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English version of Hebrew article published in Roni Weinstein ed. Italiyah [Italy], Ben Zvi Institute, Jerusalem 2012: 143-150.
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2018, Annali d'Italianistica
As emancipated Jews joined Italy's mainstream cultural, economic and political life, their centuries-old traditions became confined to the realm of the synagogue. There, Italian Jews could explore their modern identity without fully breaking away from the past. Liturgical music of this epoch, handed down in oral tradition and manuscript sources, presents a fascinating link between the age of the ghettos and modern times. Musica sacra, a new kind of"sacred music" composed for the synagogue, sonically represented the aspirations of the era. Inside the new "monumental" synagogues, composers wrote music inspired by opera, church liturgy, and Risorgimento marches, sung by choirs with organ accompaniment. This essay focuses on a now forgotten liturgical repertoire especially created to mark the 1848 Emancipation with annual synagogue celebrations that included a dedicated ritual, new poetry (in Hebrew and in Italian), and new music that is reminiscent ofltaly's own national anthem.
2013, Vol. 38 (Fall 2013)
This essay investigates the ways in which Italian Jews used Ladino song as a vehicle to define their cultural identity during the 20th century. The revitalization of a musical repertoire sung in Ladino happened twice during the last century. During the 1920's, a small corpus of Judeo-Spanish songs were incorporated in a new Judeo-Italian folk repertoire, created by the writer, ethnographer and community activist, Guido Bedarida (1900-1962). Bedarida's original research drew on the history of Livorno as a center of Ladino press since the 18th century. Decades later, beginning in the 1980's, a handful of Jewish performers - mostly women - helped spreading the repertoire of the international Ladino revival to Italy. These performers often incorporated both Ladino and Yiddish songs in their performances and recordings, based on commercially released sources from Israel and the United States. The two waves of Ladino revival in Italy have served distinctly different purposes. The first revival centered on Sephardic culture as a more "noble" form of Jewish heritage than the local Italian one was perceived to be (by Italian Jews themselves), which could serve as a vehicle resuscitating the pride in the local culture. The second revival can instead be seen as an attempt to create a "new" Jewish culture after the loss of Italian Jewish traditions since the Holocaust. In both instances, however, songs in Ladino have contributed to the creation of a virtual Jewish identity, based on ethnographic sources that are removed from local Italian Jewish culture.
2002, In Search of Jewish Musical Antiquity in the 18th-century Venetian Ghetto: Reconsidering the Hebrew Melodies in Benedetto Marcello’s Estro Poetico-Armonico. The Jewish Quarterly Review 93/1-2 (2002): 149-200
Traditional melodies from diverse Jewish liturgical traditions used by Benedetto Marcello in his Estro Poetico-Armonico are examined in the context of Judeo-Christian relations in the Venetian Ghetto in the early eighteenth-century.
2009, Jewish Studies – Yearbook of the World Union of Jewish Studies vol. 46
Critical review of paradigms, models and topics in the study of Jewish music.
Donatella Calabi ed. "Venice, The Jews, and Europe," Venice, Marsilio 2016: 264-269.
