Author Description

During the century and a half from the Jewish Enlightenment (or iHaskala/i) to the Holocaust, European Jews increasingly confronted the challenges to their growing presence in the public sphere. This book examines the complex ways in which music gave voice to Jewish responses to modernity and the divisive distinctions it created between Self and Other in modern European history. The histories narrated in this book throw light on the multiple ways in which music revealed and engendered new forms of Jewish identity, especially in the German- and Yiddish-speaking lands of the Diaspora. Regarded with ambivalence and often suspicion prior to the iHaskala/i, music charted new paths into European society for Jews from the late eighteenth century until the eve of the Holocaust itself. Broadly historical in scope, this book makes extensive use of ethnographic approaches and recent field studies, which lead the reader to the Jewish villages in Central Europe's boundary regions, to the synagogues in which a new breed of cantor flourished, and to the immigrant stages of the metropolis on which Jewish cabaret and popular song thrived. Jewishness in Western art music serves as a touchstone for examining both anti-Semitism and the multiple mirrors of selfness. As a history of Jewish music in Central and East Central Europe, the book does not simply chart an ineluctable path toward destruction in the Holocaust, but rather it recognizes the ways in which we historicize Jewish music in our own present, where it serves no less as witness to Self and Other in postmodern European history.