V. The Multiple Nature of Jewish ‘Songs’

 

The actual position of songs in the Yiddish language—as well as songs employing Yiddish in addition to Hebrew and/or non-Jewish languages—within East European Jewish culture had not been the subject of sufficient research in Europe to elucidate the many distinct cultural patterns it represented. It would appear that these songs constituted several distinct repertoires, some of which may be seen as “traditional,” having developed over many generations, while others were more recent, and part of an ongoing process of cultural change. Thus the bulk of the surviving Yiddish song repertoire is not comparable to the other musical repertoires (liturgical chant, paraliturgical song, Hasidic nign) or to klezmer instrumental music. All of these latter were practiced primarily by Jewish males, and hence had acknowledged public positions within East European Jewish society as a whole. In fact, the existing corpus of Yiddish-language songs can be divided into several distinct genres and styles, of which folk song is only one.

 

In 1901 Saul Ginzburg and Peysekh Marek included the religious/festive song repertoire in both loshn-koydesh and Yiddish, but their emphasis was clearly on the side of the secular, worldly repertoire that resembled the themes of other ‘folksongs’ in Europe.  As late as 1912 in Russia Zisman Kisselgoff organized his collection of Jewish songs with a great variety of religious vocal genres, including wordless niggunim, in addition to several secular genres, and even included composed ‘art’ songs. Nevertheless both collections avoided for the most part the productions of professional wedding jesters (badkhonim), who had already been publishing their own songs by the second half of the nineteenth century (e.g. Zbarzher and Zunzer). Thus, perhaps the most basic issue to resolve is how to characterize the extremely large and influential East Ashkenazic vocal repertoires of a paraliturgical and/or Hasidic nature, and how these may relate or not relate to secular or religious songs in the Yiddish language. In the annotated Online Bibliography of East European Jewish Folk Music by Feldman and Lukin (Oxford 2017), “Yiddish Folk Song” occupies a section distinct from “Religious Tunes and Songs: Niggunim and Zmires”, although an earlier section on the history of collection refers to both.

 

Already in 1946 the great Soviet ethnomusicologist Moyshe Beregovski had made clear the large structural difference separating the wordless niggunim (Russ. ‘napev’) from any kind of Yiddish song (Russ. ‘pesen’), whether religious or secular. It is not accidental that the Ashkenazim chose the word ‘nign’ for this genre, with its links to instrumental playing (Heb.NGN). Indeed early nineteenth century klezmer manuscripts might use the word ‘nigundl’ to refer to an instrumental dance tune. But, as we have seen, many liturgical and non-liturgical metrical tunes, with short or even more extensive loshn-koydesh texts might be termed ‘nign,’ at least in some East European communities.

Turning to religious songs with loshn-koydesh texts, some zmires shared structural features with Yiddish secular songs, which were in turn derived from much earlier Western European songs (Wiora 1966, Lukin 2019). Others showed links with the klezmer wedding repertoire of dobriden and gas nign. Unfortunately this entire metrical non-liturgical sung repertoire in loshn koydesh has attracted even less analytical research than has the secular Yiddish repertoire, so we can reach only the most tentative conclusions at present. While most collectors grouped both zmires and niggunim together, they represent distinct repertoires which may share some musical structures but not others.

In both Hasidic and klezmer usage a ‘menagen’ was a composer. Neither among Hasidim nor among klezmorim was there any assumption of folkloric ‘anonymity.’ Virtually everything in their respective repertoires had composers, even if their names may have been forgotten with time. While most collectors of Yiddish secular songs assumed their unknown authorship as part of a collective folk culture, Yosef Goldberg in Minsk stressed the personal nature of most Yiddish songs, whose authors had been forgotten within a couple of generations; especially as most of them were female (Goldberg 1926: 105-106).

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Thus to use a very loose cross-cultural analogy, some vocal dance niggunim might be compared to the vocal lilting “mouth-music” tradition of Scotland or Ireland. These lilted dance tunes are little more than vocal renditions of reels or jigs, and that is how the culture regards them—they are not “songs.” On the other hand, many songs in Gaelic or English are based in a more general way upon these reels or jigs, but are clearly part of the folk song tradition, separate from the dance.  Thus, as we will note below, some Yiddish folk songs are based on instrumental dance genres, or sometimes are even texts set to particular dance tunes. But—as we will also note below—the nign tradition long ago transcended its partial roots in instrumental dance music, especially in the Jewish ‘South.’ And even in the North, the stylistic context of the vocal rendition of a dance-tune as a ‘nign’ usually altered much of the musical ‘articulation,’ as well as the inner ‘intention’ (kavoneh) of the piece.

