Welcome to Beyond the Music, a new commentary on Jewish musicology, arts, and culture! I’ll be posting every 1-2 weeks; you can subscribe below to receive this regularly in your mailbox.
Last week, we learned about how Christian ideas of harmony often conceived of Jewish sound as noise and Jews as the the disorderly sonic opponents of a redeemed Christian world. It would take a full eighteen centuries for Western harmony to become adopted in both theory and practice by groups of European Jews. Cultural self-segregation and othering on both sides partially accounts for this long divergence in aesthetics, but also the fact that Jews maintained an individual obligation to prayer which they could not efface through creations of musical beauty.
The Second Obstacle: Orality & Literacy
An additional obstacle to Jewish musical harmony was that Jewish music was almost always transmitted orally rather than via written notation.1 The importance of such orality in Jewish music cultures cannot be understated.
In oral cultures, music is highly mediated by its relational contexts, which for Jews included the home, the house of study, and the synagogue. One must receive the melodies of these places, as one of my favorite cantors wrote, ish mipi ish (איש מפי איש)—one person from another.2 This interpersonal framework of music transmission re-emphasized the communal obligations and bonds of Jewish culture, mediated and strengthened by the music itself.
Once music has been written down, however, it can be encountered, even revered, in an entirely different way, including outside those binding relationships. This problem is not unlike what Plato described as Socrates’ objection to writing amongst philosophers; not only would it weaken their powers of memory, but it would disconnect their knowledge acquisition from relationships with teachers, leading to a lack of wisdom.3 So the creation of Jewish harmonies, at least through written notation, not only was long culturally alien to Jews but conceptually ran up against the natural suspicions that all oral cultures have of the introduction of literacy.4
We shouldn’t be surprised then that the first fragments of Hebrew music in Western notation come from an ex-monk, Johannes of Oppido (1070-1150) who converted to Judaism in the 11th century. He is known also by his Hebrew eponym, Ovadia HaGer (Obadiah the Proselyte), and his musical compositions, along with his memoir, were among the thousands of manuscripts discovered by Dr. Solomon Schechter in the famous Cairo Genizah.
![Documentary unravels history -- and digital future -- of mysterious Cairo Geniza | The Times of Israel Documentary unravels history -- and digital future -- of mysterious Cairo Geniza | The Times of Israel](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa390a22c-a725-4c8a-942b-1e7873913ba8_2048x1649.jpeg)
Ovadia’s three songs have provided ample musical inspiration for those wishing to reanimate Jewish musical antiquity in a modern spirit.5 Yet his is the exception that proves the rule.6
Shema Yisrael: The Jewish Ear & Music in the Streets
While the Jewish norm of orality nominally kept musical transmission to trusted relational frameworks, it also was very porous. The open ear of the aural learner goes both ways; one who hears and remember the music of the synagogue will just as easily remember the Christian procession music of the street or the bawdy love songs of the tavern. Our ancestors lived in louder places than we often appreciate, roaring with the din of bells, bars, musicians and public ceremonies.7 Thus the music traditions of medieval and early modern Jews were not largely defined by the cultivated music of the courts, but by the oral music traditions of the streets.
This reality is terribly vexing for contemporary scholars of a Jewish music, as many of these vernacular, European music traditions were simply not written down. You can imagine my frustration when searching for seventeenth century music of Polish guild musicians and coming across the sentences like: “The Cracow musicians’ guild lasted through the whole of the Old Polish period, yet left no musical documents whatsoever.”8 But in some instances, recent scholarship has been able to insightfully reconstruct the soundscape of the oral cultures of European Jews.
Case 1: A Zemer from the Church
"One should not make melodies on Sabbath eve and the end of the Sabbath to the melodies of the non-Jews, such as "Kol Mekadesh" and “Birchot Ittim.” And all the more so one should not sing these melodies in the synagogue, like those sophists who seek a leniency on the basis that their melodies were stolen from us at the time of the Temple.9
This is Rabbi Juspa Hahn Nördlingen (1570-1637), writing in his book of Frankfurt customs, Yosef Ometz, valiantly trying to defend the musical boundaries of his community. Thanks to Dr. Naomi Cohen Zentner, we know he lost that battle. She has demonstrated that the widely-used melody for the first of the aforementioned Sabbath songs, Kol Mekadesh, is actually a well documented Catholic hymn, Der Himmel jetzt frohlocken soll, printed widely in the seventeenth century. You can even visualize the spread of this melody in her wonderful exhibit on Jewish Cultures Mapped.
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In a recent lecture, Dr. Zentner went so far as to speculate that the outline of this melody even conforms with the melodic outlines of traditional Ashkenazi Jewish chant (nusach). It is simply the embellishment and de-metricization of the melody which yields some of the core sounds of the Ashkenazic chant tradition. This powerfully shows the oral transmission and of one song from prohibited “foreign” status to the inner sanctum of Ashkenazic sacred music. This surprising contrast is actually quite normal for “sacred” music, but more on that another time.
Case 2: Mocking the ex-King of Poland
For this next case, let me take you to an unusual place to think about the oral repertories of Jewish music: an art gallery. I discovered this while serving as a cantor in Sarasota, Florida, during which time I made a trip to the Ringling Art Museum. How surprised and delighted I was to come across a sixteenth century painting about which there is four hundred year old Yiddish song!
