TY - JOUR
AU - Sela,, Yael
AB - In the early years of the Haskalah movement (the Jewish Enlightenment), an avant-garde Jewish intelligentsia, which in the 1780s began its organized activity in Berlin and Königsberg as the Society of the Friends of Hebrew Literature (Gesellschaft der hebräischen Literaturfreunde, or Ḥevrat dorshei leshon ‘ever),1 music and music aesthetics or history were practically absent from its agenda as areas of investigation, let alone practice. Following the ideational inspiration of Moses Mendelssohn, the younger generation of maskilim (scholars, proponents of Haskalah) sought to transform Ashkenazic Judaism from within, primarily through a revival of Bible study and exegesis free from rabbinic authority. Above all, they placed Hebrew Scripture at the center of a new Jewish curriculum and advanced the renewal of the Holy Tongue (Leshon ha-Kodesh) as a language of literary, poetic, and scholarly production. Their endeavors simultaneously drew on medieval and early modern non-Ashkenazic rabbinic Jewish textual traditions as well as contemporaneous European Enlightenment philosophy and scholarship.2 Yet while the second half of the eighteenth century saw an upsurge of printed literature on music criticism and aesthetics in North Germany,3 witnessing a rapidly growing participation of enlightened Jews in German musical culture, particularly in such urban centers as Berlin, the fine arts, including music, were not readily adopted as an operative means of advancing the maskilic vision. Despite Mendelssohn’s extensive contribution to European Enlightenment aesthetics from the outset of his philosophical career,4 music is practically nowhere to be found on the pages of the main organ of the Prussian Haskalah, the monthly periodical ha-Me’asef, first published in early 1784. Indeed, music and other arts had not played a significant role, if any, in the upbringing of the maskilim. Entrenched in the traditional Ashkenazic world of Central and Eastern Europe, their education had been dominated by rabbinic law that gave supremacy to Talmud and Torah learning and considered music, like other sensual temptations and vanities, a distraction to religious scholarship and a life of devotion.5 The present essay draws attention to an arguably seminal cultural moment of Jewish modernity, when music began to emerge into the agenda and ideational discourse of Jewish Enlightenment in Prussia. This moment can be gleaned from a series of events that culminated in 1791 with the publication of the biggest bestseller of the Haskalah—Sefer Zemirot Israel (Book of the Songs of Israel), a bilingual Hebrew-German edition of the Book of Psalms with Hebrew commentary and three Hebrew introductions. In what follows, I suggest that these para-texts operate in several discursive arenas at the same time: engaging with contemporaneous non-Jewish aesthetic and philological approaches to biblical poetry, the introductions simultaneously borrow and deviate from their German models in ways that yield a novel political–theological reading of the Book of Psalms. These texts harbor a critique of contemporaneous German (Christian) Bible scholarship, seeking to reclaim the authenticity of Hebrew biblical poetry as a historical–cultural as well as liturgical patrimony of present-day Jews and gain for Judaism an equal footing within modern European thought. Furthermore, in giving music a prime place in the formulation of the poetics, historical origins, and prescribed practice of the psalms, the introductions in Sefer Zemirot Israel negotiate the place of Judaism in the general history of music, an emergent field of inquiry in mid-eighteenth-century Germany. I argue that the introductions’ emphasis on the topos of music (and its loss) in the mythology of Jewish exile should be seen not only as a polemic against the traditional Christian accusation of the Jews’ unmusicality; considering the overwhelmingly Jewish readership for which the edition was intended, they should also be understood as a response to Jewish consciousness of exile itself, the foundational ethos of diasporic Judaism, formative to the very impetus of the Haskalah as an ideational movement. Jewish tradition has made exile inextricably bound up with the obliteration of music from Jewish religious worship, identifying the destruction of Jerusalem as the very moment in which the soundscape of the Temple—the Levites’ perpetual singing and their accompanying musical instruments—was silenced. In the mythical consciousness of exile, music will return to Israel with messianic redemption and the reinstitution of the Levites in the newly rebuilt temple.6 The loss of music thus demarcates Jewish historical time as paradigmatically epitomized in Psalm 137 (“By the waters of Babylon,” describing the Levites’ inability to sing in exile) and Psalm 126 (“When the Lord restores the fortunes of Zion … our mouths will be filled … with song”), making the crisis in the bond between God and his nation audible through silence. The long tradition of Christian commentary and translation of the Hebrew psalms, which reached its pinnacle in the early modern period, received among eighteenth-century German Hebraists, poets, and Orientalists an ideological impetus that positioned the poetry of the ancient Hebrews with its expressive, allegedly primitive yet idyllic traits as a model for German national poetry. This historicist–aesthetic vein separated ancient Hebrews all the more from diasporic Jews, denying the latter’s claim to the former, reproving modern-day Jews for their unmusicality as proof of their moral baseness.7 The commentator’s emphasis in Sefer Zemirot Israel on the historical contingency of exile—and hence of the obliteration of music from Judaism—responds, therefore, also to the Christian theological (that is, essentialist) accusation against the Jews. Focusing on the core theme of the three introductions of Sefer Zemirot Israel, I trace how the commentator’s advocacy of a renewed political–theological and aesthetic concept of the Hebrew psalms as the prime liturgical corpus of holy songs of the Jews—past, present, and future—simultaneously deploys and attenuates, even refutes, contemporaneous non-Jewish attitudes in German Bible scholarship to biblical poetry and its musical origins, reclaiming, in turn, modern-day Jews’ uninterrupted relation to the art of music and poetry in ancient Israel.8 The Fine Arts and Jewish Enlightenment in Prussia In the revolutionary educational curriculum laid out in 1782 by Naphtali Herz Wessely, the ideological patron of the maskilim in Prussia, under the title Words of Peace and Truth (Divre shalom ve-emet), music is not included among the commended subjects. Although one of the enthusiastic letters of endorsement written by Italian rabbis in defense of Wessely’s program and published in 1783 encourages the inclusion of music in the envisioned curriculum, this recommendation went completely unheeded in Wessely’s subsequent response, published in 1785. The Venetian rabbis’ defense of the material arts and crafts—architecture, drawing, metalwork, gold- and silversmithing—is reiterated in Wessely’s subsequent response merely in technical terms as the drawing of charts and building designs.9 Indeed, while German Enlightenment thought maintained the notion inherent in the concept of Bildung that “the aesthetic … activated the moral imperative which resided in any man,” as demonstrated also in Mendelssohn’s important contribution to German aesthetics, and hailed music, above all other arts, for its cathartic effect as a vehicle of moral edification and social refinement (Bildung, Sittlichkeit) of the individual and of society as a whole,10 maskilic ideology was initially indifferent to the arts for the sake of aesthetic pleasure, moral amelioration, and personal edification.11 Against this backdrop, it is all the more remarkable that the last issue of the Me’asef in its second year (1786) announced the expansion of the Society of the Friends of Hebrew Literature, to include both structural and ideological rearrangements. This development, led by the entrepreneurial scholar Isaac Euchel and his right hand, Joel Bril Löwe (1762–1803), was made possible through the financial support of patrons of the Haskalah that included two of the wealthiest members of the Berlin Jewish elite, Isaac Daniel Itzig and David Friedländer.12 The goal of the new society, now appearing under a new name as the Society for the Promotion of the Good and the Beneficent (Gesellschaft zur Beförderung des Guten und Edlen, or Ḥevrat shoḥarei ha-tov ve-ha-tushia), was to expand its horizons and scope geographically beyond Berlin and Prussia to other parts of the European Jewish world, thus extending its mission beyond Hebrew literature and scholarship to include other sciences and above all arts and