“Barucaba” as an Emblem for Jewishness in Early Italian Art Music

The expression “barukh ha-ba,” with its various continuations, has a fixed place in Jewish prayer and everyday Hebrew. It will be argued that the frequency of its usage tends to mark it, for non-Jewish hearers, as a typological label for Judaism. The operability of this proposition can be tested upon Italian art music from the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries, with an extension into the nineteenth, more specifically in works that not only integrate “barukh haba” alias the Italianate barucaba into their text and music but feature Jews in their subject matter, the so-called ebraiche (of which some ten or so survive). Three ebraiche in particular demonstrate how barucaba, along with, and reinforced by, a number of other Hebraisms (some of them genuine, others concocted as Hebrew mumbo-jumbo), was purposely employed as an indication of ethnic and cultural alterity in their poetico-musical composition and would vicariously have been heard as such in their performance. Barucaba joins the ranks of other labels drawn from Jewish social or behavioral customs and functioning similarly to designate the Jews as an alien subgroup within a Christian majority. The conceptual apparatus needed for its apperception as a signifier for Jewishness will be discussed, as will the gradual breakdown of the same apparatus in the nineteenth century under changing socio-economic conditions.