Music of the "Folks-Neshome": "Hebrew Melody" and Changing Musical Representations of Jewish Culture...

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MUSIC OF THE “FOLKS-NESHOME”Joshua Walden

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Journal of Modern Jewish Studies Vol 8, No. 2 July 2009, pp. 151–171ISSN 1472-5886 print/ISSN 1472-5894 online © 2009 Taylor & Francishttp://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/14725880902949122

Joshua Walden

MUSIC OF THE “FOLKS-NESHOME”

“Hebrew Melody” and changing musical

representations of Jewish culture in the

early twentieth century Ashkenazi

diasporaTaylor and FrancisCMJS_A_395084.sgm10.1080/14725880902949122Modern Jewish Studies1472-5886 (print)/1472-5894 (online)Original Article2009Taylor & [email protected]

In their task of creating a style of “Jewish” national art music based on ethnographic research,many of the composers affiliated with the St. Petersburg Society for Jewish Folk Music wrotearrangements of traditional ethnic songs and dances for small chamber ensembles. Theseworks, generally no longer than the duration of a traditional folk melody, and written withthe aim of evoking Jewish village folk culture, occupy a genre that I call the “rural minia-ture”. This genre was popular in Eastern and Central Europe during this period, and wasmost commonly composed and performed by musicians who conducted ethnographic fieldworkthemselves or studied the findings of other ethnographers of music. The rural miniature wasa critical art music genre in the development of state and diaspora musical nationalism.Works in the genre assumed a standard role in the chamber music and solo repertoire duringthe first four decades of the twentieth century. As the genre’s early proponents moved awayfrom their homes and settled throughout the diaspora, however, the continued survival ofrural Jewish life appeared increasingly imperilled by urbanization, emigration, and anti-Semitism. A discussion of Joseph Achron’s “Hebrew Melody” will demonstrate that, with thiscultural migration, the ethnographic component of the rural miniature came gradually tobe superseded by the aesthetic elements of propaganda and nostalgia, as the genre was appro-priated for fictional idealizations of traditional life in the Eastern European shtetl1 andexpressions of a Zionist longing for the biblical Jewish homeland.

Introduction

At the turn of the twentieth century, as the Russian Revolution of 1905 brought abouta brief period of relative freedom of artistic and political expression for Russian Jewsafter years of censorship, a group of Jewish ethnographers and composers undertook theproject of studying and expanding the Jewish musical tradition. Some focused oncollecting and organizing taxonomies of Jewish folk music; others were occupied withthe task of creating a “Jewish” art music tradition from the ground up. Together thesemusicians formed the Society for Jewish Folk Music in St. Petersburg in 1908. In a 1924

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essay, the Russian musicologist Leonid Sabaneev coined the term “Jewish NationalSchool” to describe the original group of members of the Society.2

Composers affiliated with the Society, who considered themselves united to oneanother and Jews around the world as members of a Jewish ethnic nation, sought toestablish a new shared musical style by writing works of art music that employedcontemporary compositional techniques but were based on melodic and stylisticelements adapted from Jewish traditional religious and secular music collected byethnographers. Most European composers of the new “Jewish” music who were nevermembers of the Society or the multiple offshoots founded during the 1920s aroundRussia and in Warsaw and Vienna were, like the Swiss composer Ernest Bloch, at leastinfluenced by, and promoted in, writings generated by Society affiliates.

In their task of creating a body of “Jewish” art music based on ethnographicresearch, many of the composers in the Society wrote arrangements of traditional ethnicsongs and dances for small chamber ensembles. These works, generally no longer thanthe duration of a traditional folk melody, and written with the aim of evoking Jewishvillage folk culture, occupy a genre that I call the “rural miniature”. This genre waspopular in Eastern and Central Europe during this period (in addition to composers inthe Jewish diaspora, the Hungarian composer Béla Bartók wrote frequently in thegenre3), and was most commonly composed and performed by musicians whoconducted ethnographic fieldwork themselves or studied the findings of other ethnog-raphers of music. The rural miniature was a critical art music genre in the developmentof state and diaspora musical nationalism. Works in the genre assumed a standard rolein the chamber music and solo repertoire during the first four decades of the twentiethcentury. They were dispersed through score publications in multiple editions, heardfrequently in public and private concerts, reviewed by critics in periodicals, and incor-porated into a variety of media including records, radio and film.

The rural miniature

Rural miniatures based on Jewish traditional music include Joel Engel’s “Chabad”erMelody” (Opus 20, No. 1) and “Freilachs” (Opus 20, No. 2), as well as JosephAchron’s first work in the genre, “Hebrew Melody” (Opus 33), and his subsequent“Hebrew Dance” (Opus 35, No. 1), “Hebrew Lullaby” (Opus 35, No. 2), “Sher” (Opus42) and “March” (Opus 46). These and other rural miniatures share a number ofcompositional tropes, including the typical use of the minor key with unprepared majorphrase endings, and experimentation with Phrygian and other non-diatonic harmonicmodes; frequent ornamental embellishments such as trills, rapid runs, slides and gracenotes; periodic repetitions of phrases; melodic motifs such as augmented second inter-vals; and rhythmic juxtapositions of duple and triple divisions of the beat. Despite thedifferences between these art music settings and the original folk songs and dances onwhich they are based, the works appeared to many urban listeners as primary sourceevidence of rural and suburban Jewish folk music, bringing the traditional Jewish wayof life into closer relief. The works were named for Jewish musical genres, prayers andsongs, and their incorporation of compositional techniques that evoked music fromoutside of the conventions of contemporary art music enhanced their realism andbelievability.


C H A N G I N G M U S I C A L R E P R E S E N T A T I O N S 153

The word “miniature” in the genre designation “rural miniature” refers to the minia-ture nature of the works’ durations and ensembles, but also alludes to the function ofminiaturization as a tool of memory, nostalgia and appropriation. Like small travelsouvenirs and postcards, rural miniatures function as portable representations of aforeign locale, and serve as aids for recollection. Thus, they provide evidence of thedifference and distance between the urban centres where they became popular and therural regions they represent, while simultaneously functioning as proximate appropria-tions of these rural regions’ traditions. They are at once possessed of a veneer of authen-ticity, and modified for consumption by cosmopolitan listeners.

Literary critic Susan Stewart has explained of the souvenir miniature: “On the onehand, the object must be marked as exterior and foreign, on the other it must be markedas arising directly out of an immediate experience of its possessor.”4 She continues, “Weneed and desire souvenirs of events that are reportable, events whose materiality hasescaped us, events that thereby exist only through the invention of narrative.”5 Likesouvenir miniatures, which serve as tangible evidence of experience, rural miniaturesinvoke narratives of authenticity. They imply that the composer, and perhaps theperformer, possess what could be characterized as an authentic knowledge of thetraditions represented in the music. They came also, in time, to invoke narratives ofnostalgia. Those traditions inhabit a world that is distant spatially and perhaps also tempo-rally, and threatened by the destructive influences of urbanization and modernization.

