It’s the other national anthem, saying,
If you want to hear -
It says, “Bullshit!”…
It says: Listen
To the tune that keeps sounding
In the distance, on the outside,
Coming through the ground…
We’re the other national anthem, folks,
The ones that can’t get in
To the ball park.
(Assassins)

Sandy Wilson, composer and lyricist, famously declared that Stephen Sondheim “destroyed the American musical almost singlehandedly. He’s turned it into a semi-operatic disquisition rather than an entertainment.” A brief survey of Sondheim’s catalogue, from the first concept musical Company (1970) with its lean view of marriage and flattened chronology, to Assassins (1990), a prickly but sympathetic account of eight American hit men (and women), suggests the composer and lyricist has indeed enacted a radical break with the unabashed good cheer of Oklahoma!’s “O what a beautiful mornin’’. More serious still, to challenge the form of that most American of theatrical celebrations—the Broadway musical—is apparently to challenge America itself. Yet a closer look at the so-called 1940s Golden Age of the musical comedy reveals Broadway’s tangled relationship with the American dream and a complex project of Jewish assimilation through the on-stage depiction of ‘outsiders’. Sondheim has been reticent about his heritage in interviews and commentaries on his work, but has noted an affinity with the outsider, stating “it’s obviously something I feel, belonging to two minorities”(being Jewish and gay). While Sondheim’s works often depict fragmented worlds that seem a far cry from the American creed, peopled as they are by the incompatible, dispossessed or unruly, his musicals do not perhaps disconnect with the musical’s Golden Age as much as Wilson feared: the Broadway “disquisition”on the outsider has been around for longer than might be expected. Just as the American musical of the 1940s began to redraw the boundaries of social inclusion, so Sondheim scores an alternative national anthem, for “the ones that can’t get in to the ball park.”

Sondheim had a formidable training. Oscar Hammerstein II became part-mentor, part-father to the ten-year old Sondheim, steering his young charge through a lively apprenticeship in musical theatre and remaining a close associate throughout Sondheim’s career. On graduating, Sondheim pursued a more classical musical education , studying with the infamous Milton Babbitt, composer of rigorous and complex serial and electronic music but also, as Sondheim later declared, an unlikely but “frustrated show composer”. Together they unpicked the Broadway canon, often spending the first part of composition classes absorbed in structural analysis of a Jerome Kern song. When Sondheim asked for guidance in moving towards atonal music, Babbitt reportedly told his student “you haven’t exhausted tonal resources for yourself yet, so I’m not going to teach you atonal.” From here, Sondheim identifies that “I am his maverick, his one student who went into the popular arts with all his serious artillery.”

Sondheim’s “popular art” has nonetheless challenged audiences and critics alike, and his works have tended to be chameleon and acidic in their theme and realisation. Cutting his teeth as a lyricist on Bernstein’s genre-bending West Side Story (1957), Sondheim went on to create the so-called “concept musical” in 1970 with Company, a new approach to musical theatre driven not by plot development, but by the exploration of theme. Company was followed by a string of acclaimed but provocative works exploring topics from America’s cultural incursion into East Asia (Pacific Overtures, 1976), to revenge tragedy (Sweeney Todd, 1979); pointillism and the artistic process (Sunday in the Park with George, 1984) to the deconstructed fairy tale (Into the Woods, 1987). His work repeatedly confronts the power of the institution— be it marriage, justice, government or the happy ending— examining its grip on those individuals who are excluded, by choice or circumstance. It is a stance that has seen the composer branded a Broadway revisionist, allied, by certain commentators, with an earlier European school of politicised musical satire. Sondheim however firmly disassociates himself from the link (and what might be considered a certain cachet in the alliance):

“I’m not a Brecht/Weill fan and that’s really all there is to it. I’m an apostate: I like Weill’s music when he came to America better than I do his stuff before…. when he was not writing with Brecht, when he was writing for Broadway.”

Indeed, Sondheim’s readiness to explore social exclusion is something he traces back not to Weimar cabaret but to the Broadway canon. In an oft-cited New York Times interview, Sondheim recalls a first teenage encounter with Roger and Hammerstein’s Carousel (1945): “I remember how everyone goes off to the clam bake at the end of Act One and Jigger just follows, and he was the only one walking on stage as the curtain came down. I was sobbing.” Sondheim goes on to explain why Carousel remains his one of his favourite musicals, “because it’s about a loner [Billy Bigelow] who’s misunderstood”. With a customary lack of sentimentality, later in the interview Sondheim dismisses his own remarks as “psychobabble”, but they make a striking statement and address the central subtext of much of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s output. It is perhaps only by looking more closely at the social history of the earlier Broadway musical, notably its part in Jewish assimilation in mid-twentieth-century America, that Sondheim’s contested role as Broadway torch bearer or incendiary grows clearer.

The Broadway musical comedy of the 1920s-50s has long been recognised as a Jewish-American creation (the popular scholarly roll call citing Jewish composers and lyricists Gershwin, Berlin, Kern, Hart and so on), yet the distinct part played by the Broadway musical in shaping American sensibilities amid the marginalisation of Jews has been less widely acknowledged. As musicologist Andrea Most summarises in her work on Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical (2004), the story of Jewish acculturation in America and the development of the American musical are inextricable. As such, Broadway musicals not only secured a new entry point for Jews into American cultural life, but effectively set about reconstituting America’s understanding of itself. Rather than an entirely passive and circumscribing form of assimilation which flattened difference, Most proposes instead that “the Hollywood studio and the Broadway theater became sets on which Jews described their own vision of an idealized America and subtly wrote themselves into that scenario as accepted members of the white American community.”

The first Rodgers and Hammerstein hit Oklahoma! (1943) is a primary example of this re-imagining of American communality (albeit within limited parameters). Amid the musical’s new emotional and dramatic punch, Most suggests Oklahoma! sought to redefine the myth of the American West as an inclusive and shared homeland, notably through the musical’s depiction of Persian merchant, Ali Hakim. Popular and playful Hakim is welcomed into the rural community while standing as a thinly-disguised analogue of a Jewish immigrant, allied to the writers themselves: indeed, on the invitation to a first-anniversary party for the show, Hammerstein billed himself as “Mister Ali Hakimstein”. Musicologist Raymond Knapp’s account of Oklahoma! focuses less on Jewish assimilation in favour of outsider acceptance more generally, suggesting that Rodgers and Hammerstein depict the villain of piece, Judd Fry, with unlikely compassion. Judd is shown to share the same needs and desires as the community: “he is frugal and a hard-worker; he feels entitled, like all aspiring Americans, to what he feels he has earned” (including a parodic but affecting heroic operatic solo number). For Most, however, the nominal “Jewish” acceptance of Hakim into the community is predicated on his very contrast to Judd. The show effects this through a dual definition of otherness, with one determined by a transient, manageable ethnicity and the other by a threatening and necessarily-excluded racial difference. Where Hakim’s ethnic otherness is painted as acceptable through the merchant’s peaceful commercial interests Judd is allied with the stereotype of a purportedly threatening African American, lurking predatorily at the smokehouse (whereby smoked skin translates to black skin). The anxiety of difference is absorbed by the ominous Judd, leaving Hakim as safely but distinctively other.

