot to melodies of love songs on the High
Holy Days. He claimed that selihot are supposed to cause the person to feel
remorse and not to dance:

And I find the deed bad, that some cantors on days of selihot sing

some tones which hearing them gives you the desire to dance, from

here they let you comprehend that they do not understand what

comes out of their mouth... and especially make us think that with