The Ballad in Eastern European Jewish Folklore: Origins, Poetics, Music

Abstract

Analysis of the poetics and music of Yiddish folk ballads reveals that the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe did not preserve German songs,widely popular among them up to the beginning of their gradual migration to the east, but instead developed a ballad repertoire of their own.The group of songs, designated as “medieval” by Sophia Magid, the author of a monumental study on the Yiddish ballad, includes both old ballads and those borrowed from the Germans towards the end of the 18th century and later. While the borrowed songs carried a similarity to the German originals as shown in their melodic contours, vocabulary, and plots, the old Yiddish ballads, though generally echoing both Slavic and Western European balladry, differed significantly. The article attempts to identify and characterize this older layer. It apparently first came into being in Central and Eastern Europe in the 15th 16th centuries and continued to develop until the new“urban” ballad emerged in the mid 1800s.The poetics and music of the Yiddish ballad reflect the genre’s hallmark – ballad-singing as a form of communication – which distinguished it from the Yiddish lyric song, performed “for oneself”. The ballad melodies lack melismatic embellishments and dramatic shifts; their tempo is usually moderate; some of them frequently feature the “Ionic minor” rhythmic pattern; many others resemble Klezmer dance music. These features reflect Yiddish ballad aesthetics: music is an ostensibly neutral frame for revealing a narrative that evokes emotions without referring to them directly.Two features of the international ballad canon – readiness to draw material from diverse sources, and a focus on the collective emotional response to key moments of everyday life–stimulated the formation of the indigenous Yiddish tradition. Its character also reflected the remoteness of Eastern Ashkenazi folk culture from rural Slavic folklore, and the lack of a permanent social function of balladsinging in the Ashkenazi tradition.