Broadway’s interest in outsiders and the subtext of Jewish assimilation, where Jews may still display distinct ethnic markers while gaining admittance to mainstream America, is still striking. Indeed, the deployment of the “colour line” as an enabler in the acceptance of Jewish otherness chimes with historian Eric Goldstein’s account of changing incarnations of American Jewish identity across the twentieth century. Amid a forced racial paradigm that allowed only for categories of white and black in the first part of the century, the American Jewish community faced a conundrum. Goldstein describes how white Americans “often tried to suppress the troubling image of the Jew as they suppressed the distinctiveness of other groups—either by comparing them to blacks or predicting their speedy assimilation into white society.” Yet Goldstein notes how outsider status came to stand as an intrinsic, triumphant element of being Jewish, noting that “Jews from [Central and Eastern Europe] had come to see ‘apartness’ as one of the most salient aspects of Jewish identity.” Under Roosevelt’s New Deal, it was a position that became more tenable. As economic recovery took shape during the 1940s, Jews began to dissolve as a symbol of social anxiety and were welcomed as distinct, productive members of an apparently inclusive nation, as mirrored (and prefigured) in the Broadway musical. In turn, the Jewish American community steadily grew empowered to voice protest at the treatment of African Americans.

The attention and sympathy Sondheim offers society’s outsiders in his works both draws on and disrupts the Broadway legacy. In contrast to the racial agenda of 1940s Broadway, Sondheim’s ‘outsider’ definition is resolutely inclusive, while the notion that musical theatre performance idea that musical theatre can project an utopian community is subverted, if not fully revoked. Sondheim’s works create new kinds of communities, comprised only of ‘outsiders’. In turn, these musicals conjure new possibilities of belonging, both among those characters portrayed and on occasion, for the audience itself. It is the thoroughly modern message of multicultural society: we are all outsiders now.

This idea underpins much of Sondheim’s work. Just as Marta’s ‘city of strangers’ in ‘Another hundred people’ (Company) explores the difficulty of connecting in urban life, where ‘they meet at parties through the friend of friends/Who they never know’—the number also presents the possibility that the lost may ‘find each other in the crowded streets/And the guarded parks… [and] walk together past the postered walls/With the crude remarks.’ It is a vulnerable form of coming together, taking place amid a hostile urban landscape and outside the easy but false communality of the cocktail party. In Sweeney Todd, the musical chorus is re-imagined not as a single voice of commentary on the action but as a group of isolated and fractious individuals, scored with separate characters, lines, and action, nonetheless fused in Fleet Street’s bloody drama. Sondheim’s deployment of musical form is particularly effective in conveying this shared isolation. The angular ‘Bobby’ motif—part doorbell, part alarm-call—that darts through the cast at the opening of Company suggests something jarring and off-centre, but its repetition marks the intersection of the show’s dysfunctional community and comes almost to bind them. The waltzes that thread through A little Night Music (1973) not only evoke a mixture of nostalgia and suffocating etiquette, but connect the show’s otherwise isolated inhabitants: each are excluded from the union they wish for and so trapped in a variation of the same dance. It is a process mirrored in the very idea of the concept musical.

Central to the development of the concept musical, and Sondheim’s rendering of distance and collectivity, is the manipulation of time. While Sondheim is rightly famed as a master of character development, a number of his musicals nonetheless disrupt the work’s internal flow of time as a means of exploring of its theme. For Merrily We Roll Along (1981), the tale of a pushy and once successful Hollywood songwriter and his corroding friendships, the narrative is relayed entirely in reverse, while Follies (1971) dramatises a reunion between two decaying married couples, each party consumed by the memory of their younger self, and the musical closes with an “out of time” vaudeville finale, each of the cast lost to a glittering but ghoulish vision of the past. Both works seek to expose the falsity of nostalgia and the dangers of being driven by past hopes (and the consequences of refusing to confront the choices of the present). The cruel disruption of time within these musicals has a powerful effect on audiences too: the promise of closure and the pleasure of the musical finale is subverted. Sondheim, these musicals affirm, rejects the happy ending, in life and theatre. Yet, amid this fractured flow of time in many of his works (or its notional absence in Company), the works often reinforce a sense of wholeness through other theatrical means. As Joanne Gordon notes, Sondheim “develops a new lyric, musical and theatrical language for each work” and in doing so, he draws together worlds of crumbling chronology into unified and immersive musical experiences.

The new musical languages that Gordon describes are often an exploration of existing musical styles. As far as conjuring an array of other voices can be termed a signature, the slick pastiche has become Sondheim’s hallmark, prompting questions about his own sense of musical identity. While confident to outline his stylistic approach to text (see Sondheim’s collection of lyrics in Finishing the Hat (2010) which includes bold commentary on his own work and an often acerbic account of others’), speaking in 1997 Sondheim hesitates to describe his musical voice:

“I don’t know how I would describe myself because I’m so eclectic. People say they hear my style… I’m not sure—musically. I know there are certain chords I use over and over and over again… I write in a lot of styles, because I’m often imitating a milieu or something like that. And yet, people I respect say they can tell something of mine; and people I don’t respect say it. But I’m not sure I would recognise it… I recognise when they’re doing a takeoff of my music by using lots of wrong notes, and thick chords, and that sort of thing—I recognise what they’re parodying. But I’m not sure that I would recognise a piece of mine that I hadn’t heard before.”

These so-called “thick chords”—of layered sevenths, ninths and elevenths (“I like seventh chords. I live on seventh chords. Ravel gave us that gift”)—alongside chopped up, irregular rhythmic patterns and frequent hiccups in the pulse often mark Sondheim’s work as Sondheim. Yet for all the recognisably crowded harmonies of a work such as Passion (1994), there is Bounce (2003), governed by what Sondheim describes as simple, tonal key relationships and conventional 32- bar song structures. In this sense, Sondheim is a master of disguise, outside even his own tentative definitions of style. This rather ambiguous sense of musical belonging emerges later on as a source of tension. In Mark Horowitz’s 1997 interviews with the composer, Sondheim makes a surprisingly impassioned plea against the “anxiety of influence” and towards the recognition of his own musical voice:

“It was always very clear in [Leonard Bernstein’s] music where his influences are… You can hear the Copland. But you can hear Lenny! … I don’t care if you can hear strains of the other people. He has a voice. And that’s what you listen for in music, is a voice. Even if you hear where it is from. I’m eclectic the way Lenny was eclectic. But I’ve a voice. I’ve a voice.”

It is an odd assertion in the context of Sondheim’s diffidence. However, the composer is clear and confident on one element that makes his music tick: the notion of surprise, his principal advice for other music theatre composers being “don’t tell me something I already know. Let me hear a voice, and be surprised.” Indeed, Sondheim’s pastiche work is perhaps most distinctly Sondheim-like when it startles expectations, notably when it jolts the implied musical meaning of the source itself. His chameleon-like use of pastiche is largely ironic and subversive. He toys with the audience’s familiarity with an idiom by placing it alongside something jarring in character or theme: the music invites recognition which is then rapidly unsettled. The jolted audience is forced to grasp the new alignment and its often troubling message.

This shifting of signification happens throughout Sondheim’s work but perhaps nowhere more sharply than Assassins. The musical plays on a shared recognition of various American idioms—the cakewalk, hoedown, 1940s love ballad—and quotes canonic works of American patriotism, including the Presidential march “Hail to the Chief” and various Sousa marches. However, these triumphant musics become the medium to explore the motivations of America’s most notorious assassins. Following a vaudeville-like structure, the killers troop through American idioms in increasingly sinister settings: following his attempt on Roosevelt’s life, Giuseppe Zangara sings a Sousa-inspired number from the electric chair; while Charles G. Guiteau performs a cakewalk from the hangman’s scaffold (shortly after shooting President Garfield). Sondheim draws on the wholesome soundtrack of the American dream to speak up for the excluded, creating “another national anthem”, and implicates the audience in the action as he does so. As musicologist Jim Lovenheimer suggests in his study of Sondheim’s outsiders, the composer “leaves the audience with the act of assassination as a collective cultural memory that uncomfortably lingers.” In a final punch, the show’s finale sees the assassins turning their guns on the audience as a whole, completing the show’s ambiguous and disturbing attempt to create one community and alienate another. The preface to the show’s book includes an intriguing account of a couple leaving the original off-Broadway run: the man asked, “‘I liked it but who are you supposed to feel for?’ She replied, her eyes filled with tears, ‘Us. You’re supposed to feel for us.’”

Sondheim’s definition of “us” is some way from the cheerful collectivity of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s catalogue, where the chorus speaks as one and (almost) everyone is welcome. Sondheim’s work serves a new kind of agenda. It conveys an anti-assimilatory message but one that endorses the idea of community all the same. In a sense, Sondheim’s “us” is grounded in paradox, where the only true collectivity we can achieve in the modern world is predicated on a shared experience of being alone. It is a harsh message but ultimately affirming. Indeed, commenting on his lyrics for the finale of Company, Sondheim notes “what starts as a complaint becomes a prayer”: the show does not compromise its message that the human condition is a lonely one, but enables an alternative collectivity through this very acknowledgment: “I’ll always be there/As frightened as you/To help us survive/Being alive.”

In a newspaper editorial celebrating the tenth anniversary of Tel Aviv’s most beloved satiric cabaret, Hametateh, poet Leah Goldberg begins by quoting the following saying: ‘The wounds which a lover inflicts are full of loyalty.’ She then explains: ‘this phrase applies perfectly to our self- directed satire which is created here, inside our country.’ Goldberg, a lyricist and comedic sketch writer for Hametateh, writes:

‘As Jews, we know… just how much a desire to harm is an essential part of all the criticism coming at us from the outside.And perhaps this is precisely why we need to criticise ourselves, to drum up laughter which comes from the inside, and which emerges from a love for our people, written in our own language and executed in our own style.’

Avigdor Ha’meiri and Arthur Koestler, two penniless arrivals from Hungary, decided that ‘Tel Aviv is a city without humour, particularly political humour and social commentary. It is clear that we must quickly alter this situation.’ Both Koestler and Ha’meiri were both strongly influenced by the satiric cabarets of their birth city, Budapest. When they decided to found a cabaret in Palestine they soon rallied several Hungarian actors around them to the cause.

In forming Tel Aviv’s first cabaret, Ha’Meiri and Koestler chose the name Ha’kumkum, from a Yiddish saying, ‘Don’t speak nonsense into the kettle.’ Ironically, the choice of name itself seems to indicate a permission to speak nonsense, and thus to disguise the Kumkum’s particular brand of aggression and judgment within humour and play.

The choice of Tel Aviv rather than Jerusalem as the site of the Kumkum was an obvious one. Tel Aviv had already become a cultural centre, boasting Palestine’s first opera house, ballet and museum. The British presence was also much less obtrusive in the ‘first modern Hebrew city’. The British governmental offices were in Jerusalem and, though British soldiers could still be spotted walking the streets of Tel Aviv, they were usually there as tourists rather than as law enforcers. Cabarettists felt free to create biting political satire, without fearing undue disruption from the British censor. Moreover, the majority of Tel Aviv’simmigrant population were European and somewhat familiar with satiric cabaret. Tel Aviv’s cabarets, alongside a number of other performance genres, might never have succeeded without the 4th and 5th aliyahs, or mass immigrations to the Jewish settlement of Palestine; the 4th aliyah brought huge numbers of young eastern Europeans to Tel Aviv (such as Ha’Meiri), while the 5th brought German Jews to the city, together with their hard capital, affinity for Weimar cabaret and hunger for sophisticated nightlife.

Through its satiric cabarets, tel aviv offered the yishuv an outlet for its socially unacceptable emotions

In 1929, actors from Ha’Kumkum split from Ha’Meiri’s original troop and founded the Ha’metateh, which ran until 1952 and became the most popular ‘Teatron Ammami’ or folk theatre in Jewish Palestine. Usishkin, a highly respected Zionist leader, was said to have claimed,‘If I want to know what is going on in populist Israel, I simply go to the Metateh.’The songs of the Metateh were among the most well known of the period, and (after the founding of the first Israeli radio station, Kol Yisrael, in 1936) were played on the radio constantly. Many of them subsequently became part of the canon of Shirey EretzYisrael—the songs of the early State of Israel.

Subjects for satire included corruption in the munici- pality and tension between various ethnic groups in the Yishuv (the Jewish settlement in Palestine): for example the song Shir Hateymaniyot which Natan Alterman wrote in 1934 for the Metateh, based on a traditional Yemenite Shabbat song. In Alterman’s re-imagining of the song, a cleaner complains to the audience of her experiences scrubbing the floors of Tel Aviv’s municipality and interacting with the governmental officers who work there. At the opening of the song, she proclaims: ‘A fire burns in my eyes; in my body there’s a trembling. Don’t hate me because I am dark!’ with the Hebrew text echoing the Song of Songs.

Alterman’s cleaner goes on to sing about her scrubbing techniques and the constantly expanding city of Tel Aviv, all the time with a cleaning brush in her hand.While this caricature may have offended some, the female protagonist regales us with her attitudes in a loud, empowered, voice. Moreover, the song functioned as part of the larger cultural meeting taking place in theYishuv between various ethnic groups, a meeting in which the satiric songs of cabaret played an essential part.

Alterman was not the only cabaret writer who employed existent songs such as the Teymaniyot melody to new ends; composers such as Ha’meira, Wilensky, Ha’Roosi and others all did the same.This musical grafting technique is inherently satiric, creating a gap between the original song and the newly penned one, thus commenting on both the old version and the new. In the case of Shir Ha’teymaniyot, Alterman makes use of the traditionalYemenite melody to denote a new kind of Yemenite woman;she sings the same old religious melodies, but instead of singing them around the Shabbat table, she sings of Tel Aviv.

Songs targeting the British were encouraged—such as Tzik Tzik Boom/Zeh Lo Tov (It’s Not Good)—as well as songs which mocked the capitalist values of Tel Aviv. Titina, a 1932 satiric song by Chaim Chefer, is based on a Charlie Chaplin melody that the famous comedian performed in City Lights. In Chayim Chefer’s reimagining of the melody, a pioneer couple—Titina and Ephraim—are trying to find a home for themselves inside British Palestine. Ephraim is content to stay on the kibbutz, digging ditches and draining swamps, but Titina has other plans in mind. As a result of her constant nagging, the couple eventually set up shop in Tel Aviv, where they quickly make large amounts of money and surrender to a life of carefree, capitalist decadence. Of course, the Tel Aviv audience enjoying this mockery-in-song were, for the most part, people just like Titina and Ephraim. By laughing at these characters, they were also laughing at themselves.