The term “rural” in the genre designation “rural miniature” also refers to theconception, common during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, of the ruralrealm as unsophisticated and even primitive, but nevertheless the wellspring of a vitalfolk tradition. As folklorist Alan Dundes explains, “Folk as an old-fashioned segmentliving on the margins of civilization was [from the middle of the nineteenth century]equated with the concept of the peasant. … Rural is implicitly compared with urban.The folk were rural because they could be contrasted with city dwellers.”6 Many urbanJewish composers, performers and listeners conceived of themselves in a complexrelationship with the ontology of the rural realm and folk culture, which was believedto hold at its core the foundational material of the nation’s soul, and the vestiges of theoriginary, organic relationship between its people.

The traditional association between folksong performance and the authenticexpression of nationhood dates back at least to the writings of Johann GottfriedHerder, who argues in his Essay on the Origin of Language (1772) that language wassocially learned, not innate, and thus was shared by all the people of a community andrevealed something “authentic” about that community. Because poetry and music wereconsidered to be the “highest” forms of language, folk music, the pairing of poetry andmusic purportedly shared by all members of a rural community, was seen as the mostimportant bond between members of that community.7

Although rural miniatures can be considered realist to the extent that they possessa veneer of objectivity deriving from their direct sources in ethnographic research (ortheir invention on the basis of familiarity with such sources), the genre’s aesthetic mode,however, creates friction with its content. Folk songs were inevitably modified signifi-cantly by composers of rural miniatures, and often fabricated entirely; thus, the worksencourage listeners to believe in the accuracy of something that was necessarily onlyapproximated, and frequently fictionalized. Rural miniatures thus embody a pair ofdichotomous functions: they attempted to bring urban listeners into close contact with



Jewish rural traditions, but at the same time marked the separation of urban and rurallife.

One of the forces motivating composers’ work in the genre was the fear that Jewishcommunities were vanishing in the face of new economic and industrial structures ofmodernization and urbanization, and as a consequence of war, poverty and globalization.In composing rural miniatures, Jewish musicians attempted to bolster their culture bydocumenting and representing it in music. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has describedthe similar ideology of many of the period’s folklore collectors as a “preoccupation withdisappearance”, which prompted them to engage in an “eleventh-hour” attempt to studywhat is believed to be “by definition a vanishing subject”.8 Roger D. Abrahams explainsthat “eleventh-hour ethnography”, sometimes also referred to as “salvage” or “saved-from-the-fire ethnography”, is based on the Romantic, nationalist notion shared by manyearly twentieth century ethnographers and folklorists that “the past is constantly reced-ing, and with it, the centre of our moral selves. Our professional lives are then dedicatedto healing this division between the past and present by recognizing what there is of valuein the past that is being lost.”9 The rural miniature was an art musical genre that servedto communicate folk music artefacts between “eleventh-hour ethnographers” and theurban listening public.

Defining “Jewish music”

The composition of rural miniatures by members of the Society for Jewish Folk Musicand its affiliates brought into high relief the question on the minds of many involved inthe invention of a “Jewish” musical style: how should one define “Jewish music”? Thepolymath Abraham Zvi Idelsohn, who worked prolifically during the early decades ofthe twentieth century as a composer, ethnomusicologist and professor, was occupiedthroughout his career with collecting, producing and teaching what he called “Jewish”music. In his 1929 text Jewish Music in Its Historical Development, Idelsohn contrasts twocompositions based on pre-existing traditional Jewish melodies in order to arrive at adefinition of this term. First, he describes the “Kol Nidre”opus 47 by the Germancomposer Max Bruch. In this work Bruch incorporated a traditional melody that hadbeen taught to him by the cantor Jacob Lichtenstein in the early 1860s. The melody isassociated with Kol Nidre, the prayer that opens the Yom Kippur holy day.10 Idelsohnoffers, as a contrast to Bruch’s work, the example of Russian Jewish composer JoelEngel’s “Fifty Children’s Songs”, based on secular Yiddish folk songs and set for voicewith piano accompaniment.

Idelsohn rejects Bruch’s composition as an inauthentic representation of Jewishritual, and sets up Engel’s as authentic. Bruch’s work, in Idelsohn’s judgment, is “not aJewish Kol-nidré”: by setting the melody at a fast tempo and incorporating it into a poly-phonic texture, the composer “did not express as a background of the tune the milieu outof which it sprang, the religious emotions which it voices”.11 But in Idelsohn’s explana-tion, Engel’s work exemplifies the Jewish compositional style developed by the JewishNational School. These composers, argues Idelsohn, are “Saturated with Jewish senti-ments [and] feel the emotions which gave birth to these tunes with the intense andprofound sense of artists; and they try to pour these sentiments into artistic moulds.”12

They had studied the history of traditional Jewish music and the social contexts in which



they originated. In Jewish music, Idelsohn concludes, “the vibrations of the Jewish pulsewill be re-echoed”.13 “Jewishness” in music was based on more than the simple evocationof Jewish religious ritual; it required the composer to be in touch with a set of emotionsthat Idelsohn identified as being shared by the dispersed members of the Jewish nation.

Thus Idelsohn locates authenticity in “Jewish” music as emerging from the precisemixture of purportedly objective elements with subjective feelings associated withJewishness. The objective elements consist of composers’ use of melodies compiledduring ethnographic scholarship, and the representation of these melodies as the princi-ple themes of their compositions. The subjective component involves the sentiment ofwhat many authors describe as the Jewish “soul” (sometimes referred to in Yiddishwriting as the “folks-neshome”), both personal and collective, which was said to uniteJewish composers from across the diaspora. These two categories—the precision ofethnographic knowledge and the perceived abstract and innate Jewish spirit—wereinvoked as the necessary characteristics of “Jewish” music in the writings of a vastnumber of authors of both Jewish and non-Jewish descent, and philo- and anti-Semiticsympathies during the first four decades of the twentieth century.

The Society for Jewish Folk Music and therural miniature

The revolution of 1905 served as a turning point in the history of Jewish culture inRussia. Until then, the anti-Semitic Tsarist regime had severely limited the culturalactivity of the Jews, meaning that Jewish cultural societies, literary works, and period-icals were relatively few and subject to strict oversight and censorship. With revolu-tion, however, came Tsar Nicholas II’s October 17 Manifesto, offering freedom ofspeech and assembly, and introducing an elected parliament, the Duma. In retributionfor Jewish political demonstrations during the revolution, counter-revolutionarygroups killed thousands of Jews in pogroms; in reaction, Jews sought mutual support insuch Jewish organizations as the General Jewish Workers’ Bund of Lithuania, Polandand Russia, which had been established in 1897, and after the Revolution formedgroups that were relatively successful at defending against anti-Semitic attacks.14 TheTsar’s concessions, however, allowed Jews to establish a multitude of new journals,professional and cultural societies and political parties.15

One of these new organizations established after the Revolution was the JewishHistoric-Ethnographic Society, founded in 1908 and based on the Historic-Ethnographic Commission, which had been formed in 1892 as a part of the only certifiedRussian Jewish cultural institution of the time, the Society for the Dissemination ofEnlightenment. Jewish ethnographers had begun to compile and publish collections ofJewish traditional music at the end of the nineteenth century. As Roger D. Abrahamexplains, collection and taxonomy were believed to facilitate the objectification of thefolkloric artefact, such as the folksong, allowing researchers to study it in a scientificmanner, as a natural phenomenon from another place or time. Abraham writes, “The[folklore] collection serves as a point of passage between the here-and-now and thedistant, whether the latter is of the past or of foreign places.”16