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Moreover the ethos of these “niggunim” was very different from secular Yiddish songs. As one Chabad authority had put it: “Halevay she-yispolel odom koyl hayoym, zingt men a nign, vos me davent mit dem nign, iz dos glaykh ke’ilu hispolel.” (“A man should pray all the day; he sings a nign, he prays through this nign, and it is as though he were praying”) (Zalmanoff, vol. 1, p. 31). And unlike folk songs, the Hasidic niggunim were preserved primarily within each separate court. Indeed it was forbidden to allow certain parts of the repertoire to be heard freely by outsiders. Under such conditions separate compositional styles emerged in the courts in Ukraine, in Bucovina, in Transylvania, in Galicia, Belarus/Lithuania and in Poland proper. Such  strongly distinct local centers were not known among Yiddish secular songs.

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Thus in researching anything that might be described even tentatively as a Yiddish “folksong”, we must leave aside the entire “nign” repertoire, whether entirely wordless, or with some short loshn-koydesh texts. These were compositions reflecting the professional training of both khazzonim and klezmorim, with a mixture of cantorial and instrumental techniques. Indeed some well-known nineteenth century khazzonim had also been amateur klezmorim. And in any case in the larger Hasidic courts these two professions worked side by side.

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Among Ashkenazic Jews, sacred dance was developed and encouraged by the Hasidic movement. Since these often took place on the Jewish holidays when instruments were not permitted, a great many vocal niggunim were created specifically for the purpose of dancing. It seems that in different regions, these bear different relations to the local klezmer tradition. In the North, notably in Lubavitch, the Hasidic dance niggunim are simply sung versions of the local klezmer repertoire. On the other hand, Hasidic groups in Ukraine, such as Talnoe, Chernobyl or Bratslav generally created their dance niggunim by combining instrumental and vocal techniques. Thus in these “Southern” communities, even niggunim called “freylekhs” or “skotshne” display uneven period structures, distinguished from the actual klezmer freylekhs and skotshne, which tend to be more symmetrical (Feldman 2016: 243-47).

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Before entering into more detail about either religious or secular sung repertoires, we will bring up the issue of what Izaly Zemtsovsky has termed “ethno-hearing,” building upon earlier theories of Boris Asafiev about musical “intonatsia.”

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VI. Intonatsia

 

Any presentation of the East Ashkenazic musical repertoires must also refer to the performance practices within these repertoires. Divergent attitudes of different ethnies toward accepting or rejecting musical material coming from “outside” was already documented among native peoples in the South West of the US in the 1930s (Herzog 1936). But the most consistent and elegant definitions of the “micro-level” of ethnic performance practices was the invention of Russian ethnomusicology. This had its beginnings in the later Tsarist era, but was refined and codified in the earlier Soviet period, especially by Boris Asafiev and later by Izaly Zemtsovsky (Petersburg and California). Using terms such as “intonatsia”  (Asafiev 1947, 1987) in Russian, and “ethno-hearing” (Zemtsovsky 2012, 2018) in English, this broad theoretical approach posits the existence of a cultural consensus within each ethnos about the expression of many musical features, such as 1) rhythm and tempo on every musical level; 2) about the attacks and approaches to a pitch; 3) to the timbral coloration of the human voice or especially legato musical instruments, etc. While individual musicians may create certain styles or techniques, within a “traditional” and largely oral musical culture, performance practices must meet the approval of the larger society, which set limits on the individual musician:

 

“A human being perceives the musically meaningful formation (in Russian, intonatsia[1]) and our perception transforms listening into hearing, acoustical sounding into musical intoning. Sound (as such) only indicates the meaning whereas intonatsia creates it in the process of active music performance and perception…Intonatsia is always at the center, between music-making and articulation, and all the three are governed by ethno-hearing.”  (Zemtsovsky, communication 03/2019).

