Music in Jewish History and Culture (review)

"What is Jewish Music?" This key question opening a door into the impossible—one cannot afford to ignore the question in such a book, nor can one answer it with adequate clarity or consistency—is the subtitle of the "Prelude" that precedes the first chapter of Emanuel Rubin and John Baron's Music in Jewish History and Culture (p. xxiii). This author is tempted to answer willy-nilly: What is Jewish music? Defined by whom? The ancient Israelites? A late Renaissance Italian Jew like Salamone Rossi? A romantic composer like Meyerbeer? Or, perhaps, Meyerbeer's protégé, Wagner (when he published his "scurrilous" Das Judentum in der Musik by way of a psychological patricide in 1850, p. 336), Mussorgsky ("on his tombstone Mussorgsky requested Jewish music," p. 230), or Schoenberg (whose "Jewish works are political and religious statements of a Jew to the Christian world," p. 217)? As defined by a Moroccan or Iraqi Jewish audience in Israel? Or, perhaps, Jewish music as defined by "the ethnomusicologist"?

Although Rubin and Baron state that one cannot answer this question as it is posed, their ultimate answer is thought-provoking nonetheless: "Jewish music is music that serves Jewish purposes ... any music having a Jewish purpose can be said to be Jewish music" (p. xxvi). This characterization of Jewish music subsequently informs and colors the remainder of the book. Had the authors left the question unanswered as they had first proposed, and instead suggested their conclusion as a working definition—one used only to outline the boundaries of the volume—it would have saved them from some uneasy (I dare say, awkward), assertions that they make as the text unfolds.

Consider the discussion on Felix Mendelssohn, who "can hardly be part of the history of Jewish music through his own compositions.... Nonetheless Mendelssohn is part of the history of Jewish music not only because he was the grandson of the most important maskil [an enlightened Jew, who embraced the Enlightenment as interpreted within the Jewish community] in Jewish history, but because he inspired countless Jewish youth throughout the nineteenth century to become musicians, some of whom remained Jewish and devoted their talents specifically to Jewish music" (p. 209). Mendelssohn's music is not Jewish, so the authors imply. Nonetheless, they also state, "[t]he Mendelssohn sound—a mixture of 1830s Biedermeier harmony with the sentimentalism of the period—became the ideal for the German reformers inside the synagogue (Louis Lewandowski's music is the most well-known), and once accepted there it became the new sound of Jewish music wherever it was performed" (p. 211). Self-contradicting? Perhaps, but reasonably so. Ideas that might contribute to a better understanding of Mendelssohn's case can be found in literature that seems far removed from the study of Jewish music, but is still highly relevant. Such are, for instance, the core writings on constructing cultural identity, both published in 1983: Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger's The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) and Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities (London: Verso). These, with more recent contributions to the topic, facilitate a very different perspective. Mendelssohn did not continue a Jewish musical tradition; rather, he created one—at his time (sadly, also today), an unforgivable sin in terms of orthodox Judaism, where preservation, not creation, is the defining norm.

Another case in point is Gustav Mahler's music. Rubin and Baron assert that "Mahler's relationship to his Judaism was essentially negative, and there is nothing Jewish about his compositions.... That he was born Jewish in an anti-Semitic world became a thorn in his side" (p. 214). Reading the one page the authors allocate for Mahler, one wishes that they would have slightly diverted from both their confining definition of Jewish music and their positivistic-informational-taxonomic style, and acknowledged the growing scholarship about Mahler as a...