With these goals in mind, Engel, for example, kept a detailed notebook of folkloreand music during the 1890s, and Shaul M. Ginzburg and Pesach S. Marek collected



songs in Yiddish during the century’s final years, publishing them (as texts alone withoutmelodies) in the 1901 anthology Yiddish Folksongs in Russia. With the founding of theHistoric-Ethnographic Society, the movement of Jewish ethnography reached fullthrottle. Its goals, as described by the historian and activist Simon Dubnow, who was aparticipant in its founding, were to collect and assemble historical and ethnographicdocuments, and to found a central archive and museum of Jewish history and ethnogra-phy. Members of the Historic-Ethnographic Society also aimed to generate lectures andessays, to publish research findings and historical documents, and to develop a periodicalon the subject of the history and ethnography of the Jewish people.17

At the forefront of the Jewish ethnomusicological movement were Shlomo An-sky,Susman Kiselgof and Engel. An-sky and Kiselgof were pioneering field researchers: An-sky travelled on numerous expeditions to collect folklore of various kinds, whileKiselgof specialized in the collection of ethnic musical artefacts, on such trips as his visitto the Habad hassidim in Lubavichi, in the Mogilev province (currently in the Ukraine),in 1907.18 In 1912, An-sky, Kiselgof and Engel, together with the photographerSolomon Yudovin, travelled together to do field research, using the recent technologi-cal innovation, the wax cylinder phonograph, to collect Hassidic melodies and the musicof Yiddish folk songs and dances from small towns in the provinces of Kiev and Volyn.19

During this expedition, An-sky transcribed Hassidic stories, and at An-sky’s direction,Engel and Kiselgof produced sound recordings of nigunim and other Jewish folk musicgenres, and Yudovin documented visual ornamentations and designs he found in thevillages they visited.20 An-sky enlisted the help of composers Lazare Saminsky andHayim Kopyt to transcribe melodies from the more than 500 wax cylinder phonographrecordings compiled by his team between 1912 and 1914. An-sky’s ambitious goal,which would remain unrealized, was to publish these notated folk song transcriptions aspart of a forty-volume anthology of data compiled during the expedition.21

In a 1909 letter written before this expedition, An-sky describes his task to ChaimZhitlowsky, the prominent Yiddishist and diaspora nationalist, as critical to the contin-ued survival of Jewish culture and Jewish existence itself:

If we manage to make our culture live, we will live, but if we do not manage it, wewill be tormented to death. No surgeon will be able to sew onto us an alien headand an alien heart. […] Now I have a project […] that the Jewish Historic-Ethnographic Society send me […] to collect Jewish folksongs, proverbs, folk tales,sayings, in short, folk art. If it works out, I would gladly occupy the rest of my lifewith it.22

As his comment demonstrates, during this early period of renewed freedom for RussianJews, An-sky and his colleagues felt strongly that by collecting and studying Jewishfolklore and music at the eleventh hour, before what he thought to be its imminentdisappearance, he would be able to rehabilitate endangered traditions, to invigorateRussian Jewish culture with renewed strength, and to resuscitate the Jewish “head”, orintellect, and the Jewish “heart”—the emotional and spiritual centre of being, alsofrequently referred to as the “neshome” or “soul.”

To many Jewish ethnographers, this “soul” was a collective entity, a common bondamong members of the diaspora, and was authentically reflected in folk songs anddances, crucial artifacts of Jewish cultural and social history. Ethnographers looked to



folklore as a means of connecting with what a 1912 editorial, published in the periodicalDi yidishe velt (The Jewish World), called “the folk-soul, the deepest and purest source ofculture”.23 In the introduction to Yiddish Folksongs in Russia, Ginzburg and Marekacknowledge a debt to Herder’s writings on folk music as inspiring their work andbeliefs about folksongs. They adopt Herder’s explanation that, as Ginzburg and Marekput it, folk music helps one to discover “the psyche of a people, …the opinions, memo-ries, hopes, of this folk or another, the everyday needs and the attitude to surroundingphenomena”.24 In his essay “The Yiddish Folksong”, ethnographer Yehuda Leyb Cahandescribes the value of folk songs in similar terms:

A genuine folksong…is created from the folk body, and therefore it also expressesits general character in a natural, not artificial form, and it reflects the most hiddencorners of the collective folk-soul. A genuine folksong cannot be read, recited ordeclaimed; it must only be sung, because it has coalesced with the melody, like abody and soul, each one of which cannot exist without the other.25

Kiselgof, placing similar import on the role of folksong in the study and maintenance ofJewish culture, writes in the introduction to his Lider-zamelbukh far der yidishe shul unfamilie (Collection of Songs for the Jewish School and Family) that, because the Jewish folksong reflects a variety of moments in the life of the Jewish folk, it is a necessary tool ineducation to teach Jewish children the history of their nation. He explains, “All thisplants in a child’s heart a love for the folk.”26

Contemporaneously with the 1908 founding of the Historic-Ethnographic Society,a number of composers and ethnographers established the Society for Jewish Folk Musicin St. Petersburg. On April 3, composer Solomon Rosowsky, pianist LeonidNeswishsky and singer Iosif Tomars visited their local official, General Dratschewsky,hoping to register the Society for Jewish Music. The General could not be convincedthat such a genre as Jewish music existed; recalling, however, that he once heard aJewish folksong played at a wedding he had attended in Odessa years earlier, he allowedthe musicians to found a Society for Jewish Folk Music instead.27

The Society was created based on the ideology, formulated by Engel and dubbed the“Engel Doctrine” by Rosowsky, that the survival and renewal of Eastern European andRussian Jewish culture depended on the invention of a new style of Jewish art musicbased on the ethnography of Jewish folk songs and dances. Inspired by the doctrine, thefounders of the Society envisioned this new Jewish art music style as combining contem-porary compositional techniques with the styles and melodies of Jewish traditionalmusic.28 The rural miniature became a crucial vehicle for composers and performerswho aimed to carry out the “Engel Doctrine”, because it merged a quasi-objectiveethnographic representation with the nationalist invocation of an idealized collectiveJewish soul. The genre can be seen as a component of the cultural phenomenon thathistorian Eric Hobsbawm calls the “invention of tradition”, by which innovative socialand cultural developments, most commonly associated with the activities of nationalistmovements, are rapidly assumed to be old traditions, laden with import.29 Thus, thegenre featured novel compositional styles that appeared to be part of a long-establishedmusical tradition. The rural miniature’s potent capacity to convey nationalist ideologywas based on the assumption that it was directly related to a relatively homogeneousage-old Jewish folk music tradition that never fully existed in reality, and thus the genre



attained authority as a symbol of the mythic timeless coherence of the dispersed Jewishnation.

