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In an essay entitled “Aladdin's Lamp” and published on the occasion of the edition of An-sky's The Jewish Artistic Heritage, Abram Markovich Efros, a leading Russian art critic, described a form of neonationalism. It was a creative combination of folk art and modernism in which the supposed authenticity of folk art lent stylistic credentials to modernist art. In the debates about the sources of Jewish art music, an opposition was similarly constructed between the near past and ancient times, between the Oriental-sounding Yiddish folk music and the less Orientally colored sacred music that, many believed, was historically traceable to Biblical times. In this new phase of Jewish art music, kuchkist preoccupation with folk music as an expression of national identity was replaced with a neonationalist orientation, in which national musical sources were abstracted.

Leonid Sabaneyev, like other historians of Jewish music, identified the origin of Jewish art music with the foundation of the Society for Jewish Folk Music—Obshchestvo Yevreyskoy Narodnoy Muzïki (OYNM) in St. Petersburg in 1908. The OYNM was an association of professional musicians and music lovers who sought to purvey Jewish music, both secular and sacred, to audiences both Jewish and non-Jewish. This chapter examines how the political vagaries within the Jewish national movement strongly affected the emergence and development of Jewish cultural organizations. The Russian nationalist model was crucial in turning the OYNM from an organization for the preservation and popularization of Jewish musical culture into a funnel for the creation of specifically Jewish art music. Ironically, the music written by composers whose ambition was to become the Mighty Band of Jewish music emulated their Russian models not only in technical details, but also in their willing embrace of stereotypes of Russian composers, exploited to depict the Oriental others, among them Jews.

This chapter focuses on a specific group of eighteenth-century wooden synagogues — labelled the Gwoździec–Chodorów group — within their east European context. It identifies the architectural ideas and building traditions which generated these synagogues, and particularly to emphasize the role of ideas from Jewish sources and from the Jewish community in this process. This entails investigating all phases of building development, including sponsorship, inspiration, liturgy, design, construction, and painting, and then differentiating between non-Jewish east European sources and sources from the local and the broader Jewish community. The role of Jewish ideas requires careful differentiation because their influence on the architecture of the synagogues has been so loosely assumed and insufficiently documented in current scholarship. The chapter then suggests that the explosion of interest in kabbalah in Jewish society during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries may have informed the architecture of the synagogues.

This chapter is devoted to the question as to whether Jews have imagination — namely, whether they have the creativity to produce works of art. In short, the chapter argues that there is a corpus of literary and artistic work created by Jews, which encompasses works of art and literature of all types and reveals a vast and copious creative imagination. However, during the nineteenth century, a different image prevailed, as a popular notion emerged which painted Jews as being without imagination. The chapter stresses that these anti-Jewish notions were even accepted by some Jewish writers. These notions become even clearer when the Jewish mind is contrasted with the Greek mind.

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.

This chapter considers who or what makes a Jewish artist. The issue is one that art historians and artists alike have debated for many years. Defining what is and is not Jewish art has continued to be a troubling issue — more so for how it relates to Arthur Szyk's work in particular. Though Szyk considered himself a Jewish artist and Jewish art and subject-matter extensively permeated his life and work, he is curiously absent from most discussions of twentieth-century Jewish artists. His work focused on Jewish subjects far more than most of the artists who have been included in that discourse. The chapter thus makes the case for Szyk's inclusion in the realm of Jewish art discourse.

This chapter focuses on the expansion of the Jewish press, the development of a lively Jewish art and music scene, and the strengthening of the interfaith movement. It discloses the creation of a wide variety of journals of differing Zionist, literary, and religious orientations that marked an important change in contemporary French Jewish life. It also investigates the journals that served as a vehicle to discuss new developments in the Jewish associational and cultural life of the day and provided a forum to discuss diverse aspects of Jewish culture and history. The chapter discusses the prominence of Jewish artists in the international Ecole de Paris as another important development in Jewish cultural life during the 1920s. It also describes French Jews that formed musical societies and choruses to perform Jewish music, from traditional religious compositions to Yiddish folk songs, in public settings.

