James Kaplan, Irving Berlin: New York Genius. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019.

If you want a bog-standard show-biz biography of Irving Berlin — chattily written, without enthusiasm for challenging any of the myths, giving its hero the benefit of the doubt in awkward situations (of which there are many), not showing much in the way of original research, and full of phrases (such as “in all likelihood’’, “perhaps he would have noted” and others) that give rise to authorial rambling and invention — this is maybe the book for you. 

Berlin died in 1989 at the age of 101. A ‘biography’ of sorts by his friend Alexander Woollcott, a version effectively authorized by Berlin himself, had appeared during his earliest phase of fame in 1925, but Berlin steadfastly refused to cooperate with others who wished to write about him (except for interviews on his own terms), and, obsessed with copyrights, refused permissions to third parties even to cite a few words from his lyrics. As a result, the schmaltzy legends planted via Woolcott and Berlin came to be accepted as facts: that his father was a chazan, that Berlin’s earliest memory was of the family house burning down in a pogrom, the exciting adventures of the boy Berlin in the New York streets and docks, his early encounter of a Christmas tree at the dwelling of the Irish O’Hara family; and not a few of these have seeped through to Kaplan’s account, or have even been expanded by him. The father, whose only verified occupations are known to be butcher and painter, is here shown as “during the High Holy Days, leading a choir in a Lower East Side Temple. Oh, and he took along his youngest son who could also sing a little” (4). No source or reference is given for any of this, any more than for Kaplan’s speculation about the photograph of Berlin allegedly aged 13, of which no copy is shown or location given, but which nevertheless opens the first chapter (absence of citation for some statements regrettably continues throughout the book. The photo can be found online, but without any explanation of source or dating).

With the exception of a brave account of Berlin and ragtime in the early years by Ian Whitcomb (1987), still one of the most musically literate surveys, and a journalistic rehash of the legends by Michael Freedland (1974) the songwriter’s major biographies had to wait for his death. Laurence Bergreen’s weighty (indeed ponderous) As Thousands Cheer (1990), researched in detail and on the back of many frank interviews with Berlin’s associates, was first off the block. The understandably more indulgent, but compellingly written memoir by Berlin’s daughter Mary Ellin Barrett followed in 1994. Kaplan offers little if anything of substance to add to these in biographical detail.

All of these writers, and virtually all of those between Barrett and Kaplan, have taken as a given Berlin’s permanent place in the pantheon of American song, if not song in general. It's now 30 years since Berlin’s death, and 70 years since his last significant songs were written. I (like Kaplan and Bergreen) am 70 years old and grew up with Berlin’s songs on the radio. But a little research on my own part, asking friends and acquaintances around the world (120 responses) which of Berlin’s melodies they knew from a dozen titles, showed a sharply diminishing recognition the younger the respondent. The only song that scored 100% was, inevitably, “White Christmas” — and, more significantly, it was the only melody identified at all by Generation Z, that of my grandchildren. 

This is an issue which Kaplan does not investigate, and indeed blandly sidesteps, in his enthusiasm for his subject. At his outset, three pages of his preface are given to an exordium of the words and performance of one of Berlin’s more mediocre works, “Oh, how that German Could Love”in Berlin’s own 1909 recording (xiii-xv). The performance, which Kaplan finds “thrilling”, is certainly competent for its sort of standard ethnic comedy number, and Berlin’s reedy voice is recognizable thanks to his later successes. The words, which to Kaplan are “freshness incarnate: conversational, superbly visual, borderline bawdy”, are frankly no more so than in dozens of songs by Berlin’s contemporaries, and are in fact notable for an ongoing weakness of Berlin throughout his career, the substitution of rhyme or assonance for clarity or intelligibility - “She called me her honey, her angel, her money”, “She spoke like a speaker, and oh what a speech, like no other speaker could speak”. This latter phrase Kaplan singles out as “modernism on the hoof: startlingly formal innovation smuggled into a seemingly banal idiom” (xv). What the twenty-one-year-old Berlin would have said to all this may give rise to amusing reflection.

A better starting point might have been the 1913 “Abie Sings an Irish Song”. For a start, it represents two of the four genres (Jewish, Irish, Italian, and ‘coon’, the demeaning white take on assumed black music tastes) on which all of Berlin’s early works centred. More importantly, however, it summarizes the strategy which would take Berlin to the top. Abie runs a clothing store; failing to attract customers, he buys a sheaf of Irish songs and —

When an Irishman looks in the window
Abie sings an Irish song
When a suit of clothes he sells
He turns around and yells
'By Killarney's lakes and dells'
Any time an Irishman comes in to pick a bone
If he looks at Abie and hollers in an angry tone
'I would like to wrestle with a Levi or a Cohn'
Abie sings an Irish song.

This is an astonishingly accurate self-portrait, as Berlin himself might have acknowledged. And it goes I think to the heart of what became Berlin’s true genius and of what was Jewish – or at least ‘Jew-ish’ – about Berlin’s life and achievements.

Berlin transcended Abie by realizing that the future was not in these ethnic ditties but in the production of inclusively American songs – songs whose appeal could extend across the many components of American society. As scholars including Charles Hamm have noted, his first huge hit “Alexander’s Rag-Time Band”(1911) broke the mould – the “exhortation to anyone and everyone to come and listen to a band has no precedent” (Hamm 1996, 66); in Berlin’s own words to a journalist 75 years later, the opening words were an invitation to come, join in, and listen. And although, despite its jaunty rhythm, it owes little to rag-time, it allies itself not with the European styles of first-generation immigrants, but with a home-grown style that the next generations can claim as their own. Abie gained just Irish clients – Izzie Berlin was selling to America as a whole, regardless of origin or religion. Indeed, such was its success that it became itself the locus classicus of rag-time style in conventional wisdom, superseding the “true” rag-time of Scott Joplin and his ilk. 

As Robert Greenberg has pointed out, Berlin’s works “don’t generally exhibit the slick, jazz-inspired veneer of Gershwin’s and Rodgers (and Hart’s) songs; or the sophisticated, urban shtick of Porter’s and Kern’s songs; or the compositional virtuosity of any of the above” (Greenberg 2020). I would add that neither do any of them tap any deep interpersonal passion or emotion. “I” may be dreaming, “you” may have a nice bonnet, God may bless America, but individuals generally walk placidly down the middle of avenue of human experience within the limits sanctified by mid-twentieth century middle USA. Philip Roth, in his Operation Shylock, points out how Berlin completely neutralized both his own cultural background and that of the society he was selling to: “The two holidays that celebrate the divinity of Christ — and what does Irving Berlin brilliantly do? He de-Christs them both!... Easter turns into a fashion show and Christmas into a holiday about snow” (Roth 1994, 157).

What meets people’s expectations without risking their sympathy has a good chance of selling well. With the rise in America of the consuming classes, film, and the radio, middle-men in music with a passion for selling like Berlin could also prosper. 

Berlin’s two great marketing coups in organizing army shows in the two world wars are striking testimonies to his skill in this arena. And today we interpret these according to our contemporary prejudices; Berlin scores points from his biographers for having insisted that black soldiers were included in the teams for second of these shows, but some are more reluctant to point out that these were segregated throughout their secondment, and also during performances. Kaplan rightly points out the argument between Berlin and his director Ezra Stone which led to a blackface number being reluctantly dropped from the stage show (206); he does not mention that this number was restored to the 1943 film of the show (and today of course that number is normally cut when the film is shown), or discuss the row between Stone and Berlin about the show’s rewritten finale, and its aggressive (almost sadistic) lyrics.

Kaplan also seeks to gloss over the way in which Berlin got Stone fired from the show on the ground that there were already too many Jews involved in it. We are told that the Jewish moguls of Hollywood promoted a ‘white-picket-fence’ for their fear of White Christian America (216), but that hardly excuses Berlin — who incidentally showed no sign of identifying with Jewish causes at any point in his career. 

In fact, in exactly what ways was Berlin ‘Jewish’ (apart from accident of birth)? The Jewish Lives series at Yale University. Press, of which Kaplan’s book is part, is conceived as a set of “individual volumes [which] illuminate the imprint of Jewish figures upon [inter alia] … cultural and economic life and the arts and sciences … deeply informed books that explore the range and depth of the Jewish experience….” Kaplan, no more than others of Berlin’s biographers, does not give us much of a feel for Berlin as a “Jewish figure”. The religion clearly meant little or nothing to him; we have no evidence that he ever in his life even stepped inside a synagogue. He married a Catholic and brought up his children in a blandly Christian tradition. A clear hint is that virtually all his close business associates and friends, throughout his career, were also ethnic (if not religious) Jews. A book in such a series might be reasonably expected to enlarge on or discuss this – Kaplan avoids the challenge, which still awaits proper exploration.

References

Barrett, Mary Ellin. 1994. Irving Berlin: A Daughter's Memoir. New York: Simon & Schuster. 

Bergreen, Laurence. 1991. As Thousands Cheer: The Life of Irving Berlin. London: Penguin Books. 

Freedland, Michael. 1974. Irving Berlin. New York: W.H. Allen.

Greenberg, Robert. n.d. “The Melody Lingers On: Irving Berlin.” Accessed November 25, 2020. https://robertgreenbergmusic.com/music-history-monday-the-melody-lingers-on-irving-berlin/

Hamm, Charles. 1966. “Alexander and His Band.” American Music 14/1: 65-102.

Roth, Philip. 1994. Operation Shylock: A Confession. New. York: Vintage International, 157

Whitcomb, Ian. 1987. Irving Berlin and Ragtime America. London: Rider.

Hernan Tesler-Mabé,  Mahler’s Forgotten Conductor: Heinz Unger and His Search for Jewish Meaning, 1895−1965. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020.

Biographical narratives are often based on the idea of historical influence: they aim at demonstrating how individuals altered the course of history (“made history”) and how they were affected by it. Yet the concept of historical “influence” does not emanate from the stratum of historical facts; rather, it is a construct that is imposed upon historical knowledge while assuming a distinction between particular agencies and general historical trajectories. Hernan Tesler-Mabé’s Mahler’s Forgotten Conductor: Heinz Unger and His Search for Jewish Meaning, 1895−1965 seems to question this assumption. Taking his cue from Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms (1980 [1976]) — which explores popular culture in sixteenth-century Italy through the eyes of a common miller — Tesler-Mabé sets out to write a “contextual history” [sic.] in which a “single historical subject can open up an entire universe of understanding that otherwise would have remained unexplored” (5). This means that the differentiation between the personal history of a protagonist and a generalized historical context is replaced by the idea of historical embodiment; the historical subject, in turn, is construed as a site whose actions, demeanors, and dispositions weaves a web of mediators and contiguities. Untangling the knots of that web constitutes the act of historization.

The intention of producing the microhistory of Heinz Unger can certainly add significant insights into what the author labels “the search for Jewish meaning” in his title. After all, Unger’s story involves a personal and cultural journey that begins with the emancipated and assimilated Jewish communities of the Old World and ends with the integration into the formerly East European Jewish communities of the New World. But as Tesler-Mabé clarifies, Unger’s Jewishness should not be perceived in relation to that of figures like Gershom Scholem and Franz Rosenzweig, who formulated their German-Jewish identity within “the traditional bounds of intellectual history.” Unger, he writes, demonstrates the “complex, non-monolithic nature” of the German-Jewish experience that lies in the “interaction with and negotiation of ideologies, trends, and personalities” (5). And thus, it would seem that this chronicle of Unger’s life promulgates a non-identarian perception of Jewishness as a lived experience that entails a flux of religious, national, and cultural configurations.

But inasmuch as this biography is underpinned by historical interest, it also aspires to commemorate a forgotten artist. Justifiably or not, Unger did not gain international fame during his lifetime. Shortly after his career took off, he was forced to leave Germany yet did not develop any long-lasting position in any of the countries he lived in afterwards. Unger also received scant attention from future generation; this neglect was sustained not only by his limited success, but also by the fact that he hardly recorded during his lifetime. According to Tesler-Mabé, neglecting Unger’s artistic achievements is a historical wrong that should be righted and he therefore explicitly aims at restoring Unger’s “professional achievements to their rightful place in the public consciousness” (3).

And this puts Tesler-Mabé on a problematic path. Even if the intentions of rehabilitation and contextualization can be combined — which is doubtful — the entanglement of these intentions in Mahler’s Forgotten Conductor unfortunately undermines its critical and historical value. On the one hand, the book provides the reader with numerous accounts of Unger’s so-called accomplishments, including countless flattering citations of contemporaneous critics and references to testimonials of Unger and his wife — and devotes almost half its pages to a long list of Unger’s known concerts of performances. On the other hand, Tesler-Mabé does not delve into the more specific contexts pertaining to Unger or discuss the broader implications of his findings. Regarding Unger’s Canadian experiences, for example, Tesler-Mabé briefly discusses the precarious position of German-Jews in the context of Canadian Jewry in general, yet he does not clarify how this specifically bears on Unger. The assertion that Jewishness played a key role in Unger’s life in Canada is insufficiently backed by historical facts that could attest to the possible roles, functions, and the effects of Jewishness in his personal conduct and professional environments. In this regard, the book fails to produce the contextual history it sets out to provide. Eagerly striving to establish the artistic importance of Unger’s work, the book does not stray from the path of Unger’s professional Odyssey; yet in doing so, it often projects simplistic and uncritical perception of Unger’s figure.

Since the scope of this review does not allow to address the multitude of factors affected by the conflict of commemoration and contextualization, it will suffice here to focus on the role the figure of Mahler plays in Tesler-Mabé’s narrative. Mahler surely looms large in Unger’s history: Unger decided to “devote his life to music making” after hearing Mahler’s Lied von der Erde; he participated in the Mahler-fest held in Amsterdam in 1920; and he was appointed as a member on the honorary board of directors of the Gustav Mahler Society of America (19, 21, 79). Moreover, Unger nurtured his reputation as a Mahler specialist throughout his career — from the debut concerts whose programs revolved mainly around Mahler’s music to the repeated efforts to perform Mahler in Canada. But Unger’s attachment to Mahler, according to Tesler-Mabé, is not only a musical and personal issue. Mahler, he argues, deeply affected Unger because he musically expressed a shared German-Jewish experience of “highly destabilizing social and cultural reality” (12). Unger, in other words, seems to have perceived Mahler’s music as a site of Jewishness, and for this reason, his increasing allegiance to Mahler and the dissemination of his music is interpreted a performance of his Jewish identity (8).

In defining Mahler’s music as a “site of formation and maintenance of Jewish identity”, Unger’s biography arguably abandons the “frustrating model” of categorical inclusion or exclusion from Jewishness and embrace the idea that “all spaces represented different yet still equal negotiations of Jewish identity” (11). It follows, then, that Mahler’s work is construed as a part of a “more broad-minded and inclusive” sphere of Jewish music because it expresses the cultural reality experienced by Jews in this period and functioned as “a form and reflection” of Jewish identity (11). But while Tesler-Mabé proclaims a non-essentialist and critical approach toward Jewishness, his analysis proves otherwise.

To avoid essentialist modes of thinking it is necessary to adopt elastic, mutable, and contingent formulations that transcend categories like Jewish identity and Jewish music (with Jewish being an obstinate adjective). Identity, in such a framework, should carry scare quotes as it conveys a disarrayed constellation of actions, situations, and experiences placed in specific contexts. Similarly, the locus of Jewish music should be relocated in the specific configurations in which it is performed and the functions it fulfills. Following this, the issue at hand is not whether Mahler fulfilled the function of Jewish self-positioning for Unger, but how Unger positioned himself as a Jew through Mahler. And so we may ask: how did Unger’s allegiance to Mahler affected the way he was perceived? What links did he try to establish between Mahler’s music and potential Jewish venues? Such questions do not animate Tesler-Mabé’s book nor are they even addressed.

Whereas the author aspires to position Unger, Mahler, and the performance of Jewishness within an intricate network, he neutralizes that very network by fixing the position of its constituents. In a rather tautological manner, Mahler’s music becomes a site of Jewishness because it was performed by Jews such as Unger, and Unger performed his Jewishness because he conducted Mahler. But as Adam J. Sacks sensibly pointed out, Mahler also straddles the ground between romanticism and modernism and, following the revival of his oeuvre in the sixties, has also come to embody tropes like the “psychologically therapeutic,” the “torment of pathology,” and “the kitsch of sacrificial transcendence.” (Sacks 2013, 113). These aspects are excluded from Tesler-Mabé’s view, most likely because they extend beyond the performance of Jewishness. But Mahler probably played a role in Unger’s attempt to situate himself as a modernist, especially in the fairly peripheral context of Toronto in the fifties and sixties. By the same token, it is certainly possible that the adherence to Mahler in North American contexts also solidified Unger’s self-positioning as German, and not only in relation to Jewish communities, but also to Canadians in general.

That being said, the fixation of Mahler’s figure in relation to Jewishness is by no means unintentional; it serves a central purpose in the broader conflict of commemorating and contextualizing Unger. After all, the polite praises of unknown critics in local publications in addition to the emotional testimonials of the Ungers are not enough to establish the Jewish significance and the artistic importance of Unger’s work. To do so, Unger needs to be backed by a figure that is “greater than life,” one that “made history”. Mahler appears to play that role wherein he functions as a monolithic myth that bestows Jewish meaning and tragic significance upon Unger. The opening lines of the book demonstrate this mythization most lucidly when Tesler-Mabé equates the “three blows of fate” the hit Mahler — which were allegedly represented by the three hammer blows in the finale of his Sixth Symphony — and the supposedly key three misfortunes of Unger (Mahler-Werfel 1990 [1971], 70; Tesler-Mabé 2020, 3). But there is nothing tragic about Mahler’s “blows of faith” just as there is nothing historical in Alma Mahler’s description of them. These blows of faith are part of the Mahler myth, which relies on history to the extent that it serves to idolize Mahler and is projected as a metaphysical aura upon the historical narrative of Unger.

Still, is there something wrong with idolizing Unger? If we acknowledge that historicization unavoidably constructs a narrative, why cannot it be heroic? It can, but not in a context whose mode of narration overlooks the figure it commemorates and the history it seeks to depict. Unger, so it seems, becomes part of an agenda to validate Canadian and Jewish-Canadian culture by placing it in an international arena in which he is casted as the Canadian counterpart of Leonard Bernstein, Arturo Toscanini, and John Barbirolli. Only that Toronto, especially at the time, is not New-York, and Unger is certainly no Bernstein. In this fictitious international competition, Unger loses. Based on the information Tesler-Mabé provides, Unger’s emigration to Canada was the stage on which Unger’s international career started to falter. In this local, Unger could not land any substantial position and was therefore impelled to conduct small community orchestras and later on a provisional orchestra organized by his “supporters” (63). These venues, it should also be added, were inherently related to the local Jewish community who sought to establish its own cultural presence. Likewise, Unger’s guest performances with more established orchestras dwindled over time and were usually restricted to the Canadian Toronto Symphony Orchestra and the CBC Symphony Orchestra.

Paradoxically, Unger’s marginality is doubled the more Tesler-Mabé situates him in relation to world-renowned conductors. This naturally defeats the purpose of studying Unger’s life since it glosses over some of the unique facets of his story, especially the confrontation of the romanticized aspirations of a German-Jewish conductor with the music market of post-World War II and the north-American cultural environment. In this regard, Tesler-Mabé surely deserves credit for shedding new light on the way in which Unger promoted the dissemination of European art within small communities in Canada, his advancement of non-professional communal musical production, or his negotiation of artistic modernism within relatively conservative environments. Yet to give these experiences the due attention one must rise above comparisons with conductors who left their mark on the international stage and situate Unger at the center of his stage. Tesler-Mabé does not do so; instead, he inadvertently renders Unger a provincial figure, a forgotten composer that stands in the shadow of international conductors while conducting a holy quest for Jewish meaning under the auspices of a Mahlerian titan.

References

Ginzburg, Carlo. 1980. The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Centur. Miller. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Mahler-Werfel, Alma. 1990 [1971]. Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters. Trans. Basil Creighton. London: Time Warner Books.

Sacks, Adam J. 2013. “Toward an Expansion of the Critique of the Mahler Revival.” New German Critique 40/2: 113–36.

Kevin C. Karnes and Emilis Melngailis, Jewish Folk Songs from the Baltics: Selections from the Melngailis collection. Middleton WI: A-R editions, 2014.

Jewish Folk Songs from the Baltics makes public a forgotten source from the collection of the Latvian musician Emilis Melngailis (1874–1954), a devoted collector and scholar of folk songs. In addition to the Latvian folk songs Melngailis published in thirteen volumes, he devoted attention to the collection of songs from minority communities which inhabited Latvia, namely, Jews, Roma, Russians, Germans, Lithuanians, Poles, Belarussians, Latgalians, Livornians, and Estonians (p. xiv). Kevin Karnes took upon himself the daunting task of editing the Jewish items found in two notebooks from Melngailis’s collection (nos. 65 and 74). Melngailis started collecting Jewish songs in 1899 in Keidan (Lithuania), and continued this task in the 1920s and 1930s in Latvia after a long stay in Uzbekistan. (In 2015 The Archive of Latvian Folklore made the entire Melngailis collection available, including all of his 104 notebooks).

The Jewish items in Melngailis’s collection, which were considered lost, were retrieved by Karnes (apparently only partially, as will be shown below) and are presented to the reader in a modern, annotated edition. A lengthy introduction provides ample historical and musical contexts. Karnes did not spare any effort in trying to locate parallel versions of, and information about, the songs Melngailis documented in extant publications of Jewish music, especially in anthologies of Yiddish songs, the most prominent language of this corpus. Originally, the publication was planned as a collaboration with the late Israeli musicologist of Latvian origin Joachim Braun (Bar Ilan University), whose passing Karnes mourns (p. vi); indeed, reading Karnes’s commentaries to the songs, it seems that the absence of a scholar familiar with Hebrew and Yiddish folk songs was detrimental to this project.

Introduction to the volume

The extensive introduction to this volume contextualizes the collection from diverse perspectives, thereby making this a text of value by itself, regardless of Melngailis’s collection. The introduction offers English readers a survey of Jewish culture in Latvia, where several languages (Latvian, Russian, Hebrew and Yiddish) usually impede access for the general readership.

The introduction features detailed documentation of the Melngailis project as a whole, disclosing Karnes’s intimate familiarity with Melngailis’s life work. The survey also includes a brief general history of folk song ethnography in Eastern Europe, and of the cultural life of Jews in Latvia, with emphasis on their musical ecosystem.

According to Karnes, folk songs were collected in Eastern Europe since the 1850s, decades after this practice was well established in Germany, but almost half a century before the first collection of folk song texts in Yiddish appeared (Marek and Ginzburg 1901). “Yiddish was widely spoken by Jews throughout the Baltic provinces” and in Kurland (Courland, the part of Latvia where many Jews lived) “the language of culture and commerce had been German since the Middle Ages for Jews and non-Jews alike,” while “in the early 1900s, Russian began gradually to overtake German” (p. xviii). Latvian Jews thus had limited command of the Latvian language, and their culture, subsequently, was part of the larger Eastern European Jewish space.