music.13 Under its new name, the Society now fashioned itself as a committed advocate not only of Hebrew scholarship and education but also of the arts, representing the core values of Bildung in Jewish garb.14 The new Society’s manifesto, published in 1787, is the earliest document associated with the Haskalah (and indeed, the first instance of its sort in the history of Ashkenazic Judaism) to include the fine arts as part of its official mission statement and operational agenda.15 It established a mechanism that ensured financial reward to anyone who contributed to the new Society’s mission—writers, publicists, poets, or critics, but also artists and musicians, based on three principle groups of members: literati (toraniyim; literally, Torah scholars), referring to scholars, particularly those of Hebrew language and literature; artists (omanim), pursuers of the crafts and fine arts; and patrons (nedivim).16 “The ultimate purpose of this Society,” as the document solemnly states, “should and must be no other than that, which duly fulfils its name: the promotion of the Beneficent and Good. That is, not only to carry out through its joint forces as many good activities … as possible, but also—and that primarily—to stimulate the desire for the Beneficent and Good as much as possible in the hearts of the people.”17 In other words, the inclusion of artists and musicians in the Society’s manifesto ascribed to the fine arts new significance for the individual and for “the benefit of our nation” as a whole (“zum Wohl unserer Nation,” and in the Hebrew: לכל עדת ישראל [to the entire congregation of Israel]), invoking the notion that made moral amelioration and the aesthetic inextricable.18 The art of music (מלאכת הניגון) was now, for the first time, assigned an equal function next to Hebrew scholarship, poetry, literature, and the sciences in the stockpile of faculties useful and necessary for the moral, educational, and aesthetic improvement of the modern Jew and of Jewish society at large. Two subsequent events in particular attest to the attempt of the Society for the Promotion of the Good and the Beneficent to implement this development by embracing and exploring the moral, political–theological, and cultural–historical agency of music, both as a practice and as a field of historical and aesthetic inquiry; both events furthermore demonstrate the deep, uninterrupted commitment of the maskilim to the cultural, educational, and religious centrality of Hebrew Scripture. The first, parallel to the publication of the Society’s manifesto in 1787, was the performance of the funeral cantata in memory of Moses Mendelssohn, Sulamith und Eusebia, under the auspices of the Haskalah movement in Königsberg.19 The other was the publication, completed in 1791, of Sefer Zemirot Israel, an edition of the Book of Psalms in Mendelssohn’s German translation with Hebrew commentary and three extensive introductions on biblical poetry and music by the young Jewish scholar from Berlin and proponent of Haskalah Joel Bril Löwe. Bril’s introductions, which reiterate and further interpret Mendelssohn’s exegetical and political–theological ideas about the Hebrew psalms, constitute the first endeavor to formulate a modern Hebrew poetic theory and to offer a historical study of the art of music in ancient Israel. Through these theoretical, historical, and philological surveys, Bril asserts the inherent musical origins of biblical poetry that lend it its supreme rhetorical power and ultimately engender its sacredness. This reading of Psalms as a text whose sacredness is located rather in the human response to the divine consequently results in a renewed practice that prescribes a vocally embodied engagement with the holy songs that is in accordance with eighteenth-century notions about the edifying effects of aesthetic experience through enacted music on the moral sentiments. The universality of the psalms, to which Mendelssohn'?s translation initially alluded, becomes relativized to reflect a novel Jewish idea of salvation, drawing the particular from the universal to ultimately constitute Judaism as a nation. Sefer Zemirot Israel, 1785–91 Bril initially published Mendelssohn’s German translation of Psalms with Hebrew commentary in four parts, between 1785 and 1790, as a result of financial constraints. Each part appeared separately with its own title page, bearing the unusual title Sefer Zemirot Israel—“The Book of the Songs of Israel: Including the Book of Psalms with a German Translation and Commentary.” In the minds of the Jewish readership whom the translation addressed, this title would have invoked the figure of King David, the Psalmist, or Ne’im Zemirot Israel (“the pleasant singer of Israel”), as he is called in the Book of Samuel.20 In contrast to Mendelssohn’s German translation, printed in 1783 in Gothic letters and without commentary, in a format intended for a broad, non-Jewish readership, Bril’s edition was printed in the traditional-looking layout of Mendelssohn’s commentated translation of the Pentateuch, in which the German translation in Hebrew characters was placed opposite the Masoretic text (the traditional text of Hebrew Scripture), surrounded by modern Hebrew commentary that replaced the traditional commentators of the Rabbinic Bible.21 Each section of Bril’s edition honored one of the commentator’s patrons with a dedicatory epistle, beginning with a tribute to Moses Mendelssohn “by the commentator, the youngest of his pupils, Joel Bril.”22 The edition was, however, only completed in 1791 with a supplementary prefatory volume containing three original Hebrew introductions of approximately one hundred printed pages in total, each being an essay on a different aspect of poetry and music in the Hebrew Scriptures and the Book of Psalms in particular. The prefatory volume was adorned with a new title page—which now served as the title page of the entire edition—bearing simply Sefer Zemirot Israel as its title, followed by the author’s affiliation as a “member of the Society for the Promotion of the Good and the Beneficent” and a capturing of Psalm 137 (fig. 1). In addition, the new volume featured a list of all 705 subscribers from thirty-three different cities across Europe, announcing itself as the biggest bestseller of the Haskalah, with over one thousand copies of the first edition alone—almost 30 percent more than Mendelssohn’s Pentateuch translation.23 Figure 1. View largeDownload slide View largeDownload slide Title page (first and second), Sefer Zemirot Israel. Berlin, 1791. Courtesy of the National Library of Israel. Figure 1. View largeDownload slide View largeDownload slide Title page (first and second), Sefer Zemirot Israel. Berlin, 1791. Courtesy of the National Library of Israel. Bril’s three introductions constitute one of the first attempts in the Hebrew language at a theoretical investigation of biblical poetry in modern aesthetic terms and the earliest scrutiny of music in the Lands of the Hebrews until the destruction of the First Temple according to the Hebrew Bible. The first introduction pertains to a poetic theory of biblical poetry (the melitsah, a Hebrew word for rhetoric as well as poetry and poetic theory), including the different types of poetry, and its place in Hebrew Scripture. The second is a survey of the art of music in ancient Israel until the Destruction of the Temple, with the Psalms as its prime example. This introduction offers a study of the apparatus of the art of music in biblical Israel, accompanied by an engraved catalogue of biblical musical instruments (fig. 2).24 The third introduction begins with a philological discussion of the origins, structure, and authors of the Book of Psalms, leading, in the final section, to an address advising the enlightened reader seeking solace and salvation how (and how not) to recite and sing psalms. Figure 2. View largeDownload slide View largeDownload slide Illustrations of musical instruments in biblical times (excerpts), Sefer Zemirot Israel. Berlin, 1791. Courtesy of the National Library of Israel. Figure 2. View largeDownload slide View largeDownload slide Illustrations of musical instruments in biblical times (excerpts), Sefer Zemirot Israel. Berlin, 1791. Courtesy of the National Library of Israel. The prefatory volume is, thus, ordered under the following headings: Introduction One: On poetics in general and the poetry of the Holy Scripture in particular; Introduction Two: The history of song and music in the lands of the Hebrews, their uses and accompanying instruments; Introduction Three: On the songs included in the Book of Psalms and the order of their compilation. Bril’s main aim is largely to explicate and further interpret Moses Mendelssohn on the poetics of Hebrew biblical poetry, its musical origins, and its significance to the nation of