This paper can be bought in book form from Amazon books.com
Never before the creation of the State of Israel did Jews of so many origins live together, and in such a stimulating environment, as they did in the land they soon started calling in Hebrew i-tal-yah, an “Island of Divine Dew.” A crossroad of world cultures, Italy has been for over two millennia a haven for Italian, Sephardic, and Ashkenazi Jews, in the heartland of Christianity. The Italian-Jewish symbiosis ourished with the Modern Era, in the Renais- sance ghettos, continuing through the 19th century Emancipation, and up to the present. Thus, Jewish Italy appears before our eyes both as a time capsule, where ancient cultural traits have been safely preserved, and as a laboratory, in which such traits were adapted to constantly changing living conditions. While maintaining centuries-old traditions, Italian Jews also tested out new cultural formats that came to de ne Jewish modernity. Featured prominently among these are the emergence of women as a foundational constituency of the Jewish social fabric, the printing of the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud as hypertexts, the illustration of Hebrew manu- scripts as forms of public Jewish art, the public performance of Jewish culture as entertainment for society at large, and the cultivation of the synagogue as a porous space fostering multicultural encounters. Italian Jews successfully negotiated their way across tradition, diversity, religious con icts, emancipation, cosmopolitanism, and multiculturalism, all at the very heart of Christianity. Their vicissitudes mirror the history of the Jewish people at large, both because of Italy’s strong cultural in uence upon many European countries, and because of its central place in the Mediterranean. Their cultural wealth progressively lost traction at the turn of the 20th century, and effectively came to a halt with the rise of Fascism and the anti-Semitic laws proclaimed in 1938. All major Jewish museum collections include important artifacts from Italy, and The Magnes is no exception. This exhibition presents a selection of manuscripts, books, ritual objects, textiles, photographs, and postcards collected by The Magnes over ve decades to investigate the global signi cance of Jewish history in Italy.
Global India: Kerala, Israel, Berkeley unveils the extensive holdings of The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life documenting the history of the Jewish community in Kerala, South India. The exhibition includes over one hundred individual items, many of which were never catalogued before. Thanks to a dynamic collecting campaign in the 1960s and 70s, The Magnes has become one of the world’s most extensive repositories of materials about the Jews of Southern India, taking on an important role in the preservation of their culture alongside the historic Jewish sites in Kerala, as well as national and private collections in Israel, where most of the Kerala Jews settled after the founding of the State in 1948. The Magnes Collection includes hundreds of ritual objects, textiles, photographs, archival records, Hebrew books, and manuscripts, including liturgical texts, illustrated ketubbot (Jewish marriage contracts) and amulets, in Hebrew, Aramaic, Malayalam, Judeo-Spanish, and English. These materials constitute an invaluable source of information on the Kerala Jewish community, one of the oldest in the world, and its deep connections with India’s society and cultures and with the global Jewish Diaspora, across India, the Middle East, and Europe. Among the most notable items on display are the Torah Ark from the Tekkumbhagam synagogue in Mattancherry, Kochi, an extremely rare amulet on parchment, designed to protect women in childbirth and newborn children, and the diaries of A.B. Salem, who provide a vivid account of Jewish life in Kochi throughout the 20th century. This exhibition is the culmination of years of curatorial work devoted to assessing and documenting the holdings of The Magnes, conducted in collaboration with experts in Israel and the US. It also inaugurates a new season of research, engaging the scholarly community at UC Berkeley and beyond, and intersecting Jewish and Asian Studies. The catalog includes an essay by Dr. Barbara Johnson (Ithaca College). http://bit.ly/global-india
Musical rhythms are connected to prosodic principles in many Jewish sacred music practices. For Persian-speaking Jews of Iran and Central Asia, rhythms are especially informed by ingrained habits of interpreting Persian quantitative poetic meters, applied to both Hebrew- and Persian-language texts. For describing and analyzing Jewish sacred music in the Iranian and Central Asian traditions, the term “prosodic rhythm” usefully highlights the importance of syllable length and other rhythmic features of a text, with broader implications for the study of Jewish sacred music and music without a steady pulse in general.
