Volume IV, 1982

The Nazi rise to power in Germany at the beginning of 1933 brought to an abrupt halt an important development in the field of Jewish music in Munich, especially with regard to the cooperation between Heinrich Schalit and Paul Ben-Haim. A study of musical developments in the Munich Jewish community of the 1920's may provide some indication of the cultural atmosphere that formed Ben-Haim's character and personality before his immigration to Israel.

The unique collection of medieval writings from the Cairo Genizah is an inexhaustible source of information on almost every branch of science and art. Through it, modern research has been able to draw a fairly detailed picture of family life, education, public affairs, commerce, medicine, poetry and learned studies in the Jewish community of old Cairo (Fostat) and other towns of medieval Egypt. Research workers specializing in this field have developed such a feeling of intimacy with the life and manners of that remote community that they have acquired the habit of speaking familiarly of the 'Genizah Folk.'

The most salutary contribution to the study of the psalm-titles is the historical survey of that study itself, comprised within Dieter Wohlenberg's Hamburg dissertation of 1967 Kultmusik in Israel - eine forschungsge-schichtliche Untersuchung. Its scope is from about the beginning of the 18th century to ca. 1965. His concluding assessment on our subject (p. 56-61) hinges on a brief sentence: 'Das Problem der Psalmeniiberschriften ist vorerst ungelost.' The cause is the same which Wohlenberg proposes for the rather disappointing level of achievement in most of the other areas as well. It is the interdisciplinary gap, especially the one between Biblical studies and musicology - 'eine Situation, die...sich als geradezu tragischer Grundzug durch die Epochen verfolgen lasst.' His judgment is well founded since he himself was bi-disciplinary, having taken Biblical studies under H. J. Kraus and musicology under H. Hickmann.

To palliate the lack of specialized compositions by Jewish authors during the mediaeval period on the subject of music, a fair deal of information concerning attitudes towards this art can be gleaned from works of a more general nature. In addition to encyclopedias of the sciences and biblical commentaries, especially of the Psalms, moral treatises can prove to be a rich source for this kind of speculation, particularly in connection with the 'ethical' and therapeutic properties ascribed to music. The highly interesting ethical treatise al-Mursid ila al-tafarrud ('The guide to detachment'), preserved in the Bodleian ms. Hunt. 382, contains such a passage on music which deserves to be brought to the attention of students of the subject.

The association between prophecy and music in prophetic kabbalah presents two aspects. On the one hand, music served as an analogy for the technique giving rise to prophecy and the prophetic experience; and on the other, it was an important element of the technique itself of Abulafia and his students. We shall first consider music as an analogy.

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).

This study concentrates on the Pentateuch, recited by the Yemenites in three different social and religious contexts: (a) the various synagogal services, of which the biblical recitation is a central liturgical part; (b) the traditional study-sessions of biblical sections; and (c) the heder, where the recitation of biblical texts is the basic educational instrument. The Yemenites declare that although they have a repertory of six different tunes according to which these public recitations are performed, the tunes are unified in that their structure depends on the te’amim, the cantillation symbols. The aim of this paper is to present the repertory of the musical renditions of the Pentateuch and to investigate the relationships between the te’amim and their musical realization within these three social contexts.

The poet and philosopher Moses ibn Ezra was born in 1055 in Granada and died after 1135. He refers to music in many of his poems, mainly those describing wine-drinking sessions; he also deals with the theory of music in two of his books: the book on poetic art, Kitab almuhadarah wa' lmudakarah ('Book of conversations and recollections'); and the Maqdlat alhadiqah fi macni almagaz wa' lhaqlqah ('The book of the garden, on metaphor and reality'). Ibn Ezra also indirectly contributed to the development of practical music through his religious poems and penitential prayer compositions set to music, many of which are included in the Sephardi liturgy for the New Year and the Day of Atonement.

The present paper describes the findings of a six-week research trip to Israel in May-June 1971. Having specialized in the music of Afghanistan and Soviet Central Asia, I was attracted by the possibility of finding survivals of Bukharan traditions in Israel, particularly in the area of secular music. This interest was stimulated by the observations of Israeli scholars, who have remarked that 'basic research ... should begin immediately, before the loss of those few who still remember Bukhara in all its splendour' (Lancet-Muller 1967: n.p.). Although the scope of the inquiry was limited by a serious dearth of musicians among the Israeli Bukharans, the data collected nevertheless afford a glimpse into the past and present state of Bukharan music among Central Asian Jews.

