Hebrew Writing on National Music 1880–1930: An Anthology in Translation

Abstract

This project presents an anthology in English translation of Hebrew-language writings on music by four authors—Zvi Nissan Golomb, Abraham Ber Birnbaum, Abraham Zvi Idelsohn, and Aharon Leib Bisko—published between the 1880s and the 1920s. Emerging during the revival of Hebrew as a modern language, these writings offer a distinctive perspective on the relationship between music, language, and Jewish national identity. They reveal bold, if sometimes idiosyncratic, attempts to establish a Hebrew musical terminology for polemics on Jewish folk music and proposals for reshaping musical theory and instruments in accordance with Jewish cultural identity, as it was perceived by the various authors. The accompanying introduction situates these texts within the broader history of Hebrew music publishing and examines the challenges of establishing a sustained theoretical discourse in a revived language, particularly in the absence of a sufficiently developed readership and a stable technical vocabulary. It also explores the contrasting ways in which the four authors negotiate the universal claims of music theory and the ideological demands of national revival. Their writings reveal a striking intellectual freedom, in which national and cultural aspirations permeate not only their arguments but also their terminology, literary forms, and choice of subjects. Read alongside the more professionally institutionalized Hebrew music literature that emerged following the immigration of German-speaking Jews to Palestine in the 1930s, these early texts illuminate an intellectually radical moment in the history of Jewish musical thought.