LUCSoR Annual Conference, Leiden 29-31 Oct. 2018 - Interpreting Rituals: Historiographical Perspectives and Pluralistic Contexts - Organizers: LUCSoR, NGG and NOSTER
A main topic in the study of circumcision is the increasing importance of blood mixed with wine in the liturgy of circumcision starting from rabbinic Judaism. As is well known, Lawrence A. Hoffman interprets its relevance as a response to the christian ritual of Eucharist, while David Biale reads it as a sign of the conflation of the blood of the circumcised with that of covenant in respect of the heart of Judaism. What is sure is that the cup of wine in which the mohel used to add a few drops of the circumcised blood became a feature of jewish liturgy. With the help of two case studies, the present paper aims to show how the peculiar stress on blood in western circumcision liturgy at the beginning of the Modern Age had a surprising influence on christian liturgical imagery, overturning, in a sense, the idea that only Christianty played a role in the development of Jewish ritual but not the opposite. We will see how, in contexts of strong, even if conflictual, Jewish-Christian negotiation as were late XV century Nuremberg and XVI century Ferrara, both Albrecht Durer and Ludovico Mazzolino produced original representations of the Circumcision of Christ painting a great amount of details concerning Jewish circumcision rite (the sandak holding the child on his knees, the chair of Elijah, the so called Jüdischkerze in the shammash’s hands...), with a main focus on the cup of wine. Far from being sort of folklorical cameos or just a form of anti-Jewish manifesto, these images, as grounded on a knowledge of the sacrifical meaning attributed to blood and wine in circumcision rite by rabbinic tradition, hint at how, in the studied peculiar contexts, the Jewish ritual stimulated a new way of thinking the child Christ’s blood in christian groups.
LUCSoR conference Interpreting Rituals: Historiographical Perspectives and Pluralistic Contexts Leiden University, 29-31 October 2018
2013, Jews and Muslims in the Islamic World, ed. Bernard Dov Cooperman and Zvi Zohar, University of Maryland Press, 2013, pp. 279-302
An historical overview of how the use of the maqam/makam modal system became a major feature in the performance of the Jewish liturgy in the Easter Mediterranean and the Middle East since the 16th century.
Songs in transit: a social narrative through musical grafting in the Neapolitan repertoire The Neapolitan song—as a site of contact and convergence between the diverse cultures and civilizations of the Mediterranean—has always been the meeting ground of engaging narratives in transit. By virtue of this, the identity dimension of Naples is of spontaneous integration and constant observation of the foreigner. Singing in Neapolitan dialect has become a national cultural expression and, through the vocal style and manner of local production, it has contributed to recount the experience of a country turning into a nation [1880-1920], then a nation throwing into the colonial experiences [1890-1940s] and today a Mediterranean region preparing its personal way of meeting the Islamic world. So that, the practice of inclusion and appropriation of stories resulting in the relationship with the traveller, is a model that we know to be practiced yesterday and today. In this paper I will observe the phenomenon of Neapolitan song as a narrative through excerpts from the repertory of the Italian diaspora, colonial propaganda and that contemporary one emerging in contact with the Muslim community. In all three cases chosen, the city has expressed strong identity. In the perspective of meeting the foreigner or traveller, Naples counts a path of self-expression through music as a form of behavior, and –as evidenced by Norton H. Fried and Marcello Sorce Keller— this form of behavior often becomes symbol and metaphor for other [not musical] aspects of the socio-economic life.
2015, The Festschrift Darkhei Noam: The Jews of Arab Lands, ed. Carsten Schapkow, Shmuel Shepkaru and Alan T. Levenson
Research on the musical cultures of the Moroccan Jews has focused almost exclusively on their rich paraliturgical Hebrew repertoires that are related to the Andalusian musical traditions of Morocco and to a lesser extent Judeo-Arabic folk genres. The performance of the liturgy in Moroccan synagogues has attracted far less attention. Considering this paucity of comprehensive studies of the Moroccan Jewish liturgical traditions (this plural form will be elucidated below), the early pioneer work of Abraham Z. Idelsohn in this field stands out as unique.
2014, Jerusalem, Hevrat Yehudè Italia lif’ulà ruhanit,
2017, Women and Social Change in North Africa: What Counts as Revolutionary?
This chapter explores the side-lining of Jewish women within their own communities following the exodus of Moroccan Jews from the country in the twentieth century. Orthodox rabbis from ouside Morocco entered the country to fill the void left by emigrating Moroccan Jewish leadership, and began banning and belittling centuries-old Moroccan Jewish customs. In documenting how women transmitted Jewish customs from one generation to the next - through singing - this work unearths Jewish customs long believed to have died out.