Among the prominent members of the Society for Jewish Folk Music were JosephAchron, Leo Zeitlen, Alexander Shitomirsky, Efrem Schkljar, Pesach Lwow, HirschKopit, Moses Milner, Lazare Saminsky, Alexander Krein and Mikhail Gnessin.30 Incomposing settings of folk music, these musicians often appropriated melodies that theyhad found in the collections assembled by Kiselgof, Kopyt and other ethnographers, orthat they recalled from personal experience or had taken as dictations during their ownfieldwork. By the middle of the 1910s, the Society counted hundreds of musiciansamong its membership, and had established branches in a large number of Russian cities.The Society promoted its form of Jewish composition based on the “Engel Doctrine” bysponsoring concerts featuring rural miniatures and other folk music settings, organizingpublic lectures on Jewish music and publishing works written under its auspices.

Rural miniatures composed during the most prosperous and successful years of theSociety for Jewish Folk Music reflect the early ideals of that group: their apparentlyobjective style of representing melodies taken from ethnographic research demonstratesthe tenets of the “Engel Doctrine” put into action. A number of works in the genre,including Achron’s “Hebrew Melody” and “Sher”, were published with quotations of thesource melodies printed above the score in small print. These prefatory transcriptionswere not intended to be performed; they are descriptive rather than prescriptive, repre-senting the original folk song in the style of ethnographic notation that can be found inthe numerous anthologies published during the nineteenth and early twentieth centu-ries. Transcriptions were designed to highlight for performers and listeners the associa-tion between the works and ethnographic research, and thus to imply that the ruralminiatures were composed with near-scientific accuracy.

A one-page flyer published by the Society in 1909, advertising the publication oftheir first edition of folk music transcriptions, demonstrates the role of diasporanationalism in motivating members of the Society to set about their task. diasporanationalism entails the invention of a sense of community and shared identity andlanguage among a people displaced in exile, often in a geographical area that transcendspolitical and linguistic borders. It also involves the attempt to persuade citizens ofsovereign states that a dispersed, non-state nation exists within their borders, andshould be respected as partly autonomous. For ethnographers and composers in the St.Petersburg Society for Jewish Folk Music, folk music research and the art music genreof the rural miniature could assist in achieving both of these goals. The flyer from1909, currently housed in the archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research inNew York, repeats the tenets of the “Engel Doctrine”, and emphasizes the dual roles ofethnography and contemporary art music compositional techniques that factored intothe Society’s tasks:

From the Administrators of the Society for Jewish Folk Music:

During the time when, amongst the Jewish people, a national consciousness isawakening that expresses itself in a great interest in all that is done in the domain ofJewish culture, Jewish art and, above all, Jewish music cannot, of course, remainunnoticed. The Jewish folksong, which sharply mirrors in itself the voices andexperiences, the sorrows and joys of the Jewish folk, must be studied in the mostserious manner.



The Society for Jewish Folk Music, which takes as its goal contributing to the devel-opment of Jewish folk music, has from the beginning of its activity undertaken thecollection of folk themes, and the work of arranging them artistically.

Now the organization has published the first series of folksongs.

Persuaded that they thus satisfied an essential life requirement, the Society did notstop for any difficulties and disturbances.

The administrators of the Society for Jewish Folk Music call on everyone to whomthe interest of Jewry is dear, to participate with all possible effort—to disseminatethe songs that the Society has published. At Jewish musical evenings, in Jewishschools, family events—Jewish folk songs should be heard everywhere, and every-where take their appropriate place.

The success of the ongoing activity of the Society in the same direction now turnsonly on the favourable response that the first edition receives.31

The Society for Jewish Folk Music adhered to the goals stated in this advertisement, andthrived for just over a decade, spreading its influence through concerts and publications,as well as satellite organizations around Russia that expanded membership to the thou-sands. The year 1917 brought more revolution to Russia, however, with the overthrowof Tsar Nicholas II and the rise of the Bolsheviks. The unstable political situation createddifficulty for Jews in St. Petersburg, so that by 1922 poverty, hunger and illnesshindered artists from continuing to participate. As a result, the Society and many of itssubsidiary organizations could no longer afford to continue operating.32 A new Societyfor Jewish Music was opened in Moscow from 1923–1931, while others were foundedin Poland and Vienna.

Many of the members and founders of the St. Petersburg Society emigrated fromRussia during this time. Achron, Gnessin and Engel moved to Berlin, a commondestination to which Russian Jewish artists travelled temporarily before moving on toWestern Europe, Palestine and the United States.33 In Berlin, these composers ranpublishing houses devoted to the dissemination of the works of former members of theSociety and other Jewish composers of folk music arrangements. The first to be estab-lished, Jibneh, was directed by Achron and Gnessin, while the second, Juwal, washeaded by Engel. The publication histories of the Society and Jibneh demonstrate thatafter vocal and choral arrangements of folk songs, the duo of violin or cello with pianowas the most common ensemble for which composers affiliated with the Society forJewish Folk Music set Jewish traditional music for performance.34

Unfortunately, Jibneh and Juwal did not work well together. They scheduledconcerts that competed for a limited audience; and Engel spent the majority of hishouse’s funds on reprinting the early works of Society members—and in particular hisown—rather than fostering new talent and instigating fresh compositional activity. Bothhouses were forced to fold within a few short years in the face of financial crisis.35

Despite their troubled, brief histories, however, these publishing houses, in addition tothe Society’s printing department earlier on, were crucial organizations in the dissemi-nation of rural miniatures during the first decades of the twentieth century.



Within a few years, the early members of the Society for Jewish Folk Music movedaway from Central and Eastern Europe, emigrating widely throughout the diaspora.Achron, for instance, moved to Palestine briefly in 1924, before continuing on to theUnited States. Engel, who also moved to Palestine in 1924, remained there until hisdeath three years later. Composers once involved in the Society for Jewish Folk Musiccontinued to create folk music arrangements, but their efforts to write “Jewish” musicgradually acquired a different emphasis. The dispersal of the Jewish National Schoolaround the globe meant that their once unified effort to save and promote Russian-Jewish culture by bringing the study of ethnography in Russian Jewish villages to bearon a Jewish art music style in urban St. Petersburg gradually became more attenuated,as its proponents escaped to safer, more accepting locales. Society members includingAchron, Rosowsky and Saminsky kept alive the hopes of the Society in essays, compo-sitions and concert programmes, but the cohesion and idealism of these musicians fadedwith time and distance as the “eleventh-hour” ethnography of Eastern European Jewishmusic became increasingly difficult.

Changes to the rural miniature

The incorporation of Jewish traditional music into art music composition by the middleof the 1920s began to depend more and more on the study of folk songs recalled byJewish immigrants newly settled in New York and other American cities, in Palestineand elsewhere. Distance from the original ethnographic sources in Eastern Europemeant that composers had to depend on old research or on increasingly unreliablememories of life in the Old Country. New influences and the pull to assimilationinevitably altered and transformed the relationship of these immigrant Jews to theirformer homelands, their shared Yiddish language and each other.

For younger audiences without direct experience of Eastern Europe, their limitedknowledge of Eastern European Jewish tradition brought a different, more mediatedperspective to the reception of Jewish rural miniatures. These deracinated, often naïvelisteners were more likely to believe in the purported literal authenticity of the works,implied by their realist representational mode and by the literature provided in theaccompanying concert and record programmes, even as the works became less accurateand more inventive in their portrayal of rural tradition. Authenticity and realism thusremained aesthetic goals for many of the musicians involved in the genre of the ruralminiature, although their creations would become increasingly fictional, sentimentaland divorced from ethnographic research.