 

Where two or more cultures and languages meet geographically or socially, musical items or whole genres are often borrowed, but only once they have been adapted to the dominant “ethno-hearing” and “intonatsia” of each culture. Within Eastern Europe examples abound; e.g. shared musical genres of Turks and Greeks in the Aegean/Bosphorus area; multi-ethnic “Macedonia” ; Hungarians and Romanians in Transylvania; and shared instrumental repertoires of Moldavians and Jews in Bessarabia (Chiselita 2008, Feldman 2016). The insider to any of these cultures (or even the musically informed outsider) can immediately perceive whether he or she is listening to a Turkish “zeybek” dance melody or song or to a Greek “zeimbekiko”; to a Moldavian “bulgareasca” or to a Jewish “bulgarish”.

The stylistic difference between the Ashkenazic North and South was included within the broader distinctive musical “intonatsia” developed by the Ashkenazim. This distinctive intonatsia for Ashkenazic vocal music was already referred to by Beregovski in 1928 (Slobin 2001: xii). Indeed the earliest commentator on the klezmer performance—the Russian musicologist/musician Ivan Lipaev—already sensed something of the workings of this system when he penned these lines in 1904:

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“If you listen to and sort out in detail the music of the Jewish musicians you will catch its rhythmic and melodic development, and of necessity at last you will reach the conclusion that all the foreign melodic lines were gradually blended into a single harmonious whole, and reworked within the crucible of the Jewish national feeling and soul” (Lipaev 1904: 171).

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 According to all the known data, it is only the East Ashkenazim—among worldwide Jewry—who had created a distinctive musical intonatsia, apart from the language of the text, or the larger musical form. And this feature characterized all religious and secular genres of the Eastern Ashkenazim to a greater or lesser degree. Among the “embedded” Jewish communities or the Sephardim, it would seem that certain repertoires, even particular familial repertoires, show tendencies in such a direction, setting them apart from local non-Jewish musical practices. Examples exist among the various Jewish communities of Morocco, or the Jews of Southern Uzbekistan (Shahrisabz). But the social conditions of these usually numerically small communities did not encourage a broader development of such musical “intonatsia.” Thus the concept of “intonatsia/ethno-hearing” constitutes a major distinction between the musical practices of the Eastern Ashkenazim and all other documented Jewish cultures.

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Bearing these remarks about “ethno-hearing” and “intonatsia” in mind, we can return to the issues of Yiddish song. For in these varied repertoires we can see (or rather hear) different relationships to Western European musical practices of earlier centuries, as they may have been reworked with some input from Ashkenazic liturgical chant, and an overarching Ashkenazic musical “ethno-hearing,” to a greater or lesser extent. This may depend upon the musical genre, social function or even the gender, and specific musical taste of a particular singer.

 

VII. Religious Song in Yiddish and Multi-Language Songs

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This group of at least partly Yiddish songs, with a mixture of Yiddish, Hebrew and Gentile languages,  brings to the fore issues of the musical hearing and articulation of East European Jews in an even more dramatic way than much of the Yiddish folk song repertoire per se. It will become clear that most of the musical and social factors that had shaped this broad repertoire differed in many respects from either the zmires or the nign groups. In his collection Yiddish Folksongs (Warsaw, 1913) Noyekh Prilutski (Prylucki) pointed out a key factor in the development of one Jewish vocal repertoire, namely the existence of multi-language (macaronic) lyrics mixing several languages, including Polish, Ukrainian, Russian or Hungarian, in addition to Hebrew and Yiddish, often with two or even three languages represented in one song (Slobin/Beregovski 1982: 285-302). These songs might be of a satirical or of a religious content, and were often sung by yeshiva students. As David Roskies has noted:

 

“That these songs might have originated not on the periphery but at the very center of Jewish religious life is something the Petersburg secularists could never imagine….Radicalizing Engel’s position, he argued that the key to Jewish folk culture and to ‘folk psychology’ lay in these macaronic and quasi-liturgical songs.” (Roskies 1995: 15).

