Table Of ContentJewish Musical Modernism,
Old and New
Jewish Mu sical
MOderNisM,
Old and New
PhiliP V. Bohlman
EditEd by
Sander l. Gilman
With a ForEWord by
thE UnivErsity oF ChiCago PrEss ::: ChiCago and London
PhiliP V. BOhlMaN is the Mary Werkman Distinguished Service Professor of the Humanities and
of Music at the University of Chicago and coeditor of the Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology
series, published by the University of Chicago Press.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2008 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2008
Printed in the United States of America
17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 1 2 3 4 5
isbn-13: 978-0-226-06326-3 (cloth)
isbn-10: 0-226-06326-7 (cloth)
Publication of this book and the accompanying CD has been generously supported by a subven-
tion from Carol Honigberg and Joel Honigberg.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jewish musical modernism, old and new / edited by Philip V. Bohlman with a foreword by Sander
L. Gilman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn-13: 978-0-226-06326-3 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn-10: 0-226-06326-7 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Jews—Music—History and criticism. 2. Mod-
ernism (Music) 3. Jewish musicians. 4. Music—20th century—History and criticism. I. Bohl-
man, Philip Vilas.
ML3776.J42 2008
780.89'924—dc22
2007045221
∞ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American Na-
tional Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ANSI Z39.48-1992.
contents
Foreword: are Jews musical? historical notes on the Question of
Jewish musical modernism vii
: : : sandEr L. giLman
acknowledgments xvii
introduction: The Transcendent Moment of Jewish Modernism 1
: : : PhiLiP v. bohLman
1. Multiple Modernisms? episodes from the sciences as cultures, 1900–1945 31
: : : mitChELL g. ash
2. sephardic Fins des siècles: The liturgical Music of
Vienna’s Türkisch-Israelitische community on the Threshold of Modernity 55
: : : EdWin sEroUssi
3. Jewish Music and German science 81
: : : PamELa m. PottEr
4. echoes from beyond europe: Music and the Beta israel Transformation 103
: : : Kay KaUFman shELEmay
5. charlotte salomon’s Modernism 125
: : : miChaEL P. stEinbErg
epilogue: Beyond Jewish Modernism 153
: : : PhiLiP v. bohLman
appendix 1. Moments Musicaux et Modernes: Jewish modernism in Popular and Political music:
accompanying Cd by the new Budapest orpheum Society 179
appendix 2. Cd Texts and Translations 189
Contributors 205
index 209
foreword
are Jews Musical?
historical notes on the Question of Jewish musical modernism
::: sandEr L. giLman
As early as Shakespeare the stereotypical Jew is The man that hath no music in himself,
denied any special relationship to Western (read: Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
civilized and civilizing) music. The Jew in The Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils;
Merchant of Venice is devoid of any moral and The motions of his spirit are dull as night
therefore aesthetic sensibility. As Shylock says: And his affections dark as Erebus:
Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.
Lock up my doors; and when you hear the drum (Merchant of Venice, act 5, scene 1)
And the vile squealing of the wry-neck’d fife,
Clamber not you up to the casements then, “Mark the music” is the key to one powerful
Nor thrust your head into the public street image of the stereotypical Jew that is part of Eng-
To gaze on Christian fools with varnish’d faces, lish as well as European culture. To be civilized
But stop my house’s ears, I mean my casements: the Jews had to learn to love the music of their
Let not the sound of shallow foppery enter wider world, to identify with and participate in a
My sober house. high culture beyond the Shakespearean fantasy of
(Merchant of Venice, act 2, scene 5) Jewish incomprehensibility and the myth of the
noise of the synagogue and the Judenschule (Jews’
But just so that we do not miss the message, school). They had to accept music as part of the
Lorenzo conveys to Shylock’s daughter that her decorous world of high culture that improved the
father is insensible to music: human being.
