Songs That Young Gershom Scholem May Have Heard
Jacob Beimel's Jüdische Melodieen, Jung Juda, and Jewish Musical Predicaments in Early Twentieth-Century Berlin
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5348783 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Edwin Seroussi (0000-0001-5006-1520), Meir Stern, M S Stern |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 110 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 64-101 |
| Publication date | 2020-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Jewish Quarterly Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-6682 • E-ISSN: 1553-0604 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/jqr.2020.0002 |
| OpenAlex | W3003913221 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 8 |
Published in Berlin in 1911 and edited by the Eastern European cantor-composer-musicologist Jacob Beimel (1875–1944), JüdischeMelodieen [sic] is a songster containing music for forty-five songs in German, Yiddish, Hebrew, and Hungarian by a diverse array of composers and poets. It was intended as a musical companion to the Vereinsliederbuchfür Jung-Juda (first published in 1901 without music), the songster of the Zionist-leaning youth movement Jung Juda with which Gershom Scholem sympathized for a period in his early youth. Taking JüdischeMelodieen both as a product of modern Jewish agency and as a reflection of how Jewish identities were performed in late Wilhelmine Germany, this essay explores a complex web of existential questioning regarding the past, present, and future of the Jews through a deep analysis of the songs and the human network they entailed. JüdischeMelodieen contains the earliest musical evidence of the momentous encounter between German and Eastern European Jewish songs with the repertoire stemming from the incipient Jewish settlement in Palestine. As such, it evinces a rooted Jewish identification with German values, aesthetics, and education, destabilized by growing antisemitism and forced alienation leading to the adoption of alternative models of Jewish modernity. The Eastern European option of a more authentic Jewishness and, more forcefully, Jewish nationalism and Hebraism emerges from the musical selections in JüdischeMelodieen as alternatives to the German Jewish social construct that was still prevalent in Berlin in the first decade of the twentieth century
Aesthetics · Agency (philosophy) · Archaeology · Art · Art history · German · Haskalah · Hebrew · Jewish music · Jewish studies · Judaism · Literature · Modernity · Musical · Period (music) · American Literature and Culture · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Jewish Identity and Society · Philosophy
Brothers and strangers
German Jews
The German-Jewish Experience Revisited
German Jews beyond Judaism
Music as Propaganda in the German Reformation
Berlin Metropolis, Jews and the New Culture, 1890-1918
Do Zionists Read Music from Right to Left? Abraham Tsvi Idelsohn and the Invention of Israeli Music
Leo Baeck Institute, Year BookWeltschRobert Leo Baeck Institute, Year Book xiLondonEast and West Library, 1966, xxii + 407, 12 plates
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |