Moshe Beregovsky’s Criticism, the Political Subtext of Jewish Music, and its Current Relevance: A Reconsideration

In his 1934 essay, published as the introduction to the first volume of his extensive study, soviet musicologist Moshe Beregovsky delves into harsh criticism of the previous generation of Jewish Music researchers. Subsequently, his essay, which was described as affected by an “overlay of Marxist rhetoric” and shaped by the pressures to which he had been exposed in the USSR, was largely disregarded in recent scholarship. My presentation will suggest a reconsideration of Beregovsky’s critique, focusing on its potential to reveal the political subtext underlying the construction of “Jewish Music” as a cultural representation as well as a scholarly field of study. Jewish musicology has often been treated as a neutral domain; for example, A. Z. Idelsohn, who was associated with Eliezer Ben-Yehuda’s nationalist circle, has rarely been considered through the political lens. Rather, he is generally discussed as a pioneering founder of “Hebrew Music” and subsequently of Jewish and Israeli art music. Beregovsky’s contrary approach opens the way for a reconsideration of the much-disputed question regarding the appropriate folk and liturgical musical sources for the composition of “national” art music, which had come to the fore most prominently in the famous Engel-Saminsky polemics (1915–1917) and which, I will argue, delineates the separating line between the two political camps. I will refer to the ensuing discrepancy through an examination of two contemporaneous musical works, Joel Engel’s Hadybuk (premiered 1922) and Lazare Saminsky’s Vision of Ariel (1916).