Klezmer in Church

A Surprising History of Jewish Dance Bands

At the First International Congress of Jewish Music in Paris in 1957, the musicologist Curt Sachs gave a definition of Jewish music as "music by Jews, for Jews, as Jews."

This definition works on two levels. First, it’s short and sweet. Second, it gives agency for defining Jewish music to Jews themselves.

But the Sachs definition also quickly reached its limits. Just take out any one of his three propositions and you easily find yourself on the weird but irascibly Jewish fringe:

• Prokofiev’s “Overture on Hebrew Themes” (not by Jews)

• Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” (not for Jews)

• DJ Casper’s “Cha Cha Slide” (above) which has become standard bar mitzvah party dance music since it dropped in 2000 (none of the above, although you can see a dude in a kippah at 1:07 in the music video)

These pieces represent our complex modern negotiations of “Jewishness” in the public sphere. But these slippery scenarios are not just a modern — they go back over half a millennium.

After all, when’s the last time you heard klezmer at a Catholic wedding?

The correct answer used to be: a lot.

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I talk a lot about Jews creating classical music. But I can’t pretend that this is our main thing. Because before modernity, many Jews made a living in the European dance scene. Jews in the fifteenth century served as dance masters to the Italian nobility, even authoring major treatises on the art of dance. One in particular, Guglielmo Ebreo (1420-1484) even created the vocabulary of courtly dance and movement that anticipated modern ballet.¹ Italian Jews had a particularly deep engagement and contribution to Western knowledge during the Renaissance, and their work in the Italian court not only enriched the worlds of music (in the case of Salamone Rossi) and of dance, but even contributed to the development of the modern violin family.

But Jewish involvement in the world of dance was not limited to Italy. The Jewish musicians of Prague were well-known in Central Europe, becoming guests of the the Czech nobility beginning in the early sixteenth century. The stature of Prague’s Jewish musicians grew so much over the next one hundred years that they successfully lobbied the Holy Roman Emperor to form a professional musicians guild. This elevation in status, as Walter Zev Feldman points out, also coincided with a new name: klezmer.²

What did these klezmer musicians play? Feldman hypothesizes that the earliest repertoire may have coincided somewhat with broader Western European dance music. My own dissertation research unearthed a fantastic source — R. David Ulmo’s Michtam L’David (c. 1600)— which confirms this hypothesis. The author was a rabbi-klezmer who lamented all of the dance music he had to play for his drunken Jewish co-religionists at festive meals and weddings. Recounting his time playing for the Czech nobility, he was impressed (and even embarrassed) by the Christians’ classical music, in contrast with his own Jewish dance repertoire:

“From early days I was often in the company of respected and important princes, dukes and great authorities, with my musical instruments [and] with a band of distinguished klezmorim…when I saw there a number of great and very important princes, and there were there a number of ensembles of non-Jewish instrumentalists who had among them great artists that would also play before them distinguished, stirring, and highly glorified melodies. Thus I trembled and I was fearful and overwhelmed [together] with my friend (of blessed memory), and we were at the end of our rope as to what to do. And I set my mind to search out and seek after distinguished melodies, such as they enjoyed and desired, and not those melodies that [we] regularly play to get people to dance, or to play at feasts before drunk and distempered thieves.”³

But what were those klezmer dance tunes? Rabbi Ulmo elsewhere in his manuscript makes mention of two named dances: “berintanz” and “hop recht” — “Bear’s Dance” and “Hop Right!”

Definitely remember these two hot tracks for your child’s upcoming seventeenth-century-themed bar mitzvah party.

While we don’t yet have the music for “Hop Right,” we do have bear dances in the recorded annals of early music. From my research on the possible sources, here’s the most likely candidate:

These bardcore Bohemian klezmers were fire — so much so that the Archbishop of Prague gave them legal dispensation to play for music for the entirety of Catholic religious life in Prague, including weddings and church services. The adage of a klezmer colleague of mine rings true: as a musician, you cannot make a living playing for only one God.

Business was great for Bohemian klezmers. But a fight was brewing with the obvious incumbents: the Christian musicians guild. Long before failed press conferences and twitter storms, the Jewish and Christian guilds wrote very formal and obsequious letters to the Holy Roman Emperor to fight for their right to party.

These are a great read, if you can stand really, really long German sentences. I think these must happen when Germans get especially angry. Here’s just a few lines from the accusations of the Christian musicians guild in 1651, when they were up in arms about the encroachment of Jews on their musical turf:

Prague klezmorim in 1716 playing on top of a triumphal arch.

“….The Jewish musicians shamelessly and falsely report as if they had no other business and only the music they had learned. On the other hand it is well-known and evident throughout the city of Prague how they never lack Jewish musicians, who daily run to all the inns and other places, according to their custom, go up and down the streets in shops, sell lutes, violins, zithers, instruments and dulcimers as well as all kinds of strings in copies, but instruct the young people falsely and without foundation, only to spite and ruin the Christians, and do all kinds of crafts with spices, lace, button-making and all kinds of crafts, constantly hang around the great women and the citizens and spy through them and other Jews whether there are engagements, weddings, banquets and other festive events, and through their silly music they get let us Christians have [our] bread cut off from our wives and children, considering that we Christians only live according to our profession and art, which is the case for the majority and almost all monasteries and church servants, and have to accept unaffordable pay with a small, subsistence-level living, while the Jews have all kinds of advantages and engage in all kinds of trade and usury, and therefore also make it seem as if we wanted to cut off and frighten them of the food they are seeking, they cannot prove this for eternity…” ⁴

They might not have been eating the dogs or eating the cats (definitely not kosher), but Prague’s klezmorim were accused by their Christian counterparts of flooding the Bohemian market — with music, musical instruments, and off-kilter musical instruction. Not quite the same as “immigrants taking our jobs,” but definitely the accusations of a majority culture threatened by minority pop music groups flooding their society.

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The Jewish role in dance music has many more chapters yet to be written, from five-hundred years ago until today. It should serve as a reminder that Jewish music is never just “by Jews, for Jews, as Jews.” That may be an ideal of Jewish religious community (and even a praiseworthy one). But the reality is a usually far more subtle, reflecting the ever evolving story of Jews as the dance partners of the West.

1. See Otto Kinkeldey, A Jewish Dancing Master of the Renaissance (New York: Cornell University, 1929).

2. Walter Zev Feldman, Klezmer: Music, History and Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016): 63-5.

3. R. David Ulmo, Michtam L’David (Opp. 215), 125r.

4. These primary sources have found in Paul Nettl’s articles from the 1920s, but are most richly collected in Walter Salmen, Jüdische Musikanten und Tänzer vom 13. bis 20. Jahrhundert : "--denn die Fiedel macht das Fest" (Innsbruck: Edition Hebling, 1991).