Secular Jewish Music

One broad definition describes secular Jewish music as music used primarily by Jews in non-liturgical contexts, including folk song, wordless nigunim, theater music, and epic recitation.[1] Its history is difficult to reconstruct because much of it was transmitted orally and is presumed lost.[1] The category is also complicated by music originally created for non-Jewish audiences that later became a Jewish cultural touchstone — a difficulty illustrated by Fiddler on the Roof, written by a Jewish composer, based on literature by a Jewish author, and intended primarily for Broadway audiences, yet subsequently a central reference point for American Jewish identity.[1]

The classification of music as secular or devotional depends on content and function rather than a fixed musical boundary. Folk and popular music generally fall outside the religious domain, while congregational song can serve both worship and celebratory settings, making the line permeable in practice.[2] Cantors also performed Yiddish songs outside synagogue worship, while klezmer served weddings, bar mitzvahs, and other Jewish life-cycle events, illustrating the overlap between religious, ceremonial, and secular settings.[4] The question of what makes a piece of music "Jewish" has been debated for more than a century without producing a comprehensive definition. One proposed framework identifies three possible grounds: music made for Jewish prayer; music culturally embedded in Jewish life, such as Yiddish or Ladino songs; or music made or performed in a specifically Jewish context — while cautioning that Jewish authorship alone does not necessarily make a work Jewish.[5]

Mark Kligman's survey of contemporary Jewish music in America distinguishes six overlapping genres — cantorial music, Yiddish music, klezmer, Hasidic music, art music, and Zionist songs — and cautions that these categories are best understood by use and setting rather than by impermeable musical boundaries.[4] Cantorial nusach, for instance, appears in Yiddish songs, klezmer, Hasidic tunes, and art music alike.[4]

The Yiddish folk-song tradition originated approximately in the fourteenth century on Germanic soil and had spread to Slavic territories by the sixteenth century.[6] Manuscript collections survive from the sixteenth century, while systematic collecting and publication began only at the end of the nineteenth century.[6] The reported genres include love songs, lullabies, children's songs, wedding songs, dance lyrics, satirical and didactic songs, workers' songs, historical songs, humorous songs, and ballads, as well as songs associated with Hasidism, the Haskalah, and Zionism.[6] Love songs form the largest and most poetic body, typically plaintive in character and concerned with lovers separated by parental interference, social barriers, or lack of dowry or family pedigree.[6]

The Sephardic musical tradition developed through sustained contact with surrounding cultures. The romansas — songs of love and heroism with an epic-recitation character — arose from cultural interaction between Jews and non-Jewish neighbors in Spain before the Inquisition, and later contact with host-country music in Turkey and Bulgaria contributed local modal and melodic patterns.[1] Ladino, the language of these songs, changed after the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492, absorbing words from Arabic, Turkish, Greek, Slavic languages, Portuguese, French, and Italian as communities migrated.[7] Its vitality declined alongside the rise of European nationalism in the late nineteenth century, and Nazi destruction of Jewish communities in Greece and the Balkans further devastated the culture; by 2007, estimates placed the number of Ladino speakers worldwide at fewer than 200,000, and UNESCO recognized Ladino and its variants as endangered languages in 2002.[7]

Evidence for secular Ashkenazic music before the nineteenth century is sparse: folk melodies likely existed but were generally not written down or maintained with much fixity.[1] The most extensive body of pre-nineteenth-century Ashkenazic secular folk music is the Hasidic niggun — the wordless tune — whose development may have been encouraged by the Hasidic emphasis on a personal, emotional relationship with God.[1]

A larger Ashkenazic effort to create distinctly secular music is associated with Jewish emancipation and the Haskalah. Reform temples incorporated instruments into liturgical practice, and Jewish intellectuals encountered non-Jewish theater and concert music; later, figures such as Mendele Mokher Seforim cultivated Yiddish literature, while Abraham Goldfaden wrote operettas drawing on Jewish history and Zionist themes, combining Western European tonal organization with pseudo-eastern melodies to give the music a culturally Jewish character.[1]

Professional Yiddish theater developed in Europe in the late nineteenth century, with the Library of Congress tracing its origins to Abraham Goldfaden in Romania in the 1870s.[8] When the tradition reached America, it drew on vaudeville alongside musical sources including cantorial recitative, Italian opera, Romanian operetta, and American popular music.[8] Songs addressed subjects ranging from love, comedy, and religious themes to Zionism and historical events, and they circulated through theater, sheet music, piano rolls, recordings, and radio from the 1920s onward.[8]