Attending a cabaret became an ideological act, proving that the Hebrew language was perfect not only for political speeches but also for topical satire

Ha’kumkum and Ha’metateh’s satiric performances had clear boundaries in terms of subject matter. British censorship forbade the portrayal of Arab characters on stage and Jewish cultural constraints were equally strict; I challenge you to find a single cabaret song from 1930’s Tel Aviv which questions Zionism, or a song which upholds Yiddish or German as the real language of the Jewish state, or one which promotes life outside the Yishuv. I have also not encountered a single yearning or nostalgic song for a home left behind in Paris,Vilna, or Berlin. Such songs simply don’t exist in this repertoire, although they form an important part of the Yiddish Theater of the Lower East Side.

Moreover, the cabarets were limited by the injunction that they only perform in Hebrew. In some of the satiric songs and sketches there are snippets of Yiddish or German, as well as English—particularly when a British officer appears in a song. But aside from these interruptions, all sketch and song material was performed exclusively in Hebrew. Attending a cabaret became a kind of ideological act, proving that the Hebrew language was perfect not only for political speeches but also for topical satire.The challenge to write and perform exclusively in Hebrew tested the talents and ideological fervour of many a cabaret artist, most of whom arrived in the Yishuv with virtually no Hebrew. Even Ha’Meiri, who was well versed in Hebrew before arriving in Tel Aviv, could be found at times scribbling in Hungarian in the margins of a song or sketch. Sometimes he wrote new lines in his mother tongue, which would later be translated into Hebrew.

Though satiric cabaret material became hugely popular and much loved by the mid-thirties, it did have dissenters, particularly at the start. A 1976 article from the newspaper Al Ha’mishmar reflects back on the times, and writes: ‘Already in 1928 the Kumkum…was performing programs which angered critics and the establishment in general.’ By the heyday of the Metateh, however, the act of creating satire in the Yishuv had been assimilated into the mainstream, turning the act of satiric performance into an essential expression of Israeli identity. As Leah Goldberg reminds us: ‘This is the first time that the Jewish capacity for irony, which became a fixture of the exile, returns to its roots, healthy, deeply planted in the ground.’

Musing on the function of satire, scholar Friedrich Max writes:‘That satire is an attack is probably the least debatable claim that one can make about it. In such attacks we have on public display some of the least socially acceptable emotions: anger, indignation, frustration, right- eousness, hatred, and malice.’Through its satiric cabarets, Tel Aviv offered the Yishuv an outlet for its own socially unacceptable emotions: disillusionment, frustration, anxiety, and rage. Through the satiric expression of these emotions, presented on stage, Tel Aviv’s cabarets guided audiences, ultimately, towards a love of nation, language, and land.

Rebecca Joy Fletcher is New York City based playwright, actress, and cantor; she is also a scholar and perform of international Jewish cabaret. Recent achievements include: the hit one woman show Cities of Light, which has been touring cabaret venues and synagogues across the US, as well as venues in London, Paris, and Warsaw. Next fall the Piven Theatre in Chicago premiers the theatrical run of Cities. Rebecca guest lectures and teaches at universities around the world and serves as a Vice President of the Association for Jewish Theater. For the on-sight, archival research she’s done into Tel Aviv’s cabarets Rebecca is indebted to the assistance of the Confidence Foundation. www.RebeccaJoyFletcher.com

Sung by the Barry Sisters, and to audience guffaws at the mention of prostitution, ‘Ketzele Baroiges’ is a popular song from Eastern Europe. But I am English, a Yiddish folk singer recently turned London Yiddish song detective, and in scouring for Yiddish songs that make mention of London people, places and experiences, the subject of prostitution has come up repeatedly. Sometimes, as in ‘Ketzele Baroiges’, it is a comic aside but in other cases it describes a social reality, reflecting Jewish history in London.

After Tsar Nicholas II’s assassination in 1881, life for Jews in the Pale of Settlement became desperate. Terrorised by waves of pogroms and new legislation that prohibited them from living in the countryside, thousands left the shtetl for the city where they tried to find work. The only option was factory work, but Jews were largely unskilled in factory technologies, anti-Semitic factory owners were reluctant to employ them and many religious Jews could not combine factory hours with religious observance. Many chose to leave Eastern Europe and seek a better life in England and America.

On arrival in England, the majority of immigrants headed for the East End of London. There are no reliable figures, but at its peak in around 1915, this square mile housed up to 250,000 Jews. Not for nothing was it called the Jewish East End: whole streets were Jewish markets, there were Yiddish theatres and synagogues on every other street corner and an abundance of Yiddish newspapers and magazines. The existing Jewish community was concerned about the record influx of poor immigrants and how it would affect their standing in British society. The Rothschilds and other wealthy Jewish families built sanitary tenement blocks for hundreds of Jewish families, but many could not afford the high rents and were forced into renting only part of a room. Competition for jobs was tough and workers were poorly paid for long hours of hard, often dangerous work.

Morris Winchevsky’s song Di Dray Shvester is the story of three sisters who probably lived in the East End but worked in the West End, in Leicester Square:

Di yingster farkoyft dortn blumen

Di eltere, bendlekh tzi shikh

In speyt in der nakht tut zi kumen

Di drite vus handlt mit zikh

The youngest sold flowers, the next shoelaces and the eldest herself. The lyrics continue, ‘The younger sisters don’t hate the oldest sister, they hate di velt (the world) and di shtot, (the town) and di gas, (the street). Late at night when they come home, the shoelaces and flowers are mixed with their tears’.  Morris Winchevsky, a political activist was born in Lithuania in 1856. A socialist and atheist, he moved to Whitechapel where he lived for five years and co-founded the first Yiddish socialist newspaper, Dos Poylishe Yidl. According to Bill Fishman in East End Jewish Radicals:

Winchevsky’s distinctive style may be discerned throughout, with its regular alternating sweep from pathos to bitter irony in the traditional patois of the shtetl. He and his co-writers present the reader with a many-sided picture of immigrant life in the 1880s. Features included local, national and world news with political analysis and commentary; correspondence from the other great Jewish centre in Leeds and weekly dramatic criticism of the spiel at the Yiddish theatre. But above all was a didactic appraisal of the harsh conditions suffered by Jews, with practical suggestions for their amelioration.

The mass movement of Jews enabled Jewish criminals to take advantage of international links and develop, within an already established ‘white slave trade’, a trade in Jewish women. Conditions in Eastern Europe made this easy; waves of emigration had created a dearth of young men, leaving families open to seemingly suitable suitors.  Jewish traffickers would procure women under the pretext of marriage (often a secret stille khuppe that wouldn’t hold up in a court of law), offering girls greater economic ease and a better life in London (or the US, South America, and South Africa). Once there they would be sold to brothels or forced into prostitution, powerless to help themselves. They were easy victims: often from religious homes, they were innocent of worldly matters and unable to speak English.

The trafficking didn’t only take place abroad.  Fishman describes the men ready at the dockside to take advantage of unaccompanied young women:

…young men were employed to pick up lonely girls embarking at the dockside and inveigle them to a place of refuge, which soon revealed itself as a brothel …Virginity being regarded as sacrosanct before marriage, the fallen woman could find no redemption but to sink deeper into the morass of prostitution.