Karnes maintains that this volume “enables us to study, perform, and hear again some of the songs and dances performed by members of substantial, centuries-old Jewish communities whose vernacular musics have remained largely inaccessible to this day” (p. xiv). Despite these claims for the exceptionality of Melngailis’s Jewish collection, however, most of the materials included in this volume belong to a well-documented Jewish music tradition. Moreover, Karnes’s argument that “traces of the region’s Jewish folk music surfaced in collections published elsewhere, but only, it seems, in forms that make its recovery all but impossible today” (pp. xxvi) seems therefore misleading.

Baltic Jewish culture is well documented in Levin (1988, 1996). Abraham Zvi Idelsohn, himself born and raised in Kurland, included in his publications many songs he knew through oral transmission from his childhood (Idelsohn 1932, p. x). Soviet Yiddish folk song collections, such as the one by Beregovskii and Fefer (1938) published in Kiev, share much of the repertoire Melngailis heard in the Baltic countries. It is also unlikely that, as Karnes implies, much of the transcribed material is indeed “centuries-old.” The items sung to Melngailis by informants affiliated with Zionist circles were rather new by the time they were collected and transcribed, at least. In fact, Karnes himself and his assistants identified the sources of about half the collection (more on that below), and the same could have been done for most of the other half they did not identify.

Awareness of Baltic Jewish culture has not been altogether absent in Jewish folklore and music scholarship. In Lithuania (where Melngailis made his earliest transcriptions of Jewish songs in 1899), a complete Hebrew publication devoted to Lithuanian folk literature appeared (Yardeni-Zakheim 1928). This volume included the earliest published translations made in any language by Leah Goldberg, the renowned Hebrew poet. There are also a few Jewish songs of Lithuanian origin. Idelsohn found one song (1932, xxiii and no. 400, davnen mir uns”) based on a Lithuanian source (O iš kur tu?). In Hebrew, the 1897 song Be’eretz ha’tsvi (In the land of Israel) by Arieh Leib Joffe (1897) is partially based on the Lithuanian national song Kur bėga Šešupė by the poet Maironis and composer Česlovas Sasnauskas. The Hebrew text is a free adaptation from the Lithuanian. The melodies are almost identical in the first section, while the second one remains unidentified. About one generation later, the “Lithuanian Polka” melody became a folk dance among the pioneers in Palestine, usually without a text, although one informant perofrms it with a local text, Hu dome letarnegol (“He Looks like a Rooster”).

Connections with Latvian culture, on the other hand, are less evident than the Lithuanian ones.[1] Idelsohn was aware of a collection of 100 (harmonized) Latvian folk songs (Vītols 1906; Idelsohn 1932, xviii, fn. 1), which he most likely researched for sources of Yiddish songs (but to no avail). Marc Lavry, a native of Riga, who composed his first works there and conducted its opera, in 1934 led five concerts of all-Jewish programs with the “Jewish minorities’ orchestra.” The events were advertised in both Yiddish and Latvian.[2]

There is no evidence of Jewish folk songs in Baltic languages. Two items in this publication are in Latvian (nos. 13–14), but the interlocutor recorded was apparently not Jewish. In addition, no. 12, a Yiddish song sung by a Latvian interlocutor, and no. 7, an instrumental “Jewish dance” by a Latvian performer, are probably instances of cross-over from Jewish music rather than towards it.[3] Thus, the Jewish items in Melngailis’s collection that relate specifically to Baltic cultures are rather an exception.

Recruiting folk songs in the process of the Latvian nation-making is a theoretical concern in Karnes’s introduction as much as it pertains to Zionism. Scholars of Israeli culture will find this discussion pertinent as it offers an alternative reading to the by now clichéd concept of “invented tradition,” as deployed in relation to the Zionist project (Burstyn 2015/16). Indeed, scholars have claimed that modern Hebrew songs were intentionally composed in imagined manufactured “archaic” styles, so as to circumvent the period of exile and express the return to the ancestral land. Karnes’s model proposes that songs transmitted orally by non-professional performers were collected prior to having been endowed with national signification.

Toward the end of the introduction, Karnes discusses Melngailis’s views during the Nazi occupation of the Baltic States. He quotes Melngailis’s mention of the linguist Sergei Bulich, according to whom the “originary [sic] home” of the Aryans is “not to be sought in the southerly reaches of the world” (p. xxvii). This idea is of course a critique of the theory of the proto-Indo-European roots of European cultures, a theory grounded on strong linguistic evidence. The critique was motivated by racist prejudices probably aimed at pleasing the ears of the occupiers. Latvians and Lithuanians, whose languages have the highest affinity to Sanskrit among all European languages, distanced themselves from such Eastern origins. Interestingly, this negative view of the Asian origins of European cultures contrasts with a predominant Zionist rhetoric that emphasized the Near Eastern foundations of “authentic” Jewish culture. Indeed, Meir Shimon Geshuri argued that “Our music must remain Oriental in character, since we were an Oriental people in the Land of Israel” (Geshuri 1943).

A long section in the introduction to Karnes’s volume calls attention to “encounters along the Baltic coast” between Jews and non-Jews. Despite “ample evidence” in support of the view that “Jews and Latvian hardly met at all” (pp. xviii-xix), Karnes finds that documents such as “published and unpublished vernacular songs, concert programs, and other documents that provide glimpses into public and private musical life . . . tell different stories” (p. xix). Yet as far as song lyrics about Jewish-Latvian encounters are concerned, I suggest they should not be seen as evidence at all, as text might depict unlikely imaginary encounters that are attractive precisely due to their unlikeliness. Analogous representations of unlikely crossover ethnic encounters are found elsewhere as well: There are Jewish-American songs about Jewish cowboys (Gottlieb 2004, 64). Also Yemenite-Ashkenazi intermarriages in Israel during the 1930s and through the 1950s were more common on stage than in reality.

The separate subhead entitled “about the edition” opens with a precise description of the editorial policy employed in handling the various aspects of Melngailis’s manuscript. The only unfortunate editorial decision was that “text underlay has been adjusted to align texts and notes at the editor’s discretion based on word accentuation, precedent and context. At least for items in Hebrew, it is not clear which system of accentuation served the interlocutors—the Ashkenazi system, where the accent most often falls on the penultimate syllable, or the Sephardi system, where it is the last syllable of the word that is usually accentuated. The latter system gradually took precedence in the Jewish settlement in British Palestine and in some Zionist circles in Eastern Europe. Furthermore, the Ashkenazi pronunciation is apparent in the transcription of some titles (e.g., Alpaim shona [no. 38] rather than shanah; Al mois Trumpeldor [no. 37.] rather than “mot”), but the Ashkenazi prosody of the Hebrew poems is not observed.

The latter part of this subhead dealing with editorial criteria is actually an analytical glimpse into the tonal systems of Eastern European Jewish music. Karnes’s detailed discussion on the Aeolian and altered Phrygian scales recalls the debate between two prominent Jewish musicians affiliated with the St. Petersburg Society for Jewish Folk Music: Lazare Saminski, who praised the Aeolian scale and regarded the Phrygian scale as its corruption, and Joel Engel, who considered the altered Phrygian scale as legitimate. Saminski’s position intersected with ideas propagated by musicians in the Jewish community of Palestine. Critic Menashe Ravina (1942, 13), for example, called for the avoidance of the augmented second, which in his view signified the despair of the diaspora. Yitzhak Edel ([1966] 1980), who was sympathetic to Jewish music of the diaspora, shared the same disdain towards the augmented second, which he regarded as a corruption stemming from foreign influence (Goldenberg 2004).

Karnes quotes Idelsohn on the importance of the lack of a leading tone in Jewish songs. These issues were apparently of concern for Latvians as well. Studying the previously mentioned Vītols collection of harmonized Latvian folk songs, Idelsohn (1932, xviii, fn. 1) found that around 40% are in minor keys. Yet, among these forty-two songs in minor, only four feature the leading tone in their melody (nos. 9, 21, 26 and 98), while twenty-two have it in their harmonization. Among the remaining sixteen songs in minor, the harmonization of the final cadence often avoids the seventh scale step, either by employing incomplete chords or by using plagal cadences. This suggests a conscious choice that reflects an internal Latvian debate over the tonality of “authentic” folk songs.

While Karnes presents the “Altered Phrygian” simply as an Aeolian with a lowered second step and a raised third step, it is in fact identical to a plagal form of harmonic minor (e.g., altered Phrygian above A as D harmonic minor). Nathan Shahar (1989, 220), having encoded melodies of Hebrew songs by their scale degrees in relation to a central tone, defined the tetrachord featuring a minor second, an augmented second and a minor second, as the upper tetrachord of an harmonic minor. This raises the question whether a clear distinction between these two conceptualizations of the altered Phrygian mode is possible or even neccesary. A crucial criterion for interpreting a melody as being in Altered Phrygian or harmonic minor should be its final tone: ending on the fifth step alone of the would-be harmonic minor could support an altered Phrygian reading; but even then there is a strong case in hearing a harmonic minor that ends on the lower melodic scale fifth step (Tarsi 2002). Tarsi suggests further distinctions, according to which a finalis need not be the final tone, but can offer a tone of gravitation different than that of a tonic. At least for the folk song repertoire in the present volume, such distinctions are not required.[4] A strong case against reading plagal harmonic minor is found in those melodies that actually appear in two forms—Aeolian and altered Phrygian on the same note. A case in point is Vos mir seinen, which Idelsohn lists in both versions (1932, no. 517). Melngailis’s commentary to the transcription of “Was wir saien” (no. 63) states that he transcribed the Aeolian form only and therefore he had no need for key signatures.

Melngailis’s practice of notating melodies based on the harmonic minor/altered Phrygian is inconsistent; such inconsistency, accordingly, impedes our understanding of this phenomenon. Consider, for example, the famous song Hava Nogilo (no. 53). This melody has three parts. In terms of harmonic minor, two sections end on the dominant and the final one ends in a stable manner. Read as an altered Phrygian, the final tone of section 1 is relatively open (analogous to an imperfect authentic cadence), and that of section 2 is the lowest tone (with possible claim for centricity). Yet the end of section 3, then, clearly reverts to harmonic minor. Melngailis notates E as the stable tone (tonic of E harmonic minor, potentially B altered Phrygian) but his key signatures are more complicated than required: F sharp, D sharp alongside naturals on C and G, avoiding four sharps that would imply E major. But F sharp in the key signature and D sharp whenever needed in an E harmonic minor context would suffice. Contrarily, the song Schabe mit Bern (no. 25) appears to be in C harmonic minor, even though it ends with the descending tetrachord on this scale and starts with an arpeggio on the dominant of the harmonic minor, thereby reinforcing G as its center rather than C. This suggests a strong case for an “altered-Phrygian” preference.

Commentaries to the songs

The collection has sixty unaccompanied melodies, numbered 1–64 (four items appear twice: nos. 6/49, 8/19, 32/56, 47/48). Compared with other anthologies of Yiddish and Hebrew songs, such as Idelsohn (1932) and Beregovskii and Fefer (1938), this is a fairly modest collection. Only four items represent the earliest stratum of the collection (transcribed in 1899), while another thirteen may belong to this batch as well. The 1899 field work alone contained 120 songs performed by Jewish singers (p. xxiv), but most of them were not included in the edition under review. If indeed “the edition includes all songs and instrumental pieces in the Melngailis Collection identified as Jewish” (p. xxxii), the reader is left to assume that the rest of the 1899 materials are lost. While “the absolute loss of Melngailis’s Jewish collection was discovered to have been a myth” (p. xi), it seems then that, at least in regard to the earliest layer, the loss is indeed almost total. Despite the exhaustive description of Melngailis’s notebooks with Jewish materials (p. xxxiii), this information appears to be missing.

Karnes and his team located thirty-two items from the Melngailis Jewish corpus in other collections of Jewish folk songs. This means that about half of this Jewish corpus consists of known materials. The rich commentary on these songs are unprecedented in English, but one wonders about their usefulness to scholarship on Yiddish and Hebrew folk songs, given the sketchiness and even randomness of the Melngailis Jewish corpus.

To begin with, nowhere in the publication does Karnes distinguish between the sources of texts alone (Ginzburg and Marek 1901, Strauss 1920, Nadel 1923) and those that include musical transcriptions. Occasionally, the distinction between different melodies set to the same text and within the same collection is missing (see below on Elijohu Honovi). One song (Schlof mein Kind, no. 33) is shown in an arrangement of a different melody (although the melody Melngailis transcribed is very well-known). The commentary of another song (Ani holachti bajaar, no. 39) refers to two sources, even though the melody transcribed by Melngailis is different than the ones included in those anthologies and is moreover apparently unique.

Missed identifications

The Melngailis Jewish collection provides few novelties to the study of Yiddish and Hebrew folk songs. While Karnes argues that Senderle mein Man (no. 26), appears “in only one published collection from the early twentieth century” (Ginzburg and Marek 1901), this source includes only the text, making Melngailis’s version probably the first and only musical transcription of this song. The first phrase of the melody resembles another widespread Yiddish song Meirke mein Sohn. Considering some similarities in the rhetoric of the text, a connection between both songs should be further studied. Especially interesting is the melody of the Hebrew song Hazak vemac (no. 51) which is not to be found in any other source.[5]

In spite of the keen efforts by Karnes to annotate the Jewish songs in the Melngailis collection, these notes are lacking information that could have been easily retrieved had the author consulted sources in Hebrew. The latter half of this review-essay therefore has my own notes on selected songs from the Melngailis collection, following which are some methodological suggestions concerning the study of Jewish folk songs.

Most of my notes refer to the Zemereshet website founded and maintained by a volunteer association of early Hebrew song enthusiasts. The website (in Hebrew only) provides recordings, texts, and original non-Hebrew songs (in the case of Hebrew covers) in addition to substantial notes. The following references are linked directly to the recordings in Zemereshet together with the ID numbers of the song pages.

No, 10, “Unidentified tune,” is a version of the Yiddish song Chezkele (no. 38 in Kisselgof 1912; sometimes spelled Chatzkele). It is also known with a Hebrew text by Kadish Yehuda Silman, Paz kula raz kula (“It is all gold, it is all secret,” Zemereshet #15). Measures 3–6 of the transcription (out of a total of eight) provide sufficient proof to claim a direct relationship.

No. 37, “Al mois Trumpeldor,” whose Hebrew title is spelled in the Ashkenazi pronunciation means “On the death of Trumpeldor.” This is the title given by Binder (1926, 42) to the Hebrew song Mini Dan ve’ad Be’er Sheva” which is also known as “Song of the Prisoners in Acre” (Zemereshet #305). The leader or the Revisionist party within the Zionist movement, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, wrote this song while imprisoned at a British facility in the fortress of Acre. It was set to music by the Galician Jewish musician Yosef Milet (1889-1947) who was one of the pioneer music teachers in the Yishuv. The melody transcribed by Melngailis hardly resembles Milet’s, except for the first measure. However, it may be argued that the singer simply did not remember the melody well (as s/he did not remember the text either). Still, the song was transmitted in different variants, some of which carry more affinities to the melody transcribed by Melngailis, such as the opening verse in the recording by Rema Samsonov. Binder notates the melody in that manner, but avoids a first open ending. In other sources (e,g. the recording by Uzi Meiri), the first verse begins differently and only the second verse recalls Melngailis’s transcription. Curiously, the two first measures of Melngailis tune match another famous Zionist song, Se’u tsiona nes vadegel (“Carry your pennants and flags to Zion”; Zemereshet #154). The performer apparently started singing Jabotinsky’s song but confused it with “Se’u tziona” and lost track of the melody. Still, tight-knit phrases later in the melody transcribed by Melngailis give the impression of a different melody altogether, of which no other documentation is available.

No. 38, “Alpaim Shona”: despite its obscure origin, this song appears in a variety of sources. The melody transcribed by Melngailis (Zemereshet #2625) was recorded with small changes by various interlocutors such as Shulamit Rosenfeld, born in Rosh Pina in 1907 and Papo Salem, who learned it in the “Hacoaḥ” Zionist youth movement in Thessaloniki. Eliyahu Hacohen (personal communication) reports that he heard the song from various members of the first waves of Zionist immigration to Palestine. This text was also taught by an ultra-Orthodox instructor at the Beit Yaakov network of schools for girls in Israel in 1936 (Rotenberg [1999] 2003).[6] The text looks like it had been penned by a professional writer, yet the source of both the text and its melody remains unknown.[7] The full text of this song with English translation (but with a different melody) was published in an unidentified bi-lingual book found at the National Library of Israel (henceforth NLI; see ex. 1);[8] based on an unpublished mimeographed collection of Ephraim Abileah’s songs I was able to identify him as the composer of this second melody.

Example 1. “Alpaim Shona”, full Hebrew text with English translation and a melody by Ephraim Abileah, from several pages of Shabbat songs, cut from an unidentified source, at the Meir Noy Archive of Hebrew Song, NLI, Noy.H, sefer B ('amami 14).

No. 43, “Dancis,”is known from several contexts. Among the Chabad Hassidic community, it is sung with the text Utsu etsa vetufar (“Hatch a plot—it shall be foiled” [Isaiah 8:10]). Chabadpedia attributes the melody tentatively to Meir Shapira from Lublin and the Yiddish text to this melody, “Lomir bigrasn,” was recorded commercially by Cindy Paley. The melody is published in Rosowski (1929) as “Hora no. 16” and was sung by pioneers in Palestine as Hora galilit (“Galilee Hora,” Zemereshet #1533). Other texts, ditties about public personalities in Hebrew (on Moshe Sne, a military leader and later the leader of the Communist Party) and Yiddish (on the author Nathan Bistritzky) are also known (Zemereshet #4371).

No. 46, “Du fregst mir mein Freind” is “apparently unique to Melngailis’s collection,” according to Karnes. Indeed, one would not find other references to this text, but that is only because the correct title should be “Du fregst mich mein Freind”. This in fact is a famous song by Abraham Reisen; its melody, however, is not the usual one set to this text by Sidor Belarsky (Bugatch 1961, 129). I suspect this “tuneful if unremarkable” melody (in Karnes’s words) might be related to the melody by which Akara (Barren) is sung (Zemereshet #3645; its text is by poetess Rachel Bluwstein). Example 2 compares both songs. The melodies share the opening motive, the cadences, the higher melodic area of mm. 3–4, the leap of a sixth to the higher third scale step at exactly the same place, and the descending arpeggio of a subdominant chord at the end of the third quarter. Without further evidence, the direct relation between these two melodies cannot be confirmed for the moment.[9]

Example 2. “Aqara” compared with “Du fregst mich mein Freind”

No. 48, “Džingale, džingale, džan”, is an Armenian melody (despite Karnes’s claim that this song is unique). It was popularized during Israel’s 1948 War as “Hafinjan” (“The Coffee Pot,” Zemereshet #888) with a text written by Haim Hefer. The latter recalled this melody was sung by Jews in Palestine even earlier, but without text (Hefer 2004, 98). Džingale, džingale, džan is also listed in the widespread songster Shirei Eretz-Israel (Schönberg 1935, 110) under the title Dschungali Dschungali Dschun, a corruption of the original Armenian lyrics “Hingala” (see Assaf 2011). The melodic version in Schönberg is closer to the Hebrew song than the one transcribed by Melngailis. We do not know how this Armenian song migrated to the Jewish repertoire, yet the very fact it appears in “copybooks compiled in the 1930s and 1940s” might attest that Melngailis’s interlocutors heard it when it was already disseminated in Europe through Schönberg’s songster.

No. 62, “Umatoi umanoim”: The title corrupts the Hebrew in Ashkenazi pronunciation, Hine ma tov uma noim (Psalm 133: 1). Karnes argues that “the tune Melngailis transcribed appears to be unique. Its similarity to the American spiritual ‘Glory, Glory Hallelujah’ (and the earlier songs to that melody) is striking but possibly coincidental.” But even without further evidence, both songs are more than similar or “strikingly similar”; they are plain and simply identical, as the Hebrew verse is simply set to the melody of the American song. The setting of this Biblical Hebrew verse to this song was documented in the autobiographical songster of Netiva Ben Yehuda (1990, 112), and it is also sung by Mike Weintraub in a 1948 recording by Ben Stonehill in New York, in a collection of Yiddish and Hebrew songs sung by Holocaust survivors.

The setting of the popular American melody and Hebrew verse was therefore not a local tradition or a ditty, but a widespread item (Zemereshet, #2774). It also became a Hebrew chant in the sports arena with the lyrics Hagavi’a hu shelanu (“The cup is ours”). The daily newspaper Davar (27 May 1928) reports on the reception for the winning Hapo’el Tel Aviv soccer team with these lyrics; although the report does not indicate the melody, it is almost certainly the American one. My late father (b. 1930) recalled the song set to this tune from his childhood.

Additions to commentaries of songs

No. 6 and 49, “Elijohu Honovi” (Zemereshet #269), are transcriptions of a widespread song for the ending of the Sabbath; they appear in earlier sources (Kisselgof 1912)[10] and have been documents in three early recordings of Hebrew songs: by the male choir of Abraham Zvi Idelsohn, by the actors of Habima theatre (both from the 1920s) and by Josef Spindel (1934). Another recording by cantor Ephraim Di-Zahav (at 1:24) was broadcast for many years at the end of the Sabbath by Kol Israel (the former Israeli state radio), thereby contributing to the wide spread of the song. The sung text is only the beginning of a long piyyut of unknown source. The entire piyyut set to music (with the same opening melody) is found in a single source (Nadel 1937, 49).

Melngailis transcribed two non-identical versions of this song. In contrast to most extant versions, both of Melngailis’s transcriptions lack the leading tone in m. 2: no. 6 has an Aeolian seventh scale step while no. 49 repeats the tonic tone. The lack of the leading tone may suggest another line of dissemination for this melody. Additionally, the first measure recurs in both transcriptions two more times: mm. 3–4 without change, then mm. 5–6 with a higher and open ending. This is how the melody is performed today. In both Kisselgof’s transcription and in Idelsohn’s recording, however, the opening two bars ascend already in the second statement (and there is no third statement). The final part of the melody appears once with a closed cadence, as opposed to the version circulating today in which it is repeated, first with half a cadence followed by a full one. This double ending may have been introduced in a relatively later stage.

No. 33, 'Shlof mein Kind,' is a widespread Yiddish lullaby. It appears in Melngailis’s collection in an arrangement for voice and piano. Taking his cue from Idelsohn, Karnes notes that this poem is sung to various melodies; some of these melodies were used for different Hebrew lullabies, some were translations of the Yiddish song, while others were original like Shkhav heradem by Aharon Liboschitzky and Numa peraḥ by Ephraim Dov Lifshitz. All the lullabies in this family of songs are in the catalectic trochaic heptameter. The tune Melngailis transcribed belongs to a family of related melodies that is similar to (and perhaps stem from) a Cossack lullaby.[11]

No. 39, “Ani holachti bajaar” (Zemereshet #4662 and #4663, with different melodies): The text of this song has a long history and many variants. For a detailed study, see Hazan and Seroussi 2005.

No. 45, 'Du forst awek,' is often attributed to Solomon Shmulewitz (Small) who published the song in the United States as “A brivele zu mamen” ('A letter from mother') and recorded it in 1908.[12] The text was previously published by Ginzburg and Marek (1901), but Small’s version features a new section, most likely a chorus he added to a pre-existing song (Idelsohn 1932, no. 428). Could the song have arrived in Latvia from the United States, in either a printed version or a commercial recording? This hypothesis must be verified through cautious comparisons of all sources. A Hebrew version of this Yiddish song (Zemereshet #1065) is set to Small’s melody for the chorus, while the verses are sung to a newly composed tune by Shmuel Freshko. Indeed, the Hebrew song takes from Small’s melody only the portion that is missing from the version Melngailis transcribed.

