The Missing Chapter in Ottoman-Jewish Musical and Cultural History: Songs, Soundscapes, and the Early Modern Society

Hadar Feldman Samet is a senior lecturer at Tel Aviv University’s department of Jewish History, where she teaches the history of Jews in Muslim contexts. Since completing her doctorate at the Hebrew University in 2018, she has held several postdoctoral fellowships, including at Katz Center, as a Harry Starr fellowship at Harvard University, and at the Scholion Interdisciplinary Research Center at the Hebrew University. Her research focuses on Jewish life in the Eastern Mediterranean Muslim world, particularly of the Sephardi diaspora in Ottoman society. She studies the entangled histories of Jews and Muslims, interfaith encounters, the relation between daily life and revolutionary practices, and how expressive culture and performative dimensions of historical phenomena—primarily music and embodied devotional practices—reveal diverse and multifaceted representations of people of the past.