Jewish trafficking was an embarrassment to the Jewish community who wanted to keep it out of the media, particularly concerned it would be seized upon by anti-Semites (as indeed it was by journalist and agitator Arnold White, among others). The situation, however, was made public by organisations set up to protect and support the women such as The Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women (JAPGW). Set up in 1885 by women from leading London Jewish families, JAPGW set out to protect women and reduce the trade by publicising its existence and making communities aware of the dangers. Lloyd Gartner writes that as early as 1890 there were notices printed in Jewish newspapers on the continent ‘warning young girls from leaving their homes by the advice of strangers or under the care of strangers’. The JAPGW made their presence felt at the dockside, boarding ships to find women travelling alone or with male non-family members.  They would escort women to their addresses, and if these addresses were suspicious, they would offer protection. Criminologist Paul Knepper credits the JAPGW as ‘the most visible Jewish anti-crime organisation in Great Britain and the model for initiatives in Jewish communities across the world’.

Although the East End was London’s largest Jewish community, the sisters in Winchevsky’s song go to the West End to work. Soho, a notorious area for prostitution, was a wealthier area with businessmen and foreign visitors. Writer Bernard Kops, in his memoir The World is a Wedding, recalls the kindness of his neighbour in the 1930s:

A woman who lived nearby sometimes brought us in potatoes. She worked ‘Up West’ my mother told me —‘Up West’ was that fabulous world beyond, our Eldorado. It was only years later that I guessed what sort of work the woman did — for who in the buildings could afford to give their neighbours potatoes in those days?

I learned Dray Shvester at London Klezfest in 2006 from Karsten Troyke, a charismatic German Yiddish folk singer who found the song on a 1961 recording by the Buenos Aires Yiddish actress Cipe Lincovsky. I later learned from Cipe that Helene Weigel (widow of Bertolt Brecht and then director of his theatre) gave her the lyrics. According to Weigel, Brecht loved the song because the sisters do not judge their sister but blame society for forcing her into prostitution.

According to the elderly Jewish Londoners I interviewed, girls were vulnerable up until as late as the 1940s and warned not to enter the Jewish gown shops in Oxford Street, as they could ‘take you into the back room and sell you to the white slave trade.’ Not all Jewish East End prostitution was a result of white slave trafficking. There were times when wome became prostitutes of their own volition, supplementing their tiny incomes when necessary. Historian Lara Marks has recounted how frequently a Jewish woman would follow her husband to London only to find he had disappeared or started a new family, leaving her an agunah, a deserted wife, unable to get the divorce needed by Jewish law as it had to be given by the husband. The Jewish charities would pay to track down the husband, but not to support the wife. Whichever way Jewish women turned, they met with discrimination.  As they lacked charitable support and were faced with a menial existence in the labour market, prostitution could seem an attractive alternative. German Jewish feminist movement, the Judischer Frauenbund, in 1904, considered prostitution as a non-choice, akin to the ‘voluntary-ness’ of a young foreign legionnaire who had no idea what he was getting himself into. Pappenheim became an outspoken activist in the fight against the white slave trade. Historian Marion Kaplan describes the attitude of the Judischer Frauenbund to the enslaved women, whether enslaved by pimps or by poverty.

She writes:

It was not unusual for Jewish feminists to view prostitutes as white slaves even if no traffickers were implicated. One Judischer Frauenbund member pointed to inadequate housing or to poverty as ‘the real trafficker’.

But comic songwriters often bypassed reality, turning instead to escapism and humour. The song Victoria Park is set in a park just north of the East End dubbed the ‘lungs of London’ when it opened in 1850. In his famous novel ‘Children of the Ghetto’, Israel Zangwill describes it as ‘the park to the ghetto’ where Eastenders would flock on shabbes and holidays. The song portrays an assortment of curiouys characters hanging around the park. Yudke and Rachel, he with one shoe and she with one sock, immigrants looking for a job, a thick necked porter, red Benny and poxy Fanny. And amongst these characters we have a rousing chorus of:

Dort geyt Khay’ite a moyd fun Lite / Zi iz di drite, zi voynt in City.

There goes Khayite from Lithuania, she is the third, lives in the City.

This has double meanings similar to Kops’ ‘Up West’, and when Bertha Jackson sang this song, she interpreted this line as a euphemism for working as a prostitute. Jackson, who was born in Liverpool in 1888, learned the song at the age of eight from her uncle, a travelling salesman. Eighty-two years later, Derek Reid, poet and folklorist, recorded her singing the song, which must date back to some time before 1897. To underline this point, the melody of the chorus is is a famous square dance called Little Redwing, whose lyrics are coarse, graphic and misogynist.

An old ex-Eastender friend chanted to me, at full speed, as if he was davening, the words to the comic song, Sadie iz a Lady. It builds an idyllic picture of shtetl life and then relocates to East Stepney:

East Stepney, East Stepney, vu di libe iz tzebrent Un yeder Sadie iz a lady, un yeder Sam a gent East Stepney, East Stepney where love has burned, and every Sadie is a lady and every Sam a gent.

The line ‘Sadie is a lady and Sam a gent’, implies an upward mobility, but the rhyme coming after the first line exposes it as another coy allusion to prostitution, with the double entendre adding the comic twist. The rhyme ‘Sadie’ and ‘Lady’ was often used in songs such as Mayn Fair Sadie (a parody of ‘My Fair Lady’) and Johnny Bond’s 1961 country song, Sadie was the Lady. There is Barbara Streisand’s 1964 Sadie, Married Lady from the musical ‘Funny Girl’. John Farnham in 1967 sang Sadie Cleaning Lady (with dancing cleaning girls, rabbit tails and mini-aprons). But most important, with film versions in 1932 and 1953, is the 1930 Somerset Maugham story of a prostitute, Sadie Thompson.  The name Sadie, popular in the East End, sometimes a nickname for Sarah, had associations for Eastenders I interviewed, including a song sung to me by Ruth:

Sadie was a lady, and all the money was spent. She spent

it here, she spent it there…

A ‘Sadie’ was described as a ‘yachne’, a ‘busybody’, a ‘right Jewish girl’, an ‘outcast woman’, a ‘woman going off the rails’. Solly, a 95-year-old ex-tailor, explained that ‘Sadie’ was used as a nickname for a fellinghand, the lowest woman in the clothing industry who would sew buttonholes.  These songs reveal a hidden social history, one missing from the more formal accounts of East End Jewish life. Through their informal, often humourous, descriptions, these songs confer a lost dignity on their subjects while shining a light into the darker recesses of Jewish life in the East End. Yiddish songs and Jewish prostitution may seem unlikely bedfellows. Yet through their wry humour, intense sadness, and anger, these songs brought Jewish audiences face to face with their own hardship in a typically bittersweet celebration.

References:

Bristow, Edward . J. Prostitution and Prejudice: Jewish Fight Against White Slavery, 1870 – 1939. (1982) Clarendon, Oxford Fishman, William J. East End Jewish Radicals 1875 – 1914.  (1975) London: Duckworth.