Israel, past and future. All three introductory essays borrow from and are in conversation with primarily non-Jewish (German) Bible scholars, Hebraists, philosophers, orientalists, and music historians, while deploying ancient rabbinic literature and early modern Jewish commentaries, utilizing traditional Jewish interpretive strategies. At times, Bril critically manipulates his textual sources—as befits the purpose of his arguments.25 As is often the case in maskilic writings, Bril’s selective deployment of non-Jewish models allows him to simultaneously critique, even refute, his German interlocutors, placing himself within a discursive arena of contemporaneous German Bible criticism, music, aesthetics, and poetics—in Hebrew. It is this prefatory volume that ultimately lends Bril’s edition of Psalms its cultural–historical significance. Joel Bril’s Music Historiography and the Beginning of Hebrew Poetic Theory If Isaac Euchel is sometimes considered the “architect” of the Prussian Haskalah,26 Joel Bril was no doubt one of its finest craftsmen. A relentless advocate of the new cultural and educational program as an exegete, educator, and grammarian, Bril had a pivotal role in formulating and disseminating the mission of the Haskalah in ways and forms that have gone almost entirely unnoticed in the scholarship. Having contributed to Moses Mendelssohn’s Hebrew commentary on the Pentateuch (the Bi’ur, published 1780–83), he pursued the project both before and particularly after Mendelssohn’s death, publishing further books of the Hebrew Scriptures with German translation and original Hebrew commentary and introductions. Perhaps Bril’s most important contribution was his effort toward a formulation of a Hebrew poetic theory and a nascent history of music, exploring the rhetorical and musical mechanisms of Hebrew poetry, or melitsah. His endeavor seems to have ultimately been geared toward affirming the sacredness of Hebrew biblical poetry among and within European poetic traditions, its simultaneous distinctness and universality.27 Bril was not the first to revive and engage the nature and tradition of the melitsah.28 In Mendelssohn’s writings on Hebrew Scripture, the aesthetic attributes and rhetorical mechanism and, in turn, its power to thereby govern the mind and the sentiments, receive a privileged place as the key hermeneutical mode of inquiry, interpretation, and translation of Scripture.29 Bril’s introductions explicate and further interpret Mendelssohn, weaving together a wealth of rabbinic and early modern Jewish traditions with contemporaneous non-Jewish models and modes of investigation. Although his synthesis does not amount to a full-fledged literary or musical theory, he formulates crucial theoretical insights that reveal little explored maskilic views on the role of the aesthetic experience of Scripture and the latter’s role in shaping the new, enlightened Jew and a modern Judaism. This mission is furthermore inscribed in the very medium of its dissemination: the introduction, a genre that Bril employed also in his other commentated editions and translations of Scripture. His primary model was the essay on Psalms in the three-volume Introduction to the Old Testament (Einleitung in das Alte Testament, 1780–83) by Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, one of the founders of modern German Bible criticism. Bril emulates the formal aspects, analytical categories, and some of the forms of investigation used by Eichhorn, but his emphasis on the authority of the Masoretic text and flexible use of traditional Jewish commentaries and ancient rabbinic literature yield an analysis that distinguishes itself from the Christian critical-philological approach to Hebrew Scripture—and ultimately rejects and refutes it.30 By attaching Hebrew introductions to new, commentated editions of Scripture, a medium intended for everyday use by a broad, heterogeneous Jewish readership, Bril offered theoretical literary, philological, moral, and aesthetic knowledge in a format accessible to Jewish publics who, although not necessarily familiar with Mendelssohn’s writings or aesthetic theories and contemporaneous Bible criticism, nonetheless aspired to edification and enlightenment, negotiating the place of Jewish liturgy and Scripture with a new and, to varying degrees, secularized lifestyle. The genre of the introduction also provided a medium through which Bril could advance the educational and linguistic maskilic agenda, demonstrating the riches of Hebrew as a language of critical inquiry and coining new Hebrew vocabulary to capture modern concepts in philosophy, aesthetics, and rhetoric. Sefer Zemirot Israel thus offered the enlightened Jewish reader the “toolbox” necessary for reciting, singing, and contemplating Psalms in accordance with (Jewish) Enlightenment culture. On the Musical Origins of Biblical Poetry Mendelssohn’s German translation of Psalms, completed in 1783, was largely intended to rebut the Christian theological claim to the exclusivity of Christianity and to affirm Judaism’s harmony with natural religion, the indispensable, universal means of promoting man’s vocation—the quest for virtue that leads to eternal felicity.31 Free of messianic and prophetic interpretations, Jewish or Christian, Mendelssohn’s translation was intended to show that the psalms encapsulate the tenets of natural religion essential for the universal salvation of all human beings across confessional boundaries, which must be accepted freely on the basis of rational conviction and intuition: the existence of God, divine providence in this world, and the immortality of the soul in the afterlife. Guided by an aspiration to rational edification (Erbauung) that would promote universal religiosity, Mendelssohn’s translation was experiential rather than literal, emphasizing the significance of the aesthetic and oral qualities of biblical poetry to the meaning of its content. Once available in a nonpartisan German translation that revealed the aesthetic qualities of Hebrew poetry according to sense and rhythm, the Book of Psalms would serve as a “primer” of universal religiosity.32 As I have discussed elsewhere, the knowledge of the eternal truths essential for salvation is internalized, according to Mendelssohn, by the rational soul as a cognitive process through the sense of hearing and oral enactment in singing and recitation.33 Both in their provenance in the ancient Hebrews’ musical science and in individual religious practice, the Psalms, Mendelssohn maintained, were embedded in the art of music: by coupling words and music, “the divine poets among the ancient Hebrews were able to arouse the most sublime sensations in us” and “knew how to make their way directly to our hearts and minds.”34 Despite its loss in exile, music, through its ordering affective principles, continues to guard the authenticity of the psalms to the present day. The psalms are therefore an eminently suitable universal source of edification and thus to salvation by way of perfecting the soul in relation to the Divine. The enlightened person’s act of singing psalms is a universal form of prayer and the subject’s adequate response to the Deity, internalizing the truths of which God is the source.35 Here we may recall Mendelssohn’s early aesthetic writings from the mid and late 1750s, which located the source of pleasure from aesthetic experience in the soul as much as in the body, yielding three categories of pleasure: beauty, intellectual perfection, and sensuous gratification; of all the arts, music is the only one that affords all three.36 These notions fed also into German music theories formulated in Berlin’s Enlightenment circles in the last third of the century—by such music theorists and philosophers as Johann Philipp Kirnberger and Johann Georg Sulzer—that located the emotions and moral sentiments invoked through physical sensation in musical practice in the physical sensation of the human body.37 The notion that the embodied act of singing psalms activates the moral sentiments and advances the perfection of the soul would have thus resontated with this broader ideational context. The idea of the musical origins and nature of biblical poetry runs throughout Mendelssohn’s writings on poetry and Scripture in ways intended to buttress the metaphysical nature of Hebrew Scripture. Already in 1757, Mendelssohn had described how the art of music in ancient Israel was inextricably bound with poetry in forming religious service, so that the psalms we know today, sung by the Levites in the Temple, were, as all other Hebrew lyrical poetry, embedded in the now lost science of music. Although the music has been lost in exile, the ancient psalms nonetheless remain inherently musical in both origin and essence.38 This notion is fully explored in Mendelssohn’s Hebrew commentary