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  • The 'Lust Machine'Recording and Selling the Jewish Nation in the Late Russian Empire
  • James Loeffler (bio)

In 1910 the Odessa cantor Pinkhas Minkovsky (Fig. 1) published a book to warn of the dangers of the 'lust machine'. The recording of Jewish cantorial chanting through the new medium of the gramophone, he wrote, constituted a 'pornographic' response to the ills of modernity—and a threat to the Jewish people.1 The same year, the Vilna pharmacist turned gramophone entrepreneur Wolf (Velvl) Isserlin and his brother Mordkhe opened their own gramophone factory. By his own calculation, Isserlin's top record customers were Jews. He claimed to have sold more cantorial 78 rpm records in a single five-month period than all other genres combined over the previous five years. Why did Minkovsky oppose the gramophone while Isserlin staked his career on it? On the face of it, the answer is obvious: religion. To the cantor, Jewish music was sacred; to the capitalist, it was a secular commodity. Minkovsky feared the desecration of Judaism, while Isserlin rushed to commercialize it. It was a classic tale of piety versus profit.

Yet such a view of both men would be a mistake. For Minkovsky, it turns out, was hardly an obscurantist rabbi plugging his ears to the howling winds of change. He read deeply in German philosophy and played a leading role in Russian cultural Zionist circles. Nor was Isserlin a cynical merchant simply intent on exploiting his [End Page 257]


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Figure 1.

Pinkhas Minkovsky

Courtesy of the Jewish Music Research Centre.

customers' nostalgia. He pioneered the recording of Jewish classical music for the benefit of 'the national cause', he claimed, even at a cost to his business. In fact, both Minkovsky and Isserlin shared the same impulse to imagine and amplify Jewish nationhood in the Russian empire through sound. If it was not religion or technology, a better candidate to explain their sharply differing attitudes towards the gramophone might be capitalism. For at the root of their opposing attitudes lay two distinct Jewish ideas about the relationship between nationalism and capitalism. Where they diverged, in other words, was in the matter of the market.

Modern Jewish culture is often seen as a product of Jewish nationalism. The very phrases 'Jewish culture' and 'Jewish music' owe their origins to nineteenthcentury Romantic nationalism. In turn modern nationalism is linked in key ways to the rise of market capitalism, or more specifically print capitalism, which allowed for the mass transmission of new ideas of an interlinked community—especially for diasporic groups unable to rely on common geography to delimit themselves.2 Yet despite the resurgence of interest in the field of Jewish economic history and the burgeoning historiography of Jewish nationalism in eastern Europe, there is [End Page 258] surprisingly little contact between these fields. There is even less research on the economics of Jewish musical life in eastern Europe. Little is known, for instance, about all those Jewish customers who purchased cantorial records in the late Russian empire or the people who manufactured them. Nor is much known about what the gramophone meant to Jewish listeners as a material object, a cultural artefact, or an expensive status symbol, not to mention as a medium of communication for an agricultural society the vast majority of whose members were still only just learning to read in the early twentieth century.3

In this chapter, I wish to use the dual careers of Minkovsky and Isserlin to rethink some of the features of modern Jewish culture's own economic genealogy. In doing so I will put forth a number of questions that need to be answered to achieve a fuller account of the history of Jewish nationalism: Was modern Jewish culture born out of a revolt against ethnic capitalism? Or in celebration and amplification of it? Should sonic capitalism be seen, alongside print capitalism, as an essential precondition for the spread of Jewish national consciousness in eastern Europe? And what would the history of Zionism look like (and sound like) viewed not only as a story of political mobilization and secularization but one of economic competition?4

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