The Confines of Judaism and the Illusiveness of Universality in Ernest Bloch's Avodath Hakodesh (Sacred Service)

The Confines of Judaism and the Illusiveness of Universality in Ernest Bloch's Avodath Hakodesh (Sacred Service)

Edmond Dantes, the narrator of Italo Calvino's short story "The Count of Monte Cristo," shares the fate of the story's original protagonist in Dumas's novel of the same title. Calvino's story of the Fortress of If that imprisons Dantes/ Monte Cristo becomes a parable for human existence. As Calvino puts it, the "fortress ... grows around us, and the longer we remain shut up in it the more it removes us from the outside." Paradoxically, by working out the possibilities for escape, Dantes is compelled to construe the perfect fortress from which there would be no departure. The story ends with a mapping out of Dantes's theory:

If I succeed in mentally constructing a fortress from which it is impossible to escape, this conceived fortress either will be the same as the real one-and in this case it is certain we shall never escape from here ...- or it will be a fortress from which escape is even more impossible than from here-and this, then, is a sign that here an opportunity of escape exists: we have only to identify the point where the imagined fortress does not coincide with the real one and then find it.

Calvino remains silent about the outcome of Dantes's experiment. We may understand his silence as a warning of the difficulty Dantes faces before making the final, liberating step; for the finding of the point of difference between the real and the theoretically constructed prison may not be easy. Instead of destroying it, Dantes's theory seems to bring the Fortress of If to perfection. Thus the end of the story brings Calvino's main theme, the interchangeability of real and imaginary states, into focus and suggests that the imaginary states have the same power over human existence as reality itself-if not a greater one. Calvino's parable is frightening. It proposes that intellectual constructions have the potential to imprison and that perfection can become a constraining force.

Calvino's version of "The Count of Monte Cristo" calls to mind the two paradigmatic phases of nationalism in many European countries, the first bringing with it liberating intellectual movements, and the second enforcing xenophobic political constraints. In these processes the confusion between the real and imagined also reminds us of the fusion that imprisoned Calvino's narrator in his imaginary fortress.

Although the oldest European nationalism, that of the English, was modeled on the example of the Hebrews as represented in the Old Testament, Jewish nationalism was more influenced by a contemporaneous European political model than by the ancient biblical one. Thus, from its very conception at the end of the nineteenth century, Zionism or Jewish secular nationalism fluctuated between basing its claims on a real community and on an imaginary one. What might seem to be the most concrete basis for a Jewish community, the ancient, shared religion, could not be used as a focal point for political leaders in the first phase of the new Zionist movement because orthodox rabbis considered it blasphemous to speak of the transformation of sacred belief into a secular national ideology. "For our many sins," writes the Dzikover Rebbe,

strangers have risen to pasture the holy flock, men who say that the people of Israel should be clothed in secular nationalism, a nation like all other nations, that Judaism rests on three things, national feeling, the land and the language, and that national feeling is the most praiseworthy element in the brew and the most effective in preserving Judaism, while the observance of the Torah and the commandments is a private matter depending on the inclination of each individual. May the Lord rebuke these evil men and may He who chooseth Jerusalem seal their mouths.

In the absence of religion, the notion of a community in Zionist ideology was based on a supposedly shared cultural tradition, of which the definition was vague and the boundaries elastic. In a nineteen thirty-three lecture on Jewish nationalism Lion Feuchtwanger compared the undefinable character of Judaism to Israel's nameless and shapeless God. Still, although he admitted that "Judaism is not a common race, not a common territory, not a common way of life or a common language," he succeeded in finding the basis that unifies world Jewry in "a common spirit, a common spiritual attitude."

Similarly, by the nineteen forties the early disagreements in the history of Jewish secular art music about what was genuinely or authentically Jewish were partially resolved by a more general, and generously vague, definition. In the preface to Gdal Saleski's nineteen forty-nine monograph Famous Musicians of Jewish Origin, the author "wishes to make clear ... that the words 'Jew' and 'Jewish' are not used in their religious or national sense. The method of approach"-Saleski assures the reader-"is purely an ethnic one." If after this introductory statement the reader expects a rigorously scientific method, the next sentence dispels this illusion. Saleski's reason for isolating these musicians into one volume repeats the old legend of shared spirituality: "all of [these musicians] have in their souls that fire to which the Jewish prophets gave utterance in the time of old Jerusalem's glory."

