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Chapter 2 traverses the year of Israeli statehood to discuss the emergence and dilution of Zionist musical onomatopoeias (citations of Jewish folk or liturgical music filtered through a post-romantic musical vocabulary under the purview of nationalism), their social hierarchies, and the separatist mechanism that enabled them. Surveying parallel developments in modern Hebrew literature and poetry, this chapter analyses the gradual disillusionment with romanticism through the usurping linear compositional devices that upset the relegation of Arab Jewish music to “pre-modern” or “religious” (and accordingly the need for a Western “correcting” hand) in an attempt to portray a non-romantic East in keeping with contemporary serial techniques. Composers’ disillusionment with romanticist Zionism accelerated the turn to the linear musical properties of Arab Jewish music that gradually severed art music from its national function. The chapter concludes by assessing the ways in which composers departed (or were unable to depart) from the eschatology embedded in the Zionist discourse.

Unfolding the dialectical processes that connect the three central chapters of the book—from modern Jewish art music in Europe through its migration to Mandatory Palestine and to the post-statehood dynamism of Israeli art music—the introduction displays the book’s main themes: the regime of representation in the post-Wagnerian era and its affect on Jewish composers in Europe, the historiography of modern Jewish art music, art music within and outside of the Wastern–European soundscape, ideological pressures in the Jewish community of Palestine, occidental imageries of Arab Jewish Music and its social hierarchies in the Yishuv and Israel, the theological undercurrents of the Zionist discourse, linear (serial) compositional devices and their weakening of national romanticist musical edifices in Hebrew culture, and the reemergence and reconfiguration of Jewish topoi in Israeli art music of the 1960s and 1970s. An additional discussion explicates the book’s methodology and theoretical framework.

Chapter 1 discusses music by and about Jews in early twentieth-century Europe, and the ways that Jews have grappled with the musical stereotypes that spelled their “otherness.” While persistently engaged with a foreign view of Jewish culture, assimilated and estranged Jewish composers became more familiar with the exoticism attributed to Jews in Western art music than with the actual sounds coming from Jewish vernacular traditions or from the synagogue. Unfolding the continuum of Jewish composers haunted by the Wagnerian regime of representation and the noisy tropes associated with musical Judaism, the chapter includes a discussion on Ernest Bloch, Arnold Schoenberg, Erich W. Sternberg, and Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco and their perceptions of the “Jewish East” (either Eastern Europe and/or Palestine). As most Jewish and non-Jewish composers gravitated to the Eastern European soundscape, musicological historiography followed suit and focused mainly on composers who drew on this inventory. Decentering of the Eastern European soundscape through the above-mentioned case studies serves the double function of underscoring the various importations of Jewish musics silenced by musicological historiographies and the mapping of the emerging habitat in Palestine and later Israel.

The postlude discusses the non-differential proliferation of modern Jewish art music in Europe, Mandatory Palestine, and Israel, and the collapse of the mechanism that nationalized the theological in Hebrew culture. The gradual usurping of linear compositional devices exposed the theological undercurrents of the Zionist project that had outgrown the secular space allocated to them in the Hebrewist discourse. Within the different rhythms responding to Hebrewism and dismantling it from within, only the simultaneity of adjacency and oppositionality could signal a break away from the dominant national-ideological discourse that still remained the beaten sounding board of modern Hebrew literature and poetry in the 1970s. Eventually, once the gap between messianism and redemption had been narrowed in the 1970s, Hebrewism in its socialist and statist modes appears as a short-lived project while its demise uncovers a network of Jewish contiguities that inspired the Hebrewist core but ultimately upstaged it.