The Jewish Enlightenment, Haskalah, an intellectual and social movement that developed in Eastern Europe at the beginning of the 19 th century, brought about some radical changes in various aspects of the lives of Jews. In the religious sphere these changes have been expressed by the use of local languages during liturgy, the active participation of worshippers in prayer, the limitation of restrictions on the partition dividing men and women in the synagogue and shorter worship services. From the beginning of these developments, worship in Reform synagogues was characterised by increased musical activity. In contrast to before, the members of the congregations participated in singing, instruments were introduced and mixed choirs started to perform. Moreover, women began to perform liturgical chants with instrumental accompaniment even on a podium. Professionally trained cantors could perform with the accompaniment of large choirs and organs. In the 19th century, the synagogue chants in northern Germany were based on Protestant choral, whilst in Austria they were based on Catholic songs. In this article the activities of the two leading representatives of the movement under consideration will be presented against the background of important events which took place during the history of synagogue music. The first is Salomon Sulzer, who reformed synagogue music during his time as a cantor in Vienna; the second is a student of Sulzer, Moritz Deutsch, who continued the work of his master in Breslau.
2017, The 17th World Congress of Jewish Studies, Jerusalem, Israel, August 6-10, 2017
This paper addresses Geltungsjuden – children of a non-Jewish parent considered to be part of the Jewish community. Besides intermarried Jews, they were the second major group remaining “legally” in Germany even after June 1943, when Goebbels had declared Berlin “free of Jews.” Focusing on Berlin’s Jewish community as still the largest in Germany, I will follow those less than a thousand “last Jewish youngsters”, who – under the persisting threat of deportation – struggled for physical and spiritual survival. New research on German late-war Jewish communities generally focuses on the experience of Jews in hiding or mixed marriage families such as Beate Meyer’s magisterial work on Mischlinge as well as Susanna Schrafstetter’s and Max Strnad’s work on Munich. This paper examines the connections between ongoing deportations, a fluid Jewish identity and the coexistence of their in- and exclusion within the remaining Jewish community. At the same time, Geltungsjuden experienced everyday persecution, denunciations as well as occasional solidarity and help by Berlin’s non-Jewish population. There is a narrative in many testimonies of survivors who were deported in the years up to 1943, that Jewish life in Berlin ended with the dissolution of the Reichsvereinigung der Juden on June 10th, 1943. But actually, the Reichsvereinigung was never formally dissolved, as the Reichssicherheitshauptamt was interested in keeping the remainder of Jewish assets under their control, instead of handing everything over to the Oberfinanzpräsident - and thus, a letter dated August 1943 states, that the Reichsvereinigung in fact continued to exist beyond the deportation of its full-jewish members in early summer 1943. Parallel to that and equally lesser-known, the Jewish community of Berlin did not „collapse“ (as a Berlin survivor then in Theresienstadt expressed it) but continued to exist - a pale, absurd, yet quite real existence. When in May 1945 Geltungsjuden became the “first Jewish youth” of the post-war community, most of them had survived by Jewish as well as non-Jewish assistance. Thus, Geltungsjuden invite us to re-examine the complexity of Jewish and non-Jewish relations. This will contribute to our understanding of the last stage of the Holocaust, but will also help us understand how after the war, some of these survivors could call Berlin, of all places, their home.
American Jewish History, Volume 101, Number 2, April 2017
2012
Salomon Sulzer (1804–90) was the first ḥazan in modern Europe to captivate audiences with his extraordinary musical, intellectual, and charismatic attributes. He was an authority in his community and a center of attraction in the general musical life of his time. The influences of his musical and social contributions are still being felt in today's Jewish music world. As Obercantor at Vienna’s Stadttempel, he developed a moderate reform of the liturgy and synagogue music, balancing the traditional and the modern in compliance with Jewish law. As part of his reforms, Sulzer began to produce a significant repertoire of Jewish liturgical music that is still heard today in many synagogues. Sulzer newly defined the position for the ḥazan, drawing attention to vocal technique. Blessed with an excellent voice (as witnessed by Franz Liszt, Francis, Trollope, Nikolaus Lenau, Ferdinand Hiller, and others) Sulzer also made a name for himself as an interpreter and composer of secular music (especially lieder); and also as a teacher. Like no other cantor, Sulzer embodies the renewal of Judaism in 19th-century Europe.