on the Song of the Sea (Exod. 15) in a manner that deviates from the mythology of Jewish exile so as to mark a watershed in modern exilic consciousness. It is this text that provides a point of departure for Bril’s discussion in Sefer Zemirot Israel. Mendelssohn’s commentary on Exodus 15 touches upon the bone of contention in Jewish-Christian polemics regarding the question of the poetic meter of biblical poetry. Rejecting all classicist tendencies that have attempted to contain Hebrew poetry in terms of European poetic traditions, Mendelssohn ascertains that metered poetry is merely pleasant to the ear, but it does not serve the content of the ideas captured in the words of the poet. Instead, the Hebrew poets favored “a more noble excellence” that “agrees with the art of music,”39 although this wisdom has been lost during the length of exile. Here, Mendelssohn’s commentary invokes the topos of music in the mythology of Jewish exile, but his treatment thereof marks a dramatic watershed in its rationale: in the mythology of Jewish exile, music, one of the lost wisdoms of the Hebrews, was silenced at the very moment of the destruction of the Temple, its obliteration marking a crisis in the bond between God and His people.40 According to this myth, music will return to Israel with messianic redemption and the reinstitution of the Levites in the newly rebuilt Temple in Jerusalem. Mendelssohn, however, omits the latter part of the myth altogether, namely the anticipation that music will return to Israel with the coming of the Messiah. What is more, in contrast to medieval and early modern commentaries, in his account, music has not been stolen or even entirely lost.41 Quoting the sixteenth-century Italian commentator Azariah de’ Rossi on “the poems composed in the holy tongue” in Meor Eynayim, Mendelssohn relies on a “sense,” an intuition, to confirm their uninterrupted, eternal presence, even if we cannot know their exact nature: “My heart tells me that the holy songs of Scripture that we still remember do undoubtedly have certain measures and structures, but that they do not depend on the number of long and short vowels.”42 In this context, the phrase “my heart tells me” resonates with biblical verses about the longing for divine revelation—for instance, in Psalm 27—and gestures toward a consciousness of the state of exile. Mendelssohn, however, foregoes the apologetic urge toward the Christian accusation against the Jews’ unmusicality, but also the traditional messianic urgency is replaced with a new, relaxed sense of confidence that reclaims the science of music, and with it Hebrew Scripture, for the present and future of the Jewish nation, despite and even regardless of the state of exile. It is from this new sense of confidence that Joel Bril’s introductions draw their impetus. Embedding his investigation, in Introduction One, in eighteenth-century aesthetic discourse and ideas about the origins of language, while drawing on early modern and classical theories of rhetoric, Bril reiterates Mendelssohn’s concept of Hebrew biblical poetry and the correct manner of its translation. The true meaning of the poetic statement is located in the rhetorical manner and in the pleasantness of its sound no less than—and inextricably from—the words themselves, since in translating poetry (in contrast to prose), apart from the meaning, one also must keep the pleasantness and ornament so as to maintain their effect on the mind of the listener equal in both tongues. “This is what the rabbi, the translator, of blessed memory, did in reproducing the lyrical poems compiled in the book before us, thereby demonstrating his strength and great aptitude in the Hebrew language as in the German language.” To understand the art of his translation, Bril tells the reader, it is necessary to grasp the intricacies of melitsah (Hebrew poetics), which requires “considerable scrutiny.” And thus, he concludes, “I have, in my deep love for the craft, set my mind to study and to probe [Eccl. 1: 13] the method followed by the rabbi … in his translation … and I resolved to write down these matters in a book, to divide them in Jacob, and scatter them in Israel (Gen. 49:7).”43 To capture the true meaning of poetry in another language, the correct translation cannot be merely literal; it must reflect also the affect and the sentiments invoked in the original language through the particular poet’s aesthetic devices and expressive ornament. Bril begins by exploring the attributes, essence, and power of the Hebrew melitsah, or poetics, from the most basic form of eloquent speech through its higher form as poetry, in which the poet, or orator, seeks to stir the mind and passions of the listener by employing the language of sentiments (Sprache der Empfindungen). Yet the paramount, most powerful, and affective form of poetic expression is that which weds poetry (melitsah) and music (nigun), yielding lyrical poetry, or song (shir): There is yet another way to govern the human soul and its faculties, and that is through music, as we find in several examples in Holy Scripture. Such as when Saul met a band of prophets preceded by timbrels and harps, and the spirit of the Lord gripped him;44 and when an evil spirit from God began to terrify him, David would play, and he would find relief … .45 Moreover, when these two sciences join together, poetry [melitsah] and music, they reinforce one another, and their effect is greater than what is possible for either to effect on its own; this is song [Gesang], wherein the value of its two components when joined is like the value of the language of reason and language of sentiments when they are joined, as mentioned above. That is, the music will amplify the affect of the poetry and the poetry will elucidate the sense of the musical components. This yields the most pleasant component of melitsah, that is, the song [shir], which is called, in German, lyrische Poesie [lyrical poetry].46 This description echoes contemporaneous ideas in German music aesthetics about the nonreferentiality of instrumental music, first formulated in German by Mendelssohn in 1761, in which “the expression of sentiment in music is intense … and moving, but indeterminate. One is pervaded by a certain sentiment but it is obscure … and not limited to any individual object. This lack can be remedied by the addition of distinct and arbitrary signs [words]. They can … make the sentiment into an individual sentiment.”47 That is, if to eighteenth-century aesthetics art’s purpose was moral edification, the concepts it generated needed to be expressed in words attached to signifiers in each particular art form. Music without text lacked the facility to describe the object of emotions, yielding merely a raw, and hence dangerous, emotion. As Kirnberger would similarly acknowledge, the alliance of physical and emotional forces meant that music coupled with words “could be used for the education of man’s disposition.”48 And it is in this highly affective form of lyrical poetry, or song, that pivotal instances of human response to the Deity appear, such as the Song of the Sea, the Song of Moses (Ha’azinu), the Song of Deborah, David’s lament, the Book of Lamentations, and, above all, the Psalms. “The Essence of the Poetry in the Holy Scriptures” Bril’s investigation of Hebrew poetic theory reaches its pinnacle in the section on “The Essence of the Poetry in the Holy Scriptures,”49 followed by an analysis of verses from biblical lyrical poems. The distinct feature of the poetry of the Hebrews, Bril tells us, lies in its metaphysical content and conceptual purity. The poetry of the heathens, by contrast, “is filled with the impurity of idols and their detestable accoutrements. It has been contaminated by false beliefs about the nature of the divine, and by foreign images and various forms engendered in the minds of the errant ones. Even in our present age, when the actual belief in icons has disappeared all over the world, the memory of them yet persists in the poetry of the nations, for … anthropomorphism is well-suited to poetry.” However, “not like these is the portion of the sons of Shem50 the holy patriarchs, who always distanced themselves from these abominations entirely, and just as they had true faith in one God and walked in His ways and kept His observances as they behaved, so was their poetic language, the spirit that hovers over it is the spirit of truth and holiness, free of every defect and error.”51 The poetry of the Hebrews distinguishes them from all other nations, above all through its relative immunity to idolatry, which is enhanced through its inherently musical (i.e., nonreferential) nature, an idea previously intimated by Mendelssohn.52 Pushing this notion a step further, Bril ascribes to sacred poetry a role in constituting the nation itself, being the