Ruth HaCohen. The Music Libel against the Jews.

Abstract

One of the more welcome trends in cultural history over the past several years has been the sonic turn. After decades of treating music and orality with caution, historians have of late plunged into sound studies. This change has also had the salutary effect of emboldening musicologists to venture into the histories of emotions, listening, and the senses. Both trends are on display in Ruth HaCohen's remarkable book. In a tour de force that mixes historical, musicological, philosophical, literary, and psychoanalytic analyses, along with an elegant autobiographical frame, she has delivered a masterful contribution to the study of sound in the formation of modern Western culture. For all of her theoretical sophistication, HaCohen builds her book around a striking empirical finding: the anti-Jewish “music libel.” She identifies a discrete European Christian tradition of imagining the sound of Jews—whether praying as a group in the synagogue or individually composing for the concert hall—as bearing an essential sonic alterity. Other scholars have explored elements of this strain of modern antisemitic thought. But they most often identify it with the rise of modern racial antisemitism, epitomized by Richard Wagner's mid-nineteenth-century polemic Das Judentum in der Musik (1869). By contrast, HaCohen takes a panoramic and long view of this anti-Jewish discourse. She traces its roots to a conscious theological medieval partition of the aural universe into Christian harmony and Jewish noise. From there, she follows the genealogies that flow through the Protestant Reformation to the eighteenth-century oratorios of George Frideric Handel and J. S. Bach and the nineteenth-century entanglements of Felix Mendelssohn, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Heinrich Heine, and Jacques Fromental Halévy with pre-modern, Enlightenment, and romantic legacies of the noise accusation. She concludes with a series of brilliant rereadings of George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, Richard Wagner's Parsifal, Arnold Schoenberg's various oeuvres, and the Nazi propaganda film, Jud Süß.