Ethnogenesis and the Interrelationship of Musical Repertoires Among the Jews of Eastern Europe

Abstract

Abstract:I will attempt to integrate my remarks about the musical creativity of the East Ashkenazim in response to recent historical paradigms about the Jewish people worldwide. The key concept is the distinction between the many numerically small and geographically local "embedded" Jewish communities, as opposed to the much larger and geographically widespread Jewish cultures, which can be defined as "transnational." Since the later sixteenth century only two such transnational Jewish cultures existed—the Ashkenazim and the Sephardim. The Ashkenazim of Eastern Europe constituted the largest portion of the Jewish people in modern times, and their musical creativity shows far deeper internal connections and developments than that of any other Jewish ethnos. Through recent linguistic research into the origin of the Yiddish language, plus musicological paradigms addressing genre, musical articulation, intonatsia, and "ethno-hearing," I will suggest how these facts and concepts can help to explain the saliant musical patterns of the East Ashkenazic Jews.