Oman at the Smithsonian Folk Festival

So, I went to the Folk Festival Saturday afternoon and spent a cacaphonous hour or so in the Oman music tent.

Before the blare of the discordant brass instruments, I witnessed two lines of bearded men, dressed in white robes with white and red headgear, do slow rhythmic line dances while chanting sonorous fugue-like "poetry" [that is what the narrator called it] which swelled and fell like a wave at a football game.

The music was oddly familiar, and it didn't take long for me to recognize the relationship between this Omani chant and Hassidic nigunim, and to re-dress the two lines of men in black, not white.

So there you have it, I realized.

We Jews are just another Arab tribe.