No. 58, “Onu Nihyeh haRishonim” (Zemereshet #534): The Hebrew text was first published in the daily “Hapo’el hatsa’ir” on 24 December 1920 and not in Schönberg‘s Shirei Eretz Israel songster as maintained by Karnes. The latter correctly indicates that the Yiddish song Blondzhe mer nit in der finster (attributed to Leib Mal’ach) is set to the same well-known tune. The Yiddish song appeared slightly before the Hebrew one (in Glattstein 1919). Vinkovetzky, Kovner, and Leichter (1985, 11–12, a source cited by Karnes elsewhere) identify the composer as “Sheinin,” but this identification is an error stemming from Helfman (1938, 42–45), where the Yiddish text is set to a different tune in a choral arrangement by E. Scheinin.

Karnes points out that there is one more melody for the Hebrew text (a Russian tune, see Zemereshet #1962). Actually, this song has been set to three additional melodies: a Russian tune (Zemereshet #1203), a melody by I[srael?] Glattstein (perhaps identical with the editor of the 1919 collection where the famous tune appeared with the Yiddish texts, Zemereshet #4863), and one more unidentified tune (Zemereshet #3829).[13]

Conclusion and Suggestions

This edition of the Melngailis Jewish collection deserves praise for the rich historical contextualization provided by its insightful introductory essay, but the partial or otherwise incorrect information included in the song commentaries is regrettable and could have been easily avoided with the aid of online databases. The publication could have benefited from a casual search at the NLI Hebrew and Yiddish song catalogs, as well as the richly informed (and constantly updated) Zemereshet website. While the editor had Hebrew-reading assistants (p. xii), he apparently did not instruct them to consult these crucial sources.

Looking at these gaps in a more positive vein, I would like to offer here a vision for future projects of this kind: it would be advantageous to separate publications of transcribed oral sources, along with their detailed commentaries, from the in-depth essays on such collections. Analyzing the social and institutional background of each collection, as well as the figures involved in these ethnographic enterprises, their ideological agendas and methodological assumptions, is a meaningful contribution to the expanding field of uncovering unattended archives. This is particularly relevant in cases such as the Latvian Jewish collection discussed in this review-essay, as access was, until now, limited by technical and language barriers.

But basic research on individual songs should be available in online databases, not in a book format; such a format could become an accumulative digital and searchable enterprise shared by the community of scholars. Each new instance of a given song could then be added to this shared project and be readily available to various scholarly communities as well as the public. Each Jewish song should have a single page. Special solutions will be required for texts with multiple melodies, melodies with multiple texts, or textless melodies. Each song will need to appear in Hebrew and Latin scripts (perhaps in more than one spelling in each script), and it should include existing translations or paraphrases in addition to new translations to English and possibly to other relevant languages, like Russian and German. Extant printed anthologies, not only ethnographic or commercial recordings, can be incorporated into such a project. Ideally, this should be a flexible format, one that can cater to the interest of scholars as well as educators and performing artists. Mutual links with other databases of non-Jewish folk songs should also be considered. Such a platform would benefit from the important work that Karnes has done with Melngailis’s Jewish materials.

Endnotes

References

Assaf, David. 2011. “Gilgulo shel nigun: Hafinjan shenadad meharei Armenia le’oholei hapalmach,” a post in Oneg Shabbat Blog, 6 July 2011.

Ben-Yehuda, Netiva. 1990. Autobiographia beshir vazemer. Jerusalem: Keter.

Bergeovskii, Moshe and Itzik Fefer 1938. Yidishe Folkslider. Kiev: Ukrmelukhenatsmindfarlag.

Binder, Abraham Wolf. 1926. New Palestinian Folk Songs. New York: Bloch Publishing.

Bugatch, Samuel (ed.). 1961. Songs of Our People: A Collection of Hebrew and Yiddish Songs. New York: Farband Book Publishing Association.

Burstyn, Shay. 2015–16. “The Ethnomusicologist as Inventor of Musical Tradition”, Min-ad 13: 124–40.

Edel, Yitzhak. [1966] 1980. “Hatoda’a hayehudit baḥinukh hamusikali”, in Yitzhak Edel: Mishnato baḥinukh uvamusika (Yitzhak Edel: His Doctrine on Education and Music), ed. Gila Uriel. Tel Aviv: Israel Music Institute.

Geshuri, Meir Shimon.1943. “Live’ayot hanegina hayehudit,” Hed hamizraḥ 2/2 (9.7.1943), 11.

Ginzburg. Shaul M. and Pessach S. Marek. 1901. Evretskiia narodnya pesni v’ Rossii. St. Petersburg: Voskhod.

Glattstein, I[srael?] (ed.), 1919. Freiheit-Lider. Warsaw: Lira.

Goldenberg, Yosef. 2004. “The Negation of the Diaspora in the Hebrew Song Repertoire,” Cathedra 111, 129–48 (Hebrew).

Gottlieb, Jacob. 2004. Funny, It Doesn't Sound Jewish. New York: State University of New York.

Hazan, Ephraim and Edwin Seroussi. 2005. “El haya’ar yatso yatsati: shir vegilgulav,” in A Hearing Heart: Jubilee Volume in Honor of Avigdor Herzog, 236–51. Jerusalem: Renanot.

Hefer, Haim. 2004. Haim Hefer mesaper umezamer. Or Yehuda: Kinneret Zmora.

Helfman, Max (ed.). 1938. Gezang und Kamf 6: Repertoire for Chorus. New York: Jewish Workers Musical Alliance.

Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger (eds.). 1983. The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Idelsohn 1932. Thesaurus of Hebrew oriental melodies. Vol. 9: The Folk Song of the East European Jews. Berlin: Benjamin Harz.

Kisselgof, Zisman (compiler) 1912. Lieder-Sammelbuch für die jüdische Schule und Familie, ed. Alexander Zhitomirsky and Pesach Lvov. St. Petersburg: Geselschaft für Jüdische Volksmusik.

Levin, Dov (ed.) 1988. Pinkas HaKehillot (Encyclopedia of Jewish Communities from Their Foundation till After the Holocaust): Latvia and Estonia. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem. An incomplete English translation (by Shalom Bronstein) is available here (accessed 2 September 2020).

Levin, Dov (ed.) 1996. Pinkas HaKehillot (Encyclopedia of Jewish Communities from Their Foundation till After the Holocaust): Lithuania. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem. English translation by Carol Hoffman available here (accessed 2 September 2020).

Levine, Joseph A. 2001. “The Three-Part Selicha Mode,” Journal of Synagogue Music 28/1: 1–36

Nadel, Arno. 1923. Jüdische Volkslieder. Berlin: Benjamin Harz.

_____. 1937. Die häuslichen Sabbatgesänge. Berlin: Schocken.

Ravina, Menashe. 1942. Hashirim la’am be’erets Israel (The Songs for the People in the Land of Israel). Tel Aviv: Hamosad lemusika la’am vehamerkaz letarbut.

Rotenberg, Ayalah. [1999] 2003. Echoes of Yesteryear: Reminiscences of Jewish History in the Making: Eretz Yisrael from 1934 to 2000 through the Eyes and Pen of a Young Girl Growing up amidst Turbulent Times. Nanuet, NY: Feldheim.

Rosovski, Solomon. 1929. Mizimrat ha’aretz. Warsaw: Hava’ad hapo’el labrit ha’olamit shel hano’ar ha’ivri.

Schönberg, Jacob. Shirei Eretz-Israel. Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag.

Shahar, Nathan. 1989. The Eretz-Israeli Song 1920–1950: Sociomusical and Musical Aspects. Ph.D. dissertation, Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Hebrew).

Strauss, Ludwig. 1920. Ostjüdische Liebeslieder. Berlin: Welt.

Tarsi, Boaz. 2002. “Lower Extension of the Minor Scale in Ashkenazi Prayer Music”, Indiana Theory Review 23: 153–83.

Vinkovetzky, Aharon, Abba Kovner and Sinai Leichter. 1985. Anthology of Yiddish Folksongs, Vol. 4. Jerusalem: Magnes.

Vītols. Jāzeps (ed. and arr.) 1906. 100 Latweeschu Tautas Dseesmas. Riga: Neldner.

Yardeni-Zakheim, Moshe (ed.). 1928. Hasifrut ha-liṭa’it ha’amamit. Kovna: Jdiše Štime.

Introduction

It is November 15, 2016 and I am sitting in a car, driving on a mountain road that winds down along the Lebanese coastline, overlooking the Mediterranean seaboard. With me, I carry a treasure, a piece of lost musical history, or so I believe. Saved on my mobile phone is the copy of a 78rpm record of a pizmon, a Hebrew para-liturgical hymn called “Yom Yom Odeh” (Every day I am grateful), which was released in the early 1920s by the Lebanese record label Baidaphon, the largest non-European record company active in the Middle East during the phonograph era;[1] from here onwards, I will refer to this record as “the famous record”. Although the famous record is in fact by no means famous, I use this expression to highlight its centrality to this article as well as to anticipate my focus on the record’s contemporary social interpretation.

Today, the famous record is carefully stored in the shelves of the Lebanese Foundation for Arab Music Archiving and Research (AMAR). Located in the little mountain village Qornet al-Hamra just outside of Beirut, AMAR holds one of the largest existing collections of historical records from the Nahda time, the period of cultural and intellectual “renaissance” that characterized the Arab-Ottoman world during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. In musical terms, the Nahda is associated with the emergence of a new school, which, having its roots in Egypt, saw the revival of classical musical forms and genres such as the qaṣida, the muwashshaḥ and, most importantly, the dawr, alongside the development of new, colloquial and “light” repertoires associated with Cairo’s musical theater (Lagrange 1996, 69-108; Racy 2003, 103; Shannon 2006, 59-61)[2]

I had made my way up to AMAR to search for historical records of Jewish musicians from Aleppo, the city which, for a long time, was regarded as one of the musical centers of the region. In Aleppo, as elsewhere in the Arab world during the Nahda era, Jewish musicians played an active role in the performance and perpetuation of the above-mentioned repertoires.[3] Moreover, synagogue cantors, ḥazzanim, often tended to structure new compositions of (para)liturgical hymns (known as piyyutim and pizmonim) according to these musical forms and/or combined Hebrew sacred and poetic texts with melodies from pre-existing popular songs, a practice with roots in the sixteenth century that continues amongst Syrian Jews today (Kligman 2009; Shelemay 1998). “Yom Yom Odeh” is an example of that tradition.

Figure 1. Photograph of the famous record's label, showing Baidaphon’s trademark sign, the gazelle, and the name of the singer and the song written in Arabic, Hebrew and English. Courtesy of the author.

Recording of the Baidaphon record, as captured on the author's cellphone.

Back at AMAR, what had prompted the famous record to be picked out from the several thousand 78rpm discs held in the archive shelves and be placed onto the spindle of an old gramophone, from which I then recorded it with my phone, was my inquiry about one of the most famous composers of pizmonim, Hakham Raphael Taboush (1830-1918/19). Hakham Taboush, whose full name was Raphael Antebi Ades Taboush, was a Kabbalist and Torah scholar from Aleppo.[4] Over the course of his life, he, who was blind and relied on a scribe to record his compositions, is said to have produced and revived over four hundred pizmonim. Many of them continue to be sung by Syrian Jews around the world, where Taboush’s legacy, his persona as well as his poetic and musical talents, have taken on an almost mythical status. Tales relate that he was able to come up with verses on demand and to set them to just about any sound or melody, such as that of a Turkish marching song (Sabato 2004, 94) or the sound of water dripping from the buckets of a waterwheel in one of Aleppo’s public gardens (Sutton & Lanyado 2005, 123). Other stories concern Taboush’s love and mastery of Arab music. It is said that, upon entering Aleppo’s local coffeehouses which he would visit in search of musical inspiration, he was ironically greeted by the musicians present as the “thief of songs”, whence he challenged them to compare their melodies and maqams with his own compositions (Shelemay 1998, 30-32). Even his blindness is rumored to be linked to his passion for music. According to his great niece in New York, Taboush lost his eyesight when, after running away from an angry crowd that had caught him secretly listening to their music, he splashed cold water on his overheated face (ibid.).

Figure 2. Hakham Raphael Antebi Ades Taboush. Courtesy of pizmonim.org.

Sitting in the car, I take another look at my phone and the photograph I took of the famous record label, wondering why both the Arabic and the Hebrew, as well as the English inscriptions of the singer’s name read Rafoul Tabbach, instead of Raphael Taboush. Was this really the famous Hakham Raphael Taboush about whom I had inquired? And how could it possibly be him if, according to the AMAR foundation, recording sessions for the famous record took place in the summer of 1921 and Taboush reportedly died in Cairo in 1918/19?[5] Was one of the dates wrong? Was someone perhaps imitating him? Or was Rafoul Tabbach a different ḥazzan altogether? And if so, was he, too, from Aleppo?

I put my headphones on. Maybe the music, his accent or singing style would provide a clue. I listen again to the copy on my phone. At that point I discover that towards the end of the first half of “Yom Yom Odeh”, around ten seconds of the song appear muted, my recording somewhat muffled and much less audible than before. How did this happen? And who was Rafoul Tabbach?

The Biography of a Recording

This article is the initial result of my attempts to answer these questions. Trying to learn more about the famous record’s origins—both the song and its singer—I played the copy on my phone to a variety of people familiar with musical traditions from the Nahda period and/or the liturgical practices of Middle Eastern Jews. While everyone from the Jewish side was familiar with Hakham Raphael Taboush and/or the Iraqi version of “Yom Yom Odeh”,[6] nobody knew Rafoul Tabbach or the rendition of “Yom Yom Odeh” saved on my phone. Moreover, listening to the song’s style, nobody, Jewish or non-Jewish, was able to determine with certainty if it was “Aleppian”, “Damascene”, or even Syrian.

But that did not stop people from having distinct and often emotional responses to it. Whether nostalgic evocations of a once shared Arab-Jewish musical history, concerns about a Jewish musician’s national authenticity, dreams about a city never seen, or my own fictional associations with the ten muted seconds on my phone—the different reactions to my recording of “Yom Yom Odeh” yielded a shift in my focus: the center of my inquiry was no longer the search for the song’s historical roots (in Aleppo) but its contemporary cultural and socio-political interpretation. Put differently, once I had taken it out of the archive, “Yom Yom Odeh”, now preserved as soundbites on my phone, began to develop a new biography, one made up of the different meanings, memories and desires that people attached to it. And my assumption that it featured a Jewish singer from Aleppo, together with my decision to call its original source “the famous record,” constituted the beginning of this biography.

Networks, Objects, Agents

In conceptualizing how this new biography is mediated by the interplay of human and non-human actors, this article brings together two main lines of inquiry. One can be found in recent scholarship on Actor-Network Theory (ANT), the other comes from the field of archeology. Developed in the early 1980s by the social theorist Bruno Latour and his colleagues at the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation in Paris, ANT is an analytical method that suggests that (social) reality is made up of networks shaped by the interaction of different actors or agents (Latour 1987, 2005). Any attempt to account for the nature of such networks, proponents of ANT argue, requires us to extend the idea of agents beyond humans and account for the role that non-human objects and “things” play in shaping the social fabric of the worlds in which we live. Scholars have applied this approach to the study of music (Born & Barry 2018; Hennion 2003, 2016; Piekut 2014), arguing that ANT can expand our understanding in that it invites us to think of music as a constellation or network of different material and non-material, human and non-human mediators, namely, sound, voice, instruments, devices, notation, venues, ideas, discourses, etc. As Georgina Born and Andrew Barry write, “identifying music’s constitutive mediations yields a more complex and distributed object (an assemblage) on the basis of which to trace the conditions, trajectories and forces that converge on a musical object or event […]” (Born & Barry 2018: 467).

For the purpose of this article, which is concerned with documenting the biography of a song, it is especially ANT’s focus on non-human actors that is of significance. Indeed, the biography of “Yom Yom Odeh” that the following pages unfold is mediated by two main things: the famous record, a material object produced around one hundred years ago, meticulously looked after by the experts at AMAR, yet today essentially immobile and inaccessible to many, especially Israeli Jews; second, the famous record’s copy on my mobile phone, generated by my interest in bringing back into circulation what I believe to be a rather remarkable evidence of a shared Arab-Jewish musical heritage, with the goal of reactivating and exploring its memory in the present.[7] Thus, both “objects“ shape the biography of “Yom Yom Odeh“ by preserving its music and animating people to ascribe meaning to it.

This second point links back to questions of human agency and its effect on objects and things, a relation that has been explored in the field of archeology. Holtorf (1998), Gosden & Marshall (1999), Peers (1999), and Joy (2009), among others, put forward the notion that material objects and artefacts have a biography which in turn is made up not only of the history of their production, but equally by the processes through which society marks them.[8] The general idea is that a meaningful relationship exists between people and things (rather than a passive, production- and consumption-based one), and that this relationship fluctuates over time. Indeed, Igor Kopytoff writes that when writing the biography of an object one should ask, “What are the recognised ‘ages’ or periods in the thing’s ‘life,’ and what are the cultural markers for them?” (Kopytoff 1986, 66-67). In chronicling aspects of “Yom Yom Odeh’s” biography, I suggest adding a spatial and sonic perspective to Kopytoff’s question: What are the recognized geographical spaces and trajectories that people associate with the famous record? And how, given that we are dealing with an audio artefact, are these mediated by the ways they listen to its recording on my phone?

Attending to these questions, the following pages present the reader with five different “scenes”, each of which contains a particular response or reaction that “Yom Yom Odeh” has elicited since I played it to people, myself included. Taken together, these scenes not only illustrate ethnomusicologist Steven Feld’s assertion that each hearing has its own history and biography (1984, 11), they also attest to a tension. And while this tension is generated by the at times opposing narratives of my interlocutors, it ultimately arises from the musical material of “Yom Yom Odeh” itself; that is, from its reluctance to being synthesized with the ideological precepts of the Israeli-Palestinian/Arab conflict. Although aimed at purportedly incompatible political projects, what these precepts have in common is that they imply not only the dissociation of those living in the modern state of Israel from the historical landscape from which the famous record emerged, but also the dissolution of its musical material into the two distinct (national) categories of “Arab” and “Jewish”. It is to a brief discussion of this musical material and with it, to the first “scene”, that we turn now.

Rafoul Tabbach, “Yom Yom Odeh”

Rafoul Tabbach was not the only Jewish Nahda musician who recorded with Baidaphon (others included, for example, the Egyptian vocalist and composer Zaki Mourad[9], his brother Nessim Mourad and the Levantine singer Badriyya Sa‘ada). However, most of them sang in Arabic and recordings of them performing Jewish religious hymns in Hebrew are rare. In that regard, the famous record, together with a few records by Zaki Mourad, one of which is referenced below, is indeed exceptional.

“Yom Yom Odeh” is traditionally performed on the Jewish holiday of Shavuot (Pentecost), which historically marked the beginning of the wheat harvest and commemorates the revelation of the Torah at Mount Sinai and which, besides Pesach (Passover) and Sukkot (Tabernacles), constitutes one of the “Three Pilgrim Festivals” in Judaism. While a printed version of the song’s poetic text can be found in a manuscript from the Cairo Genizah dating from approximately the eighteenth century,[10] a list of sources provided in Davidson’s Thesaurus of Mediaeval Hebrew Poetry points to Iraq (especially Baghdad) and Jerusalem as the main centers of the text’s printed distribution (1929: 340).

In musical terms, “Yom Yom Odeh” bears a strong resemblance to a dawr and can be divided into several sections: an instrumental prelude, a well-known dulab in maqam hijaz on G performed here on a qanun and a violin, followed by an opening section, traditionally known as the madhhab, in which Tabbach, now only accompanied by the qanun, establishes the maqam of the song—huzzam—and introduces the first verse: Yom yom odeh la-el asher bakhar banu [Day after day I thank god who has chosen us]. This section leads to a middle part and the verse min ha-amim lisgulah lo lekaḥanu [from among the nations he has taken us as chosen]. Here, Tabbach gradually moves to a higher range of the maqam, characterized by the more melismatic stretching of certain lyrical phrases, particularly the vocalization of the syllable “lo”. What follows is the climax and center piece of the song which, repeated five times in a row, signifies the occasion of its performance and has the character of a refrain: Al Har Sinai, et Torato [Upon Mt. Sinai, (God gave us) the Torah].

Upon closer listening, one notices the presence of a second singer taking turns with Tabbach—at one point he even praises Tabbach’s virtuosic singing with what sounds like Ya ʿayni [O my eye!] in Arabic. While adding a second voice may possibly have been an attempt at evoking the characteristic interaction between the ḥazzan and members of the congregation in the synagogue, such call and response style is also typical to the structure of a dawr (see Shannon 2006, 135). Eventually, Tabbach modulates back to maqam hijaz, with the final verse aseret dibrot kodsho hishmianu [he announced to us his holy ten commandments] constituting the end of the first half of the song. “Yom Yom Odeh’s” continuation on the B side is almost identical in its structure, with Tabbach commemorating the divine revelation and the descent of myriads of heavenly armies [tzeva marom ribbotayim]. This time, however, the refrain is followed by an additional section where he— joined again by the second singer—vocally improvises on the syllable “ah”, a passage which, known as “ahat”, again forms an integral element of any dawr performance (Racy 2003, 97-98).

Scene I. Traces of Movement, A Hebrew Dawr

The overall structure of “Yom Yom Odeh”, its complex modal and melodic style, Tabbach’s Arabic sounding Hebrew pronunciation (such as the glottal ‘ayn or aspirated ḥet), and finally, the Arabic-Hebrew inscriptions on its label, they not only mark the famous record as a product of the Nahda period, but also render it evidence of a historical landscape of cross-territorial and Arab-Jewish musical exchange. This exchange was mainly facilitated by travelling musicians and the advent of recording technology at the beginning of the twentieth century. Both factors helped to perpetuate and shape a “classical”, transregional (albeit heavily Egyptian-influenced) musical aesthetic, which can be considered one of the reasons why many of the people whose narratives are documented here associated “Yom Yom Odeh” not with a concrete locality, but with a history of movement.