Leon Modena, one of the celebrated personalities of Italian Jewry in the early modern period, is known for his extensive, life-long involvement with music in its various theoretical and practical aspects. The article presents additional evidence that has gone unnoticed in previous studies of Modena’s musical endeavors: his adaption of a polyphonic, secular Italian melody, for the singing of a liturgical hymn. After identifying the melody and suggesting a possible date for the composition of the Hebrew text, the article proceeds to discuss it in a broader context of the Jewish musical culture at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in particular contemporary Jewish views to the use of “foreign” melodies in the synagogue. The article concludes with an attempt to situate it as part of Modena’s thought of art music.
Jewish-Christian Dialogue in Liturgical Studies: Exploring Jewish Hybridity In 2015, I was leading a Shabbat morning service for a group of children in the Jewish kindergarten of the community in which I was interning. Reaching the Torah service, I opened the scroll, showed the beginning of Sefer Shemot to the kids, leyned a couple of verses, and took out several colorful pictures of Pharaoh, Yoheved, Aaron and Miriam, the pyramids, and baby Moses in his basket on the Nile. I knew that the children had heard the story at least once before, so I asked them what they saw on the pictures while re-telling the story and pointing out some details they missed. When we reached the picture of little Moses in his reed basket, I asked the children who that little baby was – and it was then that I heard the clear voice of a confident little girl answering me proudly: " That's little baby Jesus! " This little scene occurred in the liberal Jewish community in Hanover, Germany. But in fact, it could have happened also here in the United States. Obviously, this former little congregant of mine had been exposed to the Christian narrative in quite a formative manner; maybe through grandparents , one of her parents, or even just a babysitter or a friend of the family. Whoever told her about little baby Jesus had, I am sure, the best intentions. And the fact that many Jewish children and adults are listening to different cultural and religious narratives today is, first and foremost, a simple fact; an element of the reality we share today.
The 17th World Congress of Jewish Studies, Jerusalem, Israel, August 6-10, 2017
Jewish Community of Zagreb, 1943-1945, Naida-Michal Brandl The Independent State of Croatia (NDH) was proclaimed on April 10, 1941. The anti-Jewish measures were implemented swiftly and on April 30, the Racial laws were proclaimed (of 35,000 Jews in the NDH, around 12,000 were in Zagreb). Deportations to Croatian camps started in May 1941. Until the beginning of 1942 around half of the remaining Jews in Zagreb were deported. From August 1942 the Germans were included in the deportation process, and in the next and last mass deportation in May 1943, Jews were deported mainly to Auschwitz. The Jewish Community in Zagreb was closed in April and reopened in May 1941, now in charge of all racially defined Jews. It was under direct control of pro-Nazi regime, and responsible for Jews imprisoned in concentration camps in the NDH, remaining Jews in Zagreb, the old people’s home(s), school, and registrar books. There was an acting synagogue as well. The community was financed by member fees and international Jewish organizations. After the last big German-Croatian deportations of May 1943, only Jews in mixed marriages or honorary Aryans remained. They took over the leadership of the community, which continued to care about Jews in camps as well as the old people’s home. After liberation, they were still community leaders and took over new tasks following the same logic of the war-time period. The school as well as synagogue ceased to exist after May of 1943. There were still funerals in the Jewish section of the public cemetery, which survived the War intact.
Paper read at the conference The Ghetto and Beyond: The Jews in the Age of the Medici, Center for Jewish History, New York City/Medici Archive Project, September 18, 2016. It critically surveys diverse sonic scenes of the Ghetto of Venice in the from the early 17th century to Napoleon's conquest.