Over time, as the Society disbanded and its members emigrated, the ethnographiccomponent of the rural miniature clearly became less vital, so that by 1932 Achron, anearly pioneer of the quotation of Jewish traditional songs and dances and their display inprinted scores of new works, fabricated “folk music” in his Stempenyu Suite; its threemovements, “Stempenyu Plays”, “Sher” and “Freilachs”, were invented by Achron onthe model of the conventional structures and harmonies of Jewish traditional music hehad studied, rather than on actual pre-existing melodies. As a result of emigration andthe disappointed realization on the part of many composers that it would be impossibleto revive and refresh rural Eastern European Jewish life through musical practice as theyhad hoped to do, much of the ideological fervour of the original members of the Society



for Jewish Folk Music was replaced with nostalgia as they created increasingly fictional-ized depictions of musical traditions in later folk music settings.

As Jewish artists working in various media moved throughout the diaspora, theirdepictions of traditional Jewish culture frequently featured representations of the shtetland Palestine as largely idealized locations. In the paintings of Marc Chagall, the storiesof Sholem Aleichem, the films of the American cinema producer Joseph Green, andeven a fair amount of ethnographic writing, the shtetl became what Benedict Andersonterms an “imagined community”, a fictional locus representing Eastern European Jewryat large, and characterized by a robust sense of fraternity and unity between its Jewishinhabitants.36 The rural miniature, similarly, functioned as a means of representing arefashioned, nationalist, and nostalgic past way of life in the shtetls of Yiddishland, and,returning to the biblical Urtext, in Palestine.

David Roskies discusses the way in which nostalgia influenced representations of theshtetl in the works of Jewish artists: “At the end of the road, the shtetl would emerge notonly as one of the greatest inventions of the Jewish literary imagination but also as a keyto modern Jewish self-understanding.”37 Indeed, even artists born in Jewish villageswho had moved to urban areas began nostalgically to represent the shtetl as it never trulyexisted. Roskies characterizes the changing image of the shtetl over the first decades ofthe twentieth century: it was invoked “as the ghetto-existence best left behind; as theJewish body politic under siege; as the idealized Heimat, the local Old Countryhomeland, arrested in time; as paradise lost; and finally, as the staging ground for Jewishmass martyrdom”.38

The alterations to the rural miniature over the decades are evident not only in thecomposition of new works in the genre but in novel methods of transmission of the earlyrural miniatures as well. The first performances of early works in the genre often tookplace in concerts hosted by the Society. The function of these concerts was largely peda-gogical, meant to spread knowledge of Jewish folk music while promoting the new move-ment of Jewish art music. Over time, as the works came to be performed increasinglyaround the world in a variety of contexts, including major concert venues, their obviousties to ethnographic research often became less apparent. The following case study ofthe history of performances of Achron’s “Hebrew Melody” and its incorporation into avariety of artistic media demonstrates the changes the rural miniature underwent duringthe first four decades of the twentieth century, from a genre associated with ethnographicresearch to one characterized by nostalgia, sentimentality and in some cases propaganda.

“Hebrew Melody”

“Hebrew Melody” was one of the most popular of the seminal rural miniatures based onJewish traditional folk music. It opens with a simple arrangement of the original Hassidicmelody that Achron recalled hearing in a Warsaw synagogue during his childhood. Amiddle passage follows, in which Achron uses rising volume and pitch levels to buildexcitement; this culminates in an extended cadenza, a pseudo-improvisational solo forthe violin. The final portion of the work marks a return to the opening material,followed by a passage of dreamlike trills and turns that rise upward in pitch and becomeever quieter. “Hebrew Melody” ends with a final repetition of the end of the originalHassidic melody, played slowly on the violin’s lowest string.



“Hebrew Melody” appeared in at least four printed editions between its composi-tion in 1911 and the year 1933. It was first released in 1914 by the Society’s printingpress, followed by new editions by the violinist Efrem Zimbalist, published in 1918 byG. Schirmer; Leopold Auer, Achron’s violin teacher at the St. Petersburg Conserva-tory, published in 1921 by Carl Fischer; and Jascha Heifetz, another violinist in Auer’sstudio, published in 1933, again by Carl Fischer. At first, “Hebrew Melody” wasfrequently performed during lecture recitals arranged by the Society for Jewish FolkMusic and the Moscow Society for Jewish Music.39 In a late example, a 1922 concertprogramme of the Moscow Society for Jewish Music opened with a lecture on Jewishmusic making by Joel Engel, and included performances of Lieder and rural miniaturesby Krein, Engel, Milner and Gnessin, as well as Achron’s “Hebrew Melody”.

In other performances beginning in the 1920s, “Hebrew Melody” often came to bestripped of its original associations with the ethnographic accomplishments of theSociety for Jewish Folk Music, and even with its source melody. Professional violinistssuch as Jascha Heifetz soon brought the work to international audiences in concerts thatfeatured Classical and Baroque works, and rural miniatures representing a host of differ-ent traditional musical cultures. In the 1920s, the work appeared on Heifetz’sprogrammes throughout the world, including concerts in 1923 in Tokyo and Osaka; inRiga in 1926; in Paris, elsewhere in Western Europe and in Sydney in 1927; and in NewYork’s Carnegie Hall in 1929.40 In a 1920 recital in Orchestra Hall in Chicago, Heifetzperformed “Hebrew Melody” and “Hebrew Dance” alongside such disparate repertoireas Tomaso Vitali’s “Chaconne”, Bedøich Smetana’s “Aus der Heimat” and Pablo de Sara-sate’s “Habanera” and “Malaguena”, rural miniatures based on Spanish dances.41

“Hebrew Melody” was included on eclectic recordings by Heifetz, Ida Haendel, JosephHassid, Mischa Elman and other prominent musicians on a variety of record labels.Interested readers could find reviews of performances and recordings of “HebrewMelody” in newspapers and magazines.

Further attenuating its connection with its ethnographic origins, “Hebrew Melody”was featured as the soundtrack in the 1935 film Hebrew Melody, created by a Berlin-basedproduction company in 1935. Hebrew Melody was filmed in Jerusalem’s Old Town andthe surrounding hillside in the winter of 1934–35. In this film, the subject of the compo-sition no longer appears to be the traditional music of the Eastern European diaspora,specifically Hassidic and Ashkenazic. Instead, it comes to represent the political cause ofthe creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and the sentimentality Jerusalem’s land-scape inspires. As George Steinmetz has shown in “The Uncontrollable Afterlives ofEthnography”, it was not uncommon during the first half of the twentieth century forartists and politicians to adopt the research of ethnographers in order to promote newpolicies and political aims.42 Indeed, beginning in the 1930s, the data compiled byethnographers, and the compositions written by musicians who were members of theSociety for Jewish Folk Music, were frequently recycled in art conveying Zionistmessages, despite the initial adherence of many of these ethnographers and composersto diaspora nationalist and Yiddishist movements that were often anti-Zionist, rejectingthe goal of recreating a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

