The Music Libel Against the Jews

The Lives of Jewish Things. Curating and Collecting Material Culture, 2024

In an essay emphatically titled "Music, The 'Jew' of Jewish Studies, " musicologist Edwin Seroussi decried the marginality of music within the field of Jewish studies: "Within the modern scholarly discourses on Jewish culture . . . , music emerges as a relatively minor field of inquiry in comparison to other disciplines. " Only in recent decades have scholars from a variety of fields and disciplines "addressed music from very diverse angles, as a vital component of Jewish religious experience, reactions to social shifts, and constructions of memory, place, identity, and gender. " 1 It is safe to say that the subject of material culture occupies an equally liminal place in the context of Jewish studies and that its consideration by scholars in a variety of fields and disciplines is still in its infancy. The liminality of both music and material culture in this arena can be certainly decried. But it can also be seen as an opportunity for the entirety of the field of Jewish studies itself-a field that originates from marginality, both cultural and epistemological-to rethink its tenets, to reframe itself in a broadened and epistemologically more inclusive perspective. In fostering such inclusivity, I am proposing to consider music and material culture not only as separate fields of inquiry within Jewish studies but also in their intersection with one another. A particular case study and locus of interest for such a consideration is the synagogue,

Jewish Social Studies, 2009

"This article examines the reactions of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European Jewish musicians to Richard Wagner’s classic antisemitic essay, “Judaism in Music.” The voluminous debates about Wagner’s antisemitism have overshadowed the question of his essay’s impact on Jewish musicians and Jewish musical identity. Strikingly, two of the key intellectual architects of the concept of modern Jewish music, Lazare Saminsky and Abraham Tzvi Idelsohn, embraced selective aspects of Wagner’s myth even as they called for a new kind of Jewish musical nationalism. Recovering their responses to Wagner helps explain the role of antisemitism in the formation of modern Jewish musical aesthetics and cultural nationalism in the Russian Empire and Ottoman Palestine. The article concludes with a discussion of the lingering questions of Wagner’s appeal and controversy among contemporary American and Israeli Jews."

Comparative Literature, 2006

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Musical Quarterly, 2018

Placing Wagner's attack on Jewish musicians in the context of the developing music industry of the mid-nineteenth century. In Lecture Series of Arizona State University Jewish Studies Dept., in conjunction with Phoenix Symphony's Concert Series, 'Rediscovered Masters'.

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2019

Liturgical Music in the UK , which, during the week of 16-19 June 2015, attracted an international array of leading scholars and musicians from Europe, Australia, USA and Israel to share cutting-edge research on all aspects of synagogue music past and present. The stimulating and diverse program featured an array of keynote lectures, scholarly papers, panel discussions and musical performances, and was followed by the 10th Annual European Cantors Convention weekend. The conference, presented by the European Cantor’s Association and the music department of Leeds University, was one of the inaugural events in the three-year international project ‘Performing the Jewish Archive’ (2015-2018) which has seen several major conferences and festivals across the world. Spearheaded by Dr Stephen Muir, Senior Lecturer at Leeds and Conference Director, the project has given rise to revivals of and research into much music lost during the period of the Holocaust and Jewish migrations in the 20 cen...