Reviewed by: Jewish Musical Modernism, Old and New Marsha Bryan Edelman Jewish Musical Modernism, Old and New, edited by Philip V. Bohlman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. 218 pp. plus music CD. $35.00. Jewish Musical Modernism, Old and New is the end-result of an endowed series of Jewish Studies lectures presented at the University of Chicago in 1999. Conceived initially as an exploration of the intersection between modern Jewish history and the arts, the offerings took on a somewhat musical cast but never completely surrendered that broader conception. As such, the present volume contains essays that deal with essentially musical concerns, as well as others whose musical content appears peripheral at best. [End Page 193] In his foreword, Sander Gilman notes the Jews' attempts, especially in the nineteenth century, to become truly "modern" by adopting the musical styles of the larger "civilized" European community. Gilman documents the antipathy that greeted composers of "Jewish blood" and points to the similarly negative reception given to more general efforts at Jewish music-making in a Western context. Mitchell Ash asks whether there might actually be "Multiple Modernisms" to be addressed before one can consider the role of music in it. Ash is most interested in the history of science, and his references to music are only tangential. He echoes Gilman's (and others') observation that Jewish prominence in the arts and sciences in the period 1900-1945 is a strategy for acculturation, and admits that most of their work was decidedly secular and unrelated to the accident of their birth. Pamela Potter's essay takes up the earlier question of the "Jewish" identity of the Jews making music in Germany. While she does point to ethnomusicological activity in Russia and Palestine, Potter observes that antisemitism led the German Jews to reject the idea of cataloging their own musical culture. She observes that the Nazis' designation of music by Jewish composers as "degenerate" resolved the question of a "racial" component in Jewish music; the residue of such "scholarship" appears to have left its mark even on contemporary German scholarship regarding Jewish music. In a volume that otherwise focuses entirely on European music, Kay Kaufman Shelemay's essay on the role of music in the transformation of the Beta Israel community is a welcome contribution. She offers a comprehensive history of the musical influences that affected the group's liturgy, documenting the acculturation of the Beta-Israel to the modern world, and the linguistic as well as ritual evolutions in their contacts with Europe, Israel, and America. Most interesting is the observation that this "exotic" community is having an effect on Western cultures as it rewrites its own history in the modern era. Edwin Seroussi's essay on "Sephardic Fins des Siecles" is most clearly related to the notions of both modernism and Jewish music. Seroussi describes the musical response of the Spanish-Portuguese exile community to modernizing pressures from Salomon Sulzer and the Ashkenazic majority of Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century. He acknowledges the community's inevitable acceptance of modernity, but points to its return to Sephardic tradition in the inter-war years as ultimately a rejection of modernism. Seroussi's claim is buttressed by evidence that the historic, Arabic origins of the Sephardic community are making a decided comeback as a new, pan-Sephardic community asserts its cultural identity in twenty-first-century Israel. By contrast, the most curious essay in the volume is by Michael Steinberg, who examines the "Singspiel" of Charlotte Salomon. The artist used the constructs [End Page 194] of musical theater to structure her collection, and incorporated "song lyrics" into some of her paintings, but her "musical" references are to Bach and Wagner rather than to Jewish sources. The many examples of her work that are included as illustrations in the volume (and on its cover) are a welcome addition to what is generally a handsomely produced book, but the essay is about art produced by a young German woman "exiled" to live with her grandparents in France after Kristallnacht, and not really about Jews or music. In his epilogue, Bohlman adopts the Five Books of Moses as the ultimate metaphor with which...
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Sep 23, 2011
Anne Witchard 
Open Access