 Over a decade after Prilutski, Beregovski took up the issue of the multi-language Jewish song in 1930, in an article devoted to this topic though he apparently did not pursue later for political reasons.[1]  Like Prilutski, he also concluded that these songs, mixed as they were with learned Biblical Hebrew, could not have come from an illiterate village environment, but were the creations of literate and often learned Jewish men.  Thus he rejected the term macaronic because these songs rarely contained humorous content, but used the mixture of languages for serious, usually religious or didactic purposes. It would seem that it was this very mixture, including the tendency to use the non-Jewish language and/or melody within a Jewish context that characterized the traditional Jewish culture of Eastern Europe, especially its male component. These songs might use an entirely Jewish melody, or an entirely Polish or Ukrainian melody, or like purely Yiddish-language songs, a mixture across different sections. Many of these songs display the same serious moralist or even messianic yearning as other songs purely in Hebrew or Yiddish. It is as though the religious sentiments these songs express become more real, more tied to the actual world in which the Jews lived, by assuming the linguistic form of a Gentile language. Almost a century later in 1998 I was able to document several such songs originating in Galicia from the poet Y. Hesecheles. While some were multilingual, others were entirely in Polish or Ukrainian, yet they were sung by Jews, usually yeshivah students.

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We might surmise that Beregovski did not develop his research into these songs further, and did not include them in his collections of Yiddish song, because they blurred the boundaries of Jewish culture and could weaken the case for Yiddish as the Jewish national language.

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More recently, speaking of the role of translation and code-switching in traditional Jewish culture, Jeffrey Shandler writes:

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“…code-switching—moving back and forth between one language and another—constitutes a definitional Jewish activity.”… and “in such milieus, translation is not, as the Italians famously say, an act of betrayal (‘tradutorre, traditore’). On the contrary, in translation Jewish culture is not lost but found.” (Shandler 2006: 92).

 

Since the adoption of Yiddish as a “national” Jewish language by much of the Jewish intelligentsia and some of the masses as well, occurred after the middle of the nineteenth century, this social movement was generally less passionate about presenting Yiddish songs of a religious nature. This represented a major break with the Haskole (Haskalah) as it had developed in the previous two generations, which had chosen Hebrew alone as the Jewish national language. The Hasidic movement had placed more emphasis on Yiddish by the beginning of the nineteenth century. The songs composed by Levi Yitskhak of Berditchev became classic examples of the genre, while others were composed by rebbes of Lubavitch. Other religious songs in Yiddish were created outside of a Hasidic milieau. Most song-writers were male, but female singers and possibly creators were also known. One characteristic of this genre was the change in rhythmic organization between two or even three sections of the song.

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Recently the contemporary Yiddish song-writer Joshua Waletzky has termed this the “zogevdik, zingevdik, tantsevdik” style, that is “recited, sung, and danced” (Waletzky, oral communication). This structure evidently became so characteristic of religious songs, that it was then adopted as the hallmark of the maskilic song that satirized the religious song and much of the religious life (see below). Lukin characterizes this musical structure as “triangular,” and sees it as most characteristic of a what he terms “paraphrase songs” (shirei paraphraza, 2015). That is, Yiddish songs which refer to well-known Hebrew liturgical texts, and in some way comment on them. There had been some precedent for such songs already in the German lands of Ashkenaz I during the Middle Ages. Thus the “paraphrase” principle was a fundamental “building-block” of Yiddish song, that blended the learned and the popular. While songs using excerpts of sacred texts are not meant to be satirical (as the later maskilic songs might be), but there is a kind of humor, that Lukin compares to Bakhtin’s characterization of the “carnivalesque.” It is not that the author and his audience have ceased to believe in the validity of the sacred texts. Rather they acknowledge the distance between their everyday lives, as expressed in their Yiddish vernacular, and the exalted events or personages mentioned in the Hebrew quotations. This distance is presented as a theme for gentle comedy.

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Structurally, the use of both Hebrew liturgical quotations and Yiddish paraphrase, together with the characteristic shifts in rhythmic organization from something akin to liturgical recitation, to song, and then to dance, loosens the symmetry that might otherwise have been dominant, both in the poetry and in the music of the songs. In addition to these songs of “paraphrase,” melodies of a significant number of Yiddish folk songs make reference to parts of the synagogue liturgy (Wohlberg 1977/78). Most frequently these references are of a humorous or ironic nature, commenting on the incongruousness of the real-life situation of the singer by using semi-liturgical musical tropes to either augment its tragic seriousness, or to point out its absurdity. It would seem that most of these songs were created and sung by men, but the extant examples do not conform to the maskilic song genre because they rarely satirize features of traditional Jewish life, even though they often voice personal complaint.

