Musical Afterthoughts on Shmeruk's 'Mayufes'

In his compelling chapter 'Mayufes: A Window on Polish–Jewish Relations' published in these pages several years ago, the late historian Chone Shmeruk identified the obscure song-and-dance genre majufes as a sociological phenomenon unique to the Polish Jewish experience.¹ Drawing on an array of mostly literary sources, Shmeruk recounted the pedigree of majufes. It began as 'Mah yafit', a 'table-zemer' sung by religious Jews during the sabbath meal. Its text, composed in thirteenth-century Provence, begins with the Hebrew phrase mah yafit (ma yufes in central Polish Yiddish), meaning 'how beautiful'. The poem itself is a paean to food and wine and the commandment to sing and sound instruments to honour God's beneficence.²

Generations of Jews delighted in the celebratory verses of 'Mah yafit' as an ideal accompaniment to Friday evening's courses of fish and meat, but, as Shmeruk pointed out, 'it was not the original text that [would attract] the interest of the Polish public'. It was the tune, or perhaps the hasidic manner of intoning it, that by the early nineteenth century began to strike Poles as exotic, quaint, and even comical. With time, the modest 'Mah yafit' became fixed in most Polish minds—and, for that matter, many Jewish minds—as the arch-stereotype of Jewish music, the anthem of the Jew as an object of ridicule, known in Polish and Yiddish as majufes. Polish landowners, as part of an evening's entertainment, would summon 'their Jews'—those living on their lands—to the manor house for a command performance of majufes. And the Jews, coerced and humiliated, complied, playing out for their aristocratic landlords a travesty of a devout song accompanied by extemporaneous choreography and extravagant hand gestures: the 'majufes dance'. In time, this upper-class diversion made its way into society's less advantaged strata, where Żydek, the ubiquitous 'little Jew' of Polish folk theatrics (always portrayed by a non-Jew in costume), soon embellished his routines with song-and- dance descendants of 'Mah yafit'.³

At the heart of his chapter, Shmeruk contrasts Polish conceptions of majufes with the Jewish understanding of the term. Citing literary, journalistic, and reference works in Polish, Yiddish, and Hebrew, Shmeruk concludes that '[non-Jewish Polish sources] do not reveal that mayufes represented a traumatic experience for Polish Jewry. As far as Jews were concerned, mayufes lost its original meaning as the name of a Sabbath song and was redefined in response to its Polish usage. Within the Jewish world, mayufes became a term for toadying or coerced conformity to the expectations of Polish gentry.'⁴

Indeed, Shmeruk points to the Yiddish word mayufesnik, a nineteenth-century coinage designating a type of Jew who abases himself before non-Jews. Jewish identification of majufes with, on the one hand, servility and on the other, ridicule, eventually caused the song to be expunged from the working repertoire of sabbath hymns, and in Ashkenazi communities worldwide it is no longer heard in its original context. Yet the negative resonance of majufes for Polish Jews and its comic overtones for non-Jewish Poles ensured its place in the parlance of both Yiddish and Polish speakers throughout much of the twentieth century. Shmeruk's literary explorations present a wealth of intriguing facts and bring to light an array of fascinating themes. Still, they raise a basic question: what did majufes music sound like?

Majufes and musical caricature

Shmeruk presented very little musical evidence of majufes: he included no music examples, his literary citations provided only the barest descriptions of the music and dance, and some of the compositions referred to prove frustratingly untraceable. However, in addition to the meanings Shmeruk so eloquently attributed to it, majufes might also be looked on as belonging to a musical genre, the stylized national dance—a time-honoured zone of interface for European traditional, popular, and art musics. Majufes would be a rare species of this genre but one not entirely without precedent.

The written record reveals scant documentation of national dances characterizable as 'Jewish', much less as 'Jewish and parodic', yet students of musicology...