mode in which the Holy Covenant between God and his people is revealed and ratified since the birth of the nation, “particularly, when Moses the man of God distinguished his people, whom he had brought out of Egypt, from all other nations also through their poetry, and made it the poetry of Holy Covenant (מליצת ברית קודש) between the Chosen People and God their King and Savior.”53 The term Holy Covenant as such is rare in Hebrew Scripture, but its allusion to the blessing recited at the circumcision of the male Jewish newborn is telling: the sacred bond between God and the nation of Israel is constituted in sung poetry, just as the circumcision binds the newborn to the Jewish people and marks the Jew’s covenant with God. The most essential expressions of this bond, Bril maintains, were engendered in lyrical poetry sung by Moses the prophet before the Israelites—the Song of the Sea that marks the redemption of the people from Egypt through God’s hand and the beginning of nation building, and the Song of Ha’azinu (Give Ear; Deuteronomy 32:1–52), an indictment of the Israelites’ sins, a prophecy of their punishment, and a promise of God’s ultimate redemption of them, heard at the threshold to the Promised Land. These songs and poems in which Moses inscribed the history and ethos of God’s nation “set the model for all subsequent prophecies”—Ha’azinu for the prophets'? rebukes, and the Song of the Sea would be a model for all sorts of odes and psalms of triumph. Originating in divine revelation, the poetry of the Hebrews holds metaphysical truths and can engender divinity through rhetorical and musical means, that is, through the human agency of the prophet.54 The Prophet as Lyrical Poet Although the art of music of ancient Israel has been “forgotten due to the length of our exile, and due to the many afflictions and dislocations that entire marvelous art was lost to us,” as Mendelssohn reminds us in the commentary on Exodus 15, we nonetheless “know that this science was once widely disseminated in the nation, and the notables among the people and its wise men and prophets of the nation were adepts at poetry and well-practiced by excellent performers of music, and exceedingly skilled in that science.” They arranged their prophecies in this manner, “as the spirit of God descended upon them [1 Sam. 10:6] from above.”55 That is, while prophecy is the result of divine revelation by the holy spirit, it is the craft of the prophet to arrange his prophecies according to the science of music and poetry in a manner conducive to the aim, namely, to penetrate the listener’s heart “and to establish within him honorable virtues and excellent dispositions like goads and implanted nails [Eccles. 12:11], a stake that would not be dislodged.” It should not come as a surprise that these ideas about the cathartic rhetorical effect of music coupled with words interwoven into Mendelssohn’s Hebrew commentary on the Song of the Sea reverberate with ideas formulated in contemporaneous German aesthetic theories that emerged in the same circles of the Berlin Enlightenment. In one of his seminal contributions to German aesthetics, Mendelssohn had contended that music alone cannot express a specific sentiment or concept, and therefore must be wedded with words, which indicate the object of the emotional response.56 In the following decade, Kirnberger would similarly underscore the significance of words to capture concrete concepts that would otherwise remain obscure in purely instrumental music.57 The aim of the prophet’s art of music and poetry was, then, to Mendelssohn, the “perfection of the rational soul,” that is, “to subdue [its] faculties, control its ethical behaviors, and to alter its dispositions according to its will.”58 The ultimate purpose of Hebrew sacred poetry is therefore “guidance toward eternal felicity and true flourishing by means of the elevated and lofty content, prophecies … , and psalms praising the Eternal that lead man to eternal life.”59 If the Holy Covenant is vocally mediated by the prophet through lyrical poetry using rhetorical and musical skills, then the prophets were orators and musical poets. In a chapter on the history of music and song in the lands of the Hebrews, in Introduction Two, Bril describes the prophet as an orator, a skillful poet, and a learned musician. The Hebrew prophets employed rhetorical and musical means to reach the listeners’ hearts and minds and instill in them their moral teachings and wisdoms through the affective power of eloquent, poetic speech set to music. They were teachers and leaders of the nation (Volkslehrer, Volksführer), not sages who could foresee the future. A prophet, then, is he who governs and leads the people by virtue of his rhetorical eloquence and skill in employing the language of sentiments in poetry and music.60 Bril’s passage on the figure of the prophet paraphrases the opening paragraph of Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise, the chapter “On Prophecy”: a prophet, according to Spinoza, “is someone who interprets things revealed by God to those who cannot themselves achieve certain knowledge of them and can therefore only grasp by simple faith what has been revealed. The Hebrew for ‘prophet’ is nabi, which means ‘orator’ or ‘interpreter,’ but is always used in Scripture to mean an interpreter of God.” In turning to the question of the prophet, Bril, like Spinoza, similarly refers to Rashi's commentary in which the prophet is described as orator. Yet in contrast to Spinoza, Bril utilizes the doubtlessly familiar reference to underscore the prophet’s use of poetry as the language of prophecy: while Spinoza rejects Abraham Ibn Ezra’s linguistic critique of Rashi, Bril embraces it for the reference it holds in the Hebrew phrase “nib sepataim” (utterance, or speech) to the Hebrew “melitsah” (poetry), thereby playing up, rather than down, the rhetorical, affective role of the prophet.61 In this context, Bril’s avoidance of any mention of Maimonides, a key Jewish philosopher both to Mendelssohn and to the Kantian Jewish scholars in Bril’s circle, is significant:62 the prophet is, namely, not a philosopher. To Bril, Scripture does not hold philosophical or theological truths but rather moral lessons, which are taught through the prophets’ ability to move the listeners’ souls and minds to moral action through the cathartic power of aesthetic experience. Bril iterates the historical narrative by which, in ancient Israel, it was Samuel who had institutionalized the training of prophets as poets and musicians in the schools of the prophets;63 yet musical worship in ancient Israel reached its prime only at the time of King David. As king, David is portrayed as the founder of the liturgical practice that would be established in the Temple as the national liturgical worship, carried out by the choruses of the Levites. But as a youth, a simple shepherd anointed by Samuel as the future King of Israel, he learned from the school of prophets “to know God and His ways, to master the art of music, and to sing sweetly, and become a virtuous warrior …, until before too long he became renowned in the land to be ‘skilled in music, a stalwart fellow and a warrior, sensible in speech, and handsome in appearance, and the Lord is with him’ [1 Sam., 16:18].”64 Before becoming king, while wandering across the land on his flight from Saul, all that was left to David the young shepherd was his harp, his “source of love, comfort, and solace,” always at hand to sing songs of worship and prayer to the Divine as a natural act of a God-seeker, a spontaneous response to the deity by the individual throughout life: “he would pour his heart unto [the harp], as one would reveal one’s agony in the lover’s bosom and find there comfort, because in turning toward God, immediately anxiety turned into confidence and fear into hope.”65 It is those pleasant prayers David had composed even before becoming king “that remain with us until the present day among the other psalms.” As he rose to power, “also the art of song ascended with him to the throne, … and not only did he spread through his songs and psalms the grace of God …, but he also ordered to worship God in choruses and appointed four thousand ode singers to give thanks to God every morning, for ‘His steadfast is eternal’ [Psalm 136].”66 “On the Manner of Reciting the Psalms” Bril’s theoretical and historical insights do not remain detached from the reader of Sefer Zemirot Israel; his goal is an entirely pragmatic one, “to alert the souls of my brethren toward this good part bestowed upon us in our Holy Scriptures, namely the sublime poetry [melitsah] through which the human soul may exalt, reaching ever higher, and which will beget within it the sweetest sensation of all: that it was created in the image of God [Gen. 1:27].”67 But it is only at