This post and the following three are about the phenomenon of anti-Jewish attitudes and deeds that were pervasive in the musical worlds of the long nineteenth century. All are adapted from the second edition of my forthcoming Historical Dictionary of Romantic Music. Because that book has a great deal of ground to cover, all the entries in it are necessarily brief (the longest are about 2,500 words). They’re intended as appetizers, invitations for readers to dig deeper: if you find yourself wanting more, that is by design.
At the same time, to offer any substantive overview of the worlds of Romantic music without a dedicated discussion that specifically iterates anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism as integral rather than ancillary parts of those worlds – as most histories of nineteenth-century music have done and continue to do – would be a gross denial, an abrogation of responsibility. It would be a lie. I can’t discuss this topic here in the detail that it merits, but neither will I offer a survey of Romantic music that doesn’t try to own the centrality of anti-Jewish attitudes and deeds to that music.
So here we are. In this first installment I offer a brief historical review of the roots of anti-Jewish attitudes and deeds as they were cultivated in the reactionary late Enlightenment (see Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man), since that phase was the starting point for the music and ideas of the long nineteenth century. That forms the context for a discussion (in Part 2) of Richard Wagner’s article "Jewry in Music," which was not terribly influential in its day – not until Wagner finally had the honesty to publish it under his own name in pamphlet form in 1869 – but has become the most widely discussed nineteenth-century musical anti-Semitism in modern musical scholarship. Part 3 then turns to the document that was an influential and widely circulated and translated agent of anti-Semitism in music – the chapter on Jews and ostensible Jewish influences on music in Franz Liszt’s 1859 Des Bohémiens et de leur musique en Hongrie. (In a colossal failure of scholarly responsibility, Liszt biographer Alan Walker tried to absolve Liszt of blame for this virulently anti-Jewish, and virulently eloquent, material, which exerted far more influence than Wagner’s Jewry in Music. That Liszt continues to be ignored in scholarly discussions of nineteenth-century musical anti-Semitism shows the extent of Walker’s historiographic betrayal. Part 3 tries to set the story straight.)
Then, in Part 4, I show how the musical world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries uncritically accepted the myth of scientific objectivity and used racist pseudo-science to justify their perpetuation and extension of the peculiarly Enlightenment-born anti-Jewish attitudes and deeds that had won such eloquent champions in the lives and words of Liszt, Wagner, and others – thus ensuring that those prejudices and hatreds themselves did not die even after the ideas in which they found fertile soil in the late eighteenth century had become old-fashioned and fallen from favor. That musical world at the turn of the twentieth century thereby ensured that the latter-day lens on Romantic music would retain its anti-Jewish bias and would continue to ignore the pervasive presence of anti-Jewishness even today.
Enough of all that. Here’s Part 1:
ANTI-SEMITISM AND ANTI-JUDAISM. Terms for hostility or discrimination toward Jews as a racial or religious group, or for any action that has the effect of supporting prejudice against Jews. Anti-Semitism is often used to denote racial prejudice and anti-Judaism to denote religious prejudice, but the two overlap and the distinction can be meaningless or counterproductive. Except when the distinction is material, this entry adopts anti-Jewishness and related forms in order to avoid overfastidious distraction.
Anti-Jewish discrimination is a pervasive element of Western culture and is, like racism (which I discussed in my last multi-post) and sexism and misogyny (which I'll post about soon), central to music and musical life of the long 19th century, no less so than nationalism and exoticism (both of which often coupled with anti-Jewish stereotypes and ideas). Omitting it from any narrative or lexicographic exploration of Romantic music would be as wrong as omitting either of those cultural trends (or many other ones generally accepted and expected).
By the time of the political upheavals of the American and French revolutions in the late Enlightenment, anti-Jewishness had a long history in art, folklore, literature, and music of the Western world. Its origins were in religion (anti-Judaism), in Christian society’s subordinating of the economic, political, and theological authority of Jewish minorities and their religion to that of Christians and their faith. With the recognition of the violence and horrific human consequences incurred by this struggle of faiths, however, some late-Enlightenment thinkers introduced a new conception of the state as a secular entity, removing religion from the arena of public policy and relegating it instead to the private sphere so that individuals and groups of different faiths could coexist rationally and peacefully. But these ideas, even when only partially implemented, created new problems because they eliminated any pretense of a rational basis for the centuries-old practice of Christian-Jewish separatism, as well as its concomitant armada of stereotypes, fears, and prejudices against Jewish minorities. Eliminating the political and social rationales for anti-Jewish separatism rebuked the separatism itself – demanding that a Christian world that considered itself enlightened admit the irrationality of a prejudice it was not prepared to let go.
The result was a protracted social and political discourse that would rationalize the exclusion and disenfranchisement of Jews from politics and many walks of life in the Western world and continue the devaluation of Jewish art, literature, music, and culture generally. During the late 18th century and into the 19th century this discourse continued to be framed as a matter of religion, in the so-called tolerance debate concerning “the Jewish Question,” as cultural notables including Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-81), Moses Mendelssohn (1729-86; paternal grandfather of Fanny Hensel and Felix Mendelssohn), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and others struggled to formulate how, and whether, Europe’s Jews could be “assimilated” into Christian society – without, however, considering either that the Christian majority rather than the Jewish minority might be the subject for tolerance, or that the onus was on Christians, not Jews, to resolve the problems posed Christian separatist thought. One common strategy in this phase of 19th-century anti-Jewish thought was to require that Jews convert to Christianity in order to increase their standing as bona fide citizens. Anti-Judaism thus came to embrace issues of Jewish culture and language as well as religion. Contemporaneous with the rise of Romantic nationalism, with its essentialist notions that every “people” possessed specific characteristics which ought to be reflected in political structures of nation and nationality, this variant of the patently faith-based system of anti-Judaism rationalized continued resistance to the acceptance of Jewish minorities into dominant Christian society regardless of the Jews’ religious confessions.
This strategy, which posited Christian “tolerance” of Jews who converted and in many quarters was intended to lead to Jewry’s assimilation into Christian-dominated society, was forcefully contested in legal and political terms from the French Revolution onward.
(to be continued)
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