Ethnomusicology

Written as a memoire of the musical encounters of the author, composer and conductor Lazare Saminsky (1882-1959), with Jewish communities in his homeland, the Russian Empire and elsewhere, the book is a document of the late Romantic Orientalistic views of Western intellectuals regarding the authenticity of Jewish music in the East.

A survey first published in 1949 covering Jewish music from patriarch Abraham to contemporary Israeli composers. Its main aim is to reassert the Jewish presence in the narrative of Western music history. As others of its kind, this book presents a compilation of data devoid of theoretical or critical concerns.

A programmatic article including a very valuable critique of most of definitions of Jewish music. It stresses the ambiguity of the concept of Jewish music as well as the racialized discourses related to it that developed after Richard Wagner.

Emphasizes the vastness of Jewish music in terms of time and place and therefore the impossibility of addressing it as a unified field.

Explores the history of Jewish music research in relation to parallel developments in ethnomusicology and Jewish studies in the American academic world during the twentieth century.