One of them was Z, a renowned Syrian musician who, forced to flee from his country during the war in Syria, currently resides in Egypt.[11] Upon listening to the song over WhatsApp, and despite lacking a command of Hebrew, they not only identified Rafoul Tabbach’s voice as “old style [uslub qadim]”, but discerned in it an “Aleppian style taken to Egypt [uslub ḥalabi manqul ila maṣr]”. This prompted them to relate the story of Shaker Efendi al-Halabi and Ahmed Abu Khalil al-Qabbani al-Dimashqi, two nineteenth-century musicians, composers (and, in the case of al-Qabbani, a playwright) from Aleppo and Damascus respectively who travelled to Egypt and brought with them local musical styles and repertoires (e.g. the muwashshaḥat) that would have a strong influence on Cairo’s music and theater scenes.[12] In a similar vein, Moshe Havusha, whose ancestors came from Iraq and who is today one of Israel’s most distinguished ḥazzanim, insisted that he “felt [baḥiss]” that it was the famous Sami al-Shawa, a Cairo-born violin player of Aleppian descent, who could be heard in “Yom Yom Odeh’s” prelude.[13] He then went on to relate how al-Shawa had once come to Jerusalem to play with Ezra Aharon, a Jewish ʿud player and composer of liturgical hymns who had emigrated from Iraq to the Jewish community of Palestine in 1935.[14] Hakham Raphael Taboush himself, so Havusha maintained, had travelled between Aleppo and Jerusalem before he eventually moved to Cairo where he died. He went, for example, in the year 1893 to present one of his compositions for the inauguration of Yaakov Shaul Elyashar as Chief Sephardi Rabbi of Palestine.[15]

A look at the biographies of some of the musicians from that period shows that this kind of mobility was far from being the exception. The Egyptian composer Sayyid Darwish, another pioneer of the musical Nahda, spent over two years of his life in Aleppo (al-Hefny 1974); the Aleppian composer, nay player and music theorist Ali al-Darwish carried out much of his musical work in Cairo (Iino 2009; Katz 2015, 122-12); already during World War I, Omar al-Batsh, another of Aleppo’s famous Nahda composers, had temporarily resided in Jerusalem, where he taught the Palestinian ʿud-player Wasif Jawhariyah (Tamari & Nassar 2014, xxiii); the aforementioned violinist Sami al-Shawa lived between Cairo, Jerusalem, Beirut, Baghdad and New York to record for the leading international and local record companies of the day (Salihi & Saʿid 2015, 32); and Egypt’s female wedding musicians, known as the ʿawalim (sing. ʿalimah), would frequently travel between Cairo, Beirut, Damascus and Aleppo, thereby facilitating the exchange of Egyptian ṭaqatiq (sing. ṭaqṭuqah) and Aleppian qudud (sing. qadd; up until today, some of the latter are sung in Egyptian dialect), which both belong to the genre of “light” vocal music usually sung in colloquial Arabic.[16]

Another important factor facilitating musical exchange was the migratory paths of religious students and pilgrims: Egyptian Sheikha Sakina Hasan is said to have presented her Quranic recitations in Aleppo’s Umayyad mosque (Kawakibi 2010, 25); members of Sufi-lodges travelled to participate in a saint’s festival, the mawlid (as an Egyptian musician once explained to me, a Syrian Sufi would have few problems understanding the musical language at a mawlid in the Egyptian Nile Delta town of Tanta); ḥazzanim went from Urfa to Aleppo to receive their religious and musical education (see below); and Aleppian Kabbalists and mystics pilgrimaged to Jerusalem or Safed, the supposed origin of one of their main liturgical traditions, the baqqashot[17] (Barnea 1997, 70). Despite the considerable influence that human movement rather than mass media technology had in shaping a shared Middle Eastern geography of musical aesthetics, an historical account that traces this influence remains to be written.[18]

What is important to note here is that the Arab-Jewish musical exchange facilitated by this landscape of travelling musicians came to an end in the mid twentieth century. After the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the subsequent division of the region into British and French mandates, an international border required people to obtain passports and other official documents to travel from one place to another (Zenner 2000, 81). Growing nationalist mobilization, anti-Jewish riots in the 1940s, and the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 gave rise to the en masse migration of Jews from North Africa and the Near East, thereby dislocating almost the entire Jewish community of Syria, Lebanon, Egypt and Iraq. With the region's current political order being defined by the rule of authoritarian state regimes, travel between these countries has become more restricted than ever. Z, displaced from their hometown in Syria, now lives in Egypt, unable to return home. For Moshe Havusha, countries such as Syria, Lebanon, or Iraq, the home of his ancestors, are inaccessible (though he has travelled to Egypt). As I explore below, the national borders and ideologies attached to these ongoing histories of immobility were also discernible in the ways in which my interlocutors rhetorically framed the famous record, both formally and informally.

Scene II. Beirut: A Hebrew Song in Arab Memory

The archive where the famous record is preserved labels “Yom Yom Odeh“ as “Arab music“. As stated in its title and reiterated on its website, AMAR is dedicated to the preservation and revival of al-musiqa al-ʿarabiyyah (“Arab/Arabic Music”). Continuing the legacy of the Nahda as a project of a distinctively Arab modernity (Shannon 2006, 58-66; see also Hanssen & Weiss 2016 and Patel 2013), the foundation has chosen to mobilize a term that only really gained prevalence as a musical category in the context of the region’s struggle for national independence and which, contrary to terms such as ṭarab or al-musiqa al-sharqiyyah (“Eastern Music”), obscures the long participation of ethnic minorities in local and regional music traditions or at least implies their integration into an Arab (musical) collective.[19] As Salwa El-Shawan Castelo Branco has noted, besides referring to Egypt’s urban secular music, al-musiqa al-ʿarabiyyah more generically signifies “all musical idioms that are composed and performed by Arabs, provided that these idioms do not transcend the boundaries of Arabic musical styles as perceived by native musicians and audiences” (1980, 86). How, one is tempted to ask, does a Hebrew record fit in here? If historical records had allowed the Jewish communities that emigrated from countries such as Syria, Egypt or Iraq to literally “carry” music to their new homes—to the U.S., to South America, to Israel or elsewhere (Shelemay 1998, 108)—was the famous record simply left behind, lost somewhere on the way? Who does its music belong to today?

The answer provided by the AMAR foundation seems clear: It renders “Yom Yom Odeh” as a remnant of a time in which, to borrow the words of literary scholar Lital Levy, “the incorporation of Jews into the Arab collective—not only as a matter of citizenship but as a matter of popular or collective consciousness—was still a viable possibility” (Levy 2008, 463).[20] I was able to gain a more profound, more informal and, above all, musical insight into what this incorporation entails from a reaction by X, one of my interlocutors in Beirut who is particularly knowledgeable about the music traditions of the Nahda period.

After listening to “Yom Yom Odeh”, X not only compared the vocal style of Rafoul Tabbach with that of the aforementioned Egyptian Jewish singer and composer Zaki Mourad, they even began to sing, in Hebrew, what turned about to be an exact rendition of the opening of Adonai hu ha-Elohim [My Lord is God], a Jewish hymn that Mourad recorded in the 1920s, i.e. at around the same time the famous record was produced.[21] Once finished, X was keen to stress that Mourad was opposed to Zionism and that he never emigrated to Palestine but rather died in Egypt, adding that Mourad only recorded this hymn for the purpose of preserving the Egyptian Jewish community’s heritage, and allegedly even had to read its Hebrew text from a piece of paper.

This response captures well the tension between the continued presence of a once-shared musical heritage and the imperatives of the Palestinian/Arab-Israeli conflict. On the one hand you have X’s brief but genuinely intimate rendition of a Hebrew hymn, a proof of their insider knowledge of the musical heritage to which “Yom Yom Odeh” belongs and a gesture that seemed to musically evoke the image of the song emerging from the thousands of Arab music records held at the AMAR archive. On the other hand, you have their rhetorical framing of this rendition which, in ways that not only suggest its implicit association with Israel, but also shed light on the narratives that are mobilized to integrate Jews into contemporary Arab imagination, concerned their need to authenticate Zaki Mourad by recounting his death on Egyptian soil and suggesting the singer’s lack of familiarity with his Jewish religious and linguistic heritage.[22]

Perhaps one could conceive of X’s reaction as a “cloistered memory”, which is how Jonathan Shannon (taking his cue from Benjamin Stora’s study on the Algerian War in French public memory) describes how surviving memories of Jewish musicians in Syria relate to the politics of official amnesia that the regime has directed against the country’s Jewish past (Shannon 2015; Stora 1997). Referring to these memories as “phantom musical presences”, Shannon presents as examples a photograph of a group of Aleppian Nahda musicians that includes the Jewish qanun player Yacoub Ghazala and his son Salim, both of whose names have been erased from the photograph’s index, as well as a “Jewish” finger technique on the qanun which continues to be practiced by at least one of his interlocutors. Describing the place these memories hold in contemporary Syria, he writes:

Formerly a small but integral part of Syrian society (as they were of Arab society more generally), the Jews now constitute a spectral presence as memories of their actual presence are refracted through the mirrors of official amnesia. Like memories of the Algerian War in France, memories of Syria’s Jewish population occupy a protected (and sensitive) walled off area in the national consciousness; they reside in a cloister (Shannon 2015, 126).

If we understand X’s rendition of a Hebrew hymn as a “cloistered memory”, then the way they rhetorically framed it brings to the fore one of the main “mechanisms“ that has and continues to relegate such memories into “cloisters,” namely the caesura that the establishment of Israel and the Palestinian Nakba mark in collective Arab memory. This caesura was discernible again in the fact that many of my non-Jewish research partners viewed “Yom Yom Odeh” as authentic cultural practice, while often rendering Jewish religious hymns sung to the melodies of more recent songs by Farid al-Atrash or Umm Kulthum, most of which were produced after 1948, as “cultural appropriation”. Moreover, it was, at least to me, also audible on my phone.

Scene III. Personal Excursion, A Meaningful Fiction

As mentioned before, the most conspicuous “mark” on my mobile phone recording of “Yom Yom Odeh” consists of the ten seconds in which the recording appears muffled and significantly less audible than in the minutes before. This can be attributed to different factors: the muffled section could have been part of the original recording; it could have been the result of a flaw in either the record or the device on which it was played; or I may have accidently moved my phone in a way that covered its microphone. Whatever the reason, in the months that followed my visit to the AMAR archive, this “mark” made me feel increasingly uncomfortable, given that my repeated requests for a digitalized copy of the song (which I was hoping to compare to my recorded version) went unanswered. Rumors had it that this was because I was also carrying out fieldwork in Israel, rumors which, and this is a crucial point as I do not wish to be misunderstood as making false allegations, were never confirmed. In fact, the staff at AMAR had been very helpful and welcoming and the reason for my request having remained unanswered was probably a re-structuring that the archive was undergoing at the time. What concerns me is not the question of whether these rumors are true or not (nor, indeed, the question of what caused the ten muted seconds); rather, I would like to invite the reader to focus on the action these rumors performed, as knowing about them drastically shifted the way I listened to the muted section on my phone.[23]

If initially I concluded that the ten lost seconds resulted from my inattentiveness, my inexperience with the practice of recording, or some technical fault on either my phone, the gramophone or the famous record itself, now, knowing my engagement in a zone of conflict, I became more and more convinced that the muted section sounded as if my phone had been covered by something; I started to believe that the ten muffled seconds could have been caused by someone actively trying to prevent me from retaining a full copy of the song; I even reinterpreted a sound of coughing in the background, now thinking that it could have been an attempt to upset my recording. All this reinforced my feeling that my inquiries into Jewish musicians in the Arab world had provoked suspicion among people, both in Lebanon and in Israel.[24] And so whether the muting was the result of some form of deliberate action or a figment of my own imagination, thinking about it turned it into what the political theorist Lisa Wedeen has called a “meaningful fiction” (Wedeen 2015 [1999], 69).[25] Its socio-political ramifications can be explored in two directions, both of which highlight the ways in which “Yom Yom Odeh’s” new biography relates to landscapes of fear, tension and national ideology and conflict.

On the one hand, my anxious belief in the possibility of my recording having been “sabotaged” epitomizes what is arguably one of the most significant disciplinary causes and effects of an environment of (national) conflict: paranoia. On the other hand, it brings to the fore the political conditions and sensibilities that could have motivated an intentional muting of the song, namely the Arab world’s ongoing post-colonial struggle, the conceptualization of the famous record as a national heritage, and the desire to preserve solidarity with those affected by the ongoing histories of material and immaterial dispossession that shape the region. All of these factors would explain resentment felt towards the de-territorialization of “Yom Yom Odeh” (or at least of its full version), qualify a muting gesture to be taken seriously as a form of political protest, and, ultimately, explain why, whether deliberate or not, the geographical association that I had with the muted section on my phone was Palestine.

The way I considered it, divesting myself of parts of a song that promised to be a remnant of a repertoire that, to many of my research partners in Israel, constitutes a “quasi-sacred, esoteric body of knowledge”, to reiterate Jonathan Glasser’s reference to the status of Andalusi music in North Africa (2016: 76), could serve as a reminder of Palestinian history. More precisely, the hand that I now envisioned covering my phone carried out an act of dispossession not comparable to, but still associated with, the seizure and erasure of land executed by soldiers, bulldozers and concrete walls. Or, to put it the other way around, the 'mark' I imagined it to make on my recording was, at least to me, reminiscent of the ways a Palestinian music archivist once illustrated how the dabke, one of the region’s most popular folk dances, belonged to the Palestinian national struggle:

We stomp our feet in the dabke to show the world that this is our land [Baladna] [stomping loudly on the floor], that people and villages can be killed and erased [stomping again] …, but our heritage[turāthnā] is something that they can’t reach because it is here [motioning to his heart]. They have stolen our land [stomp], forced us out of our homes [stomp], but our culture is something they cannot steal. When we stamp our feet, we are saying that no matter how far we have been scattered, Palestine will always remain under our stamping feet [filasṭīn rāḥ biẓāl taḥt aqdāmnā] (McDonald 2013, 20).

This was how my ideas about the muted section on my phone, although almost certainly fictional, took on meaning.

Scene IV. Jerusalem: “Back Home to the Maqam”

While providing insights into past and present histories of migrating musicians, the place Middle Eastern Jewish musicians hold in the collective and personal memory of those living in the places they left behind, as well as the ways (my own) listening experiences can be disciplined by national conflict, my inquiries had not brought me any closer to knowing who Rafoul Tabbach was. The only way I could find out more about his origins, I thought, would be by visiting Syrian synagogues. Having lived in Damascus throughout the beginning of the Syrian uprisings in March 2011 disqualified me from entering the U.S. via the visa waver program and therefore from going to Brooklyn/New York, the main center of Syrian Jewry. I had to rely on interlocutors in Jerusalem; there, the cultural value that my meaningful fiction concerning the muted section had implicitly attributed to the famous record was positively reaffirmed by the desires, wishful thinking, and dreams with which people invested it.

One ḥazzan whose ancestors had emigrated from Aleppo to Egypt before settling in Israel, came running up the stairs to my fifth-floor apartment in the hope of hearing the voice of his beloved Hakham Raphael Taboush. But after taking a quick look at the famous record’s label, he concluded, not without disappointment, that this could not be him. If it was Taboush, he surely would have liked his main family name, Antebi, to be printed on the label. Then, in an instance of local pride and Aleppians’ belief in the musical superiority of their city, he told of the old rivalry between Aleppo and Damascus, asserting that whoever the singer was, he had to be someone from Aleppo because this rendition was refined, complex and “clever”.[26]

The Jerusalemite Ḥazzan and music scholar Ezra Barnea, former director of Renanot, the Institute of Jewish Music, who has documented the influence of Aleppian ḥazzanim on the liturgical styles of the Sephardic communities in Jerusalem (1997), couched his belief in Rafoul Tabbach’s Aleppian origins in more miraculous terms. Listening to the copy on my mobile phone, surrounded by books and CDs in his small shop in Jerusalem’s Clal Center (a 1970s office tower which is home to one of the city’s oldest indoor shopping malls), he insisted: this song had to be from Aleppo; why? (he answered with a smile on his face)—simply because he wanted to believe in the (im)possibility of Hakham Raphael Taboush’s voice having been captured on record.[27]

The same was true for Ḥazzan Roni Ish-Ran, one of the founders of the “Kehillot Sharot [Singing Communities]”, a nation-wide project that brings together different sectors of Israeli society interested in Jewish liturgical traditions. “This is [maqam] ḥuzzam,” is how he, sitting in his small apartment in West Jerusalem’s Rehavia neighbourhood, expressed his surprise upon listening to “Yom Yom Odeh”. Then, towards the end of the song and commenting on Tabbach’s skilful modulation, he whispered, in a reverent, approving tone: “Back home…back home to the maqam”.[28] Ish-Ran’s ancestors came from the area between Urfa and Diyarbakır in what is today Anatolia, in south-east Turkey; his family name translates into the “singing man” and, so he proudly related, has a distinctive history. When his father, as a twelve-year-old boy and accompanied only by his younger siblings, arrived in Israel in 1949, authorities turned their name from the Turkish “Içran” into the Hebrew “Ishran”. Given that this name had no meaning, he, himself a passionate singer, decided to change a letter and add a hyphen, turning it into “Ish [man]-Ron [singing]”, and the name came to designate a family tradition. Ish-Ran’s grandfather was a ḥazzan and had received part of his cantorial training in Aleppo, a city that continues to inhabit Ish-Ran’s imagination as a place of (musical) yearning and familiarity. Indeed for him, intimate knowledge and daily practice of the musical heritage to which “Yom Yom Odeh” belongs renders him quasi native to a city he has never set foot in. As he remarked:

I dream of Aleppo, I feel like it was me who was born there eighty years ago and then left at once […]. I miss Aleppo because I live this music, this is what I do, it is my life. So I feel like I belong there or at least I was born there and spent my childhood there. Just to feel like I belong, I want to go to a small street and hear the Aleppian dialect, and see the people, the Hakhamim.

As ethnomusicologist Sarah Cohen vividly argues, music can transmit and evoke memories of far removed times and locations. It can constitute a “way out” and enable people “to travel in an imaginary sense to different times and places” (Cohen 1995, 439). Indeed, immersed in the soundbites on my mobile phone, Ish-Ran traversed, auditorily, what is today an impassable national border, “missing“ a city that he has never and probably will never see with his own eyes. Yet listening to “Yom Yom Odeh“, for him, not only evoked an idyllic image of an Aleppo of the past, it also led back to the nearby Nahlaot quarter, the neighbourhood where Ish-Ran grew up. Once, he stated, people there lived lives similar to the people of Aleppo or Urfa; they greeted each other on the street in Arabic, dressed in traditional Arab clothing or wore a tarbush, the red-colored, cylindrically shaped headdress worn by men during Ottoman times. But that, he asserted, was long lost now; times have changed, and only he was somewhat “stuck in the past”.

What is captured in this response, then, is not only an act of nostalgic imagination and the claim to the acoustic intelligibility of a place never seen; Ish-Ran’s associations with the famous record also indicate a sense of displacement from the past hometowns of his musical ancestors, coupled with an alienation from his present surroundings. It is this “double loss” that leads Edwin Seroussi to speak of a “culture of exiled individuals” when describing how contemporary Mizrahi musicians in Israel longed, through music, for the cities of their ancestors (Baghdad, Tunis or Thessaloniki), cities whose cultural heritage was neglected by mainstream Zionist discourse and thus constituted, in a double sense, “homes beyond [their] reach” (2014, 47-48). This “being beyond reach”, the inability to locate in the present the historical arenas associated with the musical heritage to which “Yom Yom Odeh” belongs, was, albeit in a different way, also apparent in the following fifth scene (and thus far, the last one). Coincidently, this story was related to me in a now closed Middle Eastern instrument shop in Nahlaot, the neighbourhood of Ish-Ran’s childhood.

Scene V. Off the Map: “This News is Only for Singers”

I had come across this shop after one of my visits to the nearby Ades synagogue[29] and whilst strolling through Nahlaot’s narrow alleyways. Stepping through a door with a small wooden ʿud placed beside it, I entered a living room and, after climbing a set of winding stairs, arrived at a second floor filled with qanuns, kamanjahs, buzuqs, riqqs, and carefully arranged ʿuds. While their inside labels revealed the places of their origin (Muhammad Ali Street, Cairo… Istanbul… Jerusalem), I noticed that in some of them, letters had been blacked out with a marker.

Figure 3. Image of the inside label of one of the Syrian ʿuds. The two marks above have been added by the author to protect the name of its manufacturer. Courtesy of the author.

“This one is from Syria.” During one of my visits, the owner of the shop had watched my clumsy attempts to hold one of the ʿuds against the sunlight to detect what it was that had been crossed out. The old ʿud hanging on the wall next to the shop’s entrance, he told me, was also from Syria and manufactured by the popular Aleppian ʿud-maker Ibrahim Sukkar. How had he brought these instruments into Israel? That, he assured me, remained his secret (although he probably imported them from elsewhere). As it turned out, the Syrian ʿuds were not the only instance of a musical trajectory taking place “off the map” and revealed in this little shop. I learned this during my conversation with Y, one of the shop’s frequent visitors and an expert on the liturgical heritage of Jews from the Middle East, who, I had hoped, could help me find out more about the origins of Rafoul Tabbach. Upon taking a look at the famous record’s label, Y not only expressed doubts that this could possibly be Hakham Raphael Antebi Taboush; they were also keen to tell me how they themselves had once received a copy of “Yom Yom Odeh”, but its Iraqi version. This memory, in turn, prompted them to reminisce about their participation in gatherings with musicians from other countries in the Middle East, including Egypt, Lebanon and Iraq. What had brought them together, so I was told, was their shared passion for music from the Nahda time. Moreover, the fact that I recognized the names of some of these musicians seemed to serve as a kind of “code” that led Y to switch from Hebrew into a heavily accented but fluent Arabic, a language which, within certain parts of Israeli society, is still seen as the language of the Other (Suleiman 2011).

Instead of providing new insights into the identity of Ḥazzan Rafoul Tabbach, my conversation with Y revealed something that I had not considered when explicating my “meaningful fiction” about the muted section on my phone, and that is the fact that the eroding landscape of cross-territorial musical exchange from which “Yom Yom Odeh” emerged continues to be sustained by an ongoing history of travelling musicians. While this realization should draw our attention to the infrastructures that condition and grant access to such cross-national musical affiliations today (including my right to obtain a second German passport and travel freely between Israel and Lebanon), it is equally important to note that the musical gatherings that Y recounted happened “off the map”, and they did so in a double sense. Not only did they take place outside the Middle East; given that for many in the region contact with Israeli institutions or individuals presents a risk to their professional reputations and can even lead to their imprisonment, the names, professional details and other personal information that Y’s story revealed had to be omitted from my account, that is, they had to be taken off paper. A potential way to conceptualize the relation of Y's memories to the numerous regimes that demand this anonymization was captured in the language of musical intimacy in which they described a mournful message that they had received over WhatsApp. The message concerned the supposed (but untrue) death of the Syrian star-singer Sabah Fakhri and had been shared with them by someone in Damascus, and this at a time in which, I was assured, nobody else had yet been informed of the singer’s passing. As they explained: “Hada al-akhbar bas lil muṭribeen,” this news is just for singers.[30]

Conclusion

Whether nostalgia for lost landscapes of musical mobility, concerns about an Egyptian Jewish musician’s national authenticity, my association of the muted section on my phone with Palestine, the sense of loss and alienation experienced by the grandson of an Ottoman Jewish ḥazzan in Israel, or accounts of musical affiliations that happen “off the map”, each of the article’s scenes features a different narrative of and/or attachment to the geographical spaces and trajectories to which the famous record belongs.

Triggered by the recording on my mobile phone, each of my interlocutors’ responses constitutes an entry point into “Yom Yom Odeh’s” new biography, each acts as its mediator, and has the capacity to transform it. X’s recitation of a Hebrew hymn and Y’s account of their “secret” encounter with Lebanese, Iraqi, and Egyptian musicians expose musical networks that complicate the national borders by which they are framed and also challenge the separation between Jews and Arabs bequeathed by the Israeli-Palestinian/Arab conflict. Other insights presented here, however, contribute to a sense of stasis, to the notion of “Yom Yom Odeh” being “locked” in place. Be it the image of the famous record being safely stowed away in the shelves of the AMAR archive, the song’s association with the “enemy” State of Israel, my paranoid reaction to its muted sound on my phone or the need to anonymize members of its present-day constituencies—all these aspects render the memory of “Yom Yom Odeh” a matter of (national) dispute.

