RE: Re[4]: Der yidisher tam

[Paul M. Gifford <PGIFFORD...>]

Reyzl Kalifowicz-Waletzky <reyzl (at) flash(dot)net> wrote:
> 
> Adaptation from what?
> 
> It could be a local innovation or it could be a local Jewish innovation 
> or a local Jewish hybrid....  
> As for why some things didn't travel northward, e.g., Poland and 
> Lithuania, I can say that you can't expect the kind of dissemination 
> across these culturally and politically warring borders as you would 
> expect within a homogenous Christian society, as e.g., Central 
> Poland.  (BTW, the Ukraine was under Polish rule for a very, very 
> long time too.  The Ottoman Empire at one point extended to the very 
> borders of Poland.)  For Polish, Lithuanian, and Bielo-Russian Jews, 
> whose territories were not influenced by this very different, 
> non-Christian Turkish culture, doinas may have sounded too "Greek", 
> too "Turkish" or too "oriental" or too "different" to adopt, even if 
> this would have been a totally Jewish creation.

In the case of the doina, Beregowsky, referring to the case of 
Ukraine, said that it had been introduced relatively recently, 
c.1900.  Arkady Dvilianskiy, who recently wrote a book on Jewish
music in Belarus, says that the doina wasn't known there.   Maybe 
you're right, because in 25 or 30 years, one would assume some 
migration from Ukraine to Belarus.  Incidentally (although some
will disagree), the _Doina Oltului_, a Bucharest instrumental 
standard, is closely related to the Jewish doina.
   > 
...    
> 
> I am not insisting that Jews created or introduced doinas to the 
> region.  I am saying that from the facts that you are presenting, 
> nothing can be known.   The fact is that Armenians and Greeks also 
> played an important role in Ottoman mercantile life and they could 
> have made important contributions to the music in this region, 
> however, we also know that they don't remain in this area as a 
> distinctive ethnic element and the Jews do.  There must be some 
> important reasons for that.  Since this more southern region has 
> never been my territory of study, I don't know enough about its 
> history to be more specific.  (I am hoping to go with prominent 
> folklorist Dov Noy on a tour to Moldavia and Bukovina this summer 
> (June 30-July 6) and hope to learn a lot. 

The Greeks have mostly left, but there is a very assimilated Armenian
community in Suceava, at least.  I stayed there, on Armeneasca street, 
with someone whose name was something like Georgescu, and he said his
name was a translation of "Kevorkian."  Distinctive elements of 
Turkish origin in the Bucharest Gypsy repertoire include the _manea_;
a dance type like the chifte telli; a virtuoso cimbalom tune called
_turceasca_; and a violin tuning like the Turkish chifte telli.

> There is another argument here which is very important.  Polish 
> and Russian territories were among the very last in Europe to end 
> feudalism.   Few people today remember how dark and dismal the life
> of a peasant/serf was and what cultural services Jews performed in 
> this economic system.   The Church always wanted the credit for 
> the cultural contributions Jews made in the lives of the masses 
> and made sure the Jews got blamed for whatever went wrong.   Don't 
> expect the true history of the contributions Jews made to be told soon 
> from within these territories, even after 50 years of Communism ended.

I agree, but things are definitely changing.  The program of the 
International Cimbalom Congress held in Mogilev, Belarus, last year, 
acknowledged klezmer players and traditions in the section on the 
history of the instrument in Belarus.  Right now I'm exchanging info
on this subject with a graduate student in Minsk.  The ironic thing is
that the tsimbaly was developed as a "national instrument" in the '30s
and '40s (especially after 1948) in Belarus.  One of three teachers 
involved in developing this "national instrument," incidentally, was 
Jewish.  The instrument forms the basis of the State Orchestra of 
Folk Instruments "I. Zhinovich."  The truth of the instrument's 
history there may be a hard pill for some to swallow, but there seems 
to be a lot of interest in history there now.  Soviet-era 
publications after 1930 did not acknowledge the Jewish association.  

 > Another important factor when it comes to music in the Romanian-
> Hungarian territory is the role played by the Gypsies and the 
> stimulation such a cultural exchange afforded Jews in the realm of 
> music.  I say this because it's my impression that there was a 
> greater proportion of gypsies in these territories than in Poland 
> and Lithuania.  I really have never seen comparative figures for the
> Gypsy population across these territories, and so this only my 
> impression.  I hope someone who knows the facts corrects me on this 
> if I am wrong.    