 

VIII. Locating Folk Song in Yiddish Song Repertoires

 

In seeking a paradigm to define what may have been a truly folkloric oral and anonymous song repertoire in the Yiddish language, local non-Jewish folklore is not very helpful.  Indeed many of the basic genres of non-Jewish folk song in Eastern Europe (i.e. wedding ritual songs, collective work songs, and historical balladry) do not appear in Yiddish from the nineteenth century onward.  Yiddish wedding songs had almost totally disappeared by the nineteenth century. The existing Yiddish repertoire features many songs (often of a humorous nature) speaking about aspects of the wedding, but these were almost never ritual songs performed at the wedding itself. In nineteenth century Jewish society these songs held a lower social status and were not usually sung by fully adult members of the household. Among the folk song repertoire sung in both Yiddish and Hebrew were cumulative songs, in which each strophe added to and developed the thought of the previous one. These songs generally consist of three melodic lines, and feature an archaic Ashkenazic musical structure. Their texts might be either religious or secular.

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Determining the possible context for secular songs in Yiddish is extremely difficult prior to the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Among the people, secular songs in Yiddish seem to have been sung to accompany work in small groups by both women and men (e.g. among tailors, shoemakers), or among small groups of female kin or friends. But such singing was rarely conceived of as cultural performance, where the singing itself was the center of attention. In many cases, “performance” was an intimate communication between young or older women with members of their family.  Beregovski’s unpublished second volume consisted of what he called “Lyrical and Familial Songs,” including love songs and lullabies. It would appear that during the nineteenth century, lyrical folksongs were primarily sung by women.  In both misnagdic and Hasidic communities, this repertoire was not accorded the respect of the more purely male genres, and many middle class men ignored its existence. Both economic and social changes in Jewish society by the early twentieth century seem to have led to more working class and other Jewish men to participate in folk song.

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The newer forms of Yiddish song—often based on texts written by men-- had a more public and largely (though by no means exclusively) male social context. A basic consideration was the emergence of a new secular poetry in the Yiddish language, mainly within the Russian Empire, not before the last third of the nineteenth century. Both known song-writers, and anonymous persons  created melodies for their own and for texts by others. As we will see below, these newer often lyrical poem-songs were fit into an increasingly heterogeneous Yiddish song repertoire. At the same time songs based on much older patterns persisted within the culture. Speaking about textual continuities within Yiddish folk songs from sixteenth century Germany to nineteenth century Russia and Poland, Beregovski makes the important observation: “The closeness of sixteenth-century songs to contemporary songs shows that even during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when a wave of religiosity swept over Jewish literature, the common folk preserved older lyric love songs and even created new ones.” (Beregovski, 1962 in Slobin 1982: 291).

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IX. Lyric Song

 

It is the Yiddish lyric song—together with the narrative ballad—that corresponds most closely to the concept of “folksong” in a European context. And it was mainly to this genre of Yiddish song that Beregovski was referring in the above quotation.  By far the most common musical/poetic structure consists of four lines. Line A represents the initial musical statement; line B generally develops it, often with a higher ambitus; line C generally reaches a different and rather unexpected tonal center; while line D forms a cadential conclusion. Rhythmically a binary basis predominates. These features together link the Yiddish lyrical song with a broader European, and more particularly a West and Central European context. In addition to these general links with the West of Europe, a small but significant corpus has been identified which links these some of the Yiddish songs with much earlier German prototypes, and even with particular songs, known from sixteenth century German urban sources. Altogether both these musical and poetic commonalities are considerably stronger than resemblances to co-territorial peasant songs of Eastern Europe.  However, there are also a less numerous body of lyrical songs employing a rubato rhythmic structure with distant links to synagogue chant. In some of these songs the abcd structure may work rather differently, in that the musical climax may be in the fourth musical line, which thus carries more “weight” than that of a cadence. While the less common rubato style of course permits the singer more scope to idiosyncratic choices of “intonatsia” in general, the more typical metrical lyric song also permits smaller, more subtle alterations of rhythmic symmetry and microtonal intonation.

 

Beregovski had noted that lyrical songs were sometimes sung to melodies of the sher dance. Part of the aesthetic of these songs was the contrast of the mournful content of the texts—sometimes lamenting a lost love—with the gaiety of the music. Many other Yiddish lyric songs have been noted as sung to melodies to of the Moldavian zhok (joc) or the Polish mazurka, both utilizing different triple meters. In addition well known maskilic songs—such as Varshavski’s “Oyfn Pripetshik”—, and even religious songs (“Ah vi sheyn un ah vi git iz tsu zayn a Yid”) sometimes utilize rhythmic and melodic formulas of the mazurka, but always in minor.

