Jüdische Volksmusik - ein Beitrag zur Geistesgeschichte der Habsburger Monarchie

During the half century prior to the Holocaust "Jewish folk music" emerged as one of the most important cultural legacies for the Jews of Central Europe, who had survived for centuries in Diaspora. They discovered a shared history through their recognition of a common folk music, which at once had grown from common roots in the Middle East, in other words from the sacred music of the Temple in Jerusalem, and had incorporated the diverse sounds from the music cultures of the Diaspora. Still, on the threshold of the 20th century, one could barely speak of a living tradition of Jewish folk music in Central Europe. In order to uncover and bring that folk music to life, a cultural struggle was mobilized, which took as its goal the conceptualization of a new identity for "Jewish folk music." This book examines the new historiography that arose from that struggle. In so doing, the book serves as the point of departure for a critical reinterpretation of the modern history of Jewry in Central Europe. In fin-de-siècle Europe the central issue in the intellectual history of "Jewish folk music" was the confrontation between tradition and modernism, as well as between images of the other and the self, which in turn were constantly reshaped by an increasingly intolerant Central European society. On the eve of the Holocaust, when the search for traces of Jewish modernism in folk music had become more pressing, music even came to offer new forms of survival to the Jews of Central Europe, for example after 1933 in the activities of the Jüdischer Kulturbund in Germany. The cultural struggle for Jewish folk music was transformed into a crucial moment for European Jewish history, which in this book is interpreted from the perspectives of the contemporary documents, debates, and official positions seeking to give Jewish folk music new meaning. Those participating in the cultural struggle over "Jewish folk music" included musicians and collectors, intellectual and critics, and they came from all areas of Jewish and non-Jewish society in Central European. The public debates took place on numerous planes, and they were waged by writers such as Max Brod, theologians and philosophers such as Martin Buber, ethnomusicologists such as A.Z. Idelsohn, and artists such as Arno Nadel. The musicians and collectors, whose publications founded a new cultural legacy from folk music, came from all over Europe, including Russia, Galicia, Romania, Germany, and Austria. Some of them, moreover, were products of more recent migrations, first from Eastern to Central Europe, but then after 1918 to America and to Jerusalem. The musical practices they absorbed under folk music came from the synagogue and the shtetl, as well as from the instrumental music of klezmer bands and the romantic choral movement that had developed within the Jewish community itself. They embraced many different dialects, among them the dialects of Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews, in other words Yiddish and Ladino, as well as modern forms of written Hebrew and German. If indeed the sources and repertoires of Jewish folk music differed vastly one from another, they nonetheless combined to form a single path leading toward Jewish modernism, thus embodying a cultural movement with which all European Jews could identify on the eve of the Holocaust.