In the film, the eponymous Hebrew melody of Achron’s duet is not the originalHebrew song by an Eastern European Hassid, but an anthem of the Hebrew home-land itself, heard in the mythic, Biblical landscape, not in the Warsaw synagogueAchron’s visited as a youth. The director of Hebrew Melody, Helmar Lersky, and the



cinematographer, Walter Kristeller, were both German Zionists who had settled inPalestine around 1933.43 The film features the Jewish violinist Andreas Weißgerber,a former child prodigy born in 1900 in a small Jewish town near Chernowitz,Ukraine. The filmmakers worked under the auspices of the Jüdischer Kulturbund,which had been initiated in 1933 by the recently elected National Socialist party, asan institution under which Jews could form a ghettoized cultural life, with Jewishorchestras, publishing presses, theatres and so on.44

Hebrew Melody combines the techniques of documentary filmmaking with musicalnationalism in its illustration of Palestine as the Jewish homeland. In the spirit of traveldocumentary and ethnography, the producers filmed Hebrew Melody with the aim ofbringing images of distant Palestine home to curious viewers in Germany. At the startof the film, Weißgerber explores the urban Jerusalem market place and then travels bycar to the countryside. There he is inspired, by the steep rocks, the sight of the ruralfarmhands and the view of Jerusalem in the background, to perform “Hebrew Melody”.Achron’s slow and elegiac rendering of a traditional religious song that he heard longbefore in a Warsaw synagogue becomes anchored in the legendary Jewish Holy Land.Weißgerber performs the work as though it is a spontaneous act of spiritual inspiration;indeed, the music seems to emanate from the landscape. He puts the bow to the stringsin a grand upward gesture and begins to perform, accompanied by the invisibleorchestra, at an extremely slow tempo. He plays a dramatic rubato, slowing down andspeeding up expressively at will, and finally settling on an unstable, slowly lilting tempo.When he reaches the cadenza, his extended solo improvisation on the theme, the screenturns black for a moment and a shot fades in showing only his fingers on the neck of theviolin, as if to indicate that in the heat of his passionate playing Weißgerber has lostconsciousness; disembodied from his rational mind, his fingers flail wildly on the violin,seemingly expressing Weißgerber’s most “real” feelings. In the manner of photographicpropaganda, Hebrew Melody is meant to advertise a nostalgic and idyllic location, aremnant of the origins of Jewish culture in a far distant past, transported now into a newlandscape.

Achron’s “Hebrew Melody” was also transformed, although in a different way, byperformers in America, where it was arranged twice as popular songs. One version,written by Achron’s wife Marie Rap-hoph for the Russian singer Nina Koshetz, waspublished in 1929 in a sheet music edition released by Carl Fischer, with lyrics inEnglish, Yiddish, Russian and German. Each verse of this song repeats the line “Oldenmelodies return / Floating softly over hearts that burn.” In sentimental and nostalgiclanguage, these “olden melodies” are associated with “wails of the lowly / sayings mostholy”, “Israel’s pain” and a “folk’s long-buried pride”. In the B section of the work, theZionist goal becomes apparent, as the lyrics explain that these traditional melodies incitethe yearning for a Jewish Holy Land: “The nobility in every soul / And the love forZion’s sacred goal / Within me rise / Till the tears come blinding to my eyes.”

In Rap-hoph’s version of the song, the ethnographic research of Eastern EuropeanJewish folklore conducted by the Society for Jewish Folk Music has given way to senti-mental expressions of Zionism. Another popular song, adapted for the Jewish singerSeymour Rechtzeit, offers a similar diaspora anthem about an exile’s longing nostalgiafor what Rechtzeit refers to as the “far-off East” (“vayten mizrekh”), the Holy Land inPalestine. Rechtzeit recorded the song with Abraham Ellstein’s orchestra, on a 78-rpmdisk (the B side featured a song written to the melody of Pablo Sarasate’s work inspired



by Roma traditional music, “Zigeunerweisen”). The recording was produced by BannerRecords (catalogue number B-519); the precise date is unknown, but it appears to befrom the 1940s, as Rechtzeit co-founded Banner Records with Victor Selzman duringthat decade. This arrangement features melodramatic lyrics expressing a call to returnto the Israel he has lost:

Klangen, es heren zikhfun vayten mizrekh dortKlangen ayngehilt in a benkshaftMit libe fun a harts vos benkt.Hert zikh a vider kol,Kum tsurik tsu yene molVi di uves fun amol.Zeyer oysres hoben uns geshenkt…Sheyden fun diriz geven zeyr shver,mit dir tsu zanyiz geven mayn tsiel, mayn beger…Lozen vel ikh dikh nit,Sheyne kale fun Yisroel.

(Sounds are heard,From far-off East, there,Sounds enveloped in yearningWith love from a heart that yearns.An echo is heard,Come back from that time,When the ancestors from once-upon-a-timeGave us their treasures.…Parting from youwas very difficult,being with you/ was my goal, my desire.…I wont leave you,Lovely bride of Israel.)45

The Hebrew melody of the title is a sound that emanates from this distant space, andembodies the artistic theme of Jewish yearning for the biblical homeland; it reminds thesinger of Israel, referred to as the bride that he was forced, with great difficulty, to leavebehind as he moved away in exile and now has as his goal and desire to recover.

While the lyrics of Rechtzeit’s version of “Hebrew Melody” convey the fictionalidealization of Palestine through the extended trope of Israel as a lost bride, the song’sorchestral accompaniment features an ensemble of piano and multiple string and windinstruments, performing in a style resembling both the idioms of European RomanticLieder and American Tin Pan Alley. A solo violinist, playing a sentimental version of theoriginal violin part, can be heard over the orchestra. The violin plays high-pitched,poignant trills as Rechtzeit sings the closing line about his “bride”. It seems there was nointerest in setting the original Hassidic text—or indeed an Eastern European religious



text at all—to this work in which Achron had initially intended to represent particularHassidic Jewish religious traditions.

The melody of Achron’s rural miniature takes on an ambivalent symbolism inRechtzeit’s version with Ellstein’s accompaniment, as it becomes “assimilated” to itsnew musical context, attuned to the jazz rhythms of the New World. Rechtzeit’s songbecomes a nostalgic emblem of the idealized Jewish homeland, but also, by incorporat-ing American jazz techniques in the band arrangement, embodies the change and assim-ilation undergone by Jews and their artistic creations during their resettlement in thediaspora during this period. Rechtzeit’s rendition of “Hebrew Melody” thus representsboth the nostalgia and yearning for a Jewish nation tied to a specific, ancient land, andthe effects of cultural assimilation and appropriation caused by emigration to the NewWorld.