Recalling the original question this article set out to explore (“who was Rafoul Tabbach?“), readers will have noticed that they gained no insights into the identity of the singer featured on the famous record. In fact, it was only towards the end of my stay in Jerusalem in 2017 that I eventually found out that it was not Hakham Raphael Antebi Taboush who was featured on the famous record, and that Rafoul Tabbach—a different Ḥazzan altogether—originally came from Damascus, not Aleppo.[31] But rather than retrospectively pronouncing my fieldwork a failure, I invited the reader to consider the new geographical, cultural and political associations that the search for Tabbach’s origins elicited. Taken together, these associations not only shed light on the agency that a musical object can develop once out of the archive, they may also suggest that to physically move music in-between ideologically policed and segregated spaces, and to “think more through recording and playback,” to quote Steven Feld (2015, 17), can be a form of intervention in an environment all too often governed by national conflicts.

 

Endnotes

* This article was written with the support of the Martin Buber Society of Fellows at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. It draws from fieldwork undertaken in Beirut and Jerusalem in the years 2016/17 which was supported by a doctoral studentship of the German National Academic Foundation and the Mildred Loss Studentship of the Jewish Music Institute (JMI) in London. Earlier drafts of this article have benefitted greatly from comments by my former PhD supervisor Ilana Webster-Kogen as well as Edwin Seroussi, Martin Stokes, Laudan Nooshin, Oded Erez, Abigail Wood, Kerstin Hünefeld and the anonymous reviewers of Yuval. I thank all of them for their valuable feedback. Many thanks are also owed to the staff at the AMAR foundation, as well as Moshe Havusha, Roni Ish-Ran, Ezra Barnea, and those of my interlocutors whose names have been anonymized for matters of protection.

[1] Baidaphon was founded in 1906 by five cousins of the Lebanese Christian Baida family in Beirut. With distinctively local aesthetics—eminent, for example, in its trademark sign of the jumping gazelle, a prominent symbol in Arabic literature which stood in contrast to the dog displayed on records of the foreign “His Master’s Voice” label—the company appealed to the Middle East’s record buying public as a “national” enterprise. It soon became as influential in the Middle East as British Gramophone and German Odeon and operated in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Iran while exporting its records as far as North and South America (Racy 1976, 39-43). See also http://www.amar-foundation.org/041-recording-companies-part-1/ (accessed April 2, 2020).

[2] For biographical information on some of the musical pioneers from that time as well as detailed discussions of the aforementioned musical forms and styles, see the various podcasts available on the website of AMAR, http://www.amar-foundation.org (accessed April 2, 2020). Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in the Nahda period, with publications often drawing parallels to the Arab world’s ongoing socio-political and cultural upheavals (see, for example, the various contributions in Hanssen & Weiss 2016). For a study on the politics of the current revivalism of music from the Nahda period and the role AMAR and its director, the Egyptian singer, composer and music revivalist Mustafa Sa’id play in it, see the PhD thesis of Maria Rijo Lopes Da Cunha (2017).

[3] For an excellent overview of the musical practices of Jews in the Arab world, see Seroussi 2010.

[4] In the language of Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews, the word Hakham (pl. Hakhamim) is synonym with Rabbi. As indicated by his middle name “Antebi”, Taboush’s ancestors came from the city of Gaziantep, which today is located in Turkey, but then formed part of the Ottoman province (vilayet) of Aleppo.

[5] AMAR, written correspondence, March 30, 2017. Information about the exact date of the famous record’s release is not available. It is neither listed in any of the remaining Baidaphon catalogues held by AMAR, nor mentioned in catalogues held by the British library or the Berlin Phonogramm Archiv (as was the case with the Odeon company, many Baidaphon catalogues were lost during the Second World War or vanished during the Lebanese Civil War). However, the assumption that recording sessions for the famous record took place between July and September 1921 roughly corresponds to another classification of Baidaphon records, according to which it belongs to a group of records released between 1923 and 1928; http://www.recordingpioneers.com/docs/BAIDA-TheGerman78rpmRecordLabelBook.pdf (accessed April 2, 2020).

[6] The earliest available recording of this version is a 1920s Polyphon record of the Iraqi Ḥazzan Hagguli Shummel Darzi. It has been re-issued in the album “Shbaḥoth: Iraqi-Jewish Song from the 1920s” (2003) which was co-produced by Sara Manasseh, author of Shbahoth: Songs of Praise in the Babylonian Jewish Tradition from Baghdad to Bombay and London (2012). The National Sound Archive in Israel houses several other recordings of this version.

[7] To imagine the network-like character of this biography, one has to bear in mind that these are only two out of many more non-human and human actors (other examples would be the historical manuscripts that contain the poetic text of “Yom Yom Odeh” or the people and musical instruments that have performed it in the past), with each of them having their own biography. In the case of the famous record, this would include, for instance, the ships that transported the shellac used for its production; the human and machine labor that went into turning it into a commodity; the Baidaphon customer who originally purchased it; the founders of AMAR who acquired it decades later; the archive’s shelves that today place it next to the records of some of the most famous musicians of the Nahda period, etc.

[8] This approach is regarded to have been pioneered by a collection of essays in Appadurai 1986. Examples of its adoption in the field of ethnomusicology are the articles by Eliot Bates, who advocates for the study of the social life of musical instruments (2012) and Virginia Doubleday, who provides an ethnographic reading of the gendered history of the Middle Eastern frame drum (Doubleday 1999).

[9] For biographical information, see Shiloah 2010.

[10] Ms. British Museum Or. 12369. Here, the pizmon is said to be performed not on Shavuot but on the Sabbath of the “Omer season”, between Passover and Shavuot. I thank Edwin Seroussi for pointing out this reference. According to pizmonim.org, one of the largest online archives for the liturgical heritage of Syrian Jews, its text also appears in nineteenth century manuscript collections from Aleppo, such as the one published by the Hakham and composer Yehuda Attiah in 1858: http://www.pizmonim.org/book.php#374b (accessed April 2, 2020).

[11] For matters of protection or due to their own requests, the names of several individuals in this article have been anonymized. They are referred to as Z, X and Y, i.e. a symbolism that highlights rather than obscures their anonymization.

[12] WhatsApp correspondence, July 30, 2017.

[13] That it was Sami al-Shawa on the violin is not entirely unlikely, given that he was a permanent member in the ensemble of Baidaphon (as well as Gramophone, Odeon and Mechian ) (Salihi & Saʿid 2015, 32).

[14] Ezra Aharon, back then known as Azouri Haroun, the Arabic version of his name, also participated in the 1932 Cairo Congress on Arab Music. There, he was leading the Iraqi delegation which was composed of six Jewish musicians and one Muslim vocalist, Muhammad al-Qubandji (Barnea 1997, 74; Katz 2015, 147).

[15] Personal conversation, March 19, 2017.

[16]http://www.amar-foundation.org/043-awalem-1/ (accessed April 2, 2020).

[17] For a detailed account of the Aleppian tradition of baqqashot singing in Jerusalem see Yayama 2003; for more general accounts of this tradition see Katz 1968, Seroussi 1993, and Shiloah 1992, 151-54. For a study of it in the context of the Aleppian Jewish community in Brooklyn, New York see Kligman 2009. A useful first overview is provided here: https://jewish-music.huji.ac.il/content/baqqashah-pl-baqqashot (accessed April 2, 2020).

[18] Such an account would also have to investigate the infrastructures that shaped and enabled people’s mobility, for example, the ways in which the movement of travelling musicians was facilitated by religious and/or state institutions, depended on their private capital or relied on an audience able to afford entry fees.

[19] Looking at the records that Baidaphon released, one gets a sense of the ethnic diversity at stake here; besides music performed in the Arabic language, the company recorded Greek Orthodox hymns, Turkish instrumental compositions as well as songs sung in Armenian, Assyrian, Kurdish, Azerbaijani and Hebrew—all of which employ the maqam as their common musical denominator (Aghamohseni 2017; Racy 1976, 39).

[20] The idea that such an Arab-Jewish integration is still possible today has been most prominently advocated by Ella Shohat. In her elaborations on the “Arab Jew” (1992, 2017), Shohat argues that this concept/identity, used here primarily as a form of self-reference, has the potential to counter Zionist nationalism and its inherent discrimination not only of Arabs but also of Jews (and their descendants) who once resided in Arabic speaking lands. While the concept of the “Arab Jew” is clearly valuable in that it aims to intervene into separatist ideologies, I follow scholars who have criticized its commodification as a largely symbolic and historically ambiguous figure—one whose identity tends to be largely constructed against Zionism as well as a supposedly harmonious past—and called for more nuanced efforts to endow this concept with historical depth (Levy 2008; Gottreich 2008; Starr 2011: 121). Whether a “history of intimacy” as documented, for example, by Ammiel Alcalay (1993) or histories of competition, confrontation and social discord (Harel 2010; Tsur 1995, 2016), what emerges from such endeavors is a picture that gives nuance to, complexifies and at times complicates the possibility of a past and present Arab-Jewish integration.

[21] For a recording of the hymn see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cgfp9Whxp3U (accessed April 2, 2020). This YouTube clip also includes a recording of the prayer Sehemim betzetam (starting at 2:59) which, similar to “Yom Yom Odeh”, recalls the style of a dawr.

[22] Another point to possibly mention here would be the fact that in his recordings of Jewish liturgy, Zaki Mourad is accompanied by his daughter Leyla Mourad, one of the grand “divas” of Cairo’s music and cinema scene who eventually converted to Islam.

[23] My approach here is inspired by the article “Vulnerable Writing as a Feminist Methodological Practice” by sociologist Tiffany Page (2017) who calls on scholars to engage critically with their positionality and integrate moments of uncertainty, ambivalence and hesitance into their writing and analytical frameworks.

[24] This suspicion worked both ways, ranging from the moment where speaking Syrian Arabic with a Damascene-born Jew in Tel Aviv triggered associations with the Syrian Secret Service (mukhabarat), to the time where my clapping along to a rendition of a qadd sung by a Mizrahi singer in Jerusalem was interpreted by a Palestinian ʿūd-player as evidence of my endorsement of Israeli nationalism.

[25] Wedeen uses this term with reference to an anecdote that was related to her whilst doing fieldwork in Syria in the 1990s. The anecdote concerned “Officer M” whose regiment was prompted by a high-ranking officer to recount the dreams that they had had the night before. After several soldiers had shared their dreams, all of which featured glorious visions of Hafiz al-Asad, “Officer M” allegedly replied: “I saw that my mother is a prostitute in your bedroom,” a metaphor for his country being “a whore,” as he would later explain (Wedeen 2015, 67). According to Wedeen, the question of whether this story was really related by M himself or originated in the imagination of those who told it is of secondary importance. Rather, she encourages her readers to view it as a “fable”, one that, in this case, illustrates what she describes as “the [Syrian] regime’s demand that citizens provide external evidence of their allegiance to a cult whose rituals of adulation are manifestly unbelievable” (ibid., 68).

[26] Personal conversation, May 25, 2017.

[27] Personal conversation, April 6, 2017.

[28] Personal conversation, May 19, 2017.

[29] Built in 1901 by Aleppian immigrants, the Ades synagogue is the flagship of Aleppian Jewry in Israel and has been described to me by many as a “museum of Arab music”. Indeed, it is one of the few remnants of a time in which Nahlaot, as recounted in the diaries of the Jerusalemite ʿud-player Wasif Jawhariyah, was home to many great Aleppian-Jewish musicians and ḥazzanim (Tamari & Nassar 2014, 87). Today, the synagogue is attended not only by Syrian Jews, but also (and even more so) by worshipers and ḥazzanim from the city’s Persian, Kurdish, Moroccan and other Middle Eastern Jewish communities. They practice their liturgical traditions in what is generally referred to as “Jerusalem-Sephardi” style, an overview of which can be found here: http://jewish-music.huji.ac.il/content/jerusalem-sephardic-tradition (accessed April 2, 2020). The reactions that my recording of “Yom Yom Odeh” triggered there will, for lack of space, be recounted elsewhere in the future.

[30] Y is not a native speaker of Arabic. The grammatically correct expression would be “hadhihi akhbar” in High Standard Arabic and “hay al-akhbar” in spoken Levantine Arabic.

[31] This was related to me from two different sources, a descendant of Aleppian Jews in Jerusalem and a Syrian-Jewish musician in Buenos Aires. Besides that, I was recently informed that Tabbach’s grandson lives in Brooklyn. This and the likely fact that the famous record was pressed in a factory in Berlin, parts of which were subsequently used to produce military equipment during the Second World War, shall be the subject of a future publication.

 

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Seroussi, Edwin. 2014. “Nostalgic Zionist Soundscapes: The Future of the Israeli Nation's Sonic Past.” Israel Studies 19/2: 35-50.

_____. 2010. “Music”. In Encyclopaedia of Jews in the Islamic World, edited by Norman A. Stillman. Leiden: Brill. Consulted online on March 18, 2020.

_____. 1993. “On the Beginnings of the Singing of the Bakkashot in 19th Century Jerusalem.” Pe’amin 56: 106-124. (Hebrew)

Shannon, Jonathan Holt. 2015. “Jewish Fingers and Phantom Musical Presences: Remembrance of Jewish Musicians in Twentieth-Century Aleppo.” In Musical Exodus: Al-Andalus and its Jewish Diasporas, edited by Ruth F. Davis, 125-140. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

_____. 2006. Among the Jasmine Trees: Music and Modernity in Contemporary Syria. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.

Shelemay, Kay Kaufman. 1998. Let Jasmine Rain Down: Song and Remembrance Among Syrian Jews. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Shiloah, Amnon. 2010. “Zaki Murād”. In Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World, edited by Norman A. Stillman. Leiden: Brill.

_____. 1992. Jewish Musical Traditions. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

Shohat, Ella. 2017. On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements: Selected Writings of Ella Shohat. London: Pluto Press.

_____. 1992. “Dislocated Identities: Reflections of an Arab Jew.” Movement Research: Performance Journal 5: 7-8.

Starr, Deborah A. 2011. “Review of In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination by Gil Hochberg.” Comparative Literature Studies 48/1: 119-122.

Stora, Benjamin. 1997. Imaginaires de guerre: Algérie, Viêt-Nam, en France et aux Etats-Unis. Paris: Editions La Découverte.

Suleiman, Yasir. 2011. Arabic, Self and Identity: A Study in Conflict and Displacement. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.

Sutton, David and David T. Lanyado. 2005. Aleppo: City of Scholars. Brooklyn, NY: Mesorah.

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Niggun ‘Akedah is an Ashkenazi melody firmly associated with the Binding of Isaac, which was sung to texts in both Hebrew and Yiddish. Many of these texts touch directly upon the biblical story, while others refer to the traumatic memory of the Crusades, and to other themes, as will be shown below. Strongly affiliated with the liturgy of the High Holidays, the Niggun ‘Akedah served as a symbol, provoking ipso facto strong emotional and religious feelings among listeners. Surprisingly, this topic has been the subject of little scholarly attention, despite the significant number of transcriptions bearing the title ‘Akedah, and notwithstanding recent publications of intricate cultural-historical scholarship concerning the Binding of Isaac within the context of the Crusader massacres (Fraenkel, Gross, and Lehnardt 2016; Haverkamp 2005; Assis 2000).

Our study reviews the great significance of the ‘Akedah narrative in Ashkenazi culture, as expressed through the poems that were sung to Niggun ‘Akedah. It will assess their thematic content, formal aspects, as well as their cultural contexts and functions. Special attention will be given to verbal references to the Niggun ‘Akedah. The core of this study is an analysis of thirteen transcriptions of Niggun ‘Akedah, transcribed between 1840 and the Holocaust period, and two recent audio recordings.

The Narrative
 

The story of the Binding of Isaac (‘Akedat Yiẓḥak, or ‘Akedah) has assumed an important function in Jewish religion and culture since Antiquity. This renowned narrative describes how the first Jewish family (Abraham, Sarah and Isaac) came close to annihilation following God’s command that Abraham sacrifice his son. The plot is unexpectedly inverted by God's miraculous salvation of the bound Isaac, and God, in turn, commends Abraham for his obedience and promises to bless and multiply his future descendants. 

The story’s primary textual rendering in the Hebrew Bible (Genesis XXII:1–19) is somewhat brief, barely referring to the characters’ feelings and thoughts, and omitting the character of Sarah altogether. Midrashic literature elaborates on the narrative at length, and it is mentioned in almost all other classic Jewish sources.[1] It has been retold by generation after generation of Jews in various vernacular languages, in both oral and written forms (Spiegel 1967, 13–16; Moreen 2000, 218–222; Guez-Avigal 2009, 159–166; Kartun-Blum 2013). Likewise, the Binding of Isaac has constituted a common motif in works of art among Jews throughout the ages (Sabar 2009, 9–27).

In Jewish Ashkenazi Culture
 

The Binding of Isaac maintained a key role within the Ashkenazic diaspora center that emerged during the tenth century in present day southern Germany and northern France. However, it also acquired two new layers of meaning. The first was a Jewish reclamation of the story in reaction to the Christian appropriation of ʽthe Sacrifice of Isaac,’ i.e. the typological view of the Binding of Isaac as a prefiguration of the Crucifixion of Jesus. The second layer associated the story with acts of Kiddush Hashem. (lit, the sanctification of God’s Name). It evolved following the massacres of the First Crusade of 1096, and venerated the martyrs as the spiritual successors of Isaac, regarding their sacrifice as exemplary (Cohen 2004; Assis 2000; Chazan 1996; Spiegel 1967, 7–13). These two new concepts reflect significant historical and cultural aspects of Jewish existence in trans-alpine Europe and appear to explain the narrative’s major role in Ashkenazi culture, far greater than that accorded to it by other Jewish communities (Weinberger 1998, 5–6, 184; Fraenkel, Gross, and Lehnardt 2016, 482).

According to Jewish religious practice, the passage from Genesis is recited by worshippers on a daily basis in the preliminary morning service (Birkhot hashaḥar), invoking the Binding of Isaac as a source of protection on the grounds of Zekhut ’avot , the merit of the patriarchs (Jacobs and Sagi 2007, 556-557; Shmidman 2007; Zunz 1920, i: 83–84). This passage is also ritually read in the synagogue from the Torah scroll on two annual occasions: as part of Parashat Vayera’ (Gen. XVIII:1–XXII:24), early in the annual cycle of weekly portions, and on the second day of Rosh Hashanah, because the story plays a central role in the liturgy of the Jewish New Year festival.[2] 

In Ashkenazi Hebrew Literature
 

Medieval chronicles and Kinah piyyutim (dirges)[3] portraying the anti-Jewish persecutions which occurred from 1096 onwards often mention the Binding of Isaac. At times they depict the persecuted Jews as Isaac bound on the altar. Others connect the stories of parents killing their own children to prevent them from being forced to convert to Christianity with that of Abraham, who was willing to sacrifice his child for the sake of God (Fraenkel, Gross, and Lehnardt 2016; Haverkamp 2005; Haberman 1971). Such references contain an implicit plea for salvation similar to that bestowed on Isaac, or alternately for a reward akin to which Abraham and Isaac had received, the former for fulfilling God’s command and the latter for accepting His will.[4] 

Additionally, a specific category of piyyutim (liturgical poems) relating the story of the Binding of Isaac entered the Ashkenazi prayer rite. These poems, known as ‘Akedah piyyutim, are based on midrashic interpretations and offer highly embellished poetic retellings of the story (Fleischer 2007, 470; Weinberger 1998, 223–224). They are recited during the Seliḥot (penitential) prayers, before and during the High Holy Day season,[5] lauding Abraham and Isaac (and at times also Sarah) for their pious obedience. Around fifty such ‘Akedah piyyutim exist but these must be culled from various Maḥzorim and Seliḥot anthologies.[6] It is important to stress that their unique liturgical function in the Seliḥot prayers, which appears solely in the Ashkenazi prayer rite (Fleischer 2007, 470; Weinberger 1998, 13, 184), distinguishes ‘Akedah piyyutim from other liturgical texts, including other types of piyyutim that mention the Binding of Isaac.[7] 

Most of the ‘Akedah piyyutim were composed in Ashkenaz between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries (Goldschmidt 1965b, 18–19). These poems generally consist of four-line stanzas with varying number of syllables in each line,[8] and usually with the rhyme scheme aaaa, bbbb, etc. (Goldschmidt 1965b, 190 [no. 74], 209 [no. 83]). Monorhymed quatrains of this kind are characteristic of many types of piyyutim, yet they are rare in German literature (Fleischer 2007, 470; Goldschmidt 1965, 9; Zunz 1920, 86, 91). Some ‘Akedah piyyutim use the rhyming scheme aabb, ccdd, etc. (Spiegel 1950, 538–547), or aaax, bbbx, etc.[9] In addition, a number were written in rhyming couplets (Goldschmidt 1965b, 152 [no. 58], 172 [no. 66]), a form also used by the sub-genre of Seliḥot piyyutim called Sheniyyah piyyutim (Weinberger 1998, 223, 263–267, 318–319; Goldschmidt 1965b, 9), while at least one example utilizes monorhyme.[10] Still, the overwhelming majority of poems clearly indicates that the ideal form for an ‘Akedah piyyut was the monorhymed quatrain.

In Yiddish Literature
 

Literature composed in Yiddish also accorded the Binding of Isaac a significant role in pre-modern times (Katz 2008). A Yiddish prose adaptation of the story appears in a manuscript dating from 1511,[11] the story is mentioned within the popular homiletic work Tsene-rene (Elbaum and Turniansky 2008), as well as within various sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Yiddish epics (Dreeßen 1971, 57–58; Matenko and Sloan 1968, 13–16), Yiddish translations of Hebrew ‘Akedah piyyutim alongside Yiddish commentaries appear in Maḥzorim, etc. (see for example Maḥzor Homburg 1721 i: 86b–87b). Yet the most outstanding retelling of this story in pre-modern Yiddish literature is the epic poem Yudisher shtam (ʽThe Jewish Tribe’; Matenko and Sloan 1968, 13–16; Dreeßen 1971, 9–31; Frakes 2014, 149–155). The poem features the same monorhymed four-line stanzas used for the ‘Akedah piyyutim, yet their lines are longer than those of the Hebrew texts. However, unlike the Hebrew poems, this Yiddish poem does not appear in a Maḥzor or any other liturgical text, and its extant copies offer no indication of a liturgical function.[12] 

Yudisher shtam enjoyed immense popularity in Ashkenazi society, as is evidenced by the relatively large number of versions extant today (Dreeßen 1971, 9–31; Roman 2016, 183, fn. 29), making it the most documented poem in pre-modern Yiddish literature (Shmeruk 1967, 202). The surviving copies of Yudisher shtam have reached us in composite manuscripts[13] or as printed booklets, hailing from the German-speaking territories as well as northern Italy,[14] and spanning a period from the early sixteenth to early eighteenth centuries (Dreeßen 1971, 9-31). Philological research, however, suggests that the poem itself was composed as early as the fifteenth century (Staerk and Leitzmann 1923, 271), while cultural-historical contextualization points to earlier origins (Shmeruk 1967, 204).