Gartner, Lloyd P. Anglo-Jewry and the Jewish International Traffic in Prostitution, 1885–1914 in Association of Jewish Studies Review (1982), 7 : 129-178 Cambridge University Press Kaplan, Marion. Prostitution, Morality Crusades and Feminism:

German-Jewish Feminists and the Campaign Against White Slavery in Women’s Studies International Forum (1982)

Knepper, Paul. British Jews and the Racialisation of Crime in the Age of Empire in The British Journal of Criminology (2007), 47(1): 61-79.

Kops, Bernard. The World is a Wedding. From By the Waters of Whitechapel (2006)

Marks, Lara, ‘Race, Class and Gender: The Experience of Jewish Prostitutes and Other Jewish Women in the East End of London at the Turn of the Century’, in Women, Migration and Empire, ed. Joan Grant (1996) 31-50 Trentham books Zangwill, Israel. 1892 Children of the Ghetto: A Study of a Peculiar People.

Klezmer Klub’s CD ‘Whitechapel, mayn Vaytshepl – Yiddish songs of London’ www.klezmerklub.co.uk

Vivi Lachs is the singer with the band Klezmer Klub. She is researching Yiddish songs of London and the social histories they contain.  She gives illustrated talks, concerts and also leads Klezmer dancing at simchas. She studies Yiddish and Her real job is working in education in Hackney.

Anyone knowing a Yiddish song about any aspect of London or England, however small, please email vivilachs@gmail.com

What this self-mockery belied was a profound connection to Jewish tradition, one that characterised and influenced Dylan’s entire oeuvre. His work stems from the ancient tradition of Jewish prophecy. The prophet, or navi, was a truth-teller to and an admonisher of his people: literally, a ‘proclaimer.’ The Prophets, whose sermons and declarations are collected in the biblical books of Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and others, were, in a sense, social critics—the original protest singers, if you will. They warned against backsliding, immorality and lawbreaking and foretold the bloody consequences of this behaviour. The torah of Dylan and the Torah of Moses share many overlaps: in the book of Prophets, Ezekiel recounts a vision of angels: ‘The soles of their feet… their appearance was like fiery coals, burning like torches’ [Ezekiel 1:7, 13]. In ‘The Wicked Messenger,’ a song about a scorned prophet from his 1967 album, John Wesley Harding, Dylan sings, ‘The soles of my feet, I swear they’re burning.’ In Exodus 33:20, G-d warns Moses, ‘No human can see my face and live’ a warning repeated in the chorus of ‘I and I,’ on the 1983 album, Infidels:

I and I

One says to the other

No man sees my face and lives.

Dylan’s echoing of this encounter between G-d and Moses also references the ‘I-Thou’ theology of Martin Buber, to whose work Dylan was reportedly introduced years earlier by his manager, Albert Grossman. The song paints a bleak portrait of absolute alienation: the narrator is alone even when he’s with a sleeping lover (‘if she wakes up now, she’ll just want me to talk/ I got nothin’ to say, ’specially about whatever was’); he goes out for a walk and concludes ‘Not much happenin’ here/ Nothin’ ever does’ and sees a train platform ‘with nobody in sight’; and he contemplates the end of the world (‘The world could come to an end tonight, but that’s all right’). Yet through all the emptiness he perseveres—‘I’m still pushin’ myself along the road, the darkest part’—towards the world, holding on to Buber’s teaching, ‘One who truly meets the world goes out also to God.’

Consciously or not, Bob Dylan’s use of the modes of Jewish prophetic discourse as one of his primary means of communication, determine not just the content of his songs but also his style of delivery, which is closer to declaiming rather than melodic singing. The vocals on his live albums from the 1970s (Before the Flood, Hard Rain, and Live 1975: The Rolling Thunder Revue) are positively stentorian, underscoring his relationship to his audience, whom he never wooed but chided and provoked: You who philosophise, disgrace, and criticise all fears Take the rag away from your face/ Now ain’t the time for your tears.  (‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’)

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It peaked in particularly dramatic fashion just before the Russian Revolution. Less than 5 percent of the total Russian population at that time, Jews numbered over 50 percent of the students at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, a demographic feat that produced its own commentary. Students joked that it was the only school in the Russian Empire with a quota for non-Jewish students. In Odessa the situation reached a point of absurdity. With over 80 percent of the student body Jewish, in 1916 the Conservatory officials reacted by launching a novel affirmative action scholarship program for ethnic Russians. Of course, Jewish visibility in a bitterly antisemitic regime had an obvious downside. Charges of Jewish opportunism were common, particularly since a conservatory degree provided a draft deferment and a legal pathway out of the Pale of Settlement. Professional antisemites, such as the music critic Emil Medtner, a leading member of the Russian symbolist movement, spoke darkly of a plague of ‘little Jew boys from Lodz’ ruining Russian and European music with their ‘Asiatic’ and ‘barbarous’ ways. Even well-meaning friends were liable to resort to specious racial explanations for the preponderance of Jewish musical talent. The Russian composer Alexander Scriabin once declared that without Jews, ‘music would die out.’ Yet, he went on to explain that this talent stemmed from the biologically feminine character of the Jewish race, which predisposed them to more sensitive, lyrical instruments: ‘For an orchestra to sound right,’ he confided to a colleague, ‘it must have no less than 15 percent Jews in the string and horn sections.’

