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I HAVE BEEN ACTIVE IN JEWISH MUSIC STUDIES FOR over twenty years now, a long research cycle that has included three books and many shorter works. That experience leads me to these observations on the nature of studying Jewish music: a personal perspective by an American scholar who began his Jewish music studies in the early 1970s. My short account sketches a series of paradoxes and dilemmas familiar to Jewish music specialists, perhaps not startling in its revelations or confessions, indicating the situation of the field.
I eased into the study of Jewish music gently, following completion of a long cycle of work in Afghanistan and Central Asia. Why not try studying one's own tradition, I said to myself--let's see what they do in Yiddish music. Well, what "they" did on this topic in 1973 was--nothing. I encountered a highly motivated and articulate group of nonmusic researchers of my generation who had turned to the study of the Eastern European Jews, often, like myself, after working on other materials. These colleagues were very welcoming to someone working on music.
Paradox #1: This music could only be "seriously" studied (in the sense of modern ethnomusicology) after its population and cultural environment had been destroyed.
To explain what I mean by saying a certain kind of research had to begin after the fact, I must backtrack to the pre-1939 intellectual climate of European Jewry. A people under pressure, the Jews--particularly their intellectuals, chartered by the Enlightenment ideals of the nineteenth century that granted them that status--could not simply embark on "objective" study of their culCure. Too many major decisions had to be made about their current place in European societies and their future course. An enormous continuum of ideology and polics from bourgeois secularism to socialism to left-wing zionism to religious zionism and orthodoxy meant that any statement about "who we are" and "where we're heading" was heavily weighted. A decision to study the secular Yiddish folksong was a political, often ambivalent, choice, whereas in the 1970s, it could be an ethnomusicological alternative. There were some exceptions in eastern regions: the music component of the Ansky folklore expedition, beginning in 1912, and the work of Moshe Beregovski in Ukraine in the 1930s produced ample data. Typically, however,...