I don't know the demographic facts either, but I'm sure you're right.
In some parts of Romania, wedding musicians are exclusively Gypsies.  
In Belarus, I was told that Gypsies weren't associated with music as
an occupation.  I've heard tantalizing bits of information about 
Ukrainian Gypsy musicians (who must have largely disappeared during 
the Holocaust).  For example, a Ukrainian, born in 1893, who 
emigrated in 1913, told me that the tsimbaly was not a "Ukrainian" 
instrument, but a "Gypsy" instrument, and that nomadic Gypsies who 
appeared in his village once a year played it.  There are Polish 
Gypsy bands who play in the street, and I heard one in Warsaw 
(violin, accordion, guitar).  Unfortunately there is little or 
nothing on record of Polish or Ukrainian Gypsy music (that I know of 
anyway).  

Paul Gifford







> Anyone can do folk etymology, but only hard-nosed multi-disciplinary, 
> cross-linguistic, and cross-cultural research can reveal the answers 
> to the issues raised here.   A tremendous amount of hope was placed 
> on one young expert on Jewish languages, including the Eurasian ones, 
> Dr. Paul Wexler, who could have theoretically told us lots of 
> interesting things, but he, unfortunately, went off his rocker and 
> has claimed in the last 6 years that both Hebrew and Yiddish are 
> Slavic languages.  Not too much credibility is left in his scientific 
> methodologies after his last two books.  There are now several 
> research projects going on around the Crimea which we hope will reveal 
> lots of interesting material about early Jewish life in this region.
> 
> Understanding cultural borrowing, adaptation, hybridization, and 
> creativity is very complicated.  We all know that etymology is the 
> oldest Jewish sport, but the fact is that it is really unproductive 
> to try to guess at things from the limited perspective American Jews 
> have.   To do this properly you need to intensely study diachronic 
> histories of each territory within a continent if not a whole region 
> or the world.   There are people who are doing that already.  Then 
> will come other experts who will analyze their evidence and then we 
> will all know.   I wish we could apply the bread and khale analogy 
> to Jewish music but we just can't.   It doesn't work like that.  I 
> also don't think that pumpernickel bread is distinctly Jewish, but 
> Jews were probably the ones to introduce it to America.   They should 
> get some credit for that, but then I don't know what role they played 
> in either Western or Eastern Europe vis-a-vis pumpernickel.   Since 
> baking is a craft, and Jews were the craftsmen, they had to play an 
> important role in European society, especially in feudal societies 
> and Poland and the Ukraine were feudal till very late.   Now a more 
> controversial matter is who introduced round khales to whom in the 
> Ukraine?   No time for this discussion and it won't help with the 
> doina question anyway.   
> 
> Yes, you are safe in saying that kharoyses is Jewish, but what you 
> don't know is that Jews in different regions used different products 
> to make their Jewish kharoyses.   I happen to have about 22+ different 
> kharoyses recipes from different communities around the world and we 
> can all say that they are Jewish and pasty. 
> 
> I strongly suggest that we read the works of Mark Slobin, Albert 
> Weisser, Chana Mlotek, and many other ethnomusicologists.  In fact, I 
> hope to be setting up THE definitive Yiddish web site for YiddishNet, 
> my Yiddish news and information news service and hope to collect as 
> many excellent academic papers on Yiddish music as possible.   These 
> papers will, of course, also be available at Ari's klezmer site.  So, 
> if you have any ascii versions of any such pertinent works, please 
> let me know about it.  But please don't send me anything yet.
> 
> Remember, think eggplants.  They are a good analogy to the doinas.
> 
> 
> Please forgive my grammar.  Don't have time to edit myself.
> 
> 
> Writing to support my friend Itsik-Leyb who has had to nebekh carry
> the whole scholarly perspective alone on this list.   You know, Richard,
> he is write in everything he has written.
> 
> 
> Reyzl Kalifowicz-Waletzky
> YiddishNet
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ----------
> From:  richard_wolpoe (at) ibi(dot)com[SMTP:richard_wolpoe (at) ibi(dot)com]
> Sent:  Tuesday, March 10, 1998 5:02 PM
> To:  World music from a Jewish slant.
> Subject:  Re[4]: Der yidisher tam 
> 
> 
> 