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Now an international phenomenon, the orchestra began life as a small-scale series of music workshops, put together in 1999 to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Goethe’s birth. As part of Weimar’s programme of ‘Cultural Capital of Europe’ events, Barenboim was asked to establish a workshop to bring together young musicians from across the Middle East. With the support and interest of Said, Barenboim invited applications from players in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Israel. The response was overwhelming. Speaking at the 2006 Reith lectures, Barenboim recounts:
‘We expected to have a small forum of maybe eight or twelve young people who would come and make music together and spend a week or ten days at a workshop with us, so you can imagine the surprise we had when there were over two hundred applicants from the Arab world alone.’ Twenty-five young musicians attended, alongside a number of established, high-profile performers including cellist Yo-Yo Ma. The workshops comprised chamber music lessons and master classes, and an orchestra that performed Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. The name West-Eastern Divan was given, chosen after Goethe’s 1819 collection of poems (the Westöstlicher Diwan) inspired by the fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz.
The Weimar ‘experiment’, as Said and Barenboim termed the first workshop in Parallels and Paradoxes, was expressly not designed as ‘an alternative way of making peace’. Rather, Said suggested, ‘the idea was to see what would happen if you brought these people together to play in an orchestra in Weimar, in the spirit of Goethe, who wrote a fantastic collection of poems based on his enthusiasm for Islam.’ Said held that, just as Goethe’s poetry entered into an open dialogue with a cultural ‘other’, so such a workshop enabled participants to explore and traverse those boundaries engendered by difference in nationality, background and political stance: ‘no one felt under any pressure to hold things back. And since the groups were so miscellaneous, both animosity and cordiality were almost always in evidence.’ Barenboim likewise views the venture as creating a new channel of communication and cooperation between assumed antagonists. Speaking in his 2006 Reith lectures, Barenboim states categorically that ‘the orchestra cannot bring peace.’ However, he proposes it can ‘bring understanding. It can awaken the curiosity, and then perhaps the courage, to listen to the narrative of the other, and at the very least accept its legitimacy.’ Music, and specifically the orchestral experience, is celebrated as the ideal vehicle for open interaction. On describing a young Syrian and young Israeli musician sharing a music stand, Barenboim suggests ‘they were trying to play the same note, to play with the same dynamic, with the same stroke of the bow. They were trying to do something together, something about which they both cared… Well, having achieved that one note, they can’t look at each other the same way, they have shared a common experience.’
The potency of this image and its accompanying rhetoric—young Arab and Israeli musicians working as one, letting music soar across political adversity—was not lost on the orchestra’s European hosts. What had been created as a one-off workshop was quickly established (and funded) as a touring orchestra, formed of up to 120 permanent players, drawn from across the Middle East—Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan—and other Muslim countries including Egypt, Iran and Turkey. Since 2002, the regional government of Andalusia has sponsored the group and provides a fixed base for the orchestra in Seville, a development that has led to the inclusion of young Spanish musicians in the ensemble. The orchestra now meets each summer and rehearses in the city before launching an international tour, which often includes live television broadcasts, stadia appearances and recording deals. The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra’s blend of musical excellence and apparently humanitarian vision has proved a heady mix for liberal European audiences, provoking intense, proselytising excitement among commentators. In response to the orchestra’s various BBC Proms appearances over the past seven years, UK critics have praised the group with a particularly emotive quality of endorsement. Reviews have applauded the orchestra as an ‘astonishingly moving act of creative coexistence’, claiming ‘there is an extra power of passion and motive, of music meaning something’ and that the orchestra’s ‘magic derives from the unique chemistry between its members, its charismatic creator, and the political tragedy to which it is a defiant response’.
Indeed, the idea that the orchestra is uniquely vibrant through a connection to ‘political tragedy’ has been a source of contention for more critical accounts of the orchestra. Some accounts have charged the orchestra with impeding Palestinian solidarity on the international stage through its normalisation of Palestinian-Israeli interaction. Other studies have examined the orchestra’s ideological position by exploring what the ensemble actually offers its players. Various scholars working alongside the orchestra have concluded from their fieldwork that the ensemble seems driven more by young musicians hungry for an opportunity to play professionally (and under the gleaming baton of Barenboim) than by any will to build bridges through music or explore the ‘other’. Indeed, the composer and political activist Raymond Dean has drawn attention to the published collection of West-Eastern Divan player testimonies, An Orchestra Without Borders, noting that the orchestra appears to have done little to enhance the Israeli musicians’ insight into the political realities surrounding them. He suggests, ‘the impression ultimately gleaned from Arabs and Israelis alike is that the real glue binding these young people together is ambition… In itself, of course, there is nothing reprehensible about this—but it is a far cry from stylising the orchestra as an exemplary space of reconciliation and understanding.’

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So wrote the Geneva-born composer, Ernest Bloch (1880-1959) about his Jewish Cycle in 1917. Within two years, he had moved from a Jewish aesthetic to a Far Eastern aesthetic, as seen in his  Viola Suite, composed in New York in 1919:

My Suite does not belong to my so-called ‘Jewish works’ — though, perhaps, in spite of myself, one may perceive in a very few places a certain Jewish inspiration. It is rather a vision of the Far East … that inspired me … Java, Sumatra, Borneo, those wonderful countries I dreamed of so often though I was never fortunate enough to visit them myself in any other way than in my imagination.

What had transformed the Jew who wrote Jewish music, because this was the only way he could achieve vitality and significance, into a visionary South East Asian pentatonicist?
The surname Bloch originally indicated a ‘foreigner from the West’. When the Jews of Alsace moved to Germany in the Middle Ages, they were given the name Welsch. This became transformed, in the 13th and 14th centuries, into Wallach, Wallack, Wloch, Vlach, Block, and Bloch, as persecutions drove the Jews back and forth between Eastern and Western Europe. Though there are earlier references, the first direct ancestor of Ernest Bloch so far discovered was cited in a document found in Stühlingen in South West Germany in 1732: this was Abraham, Ernest’s great-great-great-grandfather. What seems significant here is that, although Bloch’s music has often been considered exotic and oriental, his maternal and paternal forbears were Western Ashkenazim over many generations.
In the mid-19th century, Bloch’s grandfather Isaak Josef was a celebrated ba‘al tefillah (lay-cantor) in the synagogue in the North Swiss village of Lengnau and President of its Jewish community. Bloch’s father Meier (also known as Moritz and, later, Maurice) had been a chorister in the Lengnau Synagogue and, at one time, considered entering the Rabbinate; but he went into business instead. Originally pious, he became outspokenly agnostic, but practised traditional rituals and took his family to the Geneva Synagogue, especially during the High Holidays. Ernest often wrote and spoke affectionately of his memories of Friday evenings  and Seder services at home, but indignantly of synagogal and communal behaviour: men reading the newspapers in shul on Yom Kippur, and the contemptuous treatment some members of the community meted out to poor Hasidic Jews from Eastern Europe. Bloch learned Hebrew and cantillation for his Bar Mitzvah in 1893, but lost all visible contact with Judaism for a considerable period thereafter. He had very few Jewish friends; and his student years in Geneva (1894-6), Brussels (1896-9),  Frankfurt (1899-1901),  Munich (1901-3), and Paris (1903-4) were spent far away from any Jewish milieu. In 1904, he married Margarethe (later Marguerite) Schneider, a fellow student from Frankfurt days, daughter of prosperous German-Lutheran parents who lived in Hamburg.
The year 1906 saw the surfacing of one of many apparently contradictory dualities in Bloch’s life. On the one hand, his then mentor and confidant, the well known French critic Robert Godet, persuaded him to buy a life-size Crucifix (which Bloch kept all his life). In the same year, only two years after his marriage to Marguerite, Bloch wrote to his close friend and librettist, the great Parisian author and playwright, Edmond Fleg:

My dear friend … I have read the Bible — I have read fragments about Moses. And an immense sense of pride has been surging within me! My entire being reverberated. It is a revelation … I could not continue reading, for I was afraid. Yes, Fleg, I was afraid of discovering too much of myself, of feeling everything which had gradually accumulated, glued to me, fall away in one sudden blow; of finding myself naked … within this entire past which lives inside me, of standing erect as a Jew, proudly Jewish … We must see to it that everything which has a Jewish soul is conscious of the grandeur and destiny of this race…  While reading certain passages, I almost regretted having only music to speak with; but Jews do listen to music. Yes, Fleg, this idea must enlighten us both; it is perhaps for this reason that we met.

