Orientalism, Arab Jewish identity(ies) and modernity in British Mandate Palestine viewed through the archive of master musician Azuri Effendi/Ezra Aharon

In 1934 the renowned Iraqi-Jewish musician Ezra Aharon/Azuri Effendi moved to Palestine, then under the British Mandate, where he became a prominent cultural figure who networked and intersected with a variety of agents—British authorities, Zionists, Palestinians, and a German musicologist specialising in ‘Oriental’ music. The correspondences, concert programmes, notes and musical works found in Ezra Aharon’s recently catalogued personal archive, alongside press articles, reveal the sociocultural tensions embedded in the on-the-ground encounter between ‘East’ and ‘West’ occurring in Mandate Palestine. The life story, musical activities and cultural spaces occupied by Azuri Effendi, provide a means of charting how ‘the Orient’ has been musically constructed by different agents, the shifting roles of Arab Jews in this trajectory, and the agency that musical practice brings to this terrain.