Finally, in perhaps the strangest turn, “Hebrew Melody” appeared in an adaptationeven more alien to its origins than the Zionist landscape or Rap-hoph’s and Rechtzeit’spopular song renditions. It became part of the concert and recording repertoire of ClaraRockmore, a one-time child prodigy on violin and student of Leopold Auer, on theinstrument on which she made her career during and after the 1920s, the theremin.Leon Theremin, born in St. Petersburg, was a scientist and inventor who created theeponymous musical innovation, an electronic device that is performed with subtlemotions made by the hands as they hover over electrified metal rods. At Theremin’sAmerican debut of his instrument, the poster advertised “Music from the ether …produced by free movement of hands in the air.”46 Indeed, since its inception, the ther-emin was typically associated with the ether, the ethereal, ghosts and the subconscious,due to its wailing, eerie timbres and the technique by which one performs the instru-ment, which requires the musician to stand still and unmoving and subtly shift hands andfingers in the air above the contraption. The theremin is most frequently heard in scoresof science fiction and horror films, for instance, famously, Miklós Rózsa’s score toAlfred Hitchcock’s “Spellbound”, in which the instrument’s vibrating timbres accom-pany the beginning of Gregory Peck’s character’s subconscious dream (staged by thesurrealist Salvator Dalí).

Rockmore performed “Hebrew Melody” for a recording made in 1977 by RobertMoog, inventor of the Moog synthesizer. As she plays it on the theremin, “HebrewMelody” sounds otherworldly. In Rockmore’s hands, the piece, originally a realist workclosely associated with the scientific practice of musical ethnography, is transformedinto a distant, ethereal voice conjured by a novel electronic instrument. In an extantvideo recording of her performance of the work, Rockmore appears to be in a trance asshe plays, as though presiding over a séance. She wears her hair up in a metallic head-band, suggesting the garb of a medium, and her eyes are half-open in a hypnotic-likestate. In the context of well-known associations between the theremin and the “musicof the ether”, and its use in film to signify ghosts and the subconscious, the timbres ofher performance evoke a sound emanating from a mystical, distant time and place.

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett explains that for many Jews in the diaspora who consideredassimilating to the dominant cultures in their new homes, news of the destruction toJewish communities in Eastern Europe wrought by World War II created new feelingsof loyalty towards the places they and their families had come from: “It was one thing toreject East European Jewish culture while it was still flourishing on the other side of theocean. But once the living communities that sustained that way of life were exterminated,



ambivalence towards the world they had created became a desecration of theirmemory.”47 As a result, many authors and artists created works that memorializedEastern European culture and even, as Rockmore seems to simulate in her performance,attempted metaphorically to conjure the spirits of the dead. Maurice Samuel, forinstance, describes his 1943 book The World of Sholom Aleichem as “an exercise in necro-mancy, or calling up the dead”.48 In a strange twist on Achron’s 1911 composition, thecomposer’s attempt to evoke the soul of the Jewish people has been literalized in thedecades after World War II: Rockmore appears to commune directly with the spirits ofthe dead.

In his 1934 text Music of the Ghetto and the Bible, Lazare Saminsky, a former memberof the Society for Jewish Folk Music, by this point living in New York, asserts, “Theemotional tonus of the Jewish composer is marked by his tragic position, one bestdefined as singing the song of Zion in exile.”49 Saminsky, like Achron, had earlier in hiscareer composed a number of rural miniatures for chamber ensembles. As Nazism andother forms of anti-Semitism forced Jewish composers and performers into exile tomove throughout the diaspora, this genre of music produced by the original membersof the Society for Jewish Folk Music adopted a changing role in composers’ andperformers’ activities to protect Jewish folk culture in Eastern Europe. Objectivity andthe relationship to ethnography gave way to nostalgia and propaganda, as artistsintroduced works into other media and musical genres. In their new contexts, many ofthese works, such as “Hebrew Melody”, were transformed from quasi-objective repre-sentations of ethnographic discoveries, into vehicles promoting the effort to create analternate Jewish homeland in Palestine, nostalgic pining for the “Old World” recentlyleft behind, and even the metaphoric act of conjuring ghostly impressions of a disappear-ing culture.

Notes

1. David Assaf defines the shtetl as “a physical enclave represented by hundreds of smalland midsized towns in Eastern Europe whose Jewish character was in clear evidence”.Assaf, Journey to a Nineteenth-Century Shtetl, 20.

2. Sabaneev, “The Jewish National School”, 448–468.3. Bartók’s rural miniatures include Romanian Folk Dances, Romanian Christmas Carols, and

Sonatina, all of which he composed in 1915. Bartók conducted extensive fieldworkinto villages in Hungary, Transylvania, Slovakia and elsewhere; in composing ruralminiatures, one of Bartók’s chief goals, which he shared with Jewish composers work-ing in the genre, was to introduce Central and Eastern European folk songs and dancesinto the art music tradition, in a way that preserved and highlighted the distinct musi-cal idioms out of which they emerged.

4. Stewart, On Longing, 147.5. Ibid., 135.6. Dundes, Interpreting Folklore, 2.7. Herder, Essay on the Origin of Language.8. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Folklore’s Crisis”, 300.9. Abrahams, “Phantoms of Romantic Nationalism”, 11.

10. Idelsohn, Jewish Music in Its Historical Development. The text of a private letter in whichBruch explains the source of the melody he uses in his concerto appears on page 513.



11. Ibid., 466.12. Ibid., 466.13. Ibid., 468.14. Stein,“Faces of Protest”, 734. Stein investigates the ways in which Jews after the

Revolution took advantage of their newfound freedom of press and cultural expres-sion, by publishing political cartoons in the Yiddish-language periodical Dos lebn (Life).The history of Jewish participation in and reaction to the Revolution can be found inFrankel, Prophecy and Politics: Socialism.

15. A history of the impact of the 1905 Revolution on the Russian Jewish cultural produc-tion and the use of the Yiddish language can be found in Fishman, The Rise of ModernYiddish Culture.

16. Abrahams, “Phantoms of Romantic Nationalism”, 18.17. Nemtsov, Die Neue Jüdische Schule in der Musik, 35–6.18. Sholokhova, “Jewish Musical Ethnography”, 221.19. Ibid., 222.20. Petrovsky-Shtern, “We Are Too Late”, 97.21. Zemtsovsky, “The Musical Strands”, 207–8. Some of the musical material gathered

during this field work was notated and published in the 1930s by Moshe Beregovski.See Beregovski, Old Jewish Folk Music.

22. Quoted in Kahn, “The Solomon Rosowsky Collection”, 221. My translation.“Schaffen wir es, unsere Kultur lebendig zu machen, werden wir leben, schaffen wires nicht, werden wir uns quälen bis zum Tode. Einen fremden Kopf und ein fremdesHerz wird uns kein Chirurg annähen können. … Ich habe jetzt den Plan … dass dieJüd[ische] ethn[ographische] Ges[ellschaft] mich schickt, … jüdische Volklieder,Sprichwörter, Märchen, Sprüche, kurzum die Volkskunst zu sammeln. Wenn esklappt, würde ich mich gern den Rest meines Lebens damit beschäftigen”. Nemtsov,Neue Jüdische Schule, 36.

23. Quoted in the opening epigraph, Gottesman, Defining the Yiddish Nation.24. All translations from Yiddish are mine, unless otherwise noted. Original text in

Russian, translated in this edition into Yiddish. “…di psikhik fun a folk … di meynun-gen, derinerungen, hofenungen fun dem oder yenem folk, di togteglekhe baderfenishnun di batsiung tsu di arumike dersheynungen.” Ginzburg and Marek, Yiddish Folksongsin Russia, 25. All Romanization from Yiddish throughout this article is conductedaccording to the YIVO orthography.

