Sources of Jewish Music: Active and Passive Assimilation Revisited

General theories are scarce in the current field of Jewish music research. Most attempts at all-encompassing rules or principles have proven untenable due to the complexity of the terms involved—“Jewish” and “music”—as well as the overwhelming historical and regional diversity of Jewish music cultures. Past efforts to draw maps or timelines connecting the various forms, styles, and contexts have invariably led to what Israeli musicologist Edwin Seroussi calls “unfortunate overgeneralizations.” According to Seroussi, the central flaw of such theories—whether they seek to connect various strands of musical expression to a single, longago source (commonly the Second Temple) or search for a “stable,” “unilinear,” or “authentic” musical expression—is the “ontological notion of ‘tradition,’” which “assumes the existence of unambiguous boundaries separating sonic spaces” while ignoring the complex roles of individual contributors, performance contexts, cross-cultural contacts, shifting tastes, historical circumstances, and other shaping forces. The elusiveness of a stable or definable tradition speaks to challenges in musicological inquiry more generally, where attempts at empirical or objective claims often clash with the experiential and subjective nature of the subject matter.