Eduard Birnbaum - a Bibliography

The importance of Eduard Birnbaum's scholarly work is well known to every student of Jewish music. I was privileged to belong to the team that catalogued the Eduard Birnbaum collection at the Hebrew Union College Library in Cincinnati in 1979-80, in a project directed by Prof. Israel Adler. The present work is one of the results of this project. 

The preparation of this bibliography was originally based on two existing sources: The bibliography by Eric Werner appended to his article on the Birnbaum collection of Jewish music (see item no. 66 in our bibliography) and Alfred Sendrey's Bibliography of Jewish music (New York, 1951). A further list of articles found in the course of personal research and not included in these two sources was added. The completion of the bibliography became possible after Birnbaum's own inventory of his published articles was located in his archives. This inventory, titled 'Gesammelte Aufsätze,' was catalogued under the call no. Arch IVb 0.1. We can thus claim that the present bibliography is the most complete list of Birnbaum's published works that can at present be collected. However, it cannot be said that it comprises the entire Birnbaum legacy: much is still in manuscript and thus excluded (except for the list of unpublished lectures in section II) while other material has been lost. According to Magnus Davidsohn, a Birnbaum student, 120 articles by Birnbaum were collected by his pupil Samuel Gutmann who wanted to publish them in the early 1930's. This project, as well as Arno Nadel's project to publish Birnbaum's musical compositions for the synagogue, was interrupted by World War II (see Davidsohn's article, no. 67 of the bibliography, p. 40).