viii ForEWord
In the eighteenth century Moses Mendelssohn century anti-Semitic images of the Jewish lack of
and the German Jewish Enlightenment argued any innate musicality:
that Jewish transformation into citizens of a
nation-state would enable Jews to be both Ger- Our modern arts had likewise become a portion
mans and Jews. Unlike the liberals of his time, of this culture, and among them more particularly
such as Wilhelm von Humboldt, who demanded that art which is just the very easiest to learn—the
the extension of civic emancipation to the Jews art of music, and indeed that Music which, severed
without any qualification, on the basis that all hu- from her sister arts, had been lifted by the force and
man beings shared these rights, the Haskalah, or stress of [the] grandest geniuses to a stage in her
Jewish Enlightenment, model demanded observ- universal faculty of Expression where either, in new
able change. For Germany one of the changes de- conjunction with the other arts, she might speak
manded of the Jews was that they so alter their aloud the most sublime, or, in persistent separation
“Jewish” mentality that they begin to experi- from them, she could also speak at will the deepest
ence the ethical dimensions attributed to “high bathos of the trivial. Naturally, what the cultured
culture” (Bildung), dimensions from which they Jew had to speak, in his aforesaid situation, could be
were felt to have excluded themselves because nothing but the trivial and indifferent, because his
of their religious beliefs rather than their innate whole artistic bent was in sooth a mere luxurious,
incapacity (see, in general, Sorkin 2000; Meyer needless thing (88). . . . The Jew has never had an
2001; Hess 2002; Herzig 2002; Dauber 2004). Art of his own, hence never a Life of art-enabling
Music, especially the music of modern high cul- import (“ein Leben von kunstfähigem Gehalte”): an
ture, what is today called “classical” as opposed import, a universally applicable, a human import,
to popular music, becomes one of the places not even to-day does it offer to the searcher, but
that such transformation is seen to take place. If merely a peculiar method of expression. . . . Now
“music” indeed “hath charms to soothe the sav- the only musical expression offered to the Jew tone-
age breast, / To soften rocks, or bend a knotted setter by his native Folk, is the ceremonial music
oak,” as William Congreve (1670–1729) observed of their Jehova-rites: the Synagogue is the solitary
in The Mourning Bride (act 1, scene 1), the “Jew,” fountain whence the Jew can draw art-motives at
however, was capable neither of comprehending once popular and intelligible to himself.1
nor of producing such an effect.
Certainly for the nineteenth century the for- It was into this world that Jews of the early
mulation that most strongly resonated was in nineteenth century, such as Giacomo Meyerbeer
Richard Wagner’s 1850 essay “Judaism [i.e., Jew- (born Jakob Liebmann Beer, 1791–1864), against
ry] in Music.” This essay, republished in edited whom Wagner fulminated in his essay, entered
form by Wagner in 1869 and widely reprinted at to show that they too could and did contribute to
the close of the century, summarized nineteenth- European high culture. Jews, however defined,
ForEWord ix
could show that they had the sensibility and sen- most cutting-edge high culture of the music of
sitivity to be full-fledged members of a world of the day defines Jewish preeminence (for the con-
ethics and aesthetics. Yet the more that they actu- trast in the twentieth century, see Schiller 2003).
ally did so, the more anti-Semitic stereotypes held In general the notion that the Jew could not
that they were incapable of contributing anything command the realm of high musical culture is
of value. In the end they were inhibited by their undercut in the popular mind by the presence
Jewishness from comprehending the true nature of “Jewish” performers (rather than composers)
of “classical” music. during the course of the late nineteenth century.
In 1850 in London Robert Knox, accused grave Francis Galton’s view of “hereditary genius” in
robber and medical hack, sat down and wrote 1869, documenting his interest in the “mental
the first systematic anthropology of the Jews in peculiarities of different races,” includes only
English. His book The Races of Men picked up this one Jewish “genius,” and that is the poet Hein-
thread when he observed that “the real Jew has rich Heine.3 No musicians at all make the grade.
no ear for music” (Knox 1850: 131). Knox was not But twenty years later, in 1889, Joseph Jacobs, the
merely paralleling Wagner. Both were perpetu- Australian-born anthropologist who wrote exten-
ating a view well-known from the early modern sively on Jews and race in Victorian London, com-
period, as Shakespeare’s Shylock illustrates. Ben- mented that in “Grove’s Dictionary of Music [there
jamin Disraeli, novelist and politician manqué, is] a far larger proportion of executants than com-
had countered that view in his novel Coningsby posers. . . . [There is] clear evidence of general
(1844) in which Sidonie, the embodiment of all musical ability among Jews” (cf. Jacobs 1889: 13).
that is positive among the Jews, forcefully de- In his statistical survey of Jewish professions he
clares that “musical Europe is ours!,” for every commented, “That a Jew obtained one of the fifty
time a Christian listens to a [Gioacchino] Rossi- scholarships at the new Royal College of Music,
ni2 [1792–1868] or a Meyerbeer or is “thrilled into whereas one in five hundred would represent a
raptures at the notes of an aria by a [Giuditta] proper proportion, seems to confirm the popular
Pasta [1798–1865] or a [Giulia] Grisi [1811–1869], impression of the Jewish love and aptitude for
little do they suspect that they are offering their music, and this may be further confirmed by the
homage to ‘the sweet singers of Israel!’” The Jews fact that of the six musical knights in England no
are endowed “with the almost exclusive privilege less than three are of Jewish blood” (Jacobs 1891:
of music” (Disraeli 1983: 271; see also Schwarz 45). He later lists the musical “geniuses” of “Jew-
1979). What is vital in reading Disraeli as against ish blood,” enumerating the three knighted com-
Wagner and Knox is that Disraeli stresses the posers, Julius Benedict (1804–1885), Michael
Jew’s preeminence in the music of European high Costa (1810–1884), and the famed composer of
culture, of the opera and the concert stage. Nei- “Onward Christian Soldiers” (1871) and Savoy
ther synagogue liturgy nor Jewish themes, but the operettas Arthur Sullivan (1844–1900),4 but plac-