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This painting is Antonio Palma’s Esther and Ahasueras, which depicts the biblical Queen Esther’s courageous intervention on behalf of her people before the Persian king. The artwork also represents a specific political event in Venetian history: In July 1574, King Henry III of France visited Venice. He was given a king’s welcome by the city, who hoped he would protect them in case of war with Spain. Palma’s biblical scene (painted in that very same year) represents the dynamics of that political moment: Esther is the figure of Venice – under her crown you can see the emblems of the Doge’s cap. King Ahasueras’ crown features a French fleur-de-lis, and his visage is painted to be very similar to that of King Henry III. Even the actual background of the scene is the Venetian cityscape rather than biblical Persia.
But where is the Yiddish music?
It turns out that the events portrayed in this painting immediately following one of the more comedic episodes in the history of European royalty: Henry III, when he arrived in Venice, was acting — but not yet crowned — King of France. This is beause he was until quite recently the King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania. His abortive reign lasted a mere 146 days until his brother, King Charles IX of France, died suddenly without an heir. Henry weighed his options, and decided he preferred baguettes to pierogies. So in June, the month before the scene depicted in Palma’s painting, Henry secretly absconded from his palace in Krakow and smuggled himself into Paris to assume the French throne—much to the lament and consternation of his Polish subjects.
Well, if you haven’t guessed it, people thought this was funny. And there is a German song, Spottlied auf den aus Krakau entflohenen Polen-könig, Heinrich III. von Anjou – “Mocking Song of the Krakow-Fleeing Polish King, Henry III of Anjou,” which circulated in German lands, both orally and later in musical notation. Thanks to the scholarship of Dr. Diana Matut, we now know that Jews created two versions of the song in Yiddish— one in a more or less direct translation from the German, and another adapted to be m a generic song about Purim. You can listen to a mashup of those two comic Yiddish songs here, sung by Dr. Matut and her ensemble, Simchat HaNefesh (The song begins at 1:18):
This melody is one of many dozens of co-territorial melodies that were absorbed and adapted by Ashkenazic Jews via oral transmission. This is a normative (if often rabbinically contested) way in which Jews created their music cultures - out of music from the street and the pub.
Stay tuned for Part 3, in which we’ll pivot from the musical street to that of the court, covering notable Jewish musical experiments with musical notation and Western harmony, a before ultimately turning to texts which chart the evolution of musical harmony as a Jewish concept (Part 4).
A Religious Coda: This Wednesday night and Thursday mark the Jewish people’s observance of Tisha B’Av, a national day of mourning for the destruction of the Temple. The Temple was (and is) often celebrated by Jewish music enthusiasts for its musical institutions, including its orchestra and choir - as a beacon of musical complexity we should strive to regain. Yet Jewish tradition teaches that it was sin which led to the first Temple’s destruction and sinat chinam —unbridled hatred—which led to the destruction of the Second. Both emerged from a fundamental breakdown of communal cohesion and relational care. Music, at its best, seeks to nurture these bonds. At its worst, it becomes a substitute for them, a hollow shell which will eventually be swept away.
So this week, let’s mourn the day the music died, and commit to faith, practice, and lovingkindness —the only hopes to restore what is, was, and still can be lost.
הֲשִׁיבֵ֨נוּ ה׳ ׀ אֵלֶ֙יךָ֙ (ונשוב) [וְֽנָשׁ֔וּבָה] חַדֵּ֥שׁ יָמֵ֖ינוּ כְּקֶֽדֶם׃ –
“Turn us to Thee, O Lord, and we shall be turned; renew our days as of old.” (Lam. 5:21)
For more on this, see Edwin Seroussi, “The Jewish Liturgical Music Printing Revolution: A A Preliminary Assessment” in Textual Transmission in Contemporary Jewish Cultures, (Oxford: Oxford university Press, 2020): 99-136; also Judit Frigyesi, “Orality as Religious Ideal: The Music of East European Jewish Prayer,” Yuval 7 - Studies in Honor of Israel Adler (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2001), 113-153.
Yehuda Leib Zelichower, Sefer Shirei Yehuda (Amsterdam: Kosman Emerich, 1697): 26a. A conservative (lower case “c”) cantor in the transgressive maelstrom of late 17th century Hamburg, he wrote two pious songs as alternatives to the bar & theater songs of the day, and took his fellow cantors to task for their impiety and musical frivolity.
See Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus 14, 264c-275b.
This is a bigger subject for another post, in which I hope to revisit Walter Ong’s classic study Orality & Literacy as a lens to analyze trends in Jewish music, past and present.
A shout out to Ayelet Karni, whose adaptation of Ovadia’s melody opened this post and is part of her larger Jewish music project, Mizmor LeDavid.
For more on Ovadia HaGer and the manuscripts of his held at Cambridge University, check this out: https://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/genizah-fragments/posts/qa-wednesday-monk-jew-1102-obadiah-proselyte-gary-rendsburg
For a great example of the complex and interpenetrating worlds of sound in and around Jewish communities, see Edwin Seroussi, “Ghetto Soundscapes: Venice & Beyond,” a paper read at the conference The Ghetto and Beyond: The Jews in the Age of the Medici, New York City: Center for Jewish History, September 18, 2016: https://academia.edu/resource/work/32701825.
Music in Old Cracow, Selection of Works XVth - XVIIIth Centuries, ed. Zygmunt M. Szweykowski (Krakow: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, 1964): xxix. My thanks to Dr. Sylwia Jakubczyk-Ślęczka of Jagellonian University for sharing this source with me.
Yosef Yuspa Hahn-Nördlingen, Yosef Ometz (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1722): 77a, no. 602.