2020, Min-Ad: Israel Studies in Musicology Online 17
This article examines the Torah (Pentateuch) recitation in the communities of Oran and West Algeria and concentrates on the relationship between the Masoretic accents and their musical realizations. Our findings suggest that the length of the musical motifs expresses the pausal strength gradation of the accents. Possible borrowing from the Moroccan liturgy and shared features with other Sephardic traditions resulting from sociocultural factors are also discused. The analysis is based upon old recordings (from sound archives in Paris and Jerusalem), transcriptions in ethnomusicological studies and this author's own experience.
2015, Musical Exodus: Al-Andalus and Its Jewish Diasporas
The music that the Jewish community of Tangier, Morocco, claims as its heritage is divided by clear gendered boundaries. The music of communal ritual that dominates the public sphere of liturgical practice in the synagogue is performed primarily by men and is predominantly in Hebrew. Music identified with and sung by women, known as los cantares de las antiguas (lit. the songs of the old women), in contrast, is in Judeo-Spanish and is typically confined to the private sphere of the family and life-cycle celebrations. 1 Exceptionally, however, on specific holidays in the annual liturgical cycle and at certain moments in the Sabbath morning liturgy, a gendered musical interplay occurs as both men and women's melodies are sung in the synagogue , and the language changes from Hebrew to the Judeo-Spanish vernacular the language normally associated with the private (feminine) sphere of the home. This chapter attempts to explain the significance of these phenomena through a gendered understanding of the liturgical structure. 2 [2.1] The information in this study is based on my personal observations while attending close to one hundred holiday and Sabbath services in the Jewish community of Tangier between 2005 and 2011; on interviews I conducted with members of the community between 2007 and 2012 while researching gender issues in Jewish women's traditional songs; and on the knowledge I acquired through my participation in communal study sessions while living in Tangier in 2007 and 2008. During those two years, I was the only woman invited to participate in the halacha (Jewish law) and mysticism classes held in the home of Rabbi Avraham Azancot on Sabbath mornings after services.
2018, Languages in Jewish Communities, Past and Present
Languages in Jewish Communities, Past and Present Editors: Benjamin Hary and Sarah Bunin Benor In the series: Contributions to the Sociology of Language, De Gruyter Mouton (Berlin), November 2018 Since Joshua Fishman’s seminal work in the 1980s (e.g., Fishman, Joshua A., ed. 1985. Readings in the Sociology of Jewish Languages. Leiden: Brill), there has been a good deal of research on languages in Jewish communities. This research has mostly been either structural or sociological but not both. Our volume brings together these two research traditions, offering sociological and structural descriptions of languages used in about 20 Diaspora Jewish communities, along with synthesizing descriptive and theoretical articles about the structure and sociology of languages in these and other communities. Using the construct of the continuum of Jewish linguistic distinctiveness, we posit “Jewish languages” as a historical and contemporary phenomenon. With a few exceptions, including Yiddish in Slavic lands and Ladino/Judeo-Spanish/Judezmo in Ottoman lands, Jews have tended to speak variants of the local non-Jewish languages. The distinctiveness of these variants has ranged from minor to major, depending on the degree of Jews’ integration into the surrounding populations, their orientation toward rabbinic texts, and other factors. While much previous research on Jewish languages assumes that the phenomenon essentially ended with modernity, this volume highlights its 21st-century manifestation.