By the time of Saleski's monograph, definitions of Jewish music tended to use similarly general terms. In a handbook prepared by the National Jewish Music Council to foster the commissioning of Jewish musical works, Isadore Freed defined Jewish music in this way:

The serious Jewish composer is concerned with ... clarity of thought, which is a Jewish essential; with the emotional depth of the Jewish spirit; with abstinence from flowery overstatement; with the expression of that indomitable sense of faith and hope which has kept the Jewish people alive during many dark centuries; with the prophetic demands for Justice and Freedom.

This all-inclusive yet cryptic definition of Jewish music is intimately connected to Freed's teacher Ernest Bloch, the most renowned so-called "Jewish" composer of the first half of the twentieth century. This paper will explore Bloch's role in the creation of this stereotypical notion of Jewish music and also the historical development of this Blochian stereotype: how it replaced the former, folk- or synagogue-song-based definition; how its use gained dangerous power in the hands of Nazi ideologists; and how this means of self-expression and self-identification became a Monte-Cristo-like prison that for some turned into a gruesome physical reality and for others, like Bloch, a label that doomed artistic imagination to a labyrinth of infinite repetition.

Jewish Musical Nationalism at Its Birth

What came to be referred to as the "renaissance of Jewish music" was initiated in tsarist Russia, a country where even at the end of the nineteenth century the condition of most Jews was practically medieval compared to their condition in other European states. In his monograph The Modern Renaissance of Jewish Music Albert Weisser lists three decisive forces that stimulated assimilated Jewish intellectuals to embrace the idea of a Jewish national art music: the still vital Hashkalah (Enlightenment) movement, the initial excitement surrounding Zionism, and most importantly for musicians, the model of the "moguchaya kuchka," the Mighty Handful.

In eighteen ninety-seven Vladimir Stasov, guardian of the myth of the Mighty Handful, awakened the national pride of Joel Engel, an assimilated Jew, who was then working as assistant editor in charge of music on the Moscow journal Russkiye Vedemosti. In a nineteen forty-seven lecture for the "Jewish Music Forum" Jacob Weinberg reported that Stasov's "words struck Engel's imagination like lightning and the Jew awoke in him." Another chronicler of the history of Jewish music, Israel Rabinovitch, quotes Weinberg's story at greater length. Rabinovitch describes a scene in which Engel witnessed how Stasov questioned the assimilated Jewish sculptor Mark Antokolski:

"How is it," he asked, "that Antokolski is blind to the great field for art, the extraordinary possibilities for sculpture, within the life of his own Jewish people? Tell me"-he exclaimed turning to Antokolski-"what manner of a Russian are you? What, for instance, is your name?"

"My name," murmured Antokolski in confusion, "is Mark."

"Mark! What kind of an appellation is that? It's not even a Slavic name, it's Latin! You're Mordecai! What a noble and resounding name! Mordecai! Power! Inspiration! But Mark! Really what kind of a Mark are you?"

Stasov's nationalistic passion points to a fourth factor behind the birth of Jewish art music: anti-Semitism, which would always define even assimilated Jewish artists as "others" in need of creating their "own" culture. Even Rimsky-Korsakov's support for Jewish music might have echoed the potentially anti-Semitic divide between "we Russians" and "you Jews" had Rimsky-Korsakov not encouraged equally the Ukrainians, Latvians, Estonians, and Armenians to arrange their own folk music. As a folk-music enthusiast, pieces written on Jewish themes genuinely appealed to him, and after hearing such a piece by his student Ephraim Sklar, Rimsky-Korsakov urged his Jewish students to emulate Sklar's example:

Why should you Jewish students imitate European and Russian composers? The Jews possess tremendous folk-treasures; I have often heard Jewish melodies. Your religious melodies have made the most powerful impression upon me. Jewish music awaits its Glinka.

Indeed, the first composers who became eminent in propagating Jewish art music grew up under Rimsky-Korsakov's protection.

Engel, the originator of the Jewish music movement, did not belong to Rimsky-Korsakov's circle. His efforts were not focused on Jewish art music; he participated in the edition of the folk music collection Jewish Folksongs in Russia by historians Pesach Marek and Saul Ginsburg, gave public lectures, and organized concerts of Jewish folk music in Moscow and then in St. Petersburg. The success of these lectures and concerts, attended not only by Jews but also by scholarly Russians, encouraged Jewish intellectuals and composers to welcome the notion of Jewish music.

