IN TODAY’S POST:
(1) European anti-Jewish intellectuals tender a hopelessly confused mélange of cultural anthropology, history, and biology to create a fictious race of “Semites,” who – just as they’ve believed all along – are essentially “different” than the likewise fictitious race of “Aryans” who constitute the supposedly embattled majority of “civilized” Europeans.
(2) Anti-Jewish scientists seize the opportunity to “test the hypothesis” (read: find a scientific formulation and justification of their a priori prejudice against Jews) that these newly invented “Semites” are indeed essentially different, inferior, etc.
(3) Lo and behold, scientists’ anti-Jewish prejudices were right all along! Science proves it, objectively!
(4) The Aryan-identified musical world, the flame of its covert and casual anti-Jewish biases still burning strong with the grandiloquent bigotry of Liszt, Wagner, and others, rushes to embrace science! “See, we were right all along: Jewish musicians are inferior and not worthy of our Aryan brethren. Science has proven it!”
(5) The aftermath of all this, with some closing thoughts (the more things change, the more they remain the same . . .)
The anti-Jewish arguments of Liszt, Wagner, and others won a valuable new ally in the advances of the natural sciences in the second half of the 19th century – for scientists, never free of prejudice, now offered new, ostensibly scientific findings that could be put into the service of anti-Jewish thought (and racist thought generally). Biologists, craniometrists, phrenologists, psychologists, and other scientifically trained men (they were all men) submitted apparently objective and empirically verifiable, but ultimately spurious, evidence that they said justified the [a priori] conclusion that Jews were innately inferior and corrupt, deserving of social separation from the “pure” races who, conveniently, were Christian.
One important early step in the emergence of this argument was the advent in 1865-66 of Mendelian genetics, a legitimate science that offered anti-Jewish folk a biological, rather than cultural/learned, explanation for the transmission of specific and supposedly inferior Jewish traits from one generation to the next. Science itself now argued that the age-old Christian-Jewish conflict was not primarily about faith, language, and culture at all – for regardless of their beliefs, Jews were now scientifically held to be a biological community, a group of racial Semites who were engaged in a centuries-long struggle to achieve dominance over racial Aryans (another spurious but politically potent scientific-sounding term, invented in 1853 by the French aristocrat Joseph Arthur de Gobineau [1816-82]), who constituted the majority in the Western world.
While these assertions differed from earlier anti-Jewish separatist arguments, they led to the same separatist goals and even strengthened them, submitting them anew under the spurious veneer of “scientific objectivity.” The Semitic community, anti-Jewish voices held, was engaged in the struggle for evolutionary primacy that was crucial to the relatively new science of classical Darwinism – and the Aryan community needed to declare itself anti-Semite in order to ensure its own survival. The term anti-Semitic was thus popularized by the German journalist Wilhelm Marr (1819-1904), who in 1879 founded the Antisemitenliga (League of anti-Semites) and in 1881 published his Zwanglose antisemitische Hefte (Informal anti-Semitic notes). Post-Revolutionary liberalism had threatened to make the non-Jewish world the subject of the supposedly soulless, corrupt, artistically bankrupt Semitic conspiracy [if you've read the posts on Liszt and Wagner in this series, that wording may smell familiar] whose nature now, seemingly, was biologically confirmed by empirical science and the Darwinian evolutionary theory of natural selection.
These new anti-Semitic findings buttressed longstanding anti-Judaic prejudices to burden musicians of the Modern Romantic Generation and their older contemporaries (such as Joseph Joachim and Meyerbeer). Influential Anti-Semitic cultural figures such as Vincent d’Indy, together with the increasing community of 19th- and early 20th-century individuals and scholars and every arena of cultural production who seized upon science as an irrefutable empirical validation of a hostility patently irrational, made the personal and professional lives of musicians such as Ernest Bloch, Paul Dukas, Salomon Jadassohn, and countless others fraught with peril.
The best-known example is that of Gustav Mahler – the composer and conductor who was married to, and tormented by, the anti-Semite Alma Mahler. Despite his conversion to Catholicism in 1897 (a conversion undertaken because the Vienna Court Opera banned hiring of unconverted Jews), Gustav Mahler’s “hypermodernity” led to incessant anti-Jewish critiques (both anti-Judaic and anti-Semitic) of his orchestration, harmony, and conducting (the latter because anti-Jewish stereotypes defined Jews’ bodies as different). Mahler famously described himself as an outsider throughout the world because of his Jewish heritage, yet as a composer, conductor, orchestrator he was profoundly (and paradoxically) indebted to Wagner, who never would have acknowledged him had their paths intersected. The system escalated and intensified over the first half of the 20th century, climaxing not only in the tragedy of the Holocaust, but also in the burning of Jewish books and scores throughout the Western world, the banning of the performance of Jewish music, and so on. [A sidenote: as I write, in the great state of Florida some school districts have banned The Diary of Anne Frank, but not Hitler's Mein Kampf]
A closing thought: The linchpins and their ramifications
Although defining “Jewish music” is necessarily even more problematic than defining Jewishness itself, anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism in music both have much to do with racism, and they rest upon the four linchpins that secured the prevalence of racist separatism in the general sense: (1) anti-Jewish music historians and theorists were shaping forces in the music history and theory that every Classical musician was subjected to in the long 19th century and beyond; (2) Classical performers, theorists, and historians, usually dependent on notated music, were indoctrinated to discover in notated music the black-and-white musical corroborations of Jewish identities and creative personalities that they sought, and scorned, in their world; (3) libraries and archives viewed the compositions of perceived “Jewish music” as less than that of other composers, and of course countless priceless materials were forever lost to history with the burnings and disposals of books, letters, and scores in the early 20th century; and (4) 19th- and 20th-century anti-Jewish programming and criticism resulted in the substantial erasure of much Jewish musical art from the musical canon as critics, historians, theorists, and performers, as well as the general public, rehearsed it. The canon’s nature and function as an exclusionary, self-perpetuating, and self-validating system means that musical art of Romantic composers and critics who have been identified as Jews will retain at best a token presence in modern musical life until performers and writers on music collaborate to right that marginalization.
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