The Melody Known as Niggun ‘Akedah 
 

An inseparable part of the stanzaic structure of the ‘Akedah piyyutim is their designated melody, the above-mentioned Niggun ‘Akedah (‘Akedah melody). As will be demonstrated below, this melody became strongly associated with the narrative of the Binding of Isaac and was also used for additional songs in Hebrew and Yiddish, the content of which relates to the Bindingof Issac in various ways.

Ashkenazi Jews did not employ Western notation until the late eighteenth century and relied instead on oral transmission of their musical traditions.[15] The only implicit written records of Niggun ʽAkedah prior to the modern era are verbal mentions of the melody, and the contrafactum reference “Be-niggun ʽAkedah,” i.e. the Hebrew (or indeed Yiddish) statement that a certain text should be sung ʽto the ʽAkedah melody’. [16] Such remarks provide little information concerning the music itself, yet they offer valuable insights for the present study, as will be demonstrated below.

Since the late eighteenth century, a growing number of Jews within the Ashkenazi realm became proficient in Western music notation, enabling them to record Jewish liturgical melodies, first on separate music sheets and then in cantorial compendia (Goldberg 2002). We have located in these sources thirteen transcriptions of chants for ʽAkedah piyyutim recorded between 1840 and the Holocaust period.  A close study of these melodies follows the discussion of verbal references.

Verbal References to the Niggun ‘Akedah 
 

We have never come across the indication be-niggun ‘Akedah over an ‘Akedah piyyut. Apparently precentors were aware that such piyyutim were sung to this melody. The indication “Be-niggun ‘Akedah” appears, however, before songs which are not ‘Akedah piyyutim, but should yet be sung to this melody.[17] Such cases occur in various contexts in both Hebrew and Yiddish songs. Thus, a piyyut entitled ’Enosh ʽad daka tashev which appears in a fourteenth century Seliḥot anthology is preceded by the singing instruction Be-niggun ‘Akedah (Reuchlin 7, 63r. Fig 2). This poem is not an ‘Akedah piyyut, but rather a poem about repentance (teshuva); yet it was sung to the‘Akedah melody.

Figure 1: ‘Akedah Melody in Kohn 1870, 31 [No. 64], Mus Add 4 (a), Eduard Birnbaum Music Collection, Klau Library, Cincinnati, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion

 

Another early example of such a musical instruction is found in the book of customs, Minhagei Maharil: “When a circumcision took place on a Fast Day, Maharil used to say Seliḥot, and one of them, ʽDo not break your covenant with us [O God]’, was set to the ‘Akedah melody” (Sefer Maharil, Hilkhot mila, siman 10; Schleifer, 2014). The piyyut mentioned here, whose subject is the circumcision as commanded by the Torah, is a Shalmonit piyyut, written in quatrains with the rhyming scheme aaax, bbbx, etc. Singing this piyyut to the ‘Akedah melody was apparently meant to draw a parallel between the circumcision of a newborn son and Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac.[18] 

Within the corpus of early modern Yiddish literature, three seventeenth-century songs include an instruction that they should be sung “Be-niggun ʽAkedah”: The first is Eyn sheyn lid fun Vin, a historical song describing the deportation of the Viennese Jewish community in 1670 (Turniansky 1989; Steinschneider 1852–1860, 568, no. 3668). The song is written in monorhymed quatrains, but interestingly has a recurring refrain, a fifth line, independent of the stanza: ve’eykh ʼenaḥem (and how can I be consoled?). This refrain alludes to a lamentation of Ninth of Av,[19] conceivably because the imperial deportation edict was issued close to that date.

Figure 2: 'Enosh ʽad daka tashev' with the Indication Be-niggun ‘Akedah (Karlsruhe, Badische Landesbibliothek, Cod. Reuchlin 7, 63r) 

 

The second song is Eyn nay lid gemakht bilshon tkhine, requesting God's protection from misfortunes such as sickness and untimely death, and more concretely from an ongoing plague epidemic which took place in Prague in 1680 (Steinschneider 1852–1860, 574, no. 3707; Kay 2004, 236–243). This song is in fact a prayer written in quatrains with a rhyming pattern aabb, ccdd, etc. Each line begins with the words foter kenig (O Father, King), referencing the Hebrew litany of the High Holy Day liturgy, ’avinu malkenu (Our Father and King; Steinsaltz 2000, 389). There are two known editions of this song.[20] 

Lastly, Eyn sheyn lid oyf shney kedoshim […] is a historical song relating the story of two Jews from Prostits (German: Proßnitz; Czech: Prostějov) who were convicted of theft and sentenced to death, but withstood the temptation and/or coercion to convert to Christianity which would have earned them a pardon (Steinschneider 1852–1860, 572, no. 3692; Freimann 1923, 33, 46–53; Turniansky 1989, 44, 46). The song is written in quatrains with a rhyming pattern: aabb, ccdd, etc. Its singing instructions refer to either Niggun ‘Akedah or Niggun Brauneslid.[21] Interestingly, an Old Yiddish song from the early eighteenth centurybears the singing indication “Be-niggun prostitser kedoshim lid” (in the tune of ʽthe martyrs of Prostits’ song). [22] This later song relates the suffering of the Jewish community of Prague during a plague epidemic which took place in 1713 and is written in quatrains with the rhyming pattern aabb, ccdd, etc. Judging from its tragic content and formal structure, it appears that this song was sung to the tune of Niggun ‘Akedah, which had received a new name, probably due to the contemporary popularity of the songs (Freimann 1923, 33).

No extant copies of Yudisher shtam (including two seventeenth century pastiches of it)[23] contain any indication of its intended melody. This was apparently unnecessary, as in the case of ‘Akedah piyyutim, since it was obvious that one sings Yudisher shtam to the Niggun ‘Akedah. This assumption is accepted by most researchers of Yiddish literature (Zinberg 1943, 123; Erik 1928, 125–126; Shmeruk 1978, 118–119) and is strongly supported by the close thematic and structural similarities between the Hebrew and Yiddish poems.[24] And yet, the reference “Be-niggun Yudisher shtam” appears in Eyn sheyn nay lid, a seventeenth-century Yiddish song concerning the Ten Commandments (Steinschneider 1852–1860, 571, no. 3686), and may support the assumption that Yudisher shtam had its own melody, different than the Niggun ‘Akedah.[25] We understand this reference as a functional reflection of current popular acquaintance with different songs sharing the same melody, as was the case in the above-mentioned reference to Niggun ‘Akedah as “Niggun prostitser kedoshim”.

Finally, a most valuable verbal reference to Niggun ‘Akedah, albeit from the modern era, is found in Salomon Geiger’s book Divrei kehillot.[26] In this intricate work, which delineated meticulously the synagogue rite of the Frankfurt Jewish community in the nineteenth century (but lacking any musical transcriptions), Geiger explains:

‘Akedah – a Seliḥa [penitentiary piyyut] that speaks about those who died for the sake of Kiddush Hashem [sanctification of God’s Name] and about the Binding of Isaac, is called ‘Akedah. And it has a unique melody. And in the fourth line of its last stanza the melody differs from [the melody of] the fourth line of the opening stanza. (Geiger 1862, 129)

Later in his work, describing in detail the performance practice of the ‘Akedah piyyutim, Geiger notes that three such poems are chanted consecutively on the penitential service at dawn in the morning of Rosh Hashanah Eve.[27]He states that the first and third piyyutim are sung to the ‘Akedah melody, whereas the second one is sung to an ordinary melody of penitentiary piyyutim. Geiger wonders why the second ‘Akedah piyyut is not sung to the proper melody, assuming that: “Perhaps they [i.e. the cantors] did not want to sing three Seliḥot [penitentiary piyyutim] consecutively to the sad melody of the ‘Akedah” (Geiger 1862, 130).

The characterization of Niggun ‘Akedah as sad is crucial to the present study and will be discussed below in more detail. In his explanation, Geiger also broadens the definition of ‘Akedah piyyutim to which our melody is applied. He includes poems that describe Jewish martyrdom, and even ranks these first in his definition, before the poems portraying the Binding of Isaac. Indeed, among the ‘Akedah piyyutim which Geiger mentions are two dirges (Kinah piyyutim) for the Jews persecuted and martyred during the First Crusade. These poems—’Elohim ʽal domi ledami (Fraenkel, Gross, and Lehnardt 2016, 72–89; Haberman 1971, 69–71) and ’Et hakol kol Yaʽakov (Fraenkel, Gross, and Lehnardt 2016, 192–199, 476–477; Haberman 1971, 64–66)—are written in monorhymed quatrains, and draw parallels between the medieval case of Kiddush Hashem and the ‘Akedah story, employing the Hebrew root עקד. The inclusion of these poems in the corpus of ‘Akedah piyyutim once again reinforces the idea that in Ashkenazi Jewish consciousness the Binding of Isaac was culturally associated with the traumatic memory of the Crusades, in effect blurring the distinction between the literary genres of ‘Akedah piyyutim and Kinah piyyutim. Moreover, we have noticed that many other Ashkenazi Kinah piyyutim contain formal and thematic similarities to ‘Akedah piyyutim.[28] This suggests that certain Kinah piyyutim were previously also sung to Niggun ‘Akedah, which indeed imbued them with a melancholic tone.

On the basis of the above-mentioned verbal references to our melody, it is possible to conclude that, thematically, most of the texts examined are lachrymose and include direct mentions of the Binding of Isaac and/or the traumatic persecution of Jews during the Crusades. Alternatively, some texts exploit the melody's association with these two themes and ascribe it to other contexts (for example, the circumcision of a son, repentance on the High Holidays or specific cases of anti-Jewish persecution). Such dramatic themes required a similar musical expression, supporting Geiger’s description of the melody as sad.

From a formal perspective, the prominence of the four-line stanzaic structure (quatrain) is clear, as is the variety and instability with regard to the number of words and syllables among the lines of the text, even within the same stanza. The verbal information thus appears to indicate that our melody must be composed of four flexible musical phrases (for those ‘Akedah piyyutim not written in quatrains, two couplets or four single lines could easily be sung as a quatrain).[29] In order to serve the text properly, the melody of each line unfolds without fixed meter, in an elastic structure capable of accommodating a varying number of syllables, similar to psalmodic formulae (Flender 1992). Similar to psalmody, the last line of the poem would deviate from the regular melody, leading it towards the mode of the next prayer.[30] 

The State of Musicological Research

Considering the importance of the Binding of Isaac in Jewish lore and its prominent role in Ashkenazi sacred poetry, the meagre research concerning the melody to which the ‘Akedah piyyutim were chanted is surprising. It appears that Abraham Zvi Idelsohn (1882–1938) was the first to address this topic, devoting few yet valuable remarks to this melody. Idelsohn (1929, 167) mentions the “‘Akedah-tune” as the seventh of eleven “Ashkenazic tunes for individual poetical texts,” claiming that some of them may date back to medieval times. He argues that this specific melody, which was in practice in his days, originated in the Middle Ages: “the tune was customary in the fourteenth century, and was referred to by Maharil as the ‘Akedah-tune, because it was used for all the poems with the same content and meter.” (Idelsohn 1929, 170).

Figure 3: “Jesu, welche Qual hast du gelitten!” (Bäumker 1962 iv, 31 [No. 79])

 

Idelsohn provided no evidence to substantiate this claim, but three years later he returned to the subject in the seventh volume of Hebräisch-orientalischer Melodienschatz, dedicated to the synagogue chants of the Southern-German Jews (Idelsohn 1932). In a short comment that was probably meant to validate the melody’s antiquity, he compared the ‘Akedah melody (ex. 12), with that used for a late-medieval German song concerning Jesus’ suffering (fig. 3): “Eine ähnliche Weise ist die dem ʽTonus Lamentationum’ entnommene für den text ʽJesu, welche Qual hast du gelitten!’ (W. Bäumker, Bd. IV, Nr. 79)”—“A similar melody is the one based on [or borrowed from] the ʽTonus Lamentationum’ for the text ʽJesus, what agony you suffered!’”; (Idelsohn 1932, xlii).

The “Tonus Lamentationum” is a psalmodic chant to which verses from the biblical Book of Lamentations are sung during the Divine Offices of Matins on the mornings of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Saturday of the Holy Week before Easter (fig. 4; Liber Usualis 1961, 631–637; Schleifer 1980, 121–139).

Figure 4: Lesson I, Lamentations 2, 8 (Liber Usualis 1961, 692)

 

As the transcriptions above show, it seems that Idelsohn erred twice—once in relying on Bäumker’s statement that the German tune was based on the Catholic “Tonus Lamentationum”, and again in maintaining that the ‘Akedah melody was similar to the German song.

It is difficult to understand how this simple psalmody could have provided the melody for the German song “Jesu, welche Qual hast du gelitten!” which has a different contour, and whose modality belongs to a later development of the major mode. It is thus challenging to discern similarities between the German song and the ‘Akedah melody. At first glance it seems that both melodies share a general tendency towards the major mode (a matter we return to below) and that the first three notes of the German song resemble those of the ‘Akedah melody. Yet, the resemblance beyond this point appears rather dubious. Nevertheless, as we shall try to prove, it may be possible to corroborate Idelsohn’s claim concerning the melody's antiquity.

In 1963 musicologist Leo Levi dedicated a short article to surveying chants used for texts retelling the ‘Akedah in some Jewish communities (Levi 1963). Levi’s brief discussion of the Ashkenazi melody is apparently based on the above-mentioned observations by Idelsohn (1929). Like the latter, Levi agrees that the melody originates in the Middle Ages, and he mentions the possibility of its being based on some pentatonic foundations. 

More recently, Diana Matut touched briefly upon the ‘Akedah melody in her discussion of a seventeenth-century parody of Yudisher shtam (2011 ii: 47–48, 200–201, 214). Referring to Idelsohn’s work, she excludes the possibility that his transcriptions (exx. 11 and 12) could represent the melody used for singing the parody. Matut claims that these transcriptions were intended for the Hebrew piyyut Tummat ẓurim, which has fewer syllables per line than the Yiddish song she examines (214). We cannot accept Matut’s claim because, as will be shown below, we regard the Niggun ‘Akedah as a non-metrical flexible melodic formula which could be adapted to a varying number varying number of syllables per line.

Geoffrey Goldberg’s new study of the piyyut Tummat ẓurim and its melody, as it appears in the cantorial compendia of Maier Levi of Esslingen (1818–1874; ex. 4), has made a major contribution to the research of the Niggun ‘Akedah. In his edition of Maier Levi’s music for the High Holy Days, Goldberg (2019, 109–111, 117; no. 29) provides a modern transcription of the melody and detailed annotations, including a list of comparable notated sources and a comprehensive liturgical and musical analysis of the Niggun ‘Akedah.

Transcriptions of the Niggun ‘Akedah 

Having considered the current scholarship on Niggun ‘Akedah, we move to discuss the thirteen transcriptions of this melody in ascending chronological order.[31] All transcriptions belong to the Western Ashkenazi rite. In parallel, our search for recordings of ‘Akedah piyyutim at the National Sound Archives (NSA) at the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem has yielded only one recording.[32] It is likely that this scarcity results from a combination of historical circumstances, and particularly the havoc that Nazi Germany unleashed upon Western Ashkenazi Jewry and its synagogue tradition.[33] 

Cantor Michel Heymann, a faithful preserver of the Alsatian Jewish community’s chanting heritage (minhag Elsass) sings the one recording at the NSA.[34] While his singing in this recording is clear and accurate, it is also slightly hastened (given that he was asked to sing extensive parts of the High Holiday liturgy) and therefore difficult to rely upon for a meticulous transcription. Oren Roman visited Cantor Heymann in Luxembourg in September of 2017, on which occasion Cantor Heymann kindly agreed to sing the Niggun ‘Akedah. Two transcriptions from the recording made on that occasion are presented below as exx. 14a-b.

As we will demonstrate, all the extant musical sources employ the same four-phrase melody, with some variations. All versions are intended for alternating singing between cantor and congregation, or occasionally between cantor and choir.[35] In order to facilitate the comparison of the transcriptions, they are all presented in the uniform tonality of F (the original tonality is noted) with the letters A, B, C and D added to mark the four phrases that constitute the melody. Unless otherwise stated, the rhythmical values of the notes are presented exactly as they appear in each source, as are the texts’ titles, indications for singers and text-underlays. (To avoid confusion, the term “phrase” applies to music, while the term “line” to the text).

 

Example 1: Löw Sänger and Samuel Naumbourg (Munich 1840, 62–63)[36] 

 

Original Title	תמת [sic]
Chosen Text	Tummat ẓurim.
Singing instructions	The first phrase (A) lacks an indication of the intended singer, but is understood to be the cantor's part. The third phrase (C) carries the title חסן (sic, cantor). The second and fourth phrases (B, D) are indicated as Chor (choir).
Tonality and Meter	D, no fixed meter
Remarks	Only the melody for the first stanza is provided (no ending-version for the last stanza). The text underlay is very unclear, providing only the beginning of the lines. We reconstructed the remainder of the line (in square parentheses), according to the general style of the author.

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Example 2. Samuel Naumbourg (Paris 1847, 317 [No. 263])

 

Original Title	תמת צורים
Chosen Text	Tummat ẓurim
Tonality and Meter	F, 4/4
Singing instructions	The beginning indicates Chasan (cantor) RECIT[ative]. At the end of the stanza, the indication reads: les autres versets de la même manière (the other stanzas in the same manner)
Remarks	Only the melody for the first stanza is provided (no ending-version for the last stanza).

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Example 3. Gerson Rosenstein (Hamburg 1852, 40 [No. 59a]) 

 

Original Title	עקידה, שנייה
Chosen Text	none
Tonality and Meter	G, no fixed meter
Singing instructions	The four phrases of the melody are titled: Solo I [cantor’s first part]; Chor [choir’s first part] I; Solo II [cantor’s second part]; Chor II [choir’s second part]
Remarks	The melody is printed in a section described by the table of contents as, Anhang von Gebeten des ältern Ritus (Appendix of prayers of the older rite). As the Hebrew title indicates, the melody was intended for both ‘Akedah piyyutim, usually written in quatrains, and Sheniyyah piyyutim (another sub-genre of Seliḥot piyyutim, written in couplets). In the latter case, two consecutive couplets could be sung as a unit of four musical phrases with the ABCD form of the ‘Akedah melody.

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Example 4. Maier Levi (Esslingen 1862 ix, 86–91 [No. 30])[37] 

 

Original Title	none
Chosen Text	Tummat ẓurim
Tonality and Meter	D (stanzas 1-3); F (last stanza); all in no fixed meter
Singing instructions	For the first three stanzas, only the music of the first and second phrases is provided, including a text underlay written in large printed letters with the appropriate nikkud. The text of the third and fourth lines is penned in small cursive letters without nikkud or music. As this compendium was intended to serve the cantor, it seems probable that in this transcription the cantor sings the first two lines of the stanza (A and B), whereas the congregation recites the third and fourth lines (C and D), probably in the traditional Ashkenazi loud murmur. Music is provided for all four lines of the last stanza, entitled Cadenza. After the second line, Levi comments: Gemeinde; dann Vorsänger. Schluß: (Congregation; then Cantor. End:), namely that the congregation should sing A and the cantor B–D.
Remarks	The musical transcription of this volume follows the writing direction of the Hebrew language. Volume IV was one of about a dozen (it remains unclear how many volumes existed originally) making up a vast cantorial compendium intended for teaching cantorial students. Geoffrey Goldberg (2000) provides an extensive study of Maier Levi’s life and work. An important discussion of the ‘Akedah melody in general and an analysis of Levi's melody including a comparison to other sources appears in Goldberg's edition of Levi’s chants for the High Holy Days (2019). In the transcription of the last stanza, the dynamics sign given is ff (=fortissimo) and the melody is transposed upwards from D to F, enabling the cantor to end on an impressive strong high note leading into the recitation of ’El melekh yoshev. In our transcription, we have Latinized the text underlay according to the German transliteration of Hebrew, as was common in Levi’s time and as he himself did in his later volumes.

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Example 5. N. H. Katz and Lazarus Waldbott (Brilon (Westphalia) 1868, 73–74)

 

Original Title	‘Akedah
Chosen Text	Tummat ẓurim
Tonality and Meter	F, 4/4
Singing instructions	The word Vor[beter] (cantor) is inscribed over the beginning of musical phrase A and Gem[einde] (congregation) above the beginning of section B. As there are no further instructions, C and D were apparently to be sung by the congregation. There are no instructions regarding the ending-version of the last stanza. General remarks: The melody for the first and second stanzas is provided (same for both), as well as an ending-version very different in musical character for the last stanza (indicated as Schlussstrophe [end stanza]). The latter (which is not given in the current example) bears no relationship to the ‘Akedah melody, but is based on the ending formulas for other piyyutim, such as sheniyyah and shelishiyyah.
Remarks	Katz and Waldbott force the melody to conform to common time; nevertheless, ignoring the artificial meter and bar lines, their version seems reliable. The text underlay is erroneous; we have taken the liberty of correcting it.

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Example 6. Maier Kohn (Munich 1870, 31 [No. 64]) 

 

Original Title	עקידה
Chosen Text	ʼElohim ʼal domi ledami
Tonality and Meter	F, no fixed meter
Singing instructions	A and C - חזן (cantor), B and D - קהל (congregation). Schluß wie bei שלישיה u[nd] שניה (the ending-stanza is to be sung in the same manner as the final stanzas of the Sheniyyah and Shelishiyyah piyyutim of the Seliḥot service.)
Remarks	Only the melody for the first stanza is provided (no ending-version for the last stanza has been notated, but a verbal explanation of it is provided). Each phrase is written on a different stave, with a vertical line drawn from the top to the middle of the stave, a caesura dividing the phrase into two segments. Some of the recitation tones are notated as breves, but in our transcription divides them into individual notes

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Example 7. Abraham Baer (Gothenburg 1882, 305 [No. 1320])

 

Original Title	תמת צורים (עקדה)
Chosen Text	Tummat ẓurim
Tonality and Meter	F, 4/4
Singing instructions	The first stanza carries the performance indication Solo (cantor). This is followed by the indication Ebenso die folgenden Strophen, dann (similarly the following stanzas, then…) and the transcription of the last stanza, which is divided between Solo (cantor) for A and B, and Chor (choir) for C and D.
Remarks	The same melody is notated also on 322 [no. 1420]. The melody for the first stanza is provided under the title Anfang (beginning) and the melody for the last stanza under the title Schluss (ending). In our example we have omitted the transcription of the last stanza, the chant for which differs considerably from the ‘Akedah melody.

