A Journey Through Jewish-Muslim Spain

In early July, I traveled through Spain for two weeks with our team as part of our EU-funded project, “Bridges of Understanding.” We visited eleven cities where Muslims and Jews had lived side by side for centuries, among them Toledo, Córdoba, Seville, Granada, Ávila, and Segovia. We stood in synagogues that are now churches or museums, followed the traces of Maimonides in Córdoba, and were reminded again and again that the Sephardic Jews who had helped shape these cities for generations were forced to leave the country in 1492 under the Alhambra Decree. It was an overwhelming experience, one that has stayed with me ever since: where did all these people go, and what did they carry with them from their homeland?

One answer lies far to the east of Spain, in what is today the northwest of Turkey. Many of the exiles found refuge in the Ottoman Empire, and out of this new neighborliness grew one of the most striking, and least known, forms of Jewish-Muslim intertwining: the tradition known as the Maftirim. In Edirne, a city on the border between Europe and Anatolia, Jewish cantors sang Hebrew prayers for centuries in the modes of Ottoman court music and the Mevlevi dervishes. The Maftirim are an echo of the very story I had seen with my own eyes in Spain — and today they have nearly........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)