How are we to reconcile this vigorously expressed awakening of Jewish identity with the purchase of a Crucifix? Bloch explained that, though he admired the teachings of Jesus, he regarded Christianity as a ‘failure’, and interpreted Jesus on the Cross as the figure of a ‘betrayed Jew’, a metaphor with which he was personally to identify, not least as a result of his experience with Robert Godet, which he described as ‘the greatest tragedy  . . .  in my life’, and of whom he wrote:

It was Godet who attracted my attention to the unconscious Jewishness in my music. He was the greatest anti-Semite, who translated [Houston Stuart Chamberlain’s     Foundations of the 19th Century], the book that made Hitler … and was my best and deepest friend for ten years…

Although Bloch wrote letters to numerous relatives and friends about the potential for expressing a Jewish ethos in his music during his mid-late 20s and early 30s, only two out of a total of over a hundred formal lectures on music, given by Bloch at the Geneva Conservatoire and elsewhere, prior to his settling in America, were devoted to Jewish music per se. Neither lecture has ever been published. The first is a meditation on the problem of the Jewish arts in general, as experienced through his work with Fleg, with few allusions to music. The second is a commentary on a slim volume by Emil Breslaur, the German-Jewish scholar and choirmaster, entitled Can the Synagogue and Folk Melodies of the Jews be Proved to be Historically Authentic? This book, according to Bloch’s elder daughter, Suzanne, was the only publication on Jewish music that Bloch read prior to his departure for the USA. Both lectures are vague in terms of definition. We may summarise their joint contents as follows: Bloch says that he listens to an inner voice; he eschews ‘nationalism’ and what he calls ‘deformed’ folk themes. He denies the authenticity of Jewish melos as it exists in his own time, because of the absorption of foreign elements from host nations; and it is Gregorian Chant that he sees as a direct descendant of Temple Chant. There are references to Jews in music such as Dukas, Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, Rubinstein, and Mahler. Why he adds Bruch, Ravel, Saint-Saëns and Wagner to his list is not made clear. What is apparent from these lectures, however, is an emerging pattern of ambivalence to the society around him, the pain of alienation and antisemitism, tensions between the internal world of spirituality and the external world of identity, and vacillations between confidence and insecurity.
But if his lectures contain no precise definitions of Jewish music, he defines himself unambiguously as a Jewish composer in the seven works of the Jewish Cycle (1911-16), six of which were later published by G. Schirmer: Trois Poèmes Juifs (composed in 1913); Deux Psaumes 137 et 114, Précédés d’un Prélude Orchestral (1912-14); Psaume 22 (1914); Israel Symphony (1912-16);  Schelomo – Rapsodie Hébraïque (1916); and the String Quartet No.1 (1916 — sometimes referred to as the ‘Hebrew Quartet’). All are highly charged epics, either in terms of length (the string quartet lasts 50 minutes), or in terms of the vast orchestral forces required. There are solo roles in Psalms 137 and 114 for soprano, and in Psalm 22 for baritone; two sopranos, two altos, and one bass in Israel; and cello in Schelomo. In addition, there is an unfinished and unpublished biblical opera entitled Jézabel, which occupied Bloch for over twenty years (c.1904 to the mid-1920s) and which, in a sense, generated all the published works of the Cycle.
In my doctoral research, I have scrutinised the six published works of the Cycle for traditional Jewish elements (ta’amei hammiqra — accents of biblical recitation, nusach — cantorial modality, shofar calls, etc.) as set down in eighteen carefully selected written sources of liturgical music. Bloch admitted to utilising only one traditional tune in his entire Cycle, namely, what I discovered to be the South West German High Holiday chant for the text Uvechen ten pachdecha (variants having been notated by Abraham Baer, Samuel Naumbourg, and Salomon Sulzer, in their respective anthologies), which appears at the beginning of the middle section of Schelomo.
But there are also hundreds of more subtly and unconsciously incorporated motifs and their metamorphoses which Bloch may have absorbed from his father’s singing and from the music of the Geneva Synagogue which he attended as a child: not only the melodic and rhythmic contours themselves, but also the distinctive, deep formal structures of cantillation and cantorial recitatives.
Bloch claimed he was composing Jewish music out of himself: ‘It is not my purpose, not my desire, to attempt a “reconstitution” of Jewish music, or to base my work on melodies more or less authentic,’ he wrote in 1917, the year of many such pronouncements. He continued: ‘I am not an archaeologist … It is the Jewish soul that interests me, the complex, glowing, agitated soul, that I feel vibrating throughout the Bible.’
Extraordinary it is, then, to discover that, in the very same year, he had already started to conduct research in the New York Public Library and, within a short time, had sifted through all the volumes of the 1901-1906 Jewish Encyclopedia, writing down almost all of Rev. Francis L. Cohen’s transcriptions of traditional tunes in an unpublished manuscript book which bears the title: Chants Juifs. This paradox gives rise to many questions: Is the volume of Chants Juifs surely not ‘archaeology’? Why this volte-face, which contradicted Bloch’s otherwise passionately held principles? Was his inward search for Jewish inspiration losing momentum? Had it, by 1918, been largely abandoned? Was all this a response to what he perceived to be the philosemitic atmosphere of New York, which he had encountered for the first time in 1916, and then again when he brought his family with him to settle in the following year? Was it because, now having achieved success and celebrity status in New York, he had no further use for a label that he had needed in the Old World in his struggle for survival and recognition as a composer, conductor, and educator?
The Jewish Cycle received its final coup-de-grâce in April 1918 as a result of what Bloch described, in his letters to his mother Sophie and to Fleg, as ‘perhaps the strangest experience in my life.’ He had been invited to an unspecified Hasidic community on the Lower East Side of Manhattan for a Sabbath morning service at the end of Passover. He paints a vivid picture of the bare room, the 50-60 male congregants of all ages from Poland and Galicia, their poverty, their genuine piety, and how moved he is when the Rabbi bestows upon him the Priestly Blessing. ‘And what music’, he exclaims:

Neither organ, nor instruments, nor choir. Everyone his own orchestra. . . Everything was vibrant, living, creating an extraordinary atmosphere. I dissolved with emotion…I assure you that my music seems to me a very poor little thing beside that which I heard. You will understand everything that this experience means for me. It’s a great joy. It’s also extreme sorrow; for my life has been split in two. I would have been able, as a single man, to plunge myself into this Truth, even at my age, letting it live anew in me, and creating a formidable work, linking this granite past to the present, to the future … Alas, alas, I can’t … Everything separates me from it, my wife, my children… and my whole life. It’s a great tragedy. . . All that will remain is the shadow of what I could have been.

The crunch had come: the trauma of the two Blochs — the ‘ideal’ and the ‘real’ — finally confronting each other. The one yearned for the intensely observant Jewish life that he had never truly experienced; the other lived and participated in the wider world. Since he could not attain the ‘ideal’, he would have to settle, reluctantly, for the ‘real’; but this produced an inner conflict that was never fully resolved.
Bloch, one could argue, ceased to be a ‘Jewish Composer’ at the very moment he became an ‘archaeologist’. Many of his subsequent Jewish works involved the conscious use of ethnic materials. Two will suffice to exemplify this: Abodah (God’s Worship): a Yom Kippur melody for violin and piano (1929) is an almost note-for-note transcription of the Vehakkohanim chant from the Jewish Encyclopedia; and Suite Hébraïque for violin (or viola) and piano (or orchestra) (1951) contains five traditional tunes from the same source, according to a sheet in Bloch’s own handwriting. Bloch had now become a ‘composer of Jewish music’ alongside other musics. Indeed, the non-Jewish works that he wrote after the Cycle saw the lively incorporation of Gregorian Chant; Swiss, American, and Far-Eastern folk melodies and styles; Renaissance, Neoclassical, Neoromantic, and, very occasionally, Serial idioms. Despite all these complexities and contradictions, the ethos and essences of the Cycle were the abiding qualities that permeated Bloch’s later works, and represent his unique and significant contribution to twentieth-century music.

Michael Haas is also Director of the JMI International Centre for Suppressed Music (ICSM) President Sir Simon Rattle.