the end of Introduction Three that Bril’s instructive aim is fully exposed: to recite and sing psalms out of learned contemplation is to respond to the Deity and internalize the moral knowledge encapsulated in the poetry of Scripture. Describing the highest aim of the human soul in terms of the creation of human beings in the image of God, Bril reverberates Mendelssohn’s words on the purpose of poetry in the Hebrew Scriptures to transform “the rational soul … according to its will,” providing “guidance toward eternal well-being and true felicity by means of exalted and sublime matters … that lead man to eternal life.”68 That is, singing psalms with a particular intention and proper contemplation can facilitate the purpose of creation “in God’s image”—eternal felicity and the salvation of the individual soul. Following a philological analysis of the Book of Psalms and the songs (shirim) contained in it, Bril proceeds to guide the reader in the contemplative practice of psalm singing as a key to salvation of the rational soul: Following these words and this truth, any learned reader will see that the purpose of compiling these sublime songs was not for them to be read and recited consecutively, one after the other, as is the habit of the multitudes, because many of them require a great deal of study due to their profound grasp of matters of the Divine, of God’s holy ways, and of His governance of His world. Moreover, many … were composed for the psalmist alone. And even those that were composed for public recitation …, such as the hallelujah songs … and the Songs of Ascents, should be sung in choruses with emphatic uplift of the heart and soul, not swallowing the words and phrases to the point where the heart does not know what the mouth is uttering. How can we say before God that we sing to Him wholeheartedly [Ps. 109] and rejoice in His praise and His might, when there is no joy or song within us, for there can be no joy without sentiment, and there can be no sentiment without the pleasing order or the heart’s intention to the matter at hand. However, sometimes the situation of one person will be similar to the situation of the psalmist when he composed the psalm, and he wants to pour forth his plea before the Lord [Pss. 102:1] using those sweet and pleasing verses; he will then be [blessed]. A contrite and crushed heart [Pss. 51:19] may find solace in the events that have come upon David, who God redeemed from all manner of evil due to his innocence, uprightness, and faith in his God; he, too, will strengthen his faith in God through the songs of the king, whose content is the fear of God and the wonders of His providence for his righteous ones. To ascertain the authority of his homiletic address, Bril concludes with a coda in the words of “the rabbi, the translator … in his German introduction to his translation”: I put forth before the dear reader the fruit of my endeavor, in which I have delighted for ten years. Those delights have sweetened my time and have often driven out my agony from having a share in me [1 Sam. 29:19]. I did not translate these songs according to their order, one after the other, but rather according to my disposition. I chose one psalm to which my soul was inclined at that moment …, whether for its charm and beauty or the challenge of its obscure poetic verses [melitsot]. I contemplated it for a couple of days, or a month, or days …, even though I was burdened by many and various other chores, until I believed that I had penetrated the treasure chambers of the psalmist to have grasped everything that he had fathomed in his sweet song, as much as a human being such as I is able, and only then did I translate it. Read so, dear reader, as I have translated. Not according to the order of the songs as they appear before you, but pick one that agrees with the disposition of your soul at the moment, or seek as much as possible to attune your disposition to that of the psalmist’s soul when the spirit of that man first moved him [Judg. 13:25], and you will then find solace to your soul and a gracious spirit will lead you [Ps. 143:10]. 69 The right manner to sing psalms for achieving perfection of the rational soul is described in the manner of Mendelssohn’s translation. And if accordingly, singing psalms is the most adequate human response to its Creator, the ultimate model for this is King David, the “pleasant singer of Israel,” whose figure embodies the uninterrupted, eternal bond, both national and personal, with God through song; “all that has come upon him, every experience, the bad and the good, has always awoken his harp and his spirit to put it into song. All his great deeds, above all the sanctifying of Mount Zion as God’s dwelling place, carrying the arch there accompanied by the voices of the celebrating crowd,70 have become known to every generation through pleasant songs, sung before God by choruses and collected for eternal preservation.”71 While the philological analysis that constitutes the bulk of Introduction Three is entirely fashioned after Eichhorn’s Einleitung in its methodology and structure, Bril’s deviations from it are telling, particularly in the latter section, and shed light on the relation between him and his Christian counterpart. That is, Eichhorn, too, locates the origins of the Hebrew psalms in musical practice, as do other early modern Christian Bible scholars and Hebraists, and admits that the psalms ought to be sung rather than merely read, as they had been in ancient Israel.72 However, to Eichhorn the idea of a continuous musical practice of psalm singing by diasporic Jews is an impossibility; the loss of the Hebrews’ art of music following the Destruction and exile is as absolute as Judaism’s theologically determined demise, and its knowledge cannot be regained or recovered.73 Bril, by contrast, having attempted to recover evidence (particularly in Introduction Two) of the Hebrew’s science of music, tracing its development since its earliest appearances through the zenith of its glory, turns the loss of music, its absence, into a source of defiance, revival, and restoration—and ultimately, of salvation. The imperative to sing psalms in a newly prescribed manner, inspired by Mendelssohn and further advocated by Bril, simultaneously affirms the eternal, sacred authority of psalms as poetry whose musical embeddedness is innate to its holiness in an unbroken continuum that leads from modern Jews to the ancient Hebrews and back again. Responding, at least in part, to a long and contentious European Christian tradition that persistently separated diasporic Jews from the musical culture of their Hebrew ancestors, Sefer Zemirot Israel thus reclaims music not only as a form of participation in musical culture in the spirit of Enlightenment; rather, in Bril’s pen, Mendelssohn’s exegetical and political–theological inheritance renders music inherent to, and constitutive of Judaism and the continuous existence of the Jewish nation itself. Reiterating Mendelssohn’s commentary on the Song of the Sea, Bril intimates that the obliteration of music is a contingent, and therefore temporary, historical condition just like exile itself, rather than an essential theological mark of Cain by which Judaism is forever tarnished. Pushing Mendelssohn a step further, Bril concretizes the idea of the role of lyrical poetry in the Holy Scriptures in achieving salvation: from universal salvation available to all across confessional boundaries to the elect, linking the personal to the national. If, in the exilic state, individual prayer replaces the priestly worship in the Temple, it is the individual’s spontaneous singing of psalms that ensures the “eternal preservation” (mishmeret olam) not only of the sacred songs of Israel but of the nation itself, partaking in the perpetual act of coconstituting the nation also in, indeed regardless of, exile. Conclusion: Fashioning “Musical” Jewish Modernity74 The prefatory volume of Sefer Zemirot Israel—the final volume the subscribers of the book would have received—featured a new title page by which the book now announced itself as the “Book of the Songs of Israel”; not the historicized “Nationalhymne” of an ancient, remote people but the eternally musical expressions of the Holy Covenant. Adorned with an illustration to Psalm 137 (“By the Waters of Babylon”), the quintessence of the sentiment associated with Jewish exile (fig. 3),75 the vignette on the title page of the book seems to capture a pastoral scene rather than sentiments of loss and longing: instead of weeping exiles sitting on the ground chained in their captivity, a harp hangs down ever so loosely from the tree, allowing the wind to blow against its vibrating strings, as if inviting the viewer to reach out and resume the singing of psalms anytime, anywhere. The ubiquitous image of King David