Melani Shahin (PhD Student, Music)

“The Reception of Christian Texts in Eduard Birnbaum’s Archive of Jewish Music”

Wednesday, 30 April 4:30-6:00 pm, Logan 801

Abstract:

Eduard Birnbaum (1855–1920), the chief cantor of the Königsberg synagogue (1879–1920), was one of the most prolific nineteenth-century collectors of Jewish liturgical music in Europe. The Birnbaum Collection (housed at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio) is the largest repository of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European Jewish music manuscripts. In addition to notated music in manuscript and print, Birnbaum’s archive also contains extensive transcriptions, translations, and bibliographies of historical writings about Jewish liturgical music. Many of these textual sources came from Jewish traditions of scholarship, but a significant number were also drawn from Christian-authored music histories (such as Charles Burney’s A General History of Music, 1776) and early modern Christian Hebraist treatises on Hebrew grammar and antiquities.

In this paper, I discuss two notebooks from Birnbaum’s archive, which contain preparatory material for a “Literaturgeschichte” (a survey of historical and modern writings) on synagogue music. The project was modeled on Leopold Zunz’s Literaturgeschichte der synagogalen Poesie (1865), but ultimately went unpublished. I pay specific attention to Birnbaum’s assessment of his Christian sources and the materials he excerpts and translates from these texts. By focusing on the reception of textual sources (as opposed to notated music) in Birnbaum’s archive, I endeavor to provide a more nuanced portrayal of the types of evidence that Jewish music scholars used in their research and highlight their engagement with Christian sources. My paper also thinks through the ways in which Christian sources themselves functioned as flawed, yet sometimes useful archives of Jewish musical traditions.