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The social context of the lyrical songs has been debated since early Soviet times, since primary social observation was rarely put into practice in the actual cultural milieu within Eastern Europe.  By the post-Holocaust era most observations come from a survey of Yiddish-language memoir literature, more rarely from belles-lettres. The picture that emerges from the more rigorous researchers from Beregovski, to Lukin and Sholokhova in our own day, is of the general “demotion” of an earlier more commonly shared secular song tradition. This undoubtedly occurred in the course of the eighteenth and much of the nineteenth century due to 1) increasing general religiosity, bringing with it 2) sharper gender divisions, 3) increasing distance from larger urban centers, leading to 4) loss of the earlier society-wide contact with a Central European urban song tradition.  As the “public face” of Jewish expressive culture became more exclusively male, the lyric song tradition was preserved mainly by women and men of the poorest classes.  Sholokhova (2008/2020) has traced the removal of an earlier repertoire of lyrical and flirtatious, “riddling” songs, originally meant to be sung by young men and women, from the day of the wedding proper, to the familial celebrations of the weeks prior to the wedding. Under these conditions, these songs were no longer sung by members of either of the concerned families, but only by the servant women and men. This has led Lukin more recently to describe this entire repertoire as “servant romances.” Not that the genre had been initially created only by this lower social class, but that by the nineteenth this was the social class that most perpetuated it.

 

In contrast to more polemical writings by some of the earlier collectors of Yiddish folklore, who as maskilim stressed the alienness of love and romance to the mores of East European Jewish life, more recent studies demonstrate that pre-marital and even extra-marital affairs were far from unknown even in the eighteenth century. Moreover recent research on the results of the extremely early marriage age for bourgeois Jewish families, demonstrate the phenomenally high rate of divorce among the Jews of the Russian Empire at the beginning of the nineteenth century (Freeze 2002). The extreme commonness of early divorce, when both parties were still quite young, must certainly have led at times to romance and affairs. Jewish society changed once again in many ways during the last third of the nineteenth century. Marriages became more stable, with a far lower rate of divorce. But many formerly bourgeois men had become proletarianized in the larger cities, thus breaking down some of the gender division within Yiddish lyrical and other forms of Yiddish secular song.

 

X. Ballad

 

Longer narrative songs dealing with either apparently “real-life” tragic love affairs or else archetypical quasi-romantic situations, also had been quite common in the Yiddish song repertoire in Eastern Europe. The classic study was the Russian dissertation of Sofia Magid (1938), more recently re-visited by the 2019 dissertation and Shofar article by Michael Lukin. This genre became far less diffused among the immigrants in North America, so most of our documentation is from early twentieth century notations. It does not appear that the Yiddish speaking Jews had their own term for this broad genre—“balada” appears to be a scholarly import, similar to “folkslid.” According to both Magid’s and Lukin’s terminology, the “ballad” included both long narratives, or “short-story” songs, as well as extended dialogues, often based on riddles. While the dominant category of this type involved males and females, there were also allegorical, even religious dialogues as well.  In contrast to the lyric songs, the “ballads” emphasize action over feelings and dreams.

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One major internal distinction separates apparently “real-life” story lines of some ballads from the quasi-mythical stories of others. These latter often feature the crossing of moral boundaries, such as a daughter’s attempt to seduce her father, or one unmarried sister’s successful seduction of her brother-in-law, and its tragic consequences. What the “real-life” and mythical ballads have in common is the breaking of moral and societal norms, usually leading to a cathartic tragic ending. But usually these tales avoid religious moralizing in favor of presenting the unruliness of human passions. Lukin notes their distance from non-Jewish East European peasant ballads in the absence of supernatural figures and an important function for a setting within nature.

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A major difference between Magid’s and Lukin’s analysis is his rejection of a predominant structural pattern originating in the medieval German lands. Magid had apparently accepted this thesis in part due to the newly “discovered” references to a medieval Jewish professional bard, similar to the Christian troubadour/spielmann. But we now know that this thesis rests upon a misunderstanding of a single medieval epic text. Thus there is no reason to posit a direct transmission of medieval German ballad themes by way of such a Jewish professional figure.