For many American Jews, Yiddish music offered a way to retain the culture of their birthplaces without religious commitment.[4] Theater songs reflected adjustment to American life, community, nostalgia for the old country, pogroms, hunger, and other tragedies; composers Sholom Secunda and Abraham Ellstein, both raised singing in synagogue choirs, combined synagogue music with popular American styles.[4] From 1930, Yiddish cinema provided an additional channel through which songs reached wider audiences.[4] The Library of Congress's Yiddish American popular sheet music collection, drawing mainly on Yiddish theater that flourished in New York's Bowery from the 1880s into the mid-twentieth century, also includes popular arrangements of folk and sacred songs and instrumental pieces; certain compositions, notably those of Abe Schwartz, became klezmer standards.[9]

Folk songs circulated alongside theater repertoire. Songs by writers including Berl Broder, Elyokem Tsunzer, Avrom Goldfadn, Mark Varshavski, and Mordkhe Gebirtig entered oral tradition and were often changed or parodied in the process — Sholem Aleichem's "Shlof mayn kind," printed in Odessa in 1892, had been folklorized enough by 1901 that collectors from five localities submitted changed versions.[6] Songs were usually unaccompanied and freely interpreted by singers; as many as 50 percent are in the minor mode, and melodies shared with Ukrainian songs were reshaped to suit the singers' expressive needs, texts, verse structures, and cadences.[6] "Raisins and Almonds," now widely regarded as a folk lullaby, originated as a song from a Goldfaden operetta.[1]

Klezmer denotes music heard at Jewish weddings, bar mitzvahs, and other life-cycle events, as well as instrumental accompaniment to Yiddish theater songs. Much of it drew on non-Jewish Eastern European folk traditions, and klezmer clarinet playing could imitate the cantor's wail.[4] Early twentieth-century Jewish American bands in New York — including Harry Kandel's and Abe Schwartz's orchestras — recorded music that came to be known as klezmer; their large ensembles retained characteristics of the Eastern European repertory while incorporating instruments suited to recording and popular in America.[10]

Specific dances and ceremonial functions gave klezmer its structure. The "fun der khupe" tunes accompanied the moment after the glass was broken at a Jewish wedding, when the newly married couple led guests toward the wedding feast; though cheerful, this was not a dancing moment, and while such tunes were often a freylekhs or skotshne, Abe Elenkrig's recorded tune is described as closer in style to a bulgar.[10] Elenkrig's Orchestra recorded "Fon Der Choope" on April 4, 1913, in its first recording session; the tune appeared on a 1915 recording as "Die Zilberne Chasene" and as a title also used by Abe Schwartz in 1917. Elenkrig's version is a three-part tune that uses D freygish almost throughout, except for its first six bars.[10]

In the 1920s, American ensembles adapted the tradition by introducing American rhythms, making the clarinet the lead instrument, and dropping the tsimble (hammer dulcimer) and harmonica.[4] Continuing immigration from Eastern Europe sustained interest in traditional klezmer into the mid-1920s; as immigration slowed and Jews sought to assimilate, klezmer became associated by some with immigrant and Yiddish culture and, after World War II, with Holocaust-related tragedy.[11] The postwar decline of Yiddish and klezmer in the 1940s was followed first by a turn toward music from Israel, and the late-1970s klezmer revival is described not as a simple, uninterrupted return of the earlier tradition but as a transformed relationship between older and newer musical practice.[4]

A distinctive secular choral culture emerged among Eastern European Jews from the late nineteenth century, driven in part by Jewish urbanization. Fraternal societies, trade unions, and workers' clubs organized cultural activities outside religious settings, and progressive secular Jews saw Yiddish song as a means of cultivating the sensibilities of Jewish working people.[12] The Bund developed organizations for Yiddish culture and education — including schools, a press, dramatic and literary societies, and choral groups — and figures such as Y. L. Peretz promoted the dissemination of Yiddish song among the Jewish working class.[12]

For young Jews who had moved from towns to cities and were abandoning some customs of their earlier milieu, the new repertoire of Yiddish "folk songs" — including both original compositions and remembered songs associated with childhood and the shtetl — helped sustain a sentimental connection to former homes and contributed to a particularist, Yiddish-centered identity.[12] Jewish workers' choruses initially modeled themselves on German workers' singing societies, which used four-part singing to express social harmony and unity. Early choruses in Warsaw showed a tendency toward assimilation before Yiddishist influence led them to include Yiddish songs; historian Isakhar Fater is cited as estimating that hundreds of Jewish choruses existed in Poland between the world wars.[12]

