With Professor Amnon Shiloah (1928–2014)

With Professor Amnon Shiloah

This photograph documents a meeting with Professor Amnon Shiloah in Israel in 2014  (1928–2014), a distinguished Israeli musicologist specializing in the history and theory of Arabic music. Born in Argentina to Syrian parents, Shiloah later settled in Palestine and pursued his studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Sorbonne, where he received his doctorate in 1963. He went on to serve as Professor of Musicology and held several prominent academic and institutional roles, contributing significantly to the study of Middle Eastern and Jewish musical traditions.

In the early 1970s, Shiloah conducted extensive fieldwork in Greece, visiting Jewish communities and documenting liturgical traditions, prayers, and oral musical practices of synagogues, as well as the voices of the last rabbis and Holocaust survivors. His work remains an invaluable contribution to the preservation of Sephardic and Eastern Mediterranean Jewish heritage.

In connection with the Ladino Greece project, I would like to express my gratitude for his interest, guidance, and scholarly insight, which have been of lasting importance to this work.