This chapter covers the period after Arthur Szyk's departure from Poland. He left the country for multiple reasons, both political and artistic, and came to settle in Paris by 1921. There was a thriving Polish Jewish artistic community in the region, although Szyk soon began to distinguish himself from them. Despite building close relationships with many of his fellow Jewish artists, Szyk differed from them in several significant ways — most visibly in style and subject matter. All of the artists among whom Szyk moved worked in some variation of contemporary artistic trends. Szyk, on the other hand, while maintaining a professional place within this milieu, eschewed the contemporary approaches and experiments of his colleagues and friends, preferring to look to history for his inspiration and seeking to convey a message rather than to produce art for its own sake. He also focused extensively on Jewish subject matter. The chapter explores his growing artistic fame during this period, including the first of his governmental honours conferred upon him during his artistic career.

This chapter focuses on Jerzy Malinowski's Malarstwo i rzeźba Żydów polskich w XIX i XX wieku (The Painting and Sculpture of Polish Jews in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries). Among the men Jerzy Malinowski, an authority on Polish art and Polish Jewish culture, discusses are many unknown or virtually unknown artists. He begins his story in the mid-nineteenth century with the appearance of the first Polish artists of Jewish origin, of whom Aleksander Lesser was the most important. This was an easy decision, but other decisions made by the author are more difficult and more problematic. What exactly does he mean by Polish Jewish artists? More significant is the question of what Malinowski means by ‘Jewish artists’ and ‘Jewish art’. In his very brief introduction, he explains that he has included artists who identified themselves as belonging to the Jewish national camp, and artists who, even if they did not identify themselves in this way, took an active part in Jewish life. Those who qualify on neither of these grounds are branded as ‘assimilationists’ and omitted.

After the linear properties of non-Western Jewish musical traditions had destabilized Zionist Eurocentric formulations, the theological undercurrents nationalized by the Hebrewist discourse grew more visible. Art music of the 1960s and ’70s saw a dialectical return to the Jewish worlds from which Hebrew culture sought to be “healed.” Hasidic stories enacted in modernist musical syntaxes now avoided both the otherness embedded in post-romantic and auto-exoticist constructions in the spirit of the Yishuv while the properties of both the Eastern European soundscape and non-Western Jewish oral musical traditions gave birth to new modes of cultural memory. Paradoxically, the aftermath of the 1967 War accelerated the dialectical return to Jewish culture outside of the land, underscoring the subterranean presence of linguistic and theological strata that manifested themselves both culturally and politically. The collapse of national rhetoric that formerly distinguished between diasporic and Hebrewist cultures now enabled the reemergence of repressed exilic pasts that defined Jewishness through its symbiotic qualities, rather than the translation of theology into politics that gave rise to territorial maximalism in the 1970s.

This chapter provides the obituary for Ezra Mendelsohn, who died of cancer in May 2015 and was one of the pioneers of the rediscovery of the Polish Jewish past. It talks about Mendelsohn as a professor at the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for many years. It also mentions how Mendelsohn finished his doctorate at Columbia University in 1966 and subsequently moved to Israel where he spent his entire academic career. The chapter describes Mendelsohn as a highly creative thinker that wrote widely on many topics, including the Jewish labour movement, the history of Jews in eastern Europe, modern Jewish politics, and modern Jewish art and music. It cites a volume of articles Mendelsohn was working at the time of his death that deal with universalism among Jews.

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.

This chapter reviews the book Looking Jewish: Visual Culture and Modern Diaspora (2012), by Carol Zemel. In Looking Jewish, Zemel explores normative historical accounts of “Jewish art.” She probes a “diasporic position” between the Scylla and Charybdis of the nation and the modern, offering a detailed analysis of an array of visual artifacts and their creators. The book features “pictures by Jewish artists that deal with the status and character of Jews in modern diasporic communities.” The art and artists are characterized by the notion of standing on a threshold—at the edge of place, on the cusp of time. Through her meticulous and engaging readings of images in their historical context, Zemel examines the notion of diaspora as an analytical term and its particular meaning for Jewish studies.

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.