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Musically the ballad appears to have diverse types. Unlike many European ballads, the dominant one appear similar to non-Jewish dance-tunes, often in triple time. Melodically these are constructed on two musical lines. Other musical styles feature rubato melodies, which have been documented both from Ukrainian and Hungarian Jewish singers.

In terms of gender, most known informants were female, but there was also a significant group of male singers. By the beginning of the twentieth century any putative gender distinction within this repertoire does not appear to have been characteristic.

 

XI. Lullaby

 

The female Yiddish sung genre par excellence was of course the lullaby. While textual aspects of the Yiddish lullaby were discussed by Ruth Rubin and others, the only extended musical study is that of Lukin in his dissertation. He finds both Jewish and non-Jewish—mainly East European—musical patterns within the Yiddish lullabies. Textually both he and Rubin had noted the fundamental distinction between one type of song that expressed pious wishes for the male baby to grow up to be either a Torah scholar or a successful merchant, as opposed to the other category where the mother voices her sadness and dissatisfaction with her marriage. It can be inferred that the first type was sung while the baby was still awake, while the second was sung only after he or she was sound asleep! Another factor was the age of the child—the first group of lullabies for the pre-language age, and the second when linguistic comprehension was advancing. Some lullabies might be addressed to a “baby” of either gender, many others make it clear that the mother’s expectations rested primarily upon her son rather than her daughter.

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XII. Maskilic and Other Composed Yiddish Songs

 

By the time musical documentation becomes relatively plentiful at the beginning of the twentieth century, the culture of Misnagdim included a Yiddish song repertoire that aimed to critique and subvert social norms, while maintaining traditional musical forms, -----maskilic song. Unlike the Yiddish lyric and familial song, which was predominantly female (at least in the nineteenth century), maskilic song was created and largely sung by male proponents of haskole/haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment movement, who were known as maskilim (Enlightened, from Heb. sekhel, intellect). Rather than personal sentiment, maskilic song addressed public issues and often employed techniques of satire, sometimes as a dialogue of two characters, or most characteristically an ironic pseudo-identity put into the mouth of a pious, usually Hasidic individual. In time many maskilic songs whose authors were forgotten came to be regarded as folk songs. Taken together, “folklorized” and “hasidicized” maskilic songs came to constitute a major portion of the Yiddish song repertoire.[2]

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Yiddish songs by named composers seems to have come into existence in its documented, modern form in the second half of the nineteenth century through the confluence of at least five cultural strands: 1) maskilic Yiddish poetry; 2) badkhonic verse; 3) the Broder Singers; 4) Yiddish theater; and, 5) Yiddish folk song.  Initially composed song was mainly a male form. The figure of Velvl Zbarzher (1824-1884) seems to be a more educated, refined songwriter who straddled the loosely defined territory between badkhn, poet, and maskilic songwriter. A classic figure in this style in the first half of the twentieth century was Mordkhe Gebirtig of Krakow (1877-1942), who composed both lyrics and melodies that were partly of Yiddish folkloric inspiration. The rise of modern Yiddish poetry toward the end of the nineteenth century furnished an enormous impetus toward the creation of new Yiddish songs.

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Although titled Yiddish Folk Songs, Mark Varshavski’s song collection published in 1900 was the author’s creation. The songs were sometimes modeled on non-Jewish sources, and presented fewer Jewish musical characteristics. Varshavski and his supporter Sholem Aleichem were attacked by the composer and collector Joel Engel who pointed out correctly that this collection of popular and partly international tunes could hardly be taken to represent the Jewish folk melos of its day.[3] But by the time of Varshavski’s publication, segments of the East European Jewish public had become accustomed to semi-theatrical Yiddish song performances in the style begun by Berl Broder (Berl Margulyes, ca. 1817-1886?), eponymous founder of the Broder Singers. It would seem that these performances, usually in taverns, outside the wedding context, represented a kind of working-class response to the haskalah (haskole). Variations of Polish mazurka, always in minor, form the basis for many Yiddish songs in a variety of textual contents (lyrical, religious, and maskilic). Varshavski’s classic Oyfn Pripetshik is perhaps the best-known example. Other popular and folkloric Yiddish songs refer musically to varieties of klezmer, Ukrainian, or Moldavian dance tunes.