2011, Gainesville: University Press of Florida
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book review
Sound Objects combines the study of Jewish material culture with the emerging field of sound studies and investigates the role of objects that emit sound during synagogue rituals. The exhibition includes a selection of over sixty objects, books, manuscripts and photographs from The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life documenting ritual in the global Diaspora, and integrates on-site display with online resources that comprise images, texts, and the sounds recorded by “playing” several of the ritual objects on view. Many of the objects used in the course of synagogue rituals generate sound. Some are designed to produce specific sounds, such as the shofar, the horn blown in the synagogue during the month of Elul (preceding the New Year), and on Rosh Ha-shanah and Yom Kippur, or the noisemakers used during the reading of the Book of Esther on Purim. Since the process of Jewish Emancipation in 19th-century Europe, many synagogues have incorporated musical instruments in the ritual, including the organ. But there are many other ritual objects, especially those dedicated to the embellishing, storing, carrying and reading of the Torah scrolls, as well as to the havdalah ceremony that marks the end of the Sabbath and holidays, which are often designed to emit sound, even though sound-making is not their primary function. Jewish ritual "sound objects" are not musical instruments per se. Rather, they are made with movable parts, and are at times adorned with pendants or bells. These objects rattle, ring, or otherwise make sound when they are used. Their sonic power is only apparently unintentional. The sounds they emit cannot be avoided, and sound-making parts are constitutive of their shapes, forms, and functions. While sound emission by voices and musical instruments during ritual is closely regulated by rabbinic authorities, the sounds made by objects are not. A performative approach to the study of ritual objects may thus shed a different light on an important aspect of Jewish life outside the scope of normative religion, and yet located at its very core: ritual, including the public reading of the Hebrew Bible in synagogue liturgy. http://bit.ly/sound-objects
Reconstructionism Today (6:4, Summer 1999) "... We often settle for the lowest common denominator of aesthetic value in synagogue music, choosing functional simplicity over profundity. What can be easily sung by the group prevails. This was a point made by Judith Kaplan Eisenstein, who bemoaned lack of regard for the rhythms of poetry and for all but the most obvious musical forms. She missed the subtlety of traditional Jewish liturgical music, how its modes reflected the nuances of different times of day and seasons."
The project of a network on the Semantics of Ancient Hebrew was approved by the Executive Council of the European Science Foundation twenty years ago now, with the aim of planning a critical database on the semantics of Ancient Hebrew. It is not a matter of creating a thesaurus, but a different work in which to collect the semantic data and all recent associated scientific literature. Florence is one of the universities which is involved in this project, supervised, in Florence, by Professor Ida Zatelli. My paper is a sample entry for such a database. It is structured according to a peculiar framework proposed by the executive committee of the project. The lexeme is sml and the analysis takes into consideration the morphology of the lexeme, its root and etymology, formal characteristics, syntagmatics, versions, lexical field, exegesis. The more relevant scientific literature on the issue has been examined.
In contrast to the East of Austria, its western part and especially the Genizat Tirolensia ist still widely unexplored. Until recently the Tyrolean libraries had never been checked systematically on Hebrew and Aramaic fragments of medieval Hebrew books and documents recovered from book bindings and notarial files and the 18 fragments of the University library are chance finds. However a systematically recording is promising: in less than a year eight new fragments have been found and identified. The establishment of Jews in North- and South Tyrol is documented since the 13th century. Among the new finds are unique Talmud fragments, a Haftarah exemplary, Halakhah commentaries from Ashkenazic, Sephardic and Italian provenance shedding new light on the spiritual life of the Jews of medieval Tyrol. Further findings are to be expected and it is obvious that the history of the Jews of this border region has to be rewritten and completed. In this paper we want to present the new findings and the material for a new cross-border project within the European network "Books within books: Hebrew Fragments in European Libraries".
2008
Out of Babylon: The Music of Baghdadi-Jewish Migrations into Asia and Beyond. Tucson, Arizona: Celestial Harmonies, 2007. 1 compact disc. $15.45. 13274-2. Reflecting more than six years of research, this is a compilation of Mizrahi song still heard among the remnants of Judeo-Babylonian communities. These communities consisted of Jews who left Baghdad between the 18th century and 1951. Many traveled east to communities such as Mumbai, Poona, Calcutta, Kuala Lumpur, Kowloon, Woollahra, Singapore, Jakarta, or even Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Sydney. The recordings were made during the last fifty years, some recorded by the researchers in special sessions, and some items coming from archives such as the National Sound Archives in Jerusalem. The booklet gives detailed information about the song texts, the recording of particular items, and the informants. All the songs are sung by men. There is no instrumental accompaniment, reflecting that most of the texts are liturgical songs that would normally be used during a worship service or festival. For those curious about the sounds of Jews in eastern communities, this is a treasure trove of authentic song. Many sacred texts are sung to more than one setting by the various communities for easy comparison, such as six versions of Ki eshmerah Shabbath, four of Deror Yiqra or four versions of Psalm 1. For further reading, a bibliography is provided. Recommended for research academic libraries serving music, Judaic, Middle East, or Asian studies departments. Judith S. Pinnolis, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA
2008, AJL Newsletter (February/March 2008) 27/3 : 49.