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Example 8. Samuёl David (Paris 1895, 180–182 [no. 86]) 

 

Original Title	עקדה תמת צורים AKÉDAH/ TOUMAS TSOURIM/ Chant traditionnel dialogé/ KIPOUR
Chosen Text	Tummat ẓurim
Tonality and Meter	F. The part of the Officiant (cantor) is in no fixed meter, marked Solennel[lement], (with solemnity), the part of the Choeur (choir) is in 2/4, marked Moderato, ♩=80. Duration is listed as 4 minutes
Singing instructions	The piyyut’s entire eleven stanzas are presented as a dialogue between cantor and choir: that the cantor sings the first two phrases (A and B) in free rhythm and solemn manner; whereas the choir sings the last two phrases (C and D) in strict 2/4 meter and moderately fast tempo. The singing instruction Officiant et Choeur complet à l’unisson (cantor and the entire choir in unison) seems to imply that this piyyut was not to be accompanied by the organ.
Remarks	In this rendition, Samuël David differentiates between the odd-numbered and the even-numbered stanzas. The odd-numbered stanzas portray the traditional Niggun ‘Akedah, whereas the even-numbered stanzas all bear the same clever modification of the original melody. The modern compositional technique and the fact that no such feature has been found in any of the other transcriptions of the ‘Akedah strongly suggest that the melody for the even-numbered stanzas was composed by Samuël David himself. In our reproduction of this transcription, we present the first two stanzas, which include both types of melodies.

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Example 9. Fabian Ogutsch (Frankfurt 1930, 81 [no. 242]) 

 

Original Title	עקדה-Melodie
Chosen Text	none, probablyʼElohim ʼal domi ledami
Tonality and Meter	C, 4/4
Singing instructions	none
Remarks	The transcription predates 1922, the year of Ogutsch’s death. While the transcription has no text underlay, the setting is syllabic: its individual notes, its beams and slurs, as well as its rhythms, fit the first stanza of ’Elohim ’al domi ledami. We therefore presented the melody with the text underlay of this poem. The common-time meter and the bar-lines are misleading and should be ignored. Ogutsch provides on p. 80, no. 236 the melody for סופי סליחות (Seliḥot endings).

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Example 10. Abraham Zvi Idelsohn (Jewish Music, New York 1929, 167 [Table XXV, No. 7] 

 

Original Title	none
Chosen Text	Tummat ẓurim
Tonality and Meter	F, no fixed meter
Singing instructions	Solo (cantor) for A and C, Cong[regation] for B and D
Remarks	Only the melody for the first stanza is provided (no ending-version). Idelsohn discusses the “Akedah tune” in a short paragraph among his annotations for the Table XXV (p. 170), regarding it as a medieval melody (see below, State of Musicological Research).

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Example 11. Abraham Zvi Idelsohn (HOM, Leipzig 1932 vii, 108 [No. 312a]) 

 

Original Title	Akedoh
Chosen Text	Tummat ẓurim
Tonality and Meter	F, 3/4 (the original indicates Zeitmaß frei, to be sung in free time)
Singing instructions	none
Remarks	Only the melody for the first stanza is provided (no ending-version for the last stanza).

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Example 12. Abraham Zvi Idelsohn (HOM, Leipzig 1932 vii, 93 [no. 256])

 

Original Title	Akedoh
Chosen Text	ʼElohim ʼal domi ledami
Tonality and Meter	F, no fixed meter
Singing instructions	Hazan (cantor) for A and C, Cong[regation] for B and D
Remarks	Only the melody for the first stanza is provided (no ending-version for the last stanza).

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Example 13. Emanuel Kirschner (Munich 1932–1933, 40 [no. 76]) 

 

Original Title	Âkedoh
Chosen Text	Mefalti ʼeli ẓuri. An explanatory note attached to the end of the music reads: ʽEmmunim bene maʽaminim ebenso (likewise the piyyut ʽEmmunim bene maʽaminim)
Tonality and Meter	C, no fixed meter
Singing instructions	For the first stanza, Kirschner indicates Vorb[eter] (cantor) for A and C, and Gem[einde] (congregation) for B and D. For the last stanza, he writes: Schluß [sic]. V[orbeter] u[nd] Gem[einde] (end. cantor and congregation)
Remarks	Kirschner provides the music for the first and last stanzas. The melody of the last phrase of the Schluss stanza is a transition to the next prayer.

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Example 14a. Michel Heymann (2017) 

 

 

Original Title	ʽAkedah
Chosen Text	none
Tonality and Meter	C, multiple meter, mostly in triple time patterns
Singing instructions	none
Remarks	Cantor Heymann sang just the melody without any text

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Example 14b. Michel Heymann (2017) 

 

 

Original Title	none
Chosen Text	’Ahavat izuz
Tonality and Meter	C, multiple meter, mostly in triple time patterns
Singing instructions	According to Cantor Heymann’s description during the recording, all stanzas except the final one are to be sung in alternation between the cantor (phrases A and B) and the congregation (phrases C and D). The entire last stanza is to be sung by the cantor alone.
Remarks	Cantor Heymann sang at a rather fast tempo, probably faster than in his synagogue rendition.

 

Analysis of the Transcriptions

Notwithstanding geographic and temporal differences, all the music examples are variants of the same melody. The melody itself presents a mixture of a folk tune and a psalmodic chant. It is simple, easily memorable, and repetitive, yet it recalls a psalmody, mainly due to recitation tones that render it flexible and enable it to accommodate a varying number of syllables. As will be discussed below, the documented ‘Akedah melody corresponds with the information gleaned from verbal descriptions of Niggun ‘Akedah. Combined with the clear and repeated similarities of the transcriptions, this undoubtedly indicates that the melody before us was the only one used for ‘Akedah piyyutim in the Western Ashkenazi rite during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and most likely prior to that. While it remains unclear how long before the first transcription this popular melody had circulated we will nevertheless suggest that some of its features situate it within medieval European musical culture.

Geo-Cultural Provenance

All the transcriptions belong to the Western Ashkenazi rite (minhag ’Ashkenaz); we have not discovered any Eastern Ashkenazi (minhag Polin and minhag Lita) transcriptions of the ‘Akedah melody (Goldschmidt 1965a, 6-8). Moreover, the transcription in Baer’s book (ex. 7) appears on a page divided into two columns: the right column is entitled Minhag Aschk’nas (i.e. Western Ashkenazi rite) and contains the piyyut Tummat ẓurim with the ‘Akedah melody, whereas the left column is entitled Minhag Polen (i.e. Eastern Ashkenazi rite) and contains the piyyut ’Omnam ken with a different melody. This clearly indicates that neither the text nor the melody was sung in the Eastern European rite.[38]

We tend to attribute the absence of the melody in Eastern European traditions to the simplistic manner of Seliḥot chants in that region. Unlike the musical system of the Western Ashkenazi rite, which could boast unique melodies for various kinds of piyyutim (not only ‘Akedah; Geiger 1862, 128–130; Idelsohn 1932, 93 [nos. 254-256]), in the Eastern Ashkenazi rite it was customary to sing ‘Akedah piyyutim in the same manner as other types of Seliḥot piyyutim. The cantor would sing the beginning of an ‘Akedah piyyut with a simple psalmodic phrase in the minor mode, then cantor and congregation would recite the remainder of the piyyut silently or in an audible murmur. Finally, the cantor would sing the last stanza in the major mode while transitioning to the following prayer, which in most cases leads to the recitation of the Thirteen Attributes of Mercy (Geshuri 1964, 224–225; Spiro 1999, 27 [no. 6], 30–31 [nos. 9–10]).

Choice of Poetical Texts

The selection of specific piyyutim for the various transcriptions of Niggun ‘Akedah (and the one recording) appears to demonstrate the prominence of certain poems over others, at least at the time when these transcriptions were made. The most popular piyyut was undoubtedly Tummat ẓurim,[39] which was used in eight cases (exx. 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, and 11) as the model text to accompany the transcription. Clearly, the reason for this overwhelming popularity is the setting of Tummat ẓurim in the Yom Kippur evening service: it is the first ‘Akedah piyyut recited on the holy day (Goldschmidt 1970, 32; Heidenheim 1892, 91–93). Ex. 13 uses the piyyut Mefalti ’eli tzuri (Goldschmidt 1965b, 101 [no. 39]) which is recited on the morning of Rosh Hashanah Eve and is in fact the first occasion during the High-Holiday season on which an ‘Akedah piyyut is said (Goldschmidt 1965b, 1970, 1993). Ex. 14b uses the piyyut ’Ahavat izuz which is recited during the Yom Kippur musaf service, a most meaningful service for the expert Ḥazzan. Exx. 6, 9, and 12 use the text of ’Elohim ’al domi le-dami, which is also considered a Kinah piyyut (dirge), describing and bewailing Jewish martyrdom during the First Crusade. In Western Ashkenazi practice, this dirge is also recited during the Yom Kippur musaf service. Composed by David bar Meshulam, who personally endured the calamities he describes, this is perhaps the earliest piyyut portraying the persecution of the Jewish communities in the Rhineland in 1096. It is also considered the first piyyut to draw a connection between the Jewish acts of martyrdom (Kiddush Hashem) and the ‘Akedaht Yizhak narrative; as such it influenced later similar texts, especially within the genre of ‘Akedah piyyutim (Fraenkel, Gross, and Lehnardt 2016, 72-73, 477-479). Ex. 13 mentions ’Emmunim benei ma’aminim, an ‘Akedah piyyut usually said in the morning service of Yom Kippur (Goldschmidt 1970 ii: 228).

Interestingly, Gerson Rosenstein (ex. 3) and Abraham Baer (ex. 7) mention that the ‘Akedah melody suits also Sheniyyah piyyutim (a different sub-genre of the Selihot piyyutim, written in rhyming couplets; Weinberger 1998, 223, 263-267, 318–319; Goldschmidt 1965b, 9). Baer specifically mentions the Sheniyyah  piyyut’Ana’ ha-shem ha-nikhbad ve-ha-nora’. In such case, two couplets are sung in tandem as a quatrain.

Ending-Version (Schluss) and the Musical Framework of the Service

Consistent with Salomon Geiger’s comments above, some of the transcriptions conclude the recitation of an ‘Akedah piyyut with a special ending-version, often marked Schluss (end) for the last stanza. Exx. 4, 13, and 14 use the ‘Akedah melody at the beginning of the last stanza, but digress from it at the end; we have reproduced these ending versions in our transcriptions. Exx. 5 and 7 provide a different melody, not reproduced here, which is based on the conventional endings of the Seliḥot prayers. Ex. 6 does not provide an ending melody, but advises the cantor to sing it in the same manner as the last stanzas of the Sheniyyah and Shelishiyyah piyyutim.

It is our understanding that all the endings, both those that quote the Niggun ‘Akedah and those that do not, represent the wider musical-liturgical context of the prayer cycle of the Seliḥot service. They are designed to modulate from the mode of the ‘Akedah melody to the mode of the following prayer. In some cases, the transitional melodic line is developed into a bravura on high notes. The following prayer is for the most part ’El melekh yoshev ʽal kise’ raḥamim (God, the King who sits on a throne of mercy), the preface to the recitation of the Thirteen Attributes of Mercy, and this musical modulation serves as a cue for the congregation to physically rise.[40] The same phenomenon occurs in other similar cases, such as the endings of the melodies for Sheniyyah piyyutim, Shelishiyyah piyyutim, Shalmonit piyyutim, etc. (Geiger 1862, 129–130; Ogutsch 1930, 80 [no. 236]).

As this paper focuses on the Niggun ‘Akedah itself, our analysis pertains only to the melody of the regular verses, which is usually represented in the transcriptions by the first phrase. We do not address the ending-versions which, as a rule, are not characteristic of the ‘Akedah melody. An exception to this was made in the case of Maier Levi Esslingen’s transcription (ex. 4): the ending-version here is the only source for the third and fourth phrases. These phrases are similar to their parallel phrases in other transcriptions, and therefore have been included in our research.

Performance Practice

Twelve sources (all apart from exx. 9 and 11) provide some kind of singing instructions that is the designation of which melodic phrases are to be sung by cantor, congregation or choir. Additionally, some of the sources provide instructions regarding the singing of specific stanzas within the piyyutim. These performance guidelines often bear the imprint of their contemporary reality, and do not necessarily reflect the historical circumstances in which the melody was composed and chanted.

Thus, for example, indications of the choir’s role (exx. 1, 3, 7, and 8) serve as a clear testimony to the modern phenomenon of choral accompaniment in Western European synagogues, the setting in which the transcriptions were made. This phenomenon began with Solomon Sultzer’s modernization of Jewish liturgical music toward the third decade of the nineteenth century, and remained popular until the Second World War (Schleifer 1996). Yet it appears that some transcribers employed the indication ʽchoir’ for sections that are to be sung by both choir and congregation, in which case the choir led the congregational singing. This can be inferred from the simple melodic line found in the choir’s part, or as evidenced by a clear instruction in the preface to Abraham Baer’s cantorial compendium: “The heading ʽchoir’ is equivalent to ʽcongregation’.” (Baer 1882, ix). The modern concept of choir accompaniment, thus, may in fact have referred to the traditional congregational singing.

A different but similar type of instruction refers to responsorial singing. Most of the singing instructions indicate that the ‘Akedah piyyutim were sung in the synagogue in an alternating responsorial singing between cantor and congregation (or cantor and choir). Indeed, many maḥzorim include similar instructions for responsorial singing of the ‘Akedah piyyutim (Mahzor Sulzbach 1826, 35; Mahzor Amsterdam 1828, 140b; Heidenheim 1892, 91–93), but we chose not to explore this vast source of information regarding singing instructions, because it would exceed the scope of the present research.

With regard to the main version of the melody (as opposed to the ending-version), seven transcriptions (exx. 1, 3, 5, 6, 10, 12, and 13)[41] designate that phrases A and C are to be sung by the cantor, while phrases B and D are to be sung by the congregation and/or the choir. Exx. 4, 8, and 14 assign phrases A and B to the cantor, and phrases C and D to the congregation and/or choir. Exx. 2 and 7 assign the entire stanza to the cantor.

One final type of instruction concerns the question of whether the piyyutim were ever sung in their entirety in the synagogue. This question touches upon an important matter – the history of Jewish worship – which seems to have changed over time and vary between communities.

We know that medieval Ashkenazi prayer practices were of a strong oral character: the individual worshipper did not read texts but rather recited them by heart or heard them from the precentor (Sheliaḥ ẓibbur). This is especially true with respect to piyyutim, which were originally recited by the precentor alone – as only he had a written version of the long text, while the congregation listened silently or offered short, designated responses (Ta-Shma 2003, 29–33; Goldschmidt 1965b, 9–10). Following the printing revolution, and the subsequent abundance of private prayer books, these prayer practices altered significantly (Steinsaltz 2000, 58).

In the specific context of ‘Akedah piyyutim transcriptions, we assume that in all fourteen examples the first stanza is to be sung. The presence of an ending-version (exx. 4, 8, 13, and 14b, which use the original melody but digress towards the end, and exx. 5 and 7, which provide a completely different ending chant) attests to the singing of the piyyut’s last stanza, at least in some communities. Concerning the remaining stanzas between the first and last, exx. 2, 7, 8, and 14 clearly indicate that all the piyyut’s stanzas were to be sung, yet the other examples offer no information regarding this matter. Also relevant in this respect is Salomon Geiger’s report, specifying that following the first stanza, the congregation continues “until the end” of the piyyut (Geiger 1862, 129), at which point the cantor would sing the last stanza in the melody’s ending-version. This could be interpreted to mean that the congregation would recite the remaining stanzas in a kind of a loud murmur, as is still common in traditional Ashkenazi synagogues (HaCohen 2011, 126–178; Frigyesi 2007).

Meter

Seven of the sources present the melody without fixed meter (exx. 1, 3, 4, 6, 10, 12, and 13);[42] indeed we understand the original melody’s character in this manner. The lack of meter is imperative here because the number of syllables per line varies considerably in piyyutim and other texts sung to the Niggun ‘Akedah. We suggest that originally the poem was chanted in a psalmodic manner, in what could be described as a “double psalmody”. The stanza was divided into two segments of two lines each: each segment had a psalmodic formula containing opening and closing motifs; in between them was a simple recitation tone (tonus currens), which could be repeated as many times as necessary in order to contain a varying number of syllables.

By contrast, the five sources which present the Niggun ‘Akedah with fixed musical meters (exx. 2, 5, 7, 9, and 11) seem to exhibit the influence of nineteenth- and twentieth-century aesthetic conventions. The transcribers’ desire to imbue the ancient Jewish melody with contemporary decorum led them to coerce the original lack of meter into a rhythmic mold. We doubt that these rhythmical transcriptions were performed in reality, even at the time of their transcription (see Adler 1989, xxxvi–xxxvii), because they lack the flexibility necessary for the melody to adapt to different texts.

Idelsohn’s transcription in triple meter (ex. 11), which also includes the contradictory instruction “free time”, seems especially questionable. Nevertheless, Cantor Michel Heymann’s live singing (exx. 14a-b), in which he endeavored to preserve an elastic triple-meter pattern in the melody whenever possible, may echo an old tradition, thus providing some justification for Idelsohn’s transcription.

Melodic Structure

Niggun ‘Akedah is a periodic melody constructed of four phrases (marked A, B, C, D in our transcriptions), the first two serving as an antecedent section and the last two as a consequent section. All of our sources agree on the general structure of phrase A. It begins with a recitation pattern alternating between the notes A and C’ and it ends on the notes A–G.[43] They vary, however, with regard to the use of B^♭: most of the sources use it either as a passing note between C’ and A, whereas the others do not use it at all. Our sources show great variances for phrase B. While seven sources (exx. 5, 7, 9, 10, 12, 13, and 14) begin on G, ascend to D’, then down to C’, which again serves as a recitation tone, and end on the cadence A–G–F; five sources (exx. 1, 2, 3, 6, 8) begin with the note A, continue with a recitation tone on C’ and end with the half cadence F–C. All the sources agree on phrase C: it begins with recitation tones alternating between F and C and ends with the partial cadence F–G–A (with one exception, ex. 6 by Maier Kohn, where the partial cadence is F–B^♭–A). Similarly, the sources concur with regard to phrase D: it begins with a recitation tone A and ends with the final cadence (C’)–A–G–F (again with the exception of no. 6 in which the cadence is the fifth C’–F).[44] 

Ex. 4 differs from all the above. It provides a variant beginning for phrase A which is sung from the second stanza onward, beginning by descending from the high F’ to C’ before continuing with the melody. This device was probably intended to enhance the bravura of cantorial singing. Phrase B ends with a half cadence F–D (sic!). Considering that the same ending appears in Levi’s transcription of all the stanzas and since we appreciate his vast knowledge of the cantorial tradition, we must rule out a mere error on his part. Levi does not provide the usual melody for phrase D, only the variant of the last stanza leading into the next prayer; and so it is unclear how the regular melody was supposed to end according to this tradition.

Considering all the above, we suggest a model of the melody as would apply to the ‘Akedah poem Tummat ẓurim. The melody is given here in two versions: one according to the majority of the transcriptions (exx. 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14a and 14b), and another based on fewer transcriptions (exx. 1,2,3,8 [cantor’s part], and 12). We believe that the first version represents a more modern rendition of the melody, dating most likely from the nineteenth-century, whereas the second version appears to be older (see ex. 15)

Example 15. ‘Akedah melody reconstruction (newer version) 

 

 

The ʽJoyful’ Major and the Pentatonic Scale

When consulting nineteenth century cantorial compendia like Abraham Baer (ex. 7), Katz & Waldbott (ex. 5) and Ogutsch (ex. 9.), the mode of the ‘Akedah melody appears to be in major. Indeed, all present the melody in major keys. How can we reconcile the joyfulness usually associated with the major mode (Heinlein 1928, 101–142) with the sadness of the texts chanted to it? Israel Adler raised this very question as a general issue with respect to the Ashkenazi liturgical chants, in the introduction to his Hebrew Notated Manuscript Sources:

One of the surprising phenomena of Ashkenazi synagogal chant is the cleavage which may sometimes be observed between the grave ethos of the text of the prayers and the joyful ethos of the melody. (Adler 1989, xl)

Adler settles the apparent contradiction by mentioning a Talmudic passage which implies that divine worship must be performed through joyous singing: “[W]hich service [of God] is it that is ʽin joyfulness and with gladness of heart’? – You must say: It is song” (BT Arakhin, 11a). He also mentions that Hasidic thought celebrated the verse from Psalms 100:2, “Serve the Lord with gladness, come before His presence with singing,” quoting a Hasidic story which explains why the liturgical confession of sins should be chanted with an uplifting melody: “A slave who cleans the garbage from the king’s court […] sings niggunim [melodies] of joy since he causes contentment to the king.” (Adler, 1989, xl; Agnon 1987, 32)

Still, we should question the ethos accorded to the major mode and consider that cultural meaning of a musical idiom may change over time; as Idelsohn writes,

[I]t is impossible and futile to pass judgement as to whether these tunes are capable of calling forth in our days the ideas and sentiments they are supposed to express, since so many centuries have passed since the time of their creation. (Idelsohn 1929, 135)

Therefore, it could well be argued that associating the ethos of the major mode with gladness is not necessarily a universal trait, especially in pre-modern times. Indeed, even in classical European music, for example, one of the saddest arias in the opera repertoire was composed in the major mode: the lament Che faro senza Euridice, in which Orfeo mourns the death of his beloved wife, in Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice.[45] 

What is more, as was noted above, the pre-modern German song concerning the suffering of Jesus which Idelsohn sought to compare with the “‘Akedah tune” was also sung in the major mode.  Furthermore, the Gregorian Tonus Lamentationum to which verses of the biblical Book of Lamentations are sung during the Holy Week is in the medieval “sixth mode”, the early predecessor of the major mode.[46] But above all, as we have seen, even in the early nineteenth-century Salomon Geiger considered the Niggun ‘Akedah to be particularly sad.

Additionally, in all Ashkenazi traditions, the High Holy Days confessional prayer “’Ashamnu, Bagadnu” (referred to in the Hasidic story above), during which Jews beat their chest with each word as an expression of remorse, is chanted in the major mode.[47] Likewise, we have encountered Western Ashkenazi transcriptions of Shelishiyyah piyyutim (another type of piyyut said in Seliḥot services) in the major mode (Idelsohn 1932, 93 [no. 255]). It is thus possible that Ashkenazi Jews associated constellations of the major mode with sadness or contrition, especially when the chants or melodies were sung at a slow tempo.

Furthermore, the versions which appear to be in the major mode are constructed on the hexachord F–G–A–B^♭–C’–D’ plus a lower sub-tonic note C, a fourth below the tonic. One version (ex. 6) is even limited to the pentachord F to C’, three versions (exx. 5, 7, and 10) use the full hexachord, and two additional sources (exx. 9 and 13) add an occasional high F’ leap to the octave, which creates a yodel-like grace note. It is quite significant that even the transcriptions presenting the melody in a seemingly major mode avoid the leading tone E’. This six-tone scale recalls the medieval hexachordum molle (the soft hexachord). There is even greater resemblance to the old chants: at least six out of our fourteen sources, namely the three earliest (exx. 1–3) and Idelsohn's three examples (exx. 10–12), present the melody in the pentatonic mode of (C), F (tonic)–G–A–C’–D’. Can we therefore assume that what appears now to be a melody in the major mode, is actually a modification of an older pentatonic one?

In this regard the proposition made by Jacques Chailley concerning the evolvement of pentatonic chants into diatonic ones is significant (1966, 84–93). Chailley drew on Constantin Brailoiu’s article “Sur une mélodie russe” (Brailoiu 1953), which explored the universality of the pentatonic scale. Among Brailoiu’s observations he noted the important role of the auxiliary notes, known in Chinese culture as “pien.” These notes fill in the interval of the third which is always presented in the pentatonic scale, thus enriching the pentatonic music in various cultures. Chailley applied Brailoiu’s observations in depicting the evolution of European medieval modality, suggesting that the psalm-tones developed from pre-existing pentatonic chants through the gradual incorporation of auxiliary pien notes. He proposes that in medieval European music, these auxiliary notes became stepping stones to transfer the music from the pentatonic scales into the diatonic ones. Hence behind various psalm tones that may appear diatonic, a former pentatonic version may have existed.