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Ansky notes in his article on Jewish Folk Creativity in Perezhitoe in 1909, that the song repertoire found in the earliest collection (that of the noted lawyer I. G. Orshanski from 1866) was entirely forgotten by the time of Peysekh Marek and Saul Ginzburg’s publication of Evreiskye Narodnye Pesni in 1901.[4] Ansky tentatively attributes this loss to the changes in Jewish society in the last third of the nineteenth century due to haskole, secularization, new political ideologies, and emigration, etc.

 

XIII.  Conclusion

 

A more complete analysis and classification of the existing corpus of Yiddish songs would require attention to both musical and textual issues in order to identify the characteristics of a folkloric style of musical composition, lyric poetry, and performance. Identifying a corpus, and its division to several fairly distinct repertoires is an essential first step in this process.

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Both the textual and musical parameters of traditional Yiddish folk song were fairly clear, and differed in many fundamental respects from the Broder, theater, and later composed songs. Maskilic songs sometimes adopted much of the musical style of folk song and or/religious Yiddish song in order to drive home their anti-traditional message.  Songs of both the badkhonim and early twentieth-century Yiddish song-writers adopted features of either Yiddish folk music or poetic forms. Furthermore, given that the Jewish population had a much higher rate of literacy than surrounding peasant populations, it is not surprising that much stylistic mixing of folkloric, religious, popular, and artistic Yiddish song styles occurred.

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In approaching the Yiddish song today, several methodologies are possible. One would deal primarily with the repertoires of the past, whether they have any continuity into the emigration from Eastern Europe and into the early twentieth-first century or not. Another approach would concentrate primarily on those genres which had some continuity in the post-Holocaust era. In a rough sense this would be comparable to the study of instrumental klezmer music, as seen in the work of Feldman (2016) and Slobin (2000), in which the Old World and New World repertoires are distinguished, as well as the “bridge” formed by the music of the major immigrant klezmorim (Feldman 1994). The fact that Yiddish song writing still had a few strong practitioners by the beginning of the twentieth first-century, both in North America and within the former Soviet Union, lends an attraction to a focus on this recent material.

 

But in the case of Yiddish song within the emigration, the split within the different sectors of the Yiddish-speaking population became extreme, resulting in a large stylistic difference separating the mainly female lyric songs from the largely male politicized and maskilic songs. The religious Yiddish song became increasingly restricted to the Hasidic communities who came to North America mainly following the Holocaust. Thus a study of the latest generations of Yiddish song production would leave out most of the musical features belonging to the older repertoires within Europe.

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Another approach would look to the “micro-level” of intonatsia in identifying a Yiddish performance style or “articulation”. For this purpose even a very small corpus could suffice. Connected with this would be the analysis of a repertoire sung by a single performer coming from an oral Yiddish tradition, such as had been attempted by Kirshenblatt and Slobin.

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Observing the changes within the Yiddish folk song over the last century or more is a fascinating prospect. But this study can only gain in specificity when it is integrated into a broader perspective formed by a rigorous analysis of the distinct repertoires as they had functioned within Jewish Eastern Europe over many generations. This would include both the genres regarded as “traditional” and those which arose in more or less articulate opposition to that tradition. But this latter group still employed the Yiddish language (at least in part), i.e. rather than abandoning the language in favor of either Hebrew or the dominant Gentile language of the country. Thus, in the study of Yiddish song, most of the basic work still remains to be done.

 

 

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[1]  M. Beregovski, “Tchuzhomovni I riznomovni pisni v evreiv Ukraini, Bilorusi I Polsci”, Etnograficni Visnik, 9: 37-51 (1930), quoted by Yelena Irzabekovna, “Moisiey Beregovski’s Early Publications,” in J. Nemtsov (ed.), Jüdische Musik als Dialog der Kulturen, (Wiesbaden: Harrosowitz, 2013), p. 278-282.

[2]  Roskies’ created the term ‘creative betrayal’ to describe maskilim and their contemporary epigones in his chapter “People of the Lost Book” (1995:1-19), which is a provocative discussion of modernity and tradition in Jewish culture.

[3] Most of these issues are succinctly described by James Loeffler, (2010). On the collectors Peysekh Marek and Saul Ginzburg, and their Evreiskyia narodnya pesny (1901), p. 64-65, and Varshavski/Engels, p. 175-182.

[4]   I. G. Orshanski, “prostonarodnykh pesni russkikh evreev,” Ha-Carmel, 1866.

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