Re: Is "Hatikvah" Jewish?

[Ari Davidow <ari...>]

If I understand you correctly, Shirona, you're pointing out that music,
Jewish or otherwise, doesn't occur in a vacuum and isn't created from
nothing. There =are= Jewish musical traditions that are believed to 
go very far back--I know that Idelsohn made claims that the cantorial
tradition could be traced back to the Temple, how much of that is still
considered true, I don't know.

On the other hand, as anyone writing about "Jewish" music from klezmer
to "traditional" Sephardic tunes (my ears still echo with some of the
caustic remarks Judith Cohen has made in that regard over the years)
can (and does) say, there is a lot of borrowing back and forth.

There is probably some line, which will be defined differently by
different people, which attempts to mark when some boundary is 
crossed--when, say, Bob Dylan or Irving Berlin might be considered
Jews making music, or American music, but not particularly Jewish
music, or when a common folk tune such as Debbie Friedman's religious
melodies become definitively Jewish.

For specific scholarly purposes I can see where this matters. For me,
as a writer about Jewish culture and about Jewish music, that music
which is somewhere around the edges is interesting as a way of understanding
where our cultural edges are. But otherwise? Isn't much of where one
would draw the line based on how one defines one's own Jewish identity?

ari

At 01:04 PM 5/3/2001 -0700, you wrote: 
>
> A few years ago I attended a seminar on the origins of "Jewish Music", and
> one of the examples studied was our very own Hatikvah.  Most people think
> that the melody was taken from Smetana's "Moldava" - which already implies
> that it was "shnorered" from another (non Jewish...) source.  However -
> according to some musicologists, the melody for Hatikvah can be traced to a
> Romanian horse-and-buggy song. The same tune that might have influenced
> Smetana...  But either way - our own National Anthem is not Jewish....


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