Liderman, Jorge. Aires de Sefarad: 46 Spanish Songs for Violin and Guitar. Performed by Duo 46, Matt Gould, guitar; Beth Illana Schneider, violin. Albany, New York: Albany Records, 2006. 1 compact disc. $17.98. TROY829. Those who love Sephardic music, and those that love contem¬porary composition will enjoy the pleasant combination of violin and guitar that graces this CD. Composed by Jorge Liderman in a highly accessible instrumental style, these new compositions are interesting arrangements of familiar Sephardic tunes performed in a sensitive manner by Matt Gould and Beth Schneider. Lider¬man organized the 46 short character pieces in a song cycle with a harmonic structure that progresses by fourths, and occasionally changes to the dominant or parallel minor, even although most of the pieces retain the flavor of modal harmonic structures. Some of the musical ideas and textures repeat in various songs, such as an occasional returning motive. Many sections, based on tradi¬tional Sephardic songs from Isaac Levy’s Chants Judeo-Espagnols, have very quiet and calming effects. While the violin is usually the dominant thematic instrument, in some songs, the guitar carries the familiar melodies.The individual arrangements are sophisticated, representing different aspects of Spain, but never overbearing in their reshaping. Liederman composed rhythmi¬cally interesting segments, with some polymetric textures. This CD is an important example of current thinking by Jewish com¬posers who are using native Jewish musical materials to expand Jewish composed art music. While this is not necessarily a CD for a core Jewish music library collection, it is quite nice for home and synagogue collections, and those libraries collecting Israeli or South American contemporary composers. Judith S. Pinnolis, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA
Mlotek, Chana and Mark Slobin, eds. Yiddish Folksongs from the Ruth Rubin Archive. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. 2007. 288 p. $44.95. Includes compact disc (ISBN 978-0-81433-258-0). This anthology of Yiddish folksongs from “the mouth of the people” is a posthumous edition primarily prepared by Ruth Rubin nearly 20 years ago. The YIVO Archive, which received the near-finished manuscript of this book among her materials, is releasing it with her notations intact. While the folk nature of Yiddish song means that true origins will never be definitively ascertained, the value of this anthology lies in its stark originality. Music from informants has not been altered by “adaptation, stan¬dardization, and harmonization” typical of other publications. The layout of the book indicates that it can serve as a musician’s performing edition. The pages open nicely, with the music and text printed in clear, large type for easy reading.The songs contain transliterations and translations of the texts, with references to other editions, variations of the song in other books, or original Yiddish. As with many other Yiddish song collections, this one is broken down by topic, such as love songs, lullabies, weddings and marriage, dancing, Hasidic nigunim or anti-Hasidic songs. Also included are excellent essays in the introduction, a bibliog¬raphy, a list of publications of Ruth Rubin, and an index of first lines of the songs. Included with the book is a CD re-release of the 1964 Folkways album, “Jewish Life: The Old Country.” All songs on the CD are sung a cappella by various singers, with only one instrumental piece. Selections in differing styles come from many sources and places. Highly recommended for all. Judith S. Pinnolis, Brandeis University, Boston, MA
2019, European Journal of Jewish Studies
Recent scholarship argues that Abraham Z. Idelsohn coined the term ‘Missinai tune’ in studies published during the 1920s and 1930s. This article refutes that claim by revisiting Idelsohn’s research, evaluating the critiques, examining earlier evidence, and comparing Missinai tunes to other venerated groupings of synagogue song.
2018, Curriculum design & development Handbook: Join master programme on Early music small vocal ensembles, Edited by Olguța Lupu, Isaac Alonso de Molina, Nicolae Gheorghiță, National University of Music Bucharest Publishing House