Twice, their music was written out of history: once in Iraq and once in Israel. The story of Jewish songwriters and musicians Sallah and Daoud Al-Kuwaiti is a tale of how ideology and culture are deeply interconnected and how ideology has the potential to suppress and deny culture.

Born in Kuwait in 1908 and 1910, respectively, (their father had moved to Kuwait from Basra), the brothers Al-Kuwaiti studied music and began performing before they had their Bar Mitzvahs. When they were received as prodigies, Iraqi record companies began distributing their music.

The family moved back to Basra and then to Baghdad in the early 1930s. Sallah began writing music in the traditional Ottoman-based melodic maqam style. But, in Baghdad, he began to study Western music, which he incorporated into the popular Arabic music of the day. The Al-Kuwaiti Brothers were an example of Jewish-led currents of modernity and cosmopolitanism in traditional Middle Eastern music.

In Iraq, the brothers became major musical stars in the 1930s. To give you an idea of how big a role they played, Sallah wrote music for Umm Kultum and Mohammed Abdel Wahab. He composed a song that was played during the coronation of King Faisal. The brothers became founding members of Iraq national radio and often were heard performing in classical and modern styles as well as in the first film made in Iraq.

All that changed after the establishment of Israel in 1948. Life for Jews in Iraq and other Arab countries became so tenuous that some 800,000 people fled or were expelled. Following the Jewish exodus from Iraq – largely because Jewish musicians had dominated – this situation became problematic for certain Arab nationalists. Cultural nationalism, and a discourse dominated by those who opposed the West, tended to exaggerate an Arabic essentialist culture; that is, a view of cultural traits and values that excluded Jews and Westerners.

Most of the Jews in the exodus from Arab countries settled in Israel. It was during the early years of the state that Arab Jews once again were written out of history and forced into cultural margins. Israeli musicologist Edwin Seroussi extensively has documented how the new Israeli song actively was mobilized by the Israeli establishment to serve the development of the New Hebrew culture. Musiqa mizrahit (Yemenite, Arabic, Moroccan, Turkish and other ethnic types of music) was perceived as “non-Israeli” up through the 1980s. For the Brothers Al-Kuwaiti and a generation of Arab musicians, this marginalization included a loss of status, audience exposure and income.

All of this brings us to the American release of the 2011 Israel album “Dudu Tassa & The Kuwaitis.” An example of the explosion of “Oriental music” in Israel, Dudu Tassa’s album is a fusion of old Kuwaiti Brothers recordings made modern by Tassa. That’s because Dudu’s grandfather was Daoud; his grand-uncle was Sallah. Dudu dug through old cassette tapes of the brothers that his mother had. Dudu had first heard the music sung by his mother as she did housework.

Dudu took some of the old recordings, added a contemporary bass, drums and electric guitar, and covered the tunes as “westernized” fusion presentations. One song on the CD features vocals by Carmela Tassa, Dudu’s mother. Ironically, the brothers admonished their children not to go into music to avoid suffering the same losses they did.

Recorded in Arabic, Dudu did not expect the album to take off. But, both young and old Israelis, as well as an Arab audience, embraced the songs.

Another irony: Dudu doesn’t know how to speak or read Arabic. He learned his grandparents’ songs in transliteration. Dudu recently toured the United States and played at SXSW in Austin, Texas. He was well received by an audience that also does not understand Arabic. No matter. One easily can understand the music, just as audiences “got” Israeli singer Rita’s latest hit album sung in Persian. This is striking and original rock music. The music is modern, exciting, extremely danceable and heavily spiced with a Middle Eastern sound. It reminds us how much Israel is part of the Middle East despite the attempts of some people to exclude her. But then, the attempt to exclude Jews from the Middle East has a long history.