The emphasis, however, shifted from folk music to art music after the Society for Jewish Music, which, due to censorship, was legally registered under the name of Obshchestvo Yevreyskoy Narodnoy Muziki, was founded by St. Petersburg Conservatory composers Ephraim Sklar, Solomon Rosovsky, Pesach Lvov, and Alexander Zhitomirsky. Later other composers such as Michael Gnesin, Lazare Saminsky, Lev Mordukhov Tseitlin, and Joseph Achron joined the Society.

The constitution of the Society sounds familiar to anyone with a knowledge of national musical institutions. The first phase was the period of collecting, studying, and then harmonizing folk music, then came the free use of folk material by the composer, and last but not least, "the period of modernization and development of individual personal styles of composition."

One: The aim of the Society for Jewish Folk Music is to work in the field of research and development of Jewish Folk Music (sacred and secular) by collecting folk songs, harmonizing them and promoting and supporting Jewish composers and workers in the field of Jewish music;

Two: In order to achieve these aims the Society is to:

a) help print musical compositions and papers on research in Jewish music;

b) organize musical meetings, concerts, operatic performances, lectures, etc .;

c) organize a Choir and Orchestra of its own;

d) establish a Library of Jewish Music;

e) issue a periodical dedicated to Jewish music;

f) establish contests and give prizes for musical compositions of Jewish character.

Three: The Society has the right to form chapters in different cities of the country in accordance with local laws.

While the collecting was an enthusiastic quest for supposed national treasures, the creation of the "modern Jewish style" in music led to serious debates. The difference of opinion between the Moscow-based Engel and the most vocal member of the St. Petersburg Society, Lazare Saminsky, who served on the editorial board and refused to publish compositions by Engel and his Moscow colleagues, initiated the foundation of a Moscow branch with Engel, Jacob Weinberg, and Alexander Krein as its most prominent members. Even the proud national cause could not erase the sometimes hostile rivalry between the "intellectual" and "pedantic" St. Petersburg Conservatory and its "over-emotional" and "hysteric" Moscow counterpart.

Saminsky launched his attack against the Society's (read Engel's) erroneous emphasis on Jewish secular music in the Russian-Jewish weekly Rassvet:

The first work of the Society does not even touch the rich treasure of religious melody, that melody which stems from age-old sources, and whose creative potentialities and great value for the science of music cannot be overestimated.

In Music of the Ghetto and the Bible, published in nineteen thirty-four after his emigration from Russia to the United States, Saminsky reprinted his side of the debate that had taken place in the press and at public gatherings in Russia from nineteen fifteen through nineteen twenty-three. The core of Saminsky's argument was that

Hebrew art should cultivate the old sacred chant ... [and] should abandon the doubtful guiding rod of the banal and trite type of our domestic and chassidic music, a medium doubtful as to both its aesthetic worth and its racial purity.

Saminsky argued that the "racially muddy, wandering pan-Oriental" features of Jewish folk song were due to a strong influence of the non-Jewish neighbors, hence folk song cannot reflect the Jewish "racial mind." He proposed that

The banal, the racially neutral, the muddy and rickety, the flagrantly borrowed element of our music, should be weeded out mercilessly from the cycle of means in use by our young creators. Otherwise this element is a source of feebleness and instability in our budding national-musical organism. And our young composition is doomed to a work nationally insignificant.

Saminsky's fervent intolerance created still more arbitrary dualisms by the time Music of the Ghetto and the Bible was published in New York. In his original argument Saminsky opposed the music of the Diaspora to that of the imaginary, pure pre-Diaspora period. Writing from a different perspective in nineteen thirty-four, Saminsky seems to have shifted his focus to the opposition between East and West. He argues that the Jewish composer in the East (read: eastern Europe) lived in undisturbed communion with his race. In the West, in a spiritually heterogeneous and fundamentally alien cultural milieu, "the Hebrew composer's task is weighted down with emotional and racial poignancy." No wonder that in that atmosphere the "creative Jewish musician who has scaled the heights of modern craft, shrinks from the aesthetic suffocation menacing him in his own racial task." "The West," Saminsky continued, "has discolored and distorted the very essence of Jewish habit and behavior, in religion as well as in art."