as Ne’im Zemirot Israel, “the pleasant singer of Israel,” inscribed in the adjacent title, thus becomes simultaneously a metonym for individual salvation as well as for the eternal constitution of the nation through the practice of psalms.76 The patronage of Ḥevrat shoḥarei ha-tov ve-ha-tushia, the Society for the Promotion of the Good and the Beneficent, announced at the center of the title page, embodies even in its very name the moral decree encapsulated in the psalms as the vocation of man to emulate the loving-kindness of the Divine: “to search truth, enable the beneficent and beautiful, seek the good, and do the best.”77 Figure 3. View largeDownload slide Frontispiece (detail), Sefer Zemirot Israel. Berlin, 1791. Courtesy of the National Library of Israel. Figure 3. View largeDownload slide Frontispiece (detail), Sefer Zemirot Israel. Berlin, 1791. Courtesy of the National Library of Israel. Perhaps the most significant impact of Sefer Zemirot Israel, widely disseminated in numerous subsequent editions among progressive Jewish milieus in Central and Eastern Europe through the 1860s, was in prescribing a renewed, enlightened practice of the most common traditional Jewish liturgical text. With the gradual rise of Jewish reform in the course of the nineteenth century, the place of music would become increasingly secured in the liturgical practice of progressive congregations. Although as time went by Bril’s introductions were occasionally omitted, the question of whether the dissemination of Sefer Zemirot Israel played a role in bringing about an upsurge of liturgical compositions among such circles, where Moses Mendelssohn was made an exemplum of progressive Judaism, nonetheless remains a matter for further investigation. To be sure, with the emergence in Germany of the Jewish study of the Science of Judaism—Wissenschaft des Judentums, or Verein für Kultur und Wissenschaft der Juden (Society for the Culture and Science of the Jews) as the movement was initially called in 1819—Joel Bril’s study of the history of music in pre-exilic Israel would provide Leopold Zunz a model for the study of music in Judaism in his seminal essay Etwas über die rabbinische Litteratur (1818).78 Wittingly or not, Zunz would once again gesture toward Bril in his 1855 discussion about the Psalms, hailing the “orphic sounds and the voices of the prophets,” bestowing upon the psalmist the role of “an organ of the nation,”79 one who turns the individual’s poem into property of the Volk. The psalms become the national musical poetry of Jews. Footnotes Yael Sela is head of the Program in Music at the Open University of Israel and a research fellow at the Van Leer Institute Library in Jerusalem. She received her PhD from the University of Oxford (2010) and has held postdoctoral fellowships at Humboldt University, the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Hebrew University, and the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her articles are included in such journals as Renaissance Studies and the Jewish Quarterly Review, among others, as well as in publications such as The Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception (forthcoming); Sara Levy’s World: Gender, Judaism, and the Bach Tradition in Enlightenment Berlin (2018); and Psalms in/on Jerusalem (2019). She is currently working on a monograph entitled Songs of the Nation: Sefer Zemirot Israel and the Reception of Moses Mendelssohn’s Psalms Translation in Late Eighteenth-Century Haskalah, with an annotated bilingual edition (to be published with Brill). Email: yaelse@openu.ac.il. Research for this essay was supported by a grant from the German-Israel Research Foundation (GIF). An earlier version was presented at the workshop “Inadvertent Innovators,” hosted by the University of Frankfurt at Lake Como, May 2018; I thank the workshop participants for the invaluable discussion. For elucidating insights and comments on earlier drafts, I am indebted to Amir Banbaji, Eliezer Baumgarten, and Edward Breuer, as well as Halina Goldberg. 1 Notably, the Hebrew translation of the Society’s name as the “Society of Scholars of Hebrew Language” underscores the prematurity of the concept of “literature” in Hebrew, which had not yet replaced melitsah, the ubiquitous word used for a broad range of rhetorical terminology, from rhetorical theory to eloquent speech to poetry. 2 See Edward Breuer, The Limits of Enlightenment: Jews, Germans, and the Eighteenth-Century Study of Scripture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996); and Shmuel Feiner, The Jewish Enlightenment, trans. Chaya Naor (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). 3 See Mary Sue Morrow, German Music Criticism in the Late Eighteenth Century: Aesthetic Issues in Instrumental Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 4 In Letter Eleven of his first and seminal essay on aesthetics, Letters on the Sentiments (Briefe über die Empfindungen, 1755), Mendelssohn rendered music a “divine art” superior to all other arts. For the English translation, see Moses Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings (1761), trans. and ed. Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 48. 5 This attitude is illustrated, for example, in Isaac Euchel’s Hebrew epistolary novel, Igrot Meshulam Ben Uriah ha-Eshtemoi (1789), reprinted in Andreas Kennecke, ed., Isaak Euchel: Vom Nutzen der Aufklärung. Schriften zur Haskala (Dusseldorf: Parerga, 2001), 190. 6 This ethos is ubiquitously reflected in Jewish tradition in commentaries, homilies, narratives, and visual or poetic imagery from the Middle Ages and early modern period. On traditional Ashkenazic attitudes to music, see Eliyahu Schleifer, “Jewish Liturgical Music from the Bible to Hasidism,” in Sacred Sound and Social Change: Liturgical Music in Jewish and Christian Experience, ed. Lawrence A. Hoffman and Janet R. Walton (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), 13–58, at 44, 23. The prohibition against singing and instrumental music in memory of the destruction of the Temple refers primarily to wine feasts; see Karl Erich Grözinger, Musik und Gesang in der Theologie der frühen jüdischen Literatur (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1982), 241–43. 7 Traditional Christian theology has understood the attribution of moral and aesthetic virtue to the ancient Hebrews as a typological topos—as predecessors of Christianity that supplanted ancient Judaism with the true religion embodied in Christ the Messiah. The spiritual and moral blindness of post-Christ Jews is reflected in their unmusical nature and lack of any potential for aesthetic creation. For an elucidating explanation with reference to eighteenth-century theology and music, see Michael Marissen, Tainted Glory in Handel’s Messiah (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), chap. 2. For a broader discussion, see Ruth HaCohen, The Music Libel Against the Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). 8 Late eighteenth-century German Hebraists and Orientalists saw in the ancient Hebrews a model to be emulated in fashioning German national culture and poetry. See, for instance, Ofri Ilany, In Search of the Hebrew People: Bible and Nation in the German Enlightenment (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018). 9 Naphtali Herz Wessely, Words of Peace and Truth, Fourth Letter (1785), section 12. Consistent with this attitude, the Jewish school in Berlin (Freischule), founded in 1778, did not introduce singing and music into its curriculum before the early 1820s; see Ingrid Lohmann, “Die jüdische Freischule in Berlin: Ihre Rolle im Spannungsfeld von Tradition und Verbürgerlichung. Zwei Fallstudien,” Menora 16 (1996): 241–64. 10 Quoted after George L. Mosse, German Jews Beyond Judaism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 6. The notion that links music with ethical faculties and moral sentiments through its power to move the emotions is typical of several contemporaneous aestheticians in England, France, and Germany (including Mendelssohn’s early writings on aesthetics from 1755 onward). It was succinctly articulated by Johann Philipp Kirnberger in the entry “Musik,” in the encyclopedia of aesthetics, Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste, ed. Johann Georg Sulzer, 4 vols. (Leipzig, 1771–94), 2:788–89. 11 By comparison, although Mendelssohn’s short-lived periodical Kohelet musar (1755–57) makes no direct mention of music and other arts, it nonetheless places the aesthetic experience of the beauty of divine creation at the center of religious experience. For an English translation, see “Moses Mendelssohn’s First Hebrew Publication: An Annotated Translation of the Kohelet Mussar,” trans. Edward Breuer, ed. Edward Breuer and David Sorkin, in The Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 48 (2003): 3–23. For a commentary, see Andrea Schatz, “Einleitung: Prediger der Moral (Kohelet Musar),” in Moses Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften. Jubiläumsausgabe, ed. Alexander Altmann, Eva J. Engel, and Michael Brocke, a.o. (Stuttgart–Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich Frommann Verlag/Günther Holzboog, 1974–), 20.1:xv–xxxvii (hereafter: JubA). All translations from German and Hebrew are mine unless otherwise noted. 