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Yemenite Jewish music is one of the oldest unbroken vocal traditions in the Jewish world. The Diwan, a corpus of liturgical and paraliturgical poetry centered on Rabbi Shalem Shabazi (17th century, ~700 piyyutim), survived 1500 years of isolation in the highlands of Yemen. After the 1949-50 airlift Operation Magic Carpet, Yemenite voices entered the Israeli mainstream, Shoshana Damari, then Ofra Haza, then a continuous line through Boaz Sharabi, Achinoam Nini (Noa), Etti Ankri, Dudu Tassa, and the A-WA sister trio. This lesson covers the vocabulary of the tradition and the artists who carried it.
Cultural note, In Yemen, Jewish men sang the Diwan; women had their own oral wedding songs in Judeo-Yemenite Arabic, mostly unwritten. When Ofra Haza recorded "Im Nin\'alu" in 1984 and again in 1988 with English club beats, she did something radical: she took her mother\'s henna-night songs and put them on MTV. The A-WA sisters (Tair, Liron, Tagel Haim) repeated the move in 2015 with "Habib Galbi", the first song in Judeo-Yemenite Arabic to top the Israeli chart. The line from Shabazi to A-WA is direct.
Diwan & Liturgical Poetry
Wedding Music & Henna Ceremony
Traditional Instruments & Dance
Pioneer Israeli Artists (Haza, Damari)
Modern Revival (A-WA, Noa)
The Yemenite Music Map
A short narrative of the tradition, from Sana\'a in the 17th century to Tel Aviv in 2015, in functional Hebrew. Read it aloud once a day for a week.