FW: Influence of Bach on Hatikvah

[Reyzl Kalifowicz-Waletzky <reyzl...>]

Tom and Matt,


>But Bach's D minor concerto dives straight into a different key anyway 
(which
>I think was the original point - that melodies can just happen to be alike 
>sometimes but this needn't always prove shared origins).

Jack Gottlieb once did a lecture in YIVO demonstrating just this.   He took 
various items from Christian and non-Jewish music, including Bach and 
Beethoven, and showed their similarity to Jewish music.  The audience was 
challenged to say that the two were samples were historically or even 
ethnically connected.   The conclusion at the end of the evening was that 
there are a limited number of notes and various musics come out with 
similarities although no causal connections can be attributed to them. 
  Indeed, some things are coincidental.

At the same time, let me just also say that there were many voluntary and 
forced conversions to Catholicism during 1300-1650 in the southern Europe 
and many Jews had large input into Christian ways and culture.  It is hard 
to either prove or deny causal relationships.  Some of the influence of the 
Jewish converts (I don't mean conversos) in Spain has been documented by 
scholars, but I am not as familiar with other territories.  I think some 
similar work has been done in Italian areas, but I am not really sure at 
the moment, simply because I have never needed to look at the issues.   If 
you study these conversion patterns, then I don't believe that scholars 
need to prove that Jewish music influenced Christian music.  It is a given. 
  One becomes even more convinced about the kinds of things Jews brought 
with them into the church when upon joining by studying the behavior 
patterns of particular meshumodim [converts out of Judaism], e.g., the 
biographies of the Grand Inquisitor, the Jewish pope, and various upper 
echelons of church leaders in the last 1000 years.   Taking Jewish 
religious and cultural ways and transforming them into novel Christian ways 
won the converts a great many brownie points and familial success.  That 
Jewish religious ways were brought into Christianity is a safe given that 
may accepted without needing to find the smoking gun, I think, although I 
have no doubt that many of these smoking guns are sitting safely in the 
closed papal
archives.   The proofs are sitting there and that is why they won't open 
the archives to
independent or Jewish scholars.  Till they open the archives for everyone 
to see what the Church took, borrowed and stole, and what Jewish converts 
voluntarily brought to its sacrificial table, everyone will sit and 
speculate.  I strongly doubt that they will ever open the archives.  That's 
one of the reasons last month's papal apology was a joke for us hard-necked 
Jews, who can't conveniently forget the historical facts.

Second, many people also don't understand that the Jewish and Christian 
communities intersected in many ways throughout Europe.   Various Christian 
scholars studied Jewish ways and those studies were not limited to Italy as 
the Aaron Herman (name?) on the Roots music site stated.   The Venetian 
Ghetto model of Jewish-Christian relations is also not useful for most 
periods and locations in Europe in the last two thousand years.



Reyzl Kalifowicz-Waletzky



-----Original Message-----
From:   TomP317 (at) aol(dot)com [SMTP:TomP317 (at) aol(dot)com]
Sent:   Monday, April 03, 2000 1:47 AM
To:     World music from a Jewish slant
Subject:        Re: Influence of Bach on Hatikvah

I don't know a great deal about this, but am intrigued by the suggestion 
that
Bach wrote Hatikvah.

I'm taking Idelsohn at his word when he says 'The Yigdal tune can be
considered a compilation of an old folk-motive which is prevalent both in
Jewish, Spanish-Basque as well as in Slavic song' and then gives examples.

But Bach's D minor concerto dives straight into a different key anyway 
(which
I think was the original point - that melodies can just happen to be alike
sometimes but this needn't always prove shared origins).

Still, it reminds me that when Yehudi Menuhin and Stefan Grapelli recorded 
a
swingy version of the concerto, the British Broadcasting Corporation 
stashed
the record away in their archives with the words 'Not to be broadcast'
stamped on the cover. That said, I only know that because I heard it
broadcast on the BBC (and loved it).

Tom Payne



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