12 Itzig and Friedländer were patrons of Jewish Enlightenment causes and, among other ventures, founders of the first Jewish school in Berlin (Freischule, or Ḥevrat Ḥinuch Ne‘arim). See Shmuel Feiner, “Erziehungsprogramme und gesellschaftliche Ideale im Wandel: Die Freischule in Berlin, 1778–1825,” in Jüdische Erziehung und aufklärerische Schulreform: Analysen zum späten 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Britta L. Behm, Uta Lohmann, and Ingrid Lohmann (Münster: Waxmann, 2002), 69–105; and Miriam Bodian, “The Jewish Entrepreneurs in Berlin and the ‘Civil Improvement of the Jews’ in the 1780s and 1790s,” Zion 49, no. 2 (1984): 159–84 (Hebrew). 13 Ha-Me’asef 3 (Elul 5546/1786): 210–11. For a discussion of the bylaws, structure, and agenda of the Society for the Promotion of the Good and the Beneficent, see Yael Sela Teichler, “Music, Acculturation, and Haskalah between Berlin and Königsberg in the 1780s,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 103, no. 3 (2013): 352–84, at 368–73. See also Uta Lohmann, “Chevrat Schocharej ha-Tov we-ha-Tuschija (Gesellschaft der Beförderer des Edlen und Guten),” in Handbuch der Berliner Vereine und Gesellschaften 1786–1815, ed. Uta Motschmann (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 835. Compare the transition to a bilingual format in this manifesto with the first manifesto of the Society of the Friends of Hebrew Literature, Nahal ha-Bessor, published in Hebrew alone in December 1783. 14 See Sela Teichler, “Music, Acculturation, and Haskalah,” 377. 15 The bilingual manifesto of the society was published in the summer of the following year (Tamuz 5547/June–July 1787) as Tavnit ḥevrat shoḥare ha-tov veha-tushiyah, founded 5547 (1787)/Plan zu einer Gesellschaft der Beförderung des Edlen und Guten unter des hebräischen Namen Schochare Hatov ve-Hatuschia (Königsberg and Berlin). 16 Plan zu einer Gesellschaft, introduction and section 1. 17 Ibid., section 1. 18 Ibid., section 2 (Hebrew). 19 See Sela Teichler, “Music, Acculturation, and Haskalah.” 20 See 2 Samuel 23:1. The reference to the psalmist by this name also appears in Mendelssohn’s first discussion about the musical origins of biblical poetry in the Hebrew commentary on Exodus 15; see below. 21 The commentary on Psalms includes Bril’s brief commentary as well as the commentary by the sixteenth-century Italian Jewish exegete Obadiah Sforno (Venice, 1586). On the page layout of Mendelssohn’s Pentateuch translation, see Abigail E. Gillman, “Between Religion and Culture: Mendelssohn, Buber, Rosenzweig, and the Enterprise of Biblical Translation,” in Biblical Translation in Context, ed. Frederick W. Knobloch (Bethesda: University of Maryland Press, 2002), 93–105. 22 Bril’s other dedicatees in order of their appearance after Mendelssohn are David Friedländer, in whose household Bril served as tutor; his patrons Aaron Jorsch and his wife; and his peer, the Jewish scholar Isaac Euchel from Königsberg. 23 Sefer Zemirot Israel was reprinted in Central and Eastern Europe in almost twenty subsequent editions during the following decades. The first edition of Mendelssohn’s commentated translation of the Pentateuch, published as Sefer Netivot ha-Shalom (1780–83), had only 515 subscribers, who altogether purchased 750 copies; see Steven M. Lowenstein, “The Readership of Mendelssohn’s Bible Translation,” Hebrew Union College Annual 53 (1982): 179–213, at 214. 24 The images in the plates have several possible models in contemporaneous printed sources, the closest and most likely being August Friedrich Pfeiffer, Über die Musik der alten Hebräer (Erlangen, 1779), which Bril references in Introduction Two of Sefer Zemirot Israel, 14b. 25 The primary non-Jewish model of Bril’s survey of the music of the Hebrews, apart from Pfeiffer, is Johann Nikolaus Forkel, Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik (1788). Throughout all three introductions, we find the influence of Johann Gottfried Herder, Vom Geist der ebräischen Poesie (Dessau, 1782–83); Johann Gottfried Eichhorn’s entry “Psalmen,” in Einleitung in das Alte Testament (Leipzig, 1780–83); and possibly also Johann Andreas Cramer’s essay on Psalms in his Poetische Übersetzung der Psalmen, mit Abhandlungen über dieselben (Leipzig, 1755). Bril’s survey of the music of the Hebrews also cites select sections from Abraham Portaleone’s Sefer Shiltei ha-Gibborim (Book of the Shields of Heroes) (Mantua, 1612). Yet his methods are closer to contemporaneous non-Jewish writers than to the mythical, messianic description of the music of the Temple by Portaleone, which imagines the ancient music of the Temple in neo-Platonic terms. On the latter, see Don Harrán, Three Early Modern Hebrew Scholars on the Mysteries of Song (Boston and Leiden: Brill, 2014), 177–205. 26 On Euchel, see Shmuel Feiner, “Isaac Euchel: Entrepreneur of the Haskalah Movement in Germany,” Zion 52 (1987): 427–69 (Hebrew); and Kennecke, Isaac Euchel: Architekt der Haskalah (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007). 27 Music has been entwined with rhetoric since its earliest renderings in classical tradition and is particularly evident in Italian humanist thought and in its later recurrence in eighteenth-century German music theory. See, for instance, Thomas Habinek, “Rhetoric, Music, and the Arts,” in The Oxford Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, ed. Michael MacDonald (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); and Patrick McCreless, “Music and Rhetoric,” in The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, ed. Thomas Christensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 845–79. 28 See Amir Banbaji, “In Praise of Melitsah: Toward a Rhetorical Historiography of Early Hebrew Modernity,” Mikan (forthcoming 2019; Hebrew). 29 See Yael Sela, “The Voice of the Psalmist: On the Performative Role of Psalms in Moses Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem,” in Psalms In/On Jerusalem, ed. Ilana Pardes and Ophir Münz-Manor (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019), 109–34, at 123–24. A more traditional approach to the Jewish study of rhetoric that draws upon medieval and early modern Jewish commentators is found in Wessely’s discussion about the entwinement of ethics and moral conduct with eloquence of speech and an understanding of the poetics of biblical Hebrew (melitsah) as a core part of the secular knowledge (Torat ha-Adam). Such knowledge is a prerequisite for any human being wishing to embark on the Teaching of God (Torat ha-Elohim), wherein the ethical wisdoms are encoded in the first place, and for the benefit of society as a whole. See Wessely, Words of Peace and Truth, Letter One (1782), chap. 1 and 3; and idem, Introduction to Lebanon, a Garden Locked (Amsterdam, 1765), 3. 30 See Bril’s introductions to Mendelssohn’s translation of The Song of Deborah, in ha-Me’asef 4 (1788); Five Scrolls (Berlin, 1788), with Aaron Wolfssohn-Halle; the Book of Jonah (Berlin, 1788); and Minor Prophets, published as Sefer Minhah Tehorah (Dessau, 1805), with three other commentators. Exegetical introductions had long been common in non-Ashkenazic Jewish traditions but were far less common among Ashkenazic commentators. 31 Die Psalmen übersetzt von Moses Mendelssohn (Berlin, 1783). The translation was initially instigated by the Protestant theologian Johann Caspar Lavater’s public attack on Mendelssohn, who challenged the Jewish philosopher to either refute “the essential arguments in support of the facts of Christianity” or else convert. On the Lavater affair, see Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 194–263; and Dominique Bourel, Moses Mendelssohn: Begründer des modernen Judentums, trans. Horst Brühmann (Zurich: Ammann, 2007), 279–318. 32 See David Sorkin, Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment (London: Peter Halban, 1996), 51. 33 See Sela, “The Voice of the Psalmist,” 118–20. 34 Mendelssohn, “Robert Lowth: De sacra Poesi Hebrauorum. Oxford 1753: Rezension,” Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und der freyen Künste 1.1 and 1.2 (1757): 1.1:122 (my translation). 35 See also Gideon Freudenthal, No Religion without Idolatry: Mendelssohn’s Jewish Enlightenment (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), 15–19, 202. 36 See Mendelssohn, Letters on the Sentiments, Letters Ten and Eleven, in Philosophical