Hazomir, founded in Łódź in 1899 by the 19-year-old Joseph Rumshinsky — who would later become a leading creator of Yiddish operetta in New York — established a drama circle, a choir, and eventually a philharmonic orchestra formed in 1915.[12] Rumshinsky's memoirs recount his efforts to bring Hasidim, maskilim, factory workers, and professionals together in a four-part ensemble, and his fear that a mixed chorus would scandalize traditional Jews; the chorus's debut ended in an ecstatic circle dance.[12] Warsaw's Hazomir, led by Leo Liow from 1908, distinguished itself by performing Yiddish folk songs in sophisticated arrangements, despite objections from members who favored Hebrew repertoire.[12]

Musical activity spread across cities: in Radomsk, a musician trained as a cantorial apprentice organized symphonic and choral concerts within a cultural group; in Warsaw, the Shniur Chorus combined Yiddish folklore and literature with major works of Western classical music; and in Vilna, singers performed both Yiddish folk music and Western art music.[12]

Secular Jewish choruses in America eventually declined by the middle of the twentieth century amid reduced immigration and assimilation, while Zionist organizations promoted Israeli culture through song.[13] From the 1990s, student-led Jewish a cappella groups appeared whose repertoires drew mainly on Israeli and American popular songs, with arrangements influenced by doo-wop and jazz vocal ensembles.[13]

The Society for Jewish Folk Music, founded in Saint Petersburg in 1908 and active until approximately 1919, encouraged young Russian Jewish composers to create a modern national style of Jewish concert music.[14] Its members transcribed Yiddish folk songs, klezmer melodies, and Hasidic nigunim as source material for original compositions. Early works were often short arrangements for voice, piano, strings, or chorus; later works grew more formally and harmonically complex, blending late Russian Romantic and emerging European modernist styles in chamber and orchestral pieces.[14]

The Society organized research, composition, performance, and publishing. It held regular lecture-concerts for members and larger public concerts, generally at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, and began publishing music in 1910. Branches were established in Moscow and Kiev in 1913 and in Odessa in 1916, and members organized music classes and community choruses in Saint Petersburg and Moscow.[14] The Society maintained a Jewish nationalist orientation without adopting a single political affiliation, collaborating with Zionist, Folkspartey, and liberal Jewish groups.[14] Its collecting work formed part of a wider effort that included Yo'el Engel's transcription of folk-song melodies beginning in 1898 and a 1912–1914 Jewish Historical-Ethnographic Society expedition to Ukraine involving Engel, Lazare Saminsky, and Zusman Kiselgof.[6]

Zionist songs developed in the first half of the twentieth century in Hebrew, English, and other languages, focused on the dream of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Popularized in schools, synagogues, summer camps, and social settings, they gained further significance after Israel's establishment in 1948 and the Six-Day War in 1967.[4] One celebrated example, "Hatikvah," drew its lyrics from Naphtali Herz Imber's 1878 poem "Tikvatenu," expressing a desire to return to the land of his ancestors. Alma Gluck recorded it in 1918; after Israel became a state in 1948 it served as the principal patriotic song, and it was officially made the national anthem in 2004.[15]

The connections between secular Zionist and religious musical culture ran deep. More than 200 songs of the Third Aliyah's pioneers — forming the core of the secular Zionist repertoire — began as Hasidic tunes. The Jewish Review of Books describes one example, "Rav ha-laila," as growing from a tune Eliezer Orland brought home after praying with Boyaner Hasidim; his son Yaakov, then losing his religious faith, fitted Hebrew words to it. The song later circulated in Zionist camps and films, and a religious-Zionist version with new lyrics was written in 1933.[16]

"Hava Nagila" offers another illustration of how sacred and secular streams crossed. The song began as a wordless Hasidic niggun associated with the Ruzhiner rebbe in Sadagora; European immigrants brought the melody to Palestine in the early 1900s, and musicologist Abraham Zevi Idelsohn added Hebrew lyrics in 1915, presenting the new version at a Jerusalem concert in 1918 celebrating the British victory in Palestine. The song became associated with Zionist culture and reached peak popularity in the 1950s and 1960s.[17]

In the United States, Israeli songs spread in synagogues, camps, and social gatherings during the 1950s and 1970s. Israeli pop songs were a mainstay of American Jewish camping in the early 1970s; songs including "Bashana ha ba-ah," "Yerushalayim Shel Zahav," and "Abanibi" circulated widely, and Arik Einstein's "Ani v'Atta" was sung in Reform camps, youth groups, and creative services, linking American Jewish youth with Israel.[18] A 1950 recording of "Tzena, Tzena" reached approximately number two on the Billboard charts for about ten weeks, while at American Jewish weddings of the 1950s and 1960s it appeared alongside "Hava Nagila," "Artza Alinu," and "Hevenu Shalom Aleichem" in Israeli-folk-song sets.[11] By the late 1970s, the flow of new repertoire from Israel to American Jewish communities had slowed considerably.[4]