Regarding the position of Jewish musicians in the West, Saminsky seems to have absorbed Richard Wagner's poisonous ideology, first proposed in his "classic" Das Judentum in der Musik in eighteen fifty. Saminsky's judgement of Western Jewish musicians curiously echoes Wagner's accusation by stating that

The Western Jewish composer has unconsciously developed two implements of self-accommodation to the alien art of his non-Jewish neighbors. One, ... the mimicry of a national pose; the other, a more modest, a less discernible one, but just as insidious: the honorable attitude of leadership in the musical vanguard.

What Wagner, champion of new music of his time, would never have said, Saminsky stated plainly: "modernism is a strange kind of substitution for Jewishness in music, a sort of escape from an anticipated and feared course." The target of Saminsky's attack on modern music was Schoenberg, in whose "harsh, temporal and domineering voice" there is no trace "of that proud and poised old melos."

Still, recalling the oldest anti-Semitic distinction, Saminsky granted that Schoenberg's compositions belonged to the manifestation of the Hebrew spirit, although not to the "Hebraic" but to the despised "Judaic" angle. This is a strange way to categorize Schoenberg considering that the new binary opposition is based on Saminsky's old distinction between the two kinds of Jewish art music, one based on "pure" religious melos, the other on "contaminated" folk song. "The Hebraic idiom," Saminsky stated,

the building substance of the age-old religious melos and biblical chant, the "frozen block" of Jewish music, emanates from the spiritually immovable, the rigid stem of the racial mind .... The Hebraic tonal idiom carried in a subtle, yet stubborn way the might of a racial obsession.

The other ingredient of Jewish music, the one that Saminsky named "Judaic," "has emanated from an alien corner, acquired by the Jewish racial psyche; it flows from the mental agility, the calamitous gift of alert self-adaptation to a new cultural quarter." Saminsky's further distinction calls to mind the old opposition between "Western" and "Oriental," but now the two have become the two sides of Jewish heritage: the one carrying the potential for "greatness," the other-the one stereotypically attached to Jewish music in anti-Semitic criticism-the threat of disintegration.

The old, the Hebraic tonal element is linear, seminal, full of structural potency; it hides a thematic and form-building might. It is full of calm and old magnificence.

The new, the Judaic element is mainly [a] color-bearer; it is a generator of harmonic and rhythmic substances. It is fluid, expressive, episodic; it is feverishly stringent and neurotic.

In praising the use of the old Hebrew idiom in art music Saminsky went as far as proposing a "noble and useful 'hebraization' of the tonal West."

Thus the end of Hebrew art may acquire a universal range: the task of helping to restore and reunite the common tonal creed of humanity. A synthesis, where the very problem, the accursed problem of "Jewishness in music," would vanish.

This utopian vision of a synthesis of European and Jewish traits suggests that by nineteen thirty-four, the year of the publication of his Music of the Ghetto and the Bible, Saminsky's conception of Jewish music was caught between the desire to create a specifically Jewish idiom and the desire to lend Jewish music the prestige of European art music.

Already in nineteen fifteen Saminsky announced that Jewish music had entered its "organic period." The distinction between "organic" and "inorganic" periods brings Saminsky close to another advocate of Jewish music, the Austrian Heinrich Berl, who in nineteen twenty-six published his own Das Judentum in der Musik. Berl's ideas, like Saminsky's, correspond with Wagner's in restating that Jews form a foreign body in Western culture. His thesis is based on three assumptions: (one) the music of the East opposes the music of the West;

(two) Jewish music belongs to the Orient; and (three) the "Jewish pseudo-morphosis" (the incongruity between content and form) is the "main cause of the Asian crisis in European music since the Romantic era." In opposing Eastern (Jewish) and Western (European) music Berl revels in binary oppositions: "melody" versus "harmony," "visual" versus "spiritual," "extensive" versus "intensive," "space-oriented" versus "time-oriented," "culture" versus "civilization." (In this last opposition, "culture" in Berl's philo-Semitic account applied to the Jews while "civilization" applied to the Germans.) The list goes on, but while Saminsky was still waiting for the Messiah of Jewish music, Berl had already found his hero in Arnold Schoenberg.

