Introduction

He only knows that ever since his infancy he yearned for a fiddle and would gladly sacrifice all he has to play it. And, as if fate would wish to tease him, he always found himself in a world of song and music, among ḥazanim and musicians.

sholem aleichem, Funem yarid

Most young boys of well-to-do families studied the violin but my father remained adamant. 'What sort of vocation is that for a Jewish boy?'

sholem aleichem, Tsu mayn biografie

Musical Imagery fills the pages of the Bible. The Bible bursts with song and music. Two-thirds of the psalms make mention of music explicitly. Throughout the Bible, the angels in heaven are described as praising God in song. David, the great king of Israel, was a musician. Joy is expressed in song. Triumph is expressed in song. Sorrow is expressed in musical terms, as in Job 30: 31: 'My harp is tuned for mourning, my flute to the sound of weepers.' For all that, rabbinical attitudes towards music and music-making from the talmudic period through to modernity were essentially that music was banal and frivolous at best and at worst sinful. Based on a passage in BT Gitin (7a), the rabbinical distaste for music began with an outright ban after the destruction of the Second Temple as a sign of mourning. In tractate Sotah (48a), it was actually hostile: 'Rav said, "The ear that listens to music should be torn off."' However, rabbinical attitudes softened somewhat when it came to weddings. Moses Isserles wrote that for religious purposes, such as at a wedding, all music is permitted, and a generation later the Italian rabbi Leone da Modena clearly believed this applied to festivals as well, based on the verse, 'and on the day of your rejoicing and your appointed seasons' (Num. 10: 10).

Nevertheless, Jewish thought on music remained divided. Music was always popular with the masses, while rabbis were quick to excoriate cantors and klezmer musicians for what they viewed as vanity and showmanship. Musicians were not seen as being religiously strict enough, an attitude reflected in the I. L. Peretz short story 'A Musician's Death', in which the wife of the dying klezmer musician scolds her sons saying 'You play at the balls of the Gentiles, you eat their bread and butter and God knows what else!' When the musician finally prepares to die, he is offered a quorum of ten men, a minyan, so that he may properly confess his sins. The musician refuses the offer. '"There is no need," the sick man protested. "Why do I need a minyan? I have my own minyan—my band!"'

This volume of Polin has as its theme 'Jews and Music-Making in the Polish Lands'. As elsewhere in Europe, musicians of Jewish origin produced an astonishing variety of music of all genres and styles. However, this important phenomenon has been largely eclipsed by the attention paid to the role of Jews in musical life in the German-speaking lands and western Europe. In this area valuable research has been undertaken on the notorious Wagnerian polemic 'Das Judenthum in der Musik'¹ and its many echoes on the part of music in the Jewish national revival, on music as an aspect of Jewish popular culture, and on specific studies of composers who self-identified as Jews or had Jewish antecedents. Reviewing the large body of scholarship that has resulted, Philip Bohlman claimed that 'the contemporary dilemma confronting the modern study of Jewish music [is] that it has become a field trapped in a discursive space between Jewish Studies, cultural studies, and the anthropology of music'.² This is certainly an accurate description of the problems involved in the research on this topic. However, we see the dilemma he identifies as an opportunity to examine the different aspects of Jewish musical life in the Polish lands from a multidisciplinary and transnational perspective. What we have attempted to do is not to define what may well be undefinable—Jewish music—but rather to explore the activities and creativity...