Within the context of the Niggun ‘Akedah, we regard the B^♭ passing tone, or upper auxiliary tone, that appears in eight transcriptions (exx. 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 13, and 14a-b) as a pien tone. It should be noted that Cantor Heymann’s singing (exx. 14a-b) is almost purely pentatonic, except for one B^♭ sung as a mere passing tone. Taking our cue from Chailley, we can suggest that the pentatonic transcriptions (exx. 1, 2, 3, 6, and 12) display versions that date back to medieval times (ex. 16)

 

Example 16. ‘Akedah melody reconstruction (older version) 

 

A quaint anecdote in this respect is the observation that one of the oldest versions of the niggun ‘Akedah in our collection, ex. 3, has been transcribed by Gerson Rosenstein, the first Jewish organist of the nineteenth-century German Reform movement, who advanced the new ritual of the Hamburg Temple. His transcription is a purely pentatonic melody with no hints of the major mode as it was understood in the nineteenth century. Within these lines, it is possible that additional chants in the Ashkenazi High Holiday repertoire, which today are considered to be in the major scale, were formerly sung in pentatonic mode.[48] Thus, for instance, if we eliminate the pien tones from the famous Eastern European melody for the minor confessional ’Ashamnu, Bagadnu, which today sounds like a tune in the major mode (ex. 17a), we arrive at a simple proto-pentatonic chant of four notes (ex. 17b), which may have perhaps constituted the original version. It is quite clear that the non-verbal preface to this melody (“oy-oy-oy”) was originally what cantors used to call “shtel” or “shtele,” namely a wordless melodic introduction to a traditional chant (Avenary 1960, 193). Similar “shtelen” were commonly sung before other High Holy-Day prayers such as the ʽAmida or ʽAleinu Leshabeaḥ prayers (Baer 1882, 258 (no. 1165, ʽPolnische Weise’); Neʼeman 1973, 65 [no. 110]). All of them were added to the original chants at a late age. In the case of ’Ashamnu, Bagadnu, however, the shtel merged with the chant and it was sung by the cantor and the congregation whenever the chant was repeated (see ex. 19; Ne’eman 1973, 196 [no. 26])).

Example 17a. “Ashamnu”, Eastern European Melody (transcribed by Schleifer) 

 

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Example 17b. “Ashamnu”, Suggested Original Melody 

 

 

This hypothesis requires further research. However, in the specific case of Niggun ‘Akedah we believe that we have sufficient evidence to conclude that this melody was originally pentatonic. As such, Niggun ‘Akedah belongs to a very early stratum of the Ashkenazi synagogue chants and melodies, dating back to the Middle Ages.[49] Consequently, it is not unfeasible that the medieval and early modern references to Niggun ‘Akedah point to the same melody as that represented in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century transcriptions above, and a variant of which is still sung today in some Jewish communities that follow the Western Ashkenazi rite.

Conclusion

We suggest that the melody recorded in the transcriptions above is indeed the medieval Niggun ‘Akedah. For centuries it was preserved through oral transmission, until it was first written down in the nineteenth century and recorded in the twentieth. The medieval character of the melody complements the texts of the early ‘Akedah piyyutim, which were composed shortly after the First Crusade, in the wake of its agonizing impact.[50] Indeed, we propose that Idelsohn was right in arguing that Maharil sang a variant of the extant melody during the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century. The fact that we have the transcription of such an ancient melody (even if through late and limited transcriptions), enriches our knowledge in the barely documented field of pre-modern Jewish music. On the one hand, our study highlights the impressive capability of oral transmission in preserving a melody over centuries and across a vast geographical area; on the other hand, it reflects the changes that this melody apparently underwent, particularly with the addition of a pien-tone to the pentatonic mode that de facto saw the melody’s “majorization”. Our conclusions also enhance the understanding of other pseudo-major melodies in the High Holiday liturgy, and indeed the musical idiom of this liturgy at large.

The ‘Akedah melody may sound joyful today, but in the past it was perceived as sad and connected with texts expressing the solemnity of the High Holidays, as well as the bitter memory of Jewish martyrdom (Kiddush Hashem). Niggun ‘Akedah was applied in synagogue services to texts designated as ‘Akedah piyyutim, but in fact also signaled to the lay public that such poems were being recited. Thanks to this tune, most worshippers in the synagogue, who were Yiddish-speakers and could not understand the enigmatic Hebrew language of the piyyutim, could recognize when an ‘Akedah piyyut was sung, and perhaps comprehend its cultural and emotional meaning.

We noted above the proximity between some Ashkenazi Kinah piyyutim and Gezera piyyutim, written in quatrains and referring explicitly to the Binding of Isaac, and the genre of ‘Akedah piyyutim. We repeat here our assumption that Kinah piyyutim, too, may have once been sung to Niggun ‘Akedah. We thus discern that Niggun ‘Akedah defines a textual corpus beyond the Seliḥot service, which includes piyyutim that are not Seliḥot, as well as Yudisher shtam and additional songs in Yiddish, all sung to its melody. All the texts in this corpus mention the Binding of Isaac, connecting it with contemporary or past persecutions suffered by Jews in Europe, while proclaiming faith in God and/or accepting persecutions as His will.

The earliest reference to Niggun ‘Akedah dates back to the fourteenth century. The contrafactum references to this melody in Yiddish literature, however, changed, thereby reflecting social dynamics and the popularity of sung texts in Jewish Ashkenazi society over the years—from Niggun ‘Akedah throguh Niggun Yudisher shtam to Niggun prostitser kedoshim and ultimately back to Niggun ‘Akedah. The last contrafactum reference to this melody in Yiddish literature dates from the seventeenth century (probably 1670). If we consider Yudisher shtam (all versions of which lack musical references) to be a contrafactum of the Niggun ‘Akedah as well, this date can be pushed to 1728, its last known edition. In Hebrew liturgy, by contrast, the name Niggun ‘Akedah has been used continuously within the liturgical setting until the present day.

Finally, we see that even the power of religion is limited. The wane and near disappearance of the Niggun ‘Akedah in the twenty-first century is strongly linked to alterations in Jewish worship. Due to historical circumstances and cultural change, and especially because of the Holocaust, many congregations abandoned the chanting of piyyutim in general. Many contemporary Maḥzorim contain no ‘Akedah piyyutim (Tal 1995; Scherman et al. 1996; Langer 1998, 182–85) and few synagogues in the world today recite ‘Akedah piyyutim, let alone according to the melodic heritage of the Western Ashkenazi rite. Under such circumstances, the unique melody of Niggun ‘Akedah is in danger of disappearing altogether from the Ashkenazi synagogue repertoire. Recently there have been attempts to revive the Western Ashkenazi liturgical tradition. Within this movement, the Niggun ‘Akedah may be preserved.

 

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Endnotes

* We would like to extend our thanks to Simon Neuberg and Peter Lenhardt for their learned advice, and to Geoffrey Goldberg for his valuable commentary on Maier Levi’s melody. 

[1] The Talmud relates that Satan urged God to test Abraham’s faith with the request that he sacrifice his son (BT Sanhedrin, 89b), while Midrash Tanḥuma (Vayera, 23) describes Sarah’s suffering and sudden death upon learning of her son’s fate. Shalom Spiegel (1967) revealed an ancient version of the story claiming that Isaac was in fact killed by Abraham but was later miraculously revived (Ginzberg 2003, 224–237).

[2] According to some traditions, Sarah conceived Isaac on Rosh Hashanah (BT Rosh Hashanah 11a), Isaac was born on this day (Zohar, Parashat Toledot), and the Binding of Isaac took place on this day too (Pesikta Rabati 40). Similarly, the ram’s horn blown on the High Holidays serves as a reminder of the piety displayed by Abraham and Isaac during the episode of the ‘Akedah (BT Rosh Hashana16b; Zunz 1920, 136–137; Spiegel 1967, 55; Noy 1961).

[3] We have come across some piyyutim of another type which may suit this context, namely Gezera piyyutim concerning the Crusades (Zunz 1920, 139; Fleischer 2007, 470; Weinberger 1998, 5–6, 184–187; Einbinder 2000, 540).

[4] According to Midrash Rabbah 56:3, Isaac asks his father to bind him tightly lest his trembling invalidate the sacrifice.

[5] Seliḥot are recited during the High Holiday season from four to nine days preceding Rosh Hashanah (according to the day of the week upon which Rosh Hashanah occurs) until the end of Yom Kippur, with the exclusion of Rosh Hashanah and Saturdays (Ganzfried, Kiẓur Shulḥan ʽArukh 128:5). However, within these Seliḥot it is customary to say ‘Akedah Piyyutim only on the morning of Rosh Hashanah Eve, and during the days following Rosh Hashanah until the end of Yom Kippur, inclusive.

[6] Many, if not most, ‘Akedah Piyyutim, can be found in Goldschmidt 1965b, 1970, 1993.

[7] Such as Meḥayye piyyutim which are said during the repetition of the second benediction of the ʽAmida prayer (Zunz 1920, 65; Weinberger 1998, 50–51; Spiegel 1967, 29–33). The liturgical rites of other Jewish communities also include piyyutim concerning the Binding of Isaac, for example twelfth century poet Yehuda ben Shmuel Ibn Abbas’ poem ʼEt shaʽarei raẓon lehippateaḥ (when the gates of mercy open), which is sung in oriental Jewish communities during Rosh Hashanah services before the blowing of the shofar at the end of the Morning Service, and in some communities in the Yom Kippur Neʽilah Service.

[8] Even within the same piyyut the lines are not always uniform in length, for example ʼIm ʼafes rovaʽ haken (Goldschmidt 1965, 190).

[9] This stanzaic structure could be viewed as a tercet followed by a refrain, a form known in the study of piyyutim as Muwashshaḥ. However, in the poems we saw, only the last word of the fourth line recurs, forming a so-called Pseudo-muwashshaḥ, Weinberger 1998, 91–94, 165, 327; Goldschmidt 1965b, 101, no. 39 (Mefalleti ʼeli ẓuri); 134, no. 49 (ʼAzay behar mor).

[10] Goldschmidt 1970 ii, 661 (ʼEmuna ʼomen ʽeẓot). Some regard Benjamin b. Zeraḥ’s ʼAhavat ʽezez as a monorhyme (Weinberger 1998, 223).

[11] Entitled ‘Akedah fun Yitskhok (and not, Shira fun Yitskhok, ʽSong of Isaac’; Falk 1938, 248; Weinreich 1928, 133; Dreeßen 1971, 145–148).

[12] Some researchers of Yiddish literature believe that this song was sung in the synagogue (Zinberg 1943 xi, 123; Shmeruk 1978, 119). For a detailed comparison between the Hebrew ‘Akedah Piyyutim and Yudisher shtam see Roman 2016, 175–194.

[13] These contain Minhagim (customs), prayers, prose exempla, Pirkei ʼAvot, songs, etc. (Dreeßen 1971, 10, 13, 19, 25).

[[14] From the beginning of the fifteenth century Jews migrated from German territories to northern Italy, continuing to speak Yiddish there and writing and printing Yiddish books until the beginning of the seventeenth century (Turniansky, Timm, and Rosenzweig 2003).

[15] Idelsohn 1932, xxxii; Adler 1989, xli; Seroussi et al. 2001. Some transcriptions of Ashkenazi synagogue chants appeared earlier and were notated by non-Jews: among them are Johannes Böschenstein’s and Caspar Amman’s transcriptions of the Torah cantillation motifs at the beginning of the sixteenth century and the Passover Seder melodies which were printed in Johann Stefan Rittangel’s Liber rituum paschalium of 1644 (Adler 1989, 556-557, 878).

[16] Such contrafactum singing instructions may be found in many Ashkenazi sources (Zunz 1920, 116; Idelsohn 1929, 381-382).

[17] Only in one case did we find an instruction to sing an ‘Akedah piyyut to a tune other than Niggun ‘Akedah (ʼAta huʼ ha’elohim, in: Goldschmit 1993, 104 [no. 5]).

[18] On the connection between the theme of circumcision and the Binding of Isaac, see Sabar 2009, 9–27; Goldin 2002, 175–176. We thank Chana Shacham-Rosby for drawing our attention to the latter source.

[19] Eleazar Hakalir’s Kinah piyyut for the Ninth of Av: איך תנחמוני הבל (How can you console me with vain words?; Feuer 1996, 286-291. This Kinah piyyut is written in monorhymed quatrains with an additional refrain. Its stanzas can therefore be sung to the Niggun ‘Akedah, but the refrain would necessarily include an additional musical motif, perhaps one that is sung by the entire congregation. We could not trace Western Ashkenazi musical transcriptions for this, but Eliyahu Schleifer is aware of an Eastern Ashkenazi melody. The tune he knows is completely different to Niggun ‘Akedah, and is comprised of four musical phrases and a refrain.

[20] The editions are very similar. Indeed, the main difference lies in the musical instruction: while one edition includes the contrafactum reference Be-niggun ʽAkedah, the other states that it should be sung Be-niggun ’Addir ’ayom venora’, a three-lined stanzas song usually sung on Saturday nights (Baer 1936, 316; Scherman 1979, 270-272). Perhaps the third line was sung twice in order to apply this melody to a four-lined stanza, or perhaps this reference was simply a mistake.

[21] Unfortunately, we have been unable to find any information on this melody, though its name suggests that it may have been a German song, perhaps about the city of Braunschweig.

[22] The first edition (Prague, ca. 1713) survived in a lithographic copy which is found in the University Library Johann Christian Senckenberg, University of Frankfurt am Main (online access PURL: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:2-2225); the second edition was printed in Amsterdam, apparently in 1714 (Steinschneider, 1852–1860, no. 3685; Steinschneider 1905 i: 138, no. 129).

[23] One, a moralizing song, is found in the Bodleian Library in Oxford (Steinschneider 1852–1860, no. 3639); the other, an obscene parody, is in the so-called Wallich Manuscript (Rosenberg 1888, 258; Butzer, Hüttenmeister, and Treue 2005, 1-29; Matut 2011 i: 140-151, ii: 199-214).

[24] A detailed comparison of Yudisher shtam and the ‘Akedah piyyutim is in Roman 2016, 175-194.

[25] Idelsohn (1929, 380–381) mentions Niggun Yudisher shtam yet barely comments on it, only mentioning that it was once a popular melody to which other songs were set. He insinuates that it is in fact identical with Niggun ‘Akedah, but contradicts himself a few pages later (383), distinguishing both names as two separate melodies.

[26] Written by Salomon Geiger (1792–1878) and first printed in Frankfurt, 1862, this book sought to preserve the old Minhag Frankfurt through detailed instructions for the synagogue rites pertaining to every day of the year. The Hebrew title of this work is: ספר דברי קהלת: המודיע מנהגי תפלות ק'ק פראנקפורט על המאין [...].

[27] Namely ’Elohim ʼal domi ledami, ʼEt hakol, kol Yaʽakov nohem and ʼEmunim benei maʼaminim. This liturgy reflects the view that in the Ashkenazi liturgical calendar, the morning of Rosh Hashanah Eve is regarded as the culmination of the preliminary penitentiary days, leading up to the New Year. Therefore, its Seliḥot service is the longest one of the entire year. Additionally, since Rosh Hashanah is associated with the Binding of Isaac, the intricate Seliḥot service which begins on the Eve of Rosh Hashanah at dawn includes a number of ‘Akedah piyyutim.

[28] They are written in monorhymed quatrains, allude to the ‘Akedah story, and mention the word ‘Akedah. See for example the Kinah piyyutim in Haberman 1971, 61, 64, 69, 84, 107, 111, 137, 159, 172, 186, 203, 209, 213.

[29] In the anthology Seliḥot keminhag medinat Köln (Cologne 1694) we came across the singing instruction for a text written in couplets (p. 42, no. 57 ʼEsaʼ kenafai shaḥar): 'עקידה שנים יחד' (This is an ‘Akedah piyyut, two sets of couplets are to be sung as one stanza). The seventeenth-century Old Yiddish poem about the deportation of the Jews of Vienna (p. 9 above) adds a short refrain to the quatrain. For singing purposes, the words of the refrain could have been incorporated into the fourth line, repeated the ending of the fourth musical phrase, or were given an additional musical expression independent of the Niggun ‘Akedah. At this point we cannot be certain how it was performed.

[30] On Hebrew psalmody see Seroussi et al. 2001.

[31] Two other samples appear in Trepp 2004, 87, no. 14, Mefalleti ʼeli ẓuri and no. 15, ʼEmunim benei ma’aminim. This source was written down from memory more than sixty years after the destruction of the Mainz Jewish community and Trepp’s personal exile. Despite its great historical and cultural significance, however, this work seems to us unfortunately unreliable from a musicological point of view, and will not be referenced in this research.

[32] Michel Heymann, Kol Nidrei and the Evening Service of Yom Kippur, recorded August 1988 in Mulhouse, France, by Chana Englard. National Sound Archives, Jerusalem (NSA), Y05916(04), 1:32:08–1:34:07. After submitting this article, the authors were pleasantly surprised to find another relevant recording of the Piyyut “Tummat ẓurim” by Cantor Binyamin Klein. Mr. Klein hails from the Alsatian tradition, and his version of the melody, as well as his performance style, are remarkably similar to those of Michel Heymann. In a field recording of the Seliḥot service on the Eve of Rosh Hashanah 1983 at Binyan Ẓiyyon Synagogue, Jerusalem (recorded by Chana Englard), NSA YC-02190(01-24), Binyamin Klein is recorded chanting this piyyut as well as fragments of two other piyyutim according to the same melody. 

[33] Today, few synagogues practice the old German-Jewish liturgical tradition and its chants exist. One can still hear a remnant of the German tradition at the Pestalozzistraße Synagogue in Berlin, at Ohel Jakob in Munich, in some synagogues in Alsace, at Belsize Square Synagogue in London and K’hal Adath Jeshurun in Washington Heights, New York City. On synagogues that adhere to the German rite see https://www.moreshesashkenaz.org/en/communities.

[34] Minhag Elsass is rooted in the southern German cantorial tradition (Idelsohn 1932, viii; Goldschmidt 1965b, 7.

[35] During the nineteenth century and following the revolution in Ashkenazi synagogue music by cantors such as Maier Kohn, Sulzer and Naumbourg, some of the congregational responses were relegated to the newly founded choirs. This is evidenced by the numerous indications in the cantorial compendia marking the traditional congregational responses as “Chor” or “Chor u. Gemeinde.”

[36] Later publications appear in Adler 1989, i: 316(no. 188) and Idelsohn 1932, 174 (no. 185). Our transcription differs in a few details from the one by Idelsohn.

[37] Goldberg 2019, 170–171 (no. 29).

[38] A similar division appears in Baer 1882, 322 (no. 1420), among the piyyutim for the morning of Yom Kippur. Baer provides there the melody for the first stanza and in a marginal note he writes: Ebenso alle Anfänge der S’lichos, die mit 'עקידה' übershcriebend sind. (In the same manner all the beginnings of the Seliḥot poems, above which the title Akedah is inscribed.)

[39] The second word of this piyyut (giving it its name) differs in prayer books. While most sources have תֻּמַת צוּרִים (Tummat ẓurim), the text underlay of ex. 4, 6, 8, and 9 has תֻּמַת צוּרָם (Tummat ẓuram).

[40] In most prayer books, the words ʼEl melekh appear at the end of the ‘Akedah to signify that the piyyut should be followed by the recitation of the Thirteen Attributes; see Goldschmidt 1970 ii, 34. In Frankfurt and other congregations, additional prayers were recited before ʼEl melekh yoshev ʽal kiseʼ raḥamim and these are indicated by Solomon Geiger.

[41] Ex. 5 does not indicate who sings phrases C and D, but it assigns A to the cantor and B to the congregation; we infer that C was to be sung by the cantor and D by the congregation.

[42] Ex. 8 presents the sections of the Officiant (cantor) in no fixed meter and the part of the Chœur (choir and congregation) in strict 2/4 meter. We have opted to present Michel Heymann’s singing in an additive meter in order to emphasize certain rhythmical features in his singing.

[43] Ex. 4 provides a variant beginning for the second stanza and later stanzas which descends from the high f’ to c’ and continues with the regular melody, a cantorial device to enhance the glory of the cantorial singing.

[44] And with the exception of ex. 4, which does not have the regular transcription of phrase D, only the variant for the final verse that leads to the prayer ʼEl melekh yoshev. 

[45] Willi Apel (1969, 452-453) states, “Today, one point on which there is a general agreement is the difference in feeling between major and minor. It is interesting, however, that [Johann] Mattheson [1681–1764] did not accept what in his day had already become a trivial convention. In Das Neu Eröffnete Orchestre (1713) he rejects the view that minor is sad and major gay [...].”

[46] During medieval times, the Lamentations were sung in different modes, but after the Counter Reformation chanting the Lamentations in the “sixth mode” became mandatory.

[47] See for example Baer 1882, 311 (no. 1346); Ogutsch 1930, 83 (no. 249); Spiro 1999, 245 (no. 217); Idelsohn 1929, 82–83. Idelsohn regards the Ashkenazi melody of ʼAshamnu bagadnu as a manifestation of the pan-Jewish “Vidui Mode,” namely, the musical mode which serves as the common basis for the confessional prayers of various communities, such as the Yemenite, Persian and Babylonian Jews. It should be added, however, that general concept of the “Prayer Modes” as it appears in Idelsohn’s writings is highly debatable.

[48] Like the above-mentioned melodies for Shelishiyyah piyyutim, an interesting example is the Eastern Ashkenazi chant of the piyyut Eder vahod as appears in Ne’eman 1973, 78 (no. 137). We are unaware of any other similar melody for this text in the Eastern Ashkenazi rite.

[49] On the pentatonic scale in early Ashkenazi practice see Avenary 1978.‎ 

[50] Some ʽAkedah piyyutim are older than the First Crusade and have been reinterpreted and deemed appropriate for this liturgical category (Roman 2016, 182).

 

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References

Adler, Israel. 1989. Hebrew Notated Manuscript Sources up to circa 1840. RISM B IX¹. Munich: G. Heine Verlag.

Agnon, S. Y. 1987. Sippurei ha-Besht. Jerusalem: Schocken (Hebrew)

Apel, Willi. 1969. “Key Characteristics.” In Harvard Dictionary of Music, 2^nd ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 452-453.

Assis, Yom Tov (ed.). 2000. Facing the Cross: The Persecution of the Jews in The First Crusade (1096) in History and Historiography. Jerusalem: Magnes (Hebrew)

Avenary, Hanoch. 1960. “The Musical Vocabulary of Ashkenazic Hazanim.” In Studies in Biblical and Jewish Folklore. Ed. Raphael Patai et al. Indiana University Folklore Series, vol. 13. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 185-198.

_____. 1978. The Ashkenazi Tradition of Biblical Chant Between 1500 and 1900: Documentation and Musical Analysis. Tel Aviv: Tel-Aviv University Press.

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