Berl was the first who, in the words of Alexander Ringer, recognized that "behind the new sounds and technical innovations [of Schoenberg's music], there lay a specifically Jewish intonation." The three Viennese composers, Gustav Mahler, Adolf Schreiber (who was the teacher of Max Brod), and Arnold Schoenberg, were for Berl the first whose music contained the "voice" representing a primarily Jewish principle, and whose careers epitomized the fate of the Jewish composer in Western society. But while Berl considered Mahler to have wrestled unsuccesfully with a Western form alien to him, and saw Schreiber's suicide as a result of his racially determined incompatibility with European music, he viewed Schoenberg as one who overcame the handicap of his race by conquering the alien Western forms and opening new horizons.

In spite of Schoenberg's paradigmatic status in Berl's conception, for Berl the solution to the "Jewish problem" in music was a Zionist one. His conviction that the Zionist movement should help Jews transform their "mechanical, inorganic existence" in exile to "organic reality" suggests a separatist solution that would mean that the Jews, while encouraged to find their own voice, would also be denied participation in the culture that surrounds them.

A trait common to many propagators of Jewish music is that they were blind to the correspondences between their principles and those of anti-Semitic ideologues. Even Max Brod, who showed more circumspection in politics than most of his Zionist contemporaries, and who was the chief inspiration for Berl, ignored the danger of labeling when it came to musical matters. Characteristic of Brod's political prudence is that in his "Rasse und Judentum" (Race and Judaism) he distinguished between German and Jewish nationalisms by coining the term "Nazionalhumanismus" (national humanism) to describe an ethically-founded nationalism. Brod's "Nazionalhumanismus" strongly opposes the brand of German nationalism, which, with the incorporation of the new German racial theory, became instrumental in the formation of German Fascism.

But while his analysis of German ideology exhibits political sensitivity, Brod's research on Jewish music, especially the discovery of Mahler's Jewishness, casts an odd shadow on his music criticism. "It may be," he wrote in nineteen sixteen in Martin Buber's periodical Der Jude, "that Mahler's music, though apparently German, is instinctively recognized as being non-German-which is indeed the case." At the time of its publication, Brod's discovery provoked angry protests from assimilated German-Jewish music critics. Paul Stefan accused Brod of being "completely imbued with Zionism." Stefan's aversion, although it may have been a typical reaction for the assimilated, intellectual Jew, also signaled the danger of Brod's achievement.

Brod's desperate efforts to save Mahler-by labeling as typically "Jewish" those characteristics of his music that were criticized by his contemporaries-show how negative criticism played into Brod's and many others' way of thinking. But Brod's tour de force also meant that his research proved useful to anti-Semitic critics. Little wonder then that such a fervent advocate of Mahler's music would receive almost grotesquely favorable treatment in the Nazis' infamous guide to verboten musical territory, the nineteen forty edition of Lexikon der Juden in der Musik (Dictionary of Jews in Music). "Brod," the authors wrote, "unlike his comrades of the same race, tries to explain the compositions of Jewish composers on the basis of their Jewish mentality." To prove the point the Lexikon quotes two long paragraphs from Brod's article on Mahler, the stereotypical Jewish composer,

who, however hard he tried, could not free himself of his racial determination.

Brod did not deny that Mahler and Mendelssohn had been "keenly anxious to forget" their origin. But, his argument continues, the "demon is nevertheless present and makes itself felt-in spite of all the polish-in a rather unruly manner." The image speaks for itself. The "demon," or as Brod put it in another sentence, the "Jewish essence," irrepressibly reveals itself, especially in the music of a great composer such as Mahler, who, as Brod stated, draws deeply on subconscious sources. Similarly, in Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto the "Jewish tone-albeit unconsciously used-can most clearly be heard, pervading the essence of the work rather than its details."

The notion that the music of Jewish composers unconsciously expresses a kind of "Jewish essence" served as the perfect fishing net for Brod; it was so general that it could snare absolutely every composer of Jewish origin. In fact it probably caught composers of all types, but the gentiles were thrown back without a word. Even when Brod tried to be more specific by collecting "Jewish traits" in Mahler's music, he could not free himself of all-embracing generalities. March rhythms, melodic lines fluctuating between major and minor, and slow beginnings of melodies may indeed be characteristic of Chassidic folk songs, but the same features appear in the music of composers who have neither racial nor cultural relations with Jewish tradition.

By emphasizing the unconscious, Brod created not only the perfect tool for gathering composers of Jewish origin under the same flag, but also the perfect prison from which there was no escape. The label "Jewish composer," although initially associated with a liberating movement among scholars in the field of Jewish music, not only could be, but in fact was easily turned into a curse.