re: What is Jewish music?

[Helen Winkler <winklerh...>]

When reading the history of Jewish dance, where this same sort of question,
"What is Jewish dance/music" has been asked, I've come across a bothersome
phenomenon.

In article that Robert Cohen sent me some time ago (thanks Robert), there is
a discussion about Jews from different ethnographic regions arriving in
Israel, bringing with them a variety of music/dance traditions.  In their
countries of origin, they participated in these dances without wondering if
they were or weren't Jewish dances.  When they got to Israel, fieldworkers
and researchers confronted them with the question of "Is this really Jewish
dance or is it really just the dance of your host countries."  The article
implies that asking the question caused the informants to begin to doubt the
Jewishness of their generations-old cultures and that as a result they
sometimes "improvised" their answers to the researchers.(Jewish Folklore and
Ethnology Newsletter, Vol.8 No.3-4, The Ethnic Dance in Israel, with
Select3d Filmography by Ayalah Goren)

In another article about the demise of Yemenite dance, there is a discussion
of the desire among choreographers, musicians and poets to create a
distinctly Israeli culture.  As a result, the newly synthetic version of
Yemenite dance actually overtook the original.  So, the Israeli version of
the Yemenite step is all that people do now and the original Yemenite step
as danced by Yemenite Jews in Yemen, is hard to come by. (Society of Dance
History Scholars, 1988, American Yemenite Jewish Dance:  Theb Oldtimers and
their Children by Dina Dahbany-Miraglia)

It makes me wonder if by trying too hard to define or categorize things as
uniquely Jewish, we may sometimes damage the original unique entity and lose
it forever.
Helen