In Israel itself, a contemporary current has emerged in which songs are not necessarily classified as Jewish music, but their content reflects the creators' Jewish-Israeli identity. In the decade or so before 2015, Israeli artists — including some who were not observant — began performing works joining Jewish source texts and centuries-old piyyutim to contemporary arrangements; the artists named include Evyatar, Meir and Ehud Banai, Berry Sakharof, Corinne Allal, Shlomo Gronich, and Kobi Aflalo.[19]

Sephardic musical traditions — most emblematically the Ladino romance, a narrative ballad genre — became touchstones for communities whose ancestors left Spain in 1492. Philip V. Bohlman's account of Jewish music in Europe emphasizes exchange with surrounding musical cultures rather than treating Jewish music as isolated, and describes a late-twentieth-century rediscovery of both Yiddish and Sephardic song traditions.[20] Contemporary practitioners have carried those traditions into new forms: London band Los Desterrados, formed by Daniel Jonas in 2000, draws on Sephardic and Middle Eastern influences and combines original lyrics and melodies with Flamenco, Balkan and Greek melodies, and Moroccan and Turkish rhythms.[7] Jonas said he sought a Jewish musical form other than klezmer that could speak to his generation and reconnect it with heritage it had not known well; the band recorded its first album, Por Dos Levanim, in 2001.[7]

North African Jewry produced musicians of major stature. Moroccan Jewish vocalist Zohra El Fassia (1905–1994), born in Sefrou, began singing in Fez coffee houses and cabarets, performing in the shaʿbī and malḥūn styles, whose songs narrated politics, beauty, and heartbreak. After moving to Casablanca in the mid-1920s, she released numerous 78 rpm records through labels including Columbia Records and the Gramophone Company.[21] Samy Elmaghribi (born Salomon Amzallag, 1922–2008) harmonized Andalusian and Jewish melodies, founded the Samyphone record label, and built a career that took him from Morocco to Montreal and Israel; later in New York he worked as a cantor and expert in Sephardi liturgy.[21]

Within Israel, Mizrahi music faced significant historical challenges. Anthropologist and performer Galeet Dardashti has argued that Ashkenazi music held a "monopoly" by the time of the large Mizrahi immigration of the early 1950s, leaving Mizrahi traditions marginalized during the early nation-building period.[22] A later revival of Mizrahi musical and poetic traditions — including piyutim, liturgical poems traditionally sung or chanted in worship — took place through singing communities, classes, concerts, and collaborations with popular musicians.[22] The Hebrew University's Jewish Music Research Centre holds collections spanning Ashkenazi, Baghdadi, Cochin, and Yemenite traditions alongside songs of the Land of Israel, organized also by subject: holidays, Kabbalah, weddings, and the Holocaust, among others.[23]

Music in the ghettos of occupied Europe encompassed street songs, performances at private gatherings and public venues, revue theater, choral and symphonic music, chamber music, liturgical selections, and partisan songs. It could offer an escape from reality, express longing for freedom, and provide comfort and hope; many songs were newly composed, while others used old melodies with new words.[24] Street performer Yankele Hershkowitz was popular in the Łódź ghetto, and the Vilna ghetto maintained an orchestra, choirs, and a conservatory with 100 students.[24] In Warsaw, organized musical activity such as that of the Bund halted after the outbreak of World War II, while musicians in the ghettos organized what they could.[12]

Some songs composed in this period became lasting memorials. Mordkhay Gebirtig composed "Es brent" in 1938, in response to the 1936 pogrom in Przytyk; its image of a burning Jewish town and its call not to stand idly by led it to be regarded as prophetic of the destruction of European Jewry, and it became one of the best-known songs performed at Holocaust memorial ceremonies.[25] Hirsh Glik wrote "Zog nit keynmol" ("Never Say") to a melody by Russian composer Dmitrii Pokrass; the song became the United Partisan Organization's hymn in 1943 and, known after the war as "Partisaner himn" ("The Partisan Hymn"), became a Holocaust commemoration anthem.[12][24] Shmerke Kaczerginski's 1948 anthology of ghetto and camp songs contains 236 Yiddish lyrics and 100 melodies; many songs from the period were never collected and have been lost.[24]

