Sources of Jewish Music: Active and Passive Assimilation Revisited

Abstract

Sources of Jewish Music:Active and Passive Assimilation Revisited Jonathan L. Friedmann (bio) General theories are scarce in the current field of Jewish music research. Most attempts at all-encompassing rules or principles have proven untenable due to the complexity of the terms involved—"Jewish" and "music"—as well as the overwhelming historical and regional diversity of Jewish music cultures. Past efforts to draw maps or timelines connecting the various forms, styles, and contexts have invariably led to what Israeli musicologist Edwin Seroussi calls "unfortunate overgeneralizations."1 According to Seroussi, the central flaw of such theories—whether they seek to connect various strands of musical expression to a single, long-ago source (commonly the Second Temple) or search for a "stable," "unilinear," or "authentic" musical expression—is the "ontological notion of 'tradition,'" which "assumes the existence of unambiguous boundaries separating sonic spaces" while ignoring the complex roles of individual contributors, performance contexts, cross-cultural contacts, shifting tastes, historical circumstances, and other shaping forces.2 The elusiveness of a stable or definable tradition speaks to challenges in musicological inquiry more generally, where attempts at empirical or objective claims often clash with the experiential and subjective nature of the subject matter.3 [End Page 389] Part of the problem is that theories of Jewish music tend to be prescriptive, concerned with how things ought to be, rather than objective frameworks derived from meticulous a posteriori observation. Jewish music scholars of the past, virtually all of whom were Jewish themselves, approached the subject with vested cultural, aesthetic, and religious interests.4 As a result, their theories more closely resemble statements of ideals or principles than scientifically acceptable schemes or systems of facts.5 What Hannah Arendt identified as a flaw in political theory also applies here: the very concept of "theory" assumes that the theorist is detached from the object instead of an active participant in a "phenomenon" involving a web of relationships "from which the theorist cannot extricate herself."6 Eric Werner's theory of active and passive assimilation is among the few far-reaching concepts of Jewish music to have largely evaded scrutiny. The theory, which he proposed in 1949 and repeated for decades thereafter, categorizes musical examples based on the presence (active assimilation) or absence (passive assimilation) of a "Judaizing" process as communities absorb foreign musical elements.7 It acknowledges the reality of musical sharing between Jews and their neighbors, as well as the existence of musical mainstreams or minhagim ("customs") that mix indigenous developments and outside influences. For Werner, the theory served as an academic leitmotif, appearing at semiregular intervals and with almost repeated language in a half dozen publications between 1949 and 1981. It was an unusually consistent and durable concept for an author whose voluminous writings can be difficult to parse, alternating as they do between elitism, polemics, speculation, music theory, and historical analysis—sometimes in the same work—and connected as they were to his activist work in Jewish professional and educational settings.8 Werner presented the active and passive categories as objective and incontestable labels applicable to examples from any region, period, or population; musical elements filtered through an existing Jewish mainstream are actively assimilated, while elements that enter unchanged [End Page 390] are passively assimilated. Like other twentieth-century theories in the field, however, active and passive assimilation are basically dressed-up extrapolations of Werner's own standards and principles. Beneath the clean definitions are prejudices, distortions, and value judgements rooted in his biography. Born near Vienna in 1901, Werner graduated from Berlin's Hochschule für Musik in 1924 and earned a doctorate at the University of Strasbourg in 1928. After lecturing at the rabbinical seminary in Breslau from 1935 to 1938, he sought refuge from the Nazis at Hebrew Union College (HUC) in Cincinnati, Ohio, succeeding famed musicologist Abraham Z. Idelsohn, who had recently passed away. In 1948, Werner oversaw the establishment of the School of Sacred Music at the HUC campus in New York, the first cantorial school in the United States and a locus of Jewish musical authority in the post-Holocaust period. A proud Central European and aggressive defender of his own musical tastes, Werner used his position to...