This essay intends to examine two individual cases of the German-Jewish symbiosis, two borderline cases of attempted assimilation, whose protagonists have given us universally acclaimed works of art. They are extreme - or borderline - cases, because both men attempted integration, through assimilation, with German culture, not the German nation, for Mendelssohn was Prussian and Saxon, Mahler was Austrian - and both came close to the realization of it. In the case of Mendelssohn, the attempt succeeded as far as the Germans would ever permit it to succeed; in Mahler's case it failed, despite goodwill on both sides. In Mendelssohn's case we find typical as well as atypical elements. He belonged to a fairly homogeneous social elite of North-German bankers and their descendants; yet his own descent from Moses Mendelssohn - who had certainly never been considered an apostate was rather a retarding circumstance. Mahler's background was that of a petite bourgeoisie, ethnically and religiously quite separate from a society that itself was many faceted in its religious beliefs and its everyday language, in a country that, like all of old Austria, was anything but homogeneous and that showed no particular desire for harmonious mutual understanding.

Three fragments of musical theory and of speculations on music, collected by an anonymous Jewish scribe (probably Northern Italy, 15th century), are preserved on fol. 5a of the ms. London, British Library, Or. 10878. They are published here as a supplement (118/Anonymous London [mus. pass. AC]) to Hebrew writings concerning music edited by the author in RISM, series B, vol. IX2. 

A. Hebrew version of a fragment from the Judeo-Arabic commentary by Dunash ibn Tamim (10th century) on the Sefer yezirah ('Book of Creation', written between the 3rd and 6th centuries), a mystical speculation on the 'Act of Creation', Music is linked with the second of the ten sefirot ('numbers'): ruah (the primal element of 'air'). Relating ruah to the acoustical foundations of the production of sounds by musical instruments, the author calls the art of music the foremost among the (four) mathematical sciences. This is probably the earliest mention of music in mediaeval Judeo-Arabic literature dealing with the classification of sciences.

B. Gloss (by Moses ibn Ezra [b. ca 1055, d. after 1135]?), which seems to be a commentary on the preceding fragment of the commentary by Dunash ibn Tamim on the Sefer yezirah. A paraphrase of the sentence asserting the preeminence of music is followed by three 'maxims of the philosophers on music' similar to those found elsewhere in mediaeval Judeo-Arabic literature (cf. RISM, B IX2, text no. 280). This version offers readings useful in elucidating some textual difficulties in the musical passage of Ibn Ezra's maqalat al-hadiqah. (cf. ibid., text no. 310). 

C. Initial fragment of a treatise on musica plana. The text has been identified as an abbreviated version (by a Jewish musician from Catalonia?) of the beginning of the treatise adapted and translated from the Latin by Judah b. Isaac, preserved in Pn, ms. hébr. 1037 (cf. RISM, B IX2, text no. 140). As in the Paris ms., the text is illustrated by the Guidonian hand and the mutation-table. The London ms. has also a table indicating the location of the notes in linea and in spatio, similar to but more developed than - the table given in the Vienna ms. CPV 787 (cf. Smits van Waesberghe, Musikerziehung (Musikgeschichte in Bildern, III,3 [Leipzig, 1969], p. 139-141).

Since the end of the 15th century we find a long series of Jewish texts containing a new evaluation of music as a means of power. This attitude emerges among Italian Jewish authors and seems to be influenced by parallel views in the Florentine Academy. Writers like Johanan Allemanno and Isaac Abrabanel describe music in magical terms: by singing and playing one can influence the extra-divine world. From the beginning of the 16th century onwards, Jewish Kabbalists frequently wrote about the possibility of reestablishing the lost harmony in the Divine World of the sefirot by theurgical singing. The most important of these authors are Meir ibn Gabbay, Solomon Alqabez and Moses Cordovero. In some texts written in Safed, the magical and theurgical views appear together. These opinions influenced later Jewish authors from the late 16th to the late 18th century, such as Salomon Maimon and R. Israel Baal Sem Tov, the founder of Hassidism.