The Vilna-ghetto cantata Di lererin Mire, composed by Vladimir Heifetz in 1943 to a poem by Avrom Sutzkever, depicts children singing under the direction of teacher Mire Bernstein.[12] The song "Shtiler, shtiler," with words by Kaczerginski and music by 11-year-old Aleksander Volkoviski-Tamir, and "Shotns," with words by Leyb Rozental sung to a popular tango melody, are among other documented works from this period.[24]

A 2004 Globes account characterizes Jewish music as intertwined with jazz throughout jazz history. When Benny Goodman performed "Bei Mir Bistu Shein" at Carnegie Hall in 1938 with a large jazz ensemble that included Harry James, Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, Lester Young, Johnny Hodges, and Gene Krupa, the musicians played a freylekhs — a Jewish celebratory dance — in a style likened to a Jewish wedding. Some of those musicians knew Yiddish culture from New York's Lower East Side and Harlem, and some played at Jewish celebrations as additional work.[26]

Jewish and Israeli songs entered American jazz recordings in the early 1960s. Shelly Manne's Steps to the Desert, recorded in December 1961 with a West Coast jazz group, included a medley of Jewish and Israeli songs; Shorty Rogers's arrangement of "Hava Nagila" develops into swing, while Lennie Niehaus arranged the Hebrew song "Orkha BaMidbar" while retaining its original melody and recast "Bokrei Lachish" — originally written as a debka — with a cabaret-like rhythm.[26] The institutionalization of Jewish jazz as an independent genre is attributed by one account to saxophonist John Zorn in the early 1990s, after which many jazz groups drew explicitly on Eastern European Jewish music.[26]

Systematic collection of Yiddish folk songs began around 1896 through the work of Y. L. Peretz and Yehudah Leib Cahan in Warsaw. In 1898, Sha'ul Ginsburg and Peysekh Marek appealed for songs in Hebrew and Russian newspapers, and their 1901 anthology was the first major collection.[6] Joel Engel transcribed folk-song melodies beginning in 1898 and later arranged them for voice and piano, helping move songs usually sung by and for the people into concert and classical-music settings.[27]

The National Library of Israel's music collection includes songs in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Ladino, as well as scores of Hasidic songs and cantors' notebooks. Its archive holds some 10,000 records of Hebrew songs recorded for broadcasting — mainly from the 1950s — and another 10,000 tapes of Hebrew songs recorded by Kol Yisrael during the 1960s and 1970s. The Library's National Sound Archive holds tens of thousands of hours of recordings, including folksongs as well as religious music and ritual material.[28]

YIVO's collections include the Ruth Rubin Legacy, an archive of songs Rubin recorded from Yiddish-speaking singers, including Holocaust survivors and refugees who arrived in New York.[27] The YIVO Folk Song Project — East European Jewish Folk Song in its Social Context — began in the 1970s, was later rediscovered and digitized, and contains about 2,000 songs from Eastern Europe and North America. The project documented not only songs and texts but also singers' lives and the roles songs played in their communities.[27] A 2006 Jewish music festival at London's Trafalgar Square, organized by the Jewish Music Institute to mark 350 years of the British Jewish community, presented the Eastern European She'koyokh Klezmer Ensemble, Sephardic melodies by Los Desterrados, Iraqi Jewish music by Rivers of Babylon, jazz tributes by the Ronnie Scott Legacy Quartet, Ladino singer Mor Karbasi, and klezmer clarinetist Merlin Shepherd — a snapshot of the breadth of traditions kept in active performance.[29]

Efforts to define and institutionalize secular Jewish music continued in 2023, when Jewish musicians proposed a Grammy Award category intended to distinguish secular Jewish music — including klezmer, Yiddish, Ladino, and Judeo-Arabic music — from religious music such as cantorial music and nigguns. The proposal also emphasized that Jewish music is transdenominational and grounded in both spirituality and culture rather than Ashkenazi heritage alone.[30] Musicians noted that they frequently cross musical boundaries and can be difficult to place in existing award categories.[30]

Some areas of classification remain genuinely contested among scholars and practitioners. The boundary between secular and religious Jewish music is not consistent across genres or communities: the Grammy-category proposal classifies certain Mizrahi music as religious while grouping klezmer, Yiddish, Ladino, and Judeo-Arabic music as secular, while other discussions describe overlapping sacred and popular traditions within those same genres.[30] The question of whether Jewish authorship, cultural embeddedness, or context of performance should be the primary criterion for calling music Jewish has not been resolved.[5]