25. Cahan, Studies in Yiddish Folklore, 11. “An ekht folkslid … iz funem folk gufe geshafngevorn, un deriber drikt es oykh oys in a natirlekher, nisht-gekintslter forem zaynalgemeynem kharakter un shpiglt op di farborgnste vinkelekh fun der kolektiver folks-neshome. An ekht folks-lid ken nisht geleyent, retsitirt oder deklamirt vern; es muznor gezungen vern, vayl es iz tsuzamengevaksn mit der melodie vi guf un neshome,vos kenen eyns on dos andere nisht eksistirn.”

26. “Dos alts flantsn ayn in kinds hartsn a libe tsum folk.” Kiselgof, Lider-zamelbukh far derYidisher shul un familie.

27. Nemtsov, Neue Jüdische Schule, 47.28. Ibid., 46.29. Examples of invented musical traditions include the composition of national anthems.

Hobsbawm and Ranger, The Invention of Tradition.30. For the past half-century, the most useful musicological texts on the history of the

Society for Jewish Folk Music and its members have been Weisser, The ModernRenaissance of Jewish Music, and Gradenwitz, The Music of Israel, originally published in



1949 as The Music of Israel: Its Rise and Growth Through 5000 Years. More recently, JaschaNemtsov has provided a detailed history with reference to a host of primary sourcesin Die Neue Jüdische Schule in der Musik, and Klára Móricz writes on the subject in JewishIdentities: Nationalism, Racism, and Utopianism in Twentieth-Century Music.

31. Pamphlet, Jewish Music Societies Collection, Center for Jewish History. “Funfervaltung fun der gezelshaft far yudishe folks-muzik. In der tsayt, ven baymyudishen folk dervekt zikh der natsionaler bevustzayn, velkher drikt zikh oys in demgroysen interes tsu alts, vos vert oyfgeton oyf dem gebit fun der yudisher kultur,ken, fershteyt zikh, nit blayben on oyfmerkzamkayt di yudishe kunst, un in derershter reyhe di yudishe muzik. Di yudishe folks-lid, velkhe shpigelt in zikh sharf obdi shtimungen un iberlebungen, di leyden un freyden fun”m yudishen folk, muzerlernt veren oyfn ergsten oyfn. Di gezelshaft far yudishe folks-muzik, velkhe shteltzikh als tsil mitvirken der entviklung fun der yudisher folks-muzik, hot fun onhoib irtetigkayt fernumen zikh mit zamlen folks motiven un kinstlerish bearbayten zey.Yetst hot di gezelshaft aroysgegeben di ershte serie yudishe folks-lider. Zayendigibertsaygt, az zi befriedigt a noytige lebens-bederfnish, hot di gezelshaft zikh nitobgeshtelt far keyne shverigkayten un shterungen. Di fervaltung fun gezelshaft faryudishe folks-muzik ruft tsu alemen, vemen s’zenen tayer di interesen fun yuden-tum mit ale meglikhkayten mitsuvirken—fershpreyten di lider, velkhe di gezelshafthot aroysgegeben. Oyf di yudishe muzikalishe ovenden, in der yudisher shul,familie—umedum darf zikh heren di yudishe folks-lid un farnemen ir pasenden ort.Der erfolkg fun der vayterdiger tetigkayt fun der gezelshaft in derzelber rikhtung,vend zikh yetst nur on dem obklang, velkhen s’vet gefinen der ershter ferzukh.”Jewish Music Societies Collection.

32. Kahn, “The Solomon Rosowsky Collection”, 51.33. Ibid., 52.34. The publication history of the Society is printed in Kopytowa, “Veröffentlichungen

der ‘Gesellschaft für jüdische Volksmusik’ St. Petersburg/Petrograd”, 123–7. Thepublication history of Jibneh can be found in Nemtsov, Neue Jüdische Schule, 241–5.

35. A detailed history of Juwal and Jibneh appears in Nemtsov, Neue Jüdische Schule.36. Anderson, Imagined Communities. See, for instance, Chagall’s 1921 mural Introduction

to the Jewish Theater; Sholem Aleichem’s 1888 novel Stempenyu: Mayn ershter yidisherroman (Stempenyu: My First Yiddish Novel); and Green’s 1936 film musical Yidl mitn fidl.

37. Roskies, The Jewish Search for a Usable Past, 44. Recently, a number of scholars havewritten about the sociology of Eastern European Jewish villages at the turn of thecentury. Examples include David Assaf’s introduction to Journey to a Nineteenth-Century Shtetl; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Introduction”; Roskies, Jewish Search; andselected essays in Estraikh and Krutikov, The Shtetl: Image and Reality.

38. Roskies, Jewish Search, 43. This ideological evolution reached a pinnacle after WorldWar II, when authors, intent on resuscitating what had been destroyed before theireyes, wrote about the shtetl. In Life Is With People, Zborowski and Herzog declare: “Thesmall-town Jewish community of Eastern Europe—the shtetl—traces its line of marchdirectly back to Creation. The Exodus from Egypt, the giving of the Law on MountSinai, are seen as steps along the way, historical events no less real than the SpanishInquisition or the Russian Revolution.” Zborowski and Herzog, Life Is With People, 29.

39. See reproduction in Nemtsov, Neue Jüdische Schule, 91.40. Programmes of these concerts are kept in the Jascha Heifetz Collection, Music

Division, Library of Congress, Boxes 218-20.41. Jascha Heifetz Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress, Box 218, Folder 6.



42. George Steinmetz explores a different way in which ethnographic research was reusedfor political purposes, its appropriation by colonial governments. Steinmetz, George.“The Uncontrollable Afterlives of Ethnography”, 251–288.

43. Bergmeier, Eisler, and Lotz, Vorbei—Beyond Recall, 389.44. Bohlman, “Music, Modernity, and the Foreign in New Germany”, 128. The Kultur-

bund is discussed in detail in Bergmeier, Eisler and Lotz, Vorbei—Beyond Recall, acompilation including a book, compact disks of the music of the Kulturbund, and aDVD recording of the film Hebrew Melody. Bohlman also discusses art productionunder the Jüdischer Kulturbund in “Musik als Widerstand”, 49–74.

45. I am grateful to Judith Schelly for her help with this transcription from the originalrecording. The lyrics are difficult to discern definitively due to the deterioratedquality of the few surviving copies of the record.

46. Poster reproduced in Glinsky, Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage.47. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Introduction”, xi.48. Quoted in Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Introduction”, xi.49. Saminsky, Music of the Ghetto, 137: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea,

we wept, when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in themidst thereof. For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; andthey that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. Howshall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” (King James version.)

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Joshua S. Walden is a Junior Research Fellow at Merton College, University of Oxford.He earned his PhD from Columbia University and his AB at the University of California atBerkeley. He has published essays and reviews in the Journal of Musicological Research,Genre in Eighteenth-Century Music, Current Musicology, and the Journal of Jewish Identi-ties and has a forthcoming article in Musical Quarterly. He has performed as a violinist inNew York, Oxford and the San Francisco Bay Area. Address: Merton College, MertonStreet, Oxford, OX1 4JD. Email: [email protected]


Music of the "Folks-Neshome": "Hebrew Melody" and Changing Musical Representations of Jewish Culture...

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