> Well I can say the following:
> 
> Pierogy is a Polish word.  I don't knwo who got it from whom.
> 
> I DO know that gefilte fish has a halahci imperative, that is not separting 
> bones on Shabbos.
> 
> Same for cholent, having soemthing warm on the oven from before Shabbos.
> 
> I cannot separate what is purely jewish from what is purely Eastern European,
> 
> BUT, I can look at other customes an note that sepharadim do not have cholent 
> but they do have chamin!
> 
> And I can listen to Kol nidre from literally dozens of communities and 
> they're 
> all similar.  so we can find a common consensus underlying them.  If one set 
> of 
> Jews basis nusach on eg the doina, and virtuallly NO other community does, 
> doesn't that say something about the melody?  IE that it's likely it was a 
> local
> adaptation...
> 
> There are no hard and fast rules.  And I do not totally agree with my Polsih 
> gentile friends either.  But pumpernickel bread is not originally Jewish nor 
> lox
> nor herring etc.  Charoses is.  Get it/
> 
> Freilichen Purim
> 
> Rich 
> 
> ______________________________ Reply Separator 
> _________________________________
> Subject: Re:  Re[2]: Der yidisher tam 
> Author:  <jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org > at Tcpgate
> Date:    3/10/98 11:42 AM
> 
> 
> On  Mon, 9 Mar 1998 12:03:28 -0500, Rich Wolpoe wrote:
> Mozart and all the rest borrowed extensivly from folk music.  So does
> our liturgy.  A number of Polish Gentiles have told me that what we pas of 
> as jewish is merely Eastern European stuff.  From pierogies, to blintses, 
> etc. etc.  So that yiddisher taam that wells our eyes with nostalgia might 
> actually refelct more the Eastern European milieu more than anything 
> intrinsically Jewish.
> 
> Reply: I'm singling out this statement, Rich, because it's such a perfect 
> illustration of misunderstanding the importance of _minhog_. in the 
> definition of Judaism. Let me first repeat something I wrote in the 
> "Klezmer Trumpet" discussion , 26 Jan 1998. Reyzl had noted:
> 
> :Some non-Jews in Balkan countries to this day hear Jewish and call it 
> Balkan, unable or unwilling to see anything distinctively Jewish or 
> different about it."
> 
> The essence of my reply was, what's unique about it, ultimately, is the 
> yidishe neshume , or what I'm calling here der yidishe tam (Jewish taste, 
> or aesthetic). Aside from the fact that when you're talking about food, 
> halakha, kashrus, has greatly influenced the food. I can't recall any 
> traditional Jewish pork dishes, but there are lots of Polish ones. 
> 
> We ought to get over this complex that Jews borrow culture from everyone 
> else, but no one else borrows culture from Jews, or that other cultures 
> don't borrow from other cultures. 
> 
> It is a historic fact, that when Christianity first was adopted in Rudssia 
> at the end of the 10th century A.D., there were already extensive Jewish 
> settlements in southern Russia, including the city of Kiev. The oldest 
> known Polish coins have writing in Hebrew letters on them -- not because 
> they were Jews, but because that was the only writing the Poles had at 
> that time.
> 
> So when you write:
> "A number of Polish Gentiles have told me that what we pas of
> as jewish is merely Eastern European stuff.  From pierogies, to blintses, 
> etc. etc.  So that yiddisher taam that wells our eyes with nostalgia might 
> actually refelct more the Eastern European milieu more than anything 
> intrinsically Jewish." I wonder what "intrinsically Jewish" could possibly 
> mean to you. Even the halakhic tradition of the East European Jews is 
> specific to the historical development of Jewish life IN EASTERN EUROPE. 
> Who suddenly made these Polish Gentiles meyvinim on the yidishn tam,
> that I should accept their judgment that it is "merely Eastern European 
> stuff"? over my own, which is from my family and culture. On the one 
> hand, yes it is part of the east European cultural milieu, as with any 
> other people from Eastern Europe. We're not from Mars, you know. On the 
> other hand, that "merely" sounds like the typically antisemitic or 
> Jewish self-hatred thing of, of "Oh, you people have no culture." There 
> may not be any ONE Jewish culture, any more than there is ONE Christian 
> culture, but there certainly are Jewish cultures, and on the Jewish 
> Music List I don't think it would be inappropriate to encourage people 
> to learn as much as thye can about the particular culture they happen to 
> come from.
> Itzik-Leyb
> 
> 
> 
>