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ABSTRACT
This article examines the reactions of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European Jewish musicians to Richard Wagner's classic antisemitic essay, "Judaism in Music." The voluminous debates about Wagner's antisemitism have overshadowed the question of his essay's impact on Jewish musicians and Jewish musical identity. Strikingly, two of the key intellectual architects of the concept of modern Jewish music, Lazare Saminsky and Abraham Tzvi Idelsohn, embraced selective aspects of Wagner's myth even as they called for a new kind of Jewish musical nationalism. Recovering their responses to Wagner helps explain the role of antisemitism in the formation of modern Jewish musical aesthetics and cultural nationalism in the Russian Empire and Ottoman Palestine. The article concludes with a discussion of the lingering questions of Wagner's appeal and controversy among contemporary American and Israeli Jews.
Key words: Richard Wagner, antisemitism, Lazare Saminsky, Abraham Tzvi Idelsohn, Jewish music, Zionism, Jewish culture
What role do the myths of antisemitism play in the creation of modern Jewish culture? In his essay "Judaism in Music" (1850/1869), one of the classics of modern antisemitic literature, nineteenth-century composer Richard Wagner (1813-83) fashioned a new modern myth about the relationship between Jewishness and art.1 Jews have no authentic culture of their own, Wagner asserted, and constitute a transnational category of cultural parasites, merely imitating the various cultures in which they reside. Jews have produced no great modern artists, and this collective aesthetic deficiency is especially noticeable in the realm of European music, where they represent a negative spiritual force of materialist capitalism and cultural impurity. In assessing the legacy of this polemic, historians have repeatedly focused on the vexing questions of the text's influence: Are Wagner's antisemitic ideas symbolically encoded in his own music? Do they constitute a direct causal link to twentieth-century Nazi antisemitism? Have they implicitly shaped the reception of nineteenth- century composers such as Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer in modern music? In spite of the unrelenting passions generated by these questions of history, art, and ideology, there has been a curious lacuna when it comes to one crucial dimension of Wagner's cultural afterlife. This is the persistent, dramatic impact of Wagner's antisemitic myth on the self-conscious development of modern Jewish aesthetics by Jewish artists and intellectuals themselves.2
Beyond the scholarly realm,...