Salah and Dawud al-Kuwaiti

Origins and early life

Salah and Dawud al-Kuwaiti were brothers, born in Kuwait in 1908 and 1910 into an Iraqi Jewish merchant family of the old Babylonian community, and they are documented together because they made their music together: Salah on the violin, the composer of the two, and Dawud on the oud, the singer.

Work and career

The family returned to Basra and then Baghdad, and in the 1930s the brothers became the sound of the young Iraqi state — the World Jewish Congress calls them the fathers of modern Iraqi music. When Iraqi national radio was created in 1936 under King Ghazi, they founded and led its first orchestra; Salah composed for the greatest voices of the Arab world, Umm Kulthum among them, and for Salima Murad, the Jewish diva of Baghdad, and is credited with founding the modern Iraqi maqam.

In 1951, with the rest of Iraq's Jews, they left for Israel, where their names were erased from Iraqi radio and their songs credited to 'folklore' or to others; in Tel Aviv they kept a small shop and played for their community, forgotten by the world. Dawud died in 1976 and Salah in 1986. It was Dawud's grandson, the Israeli rock musician Dudu Tassa, who brought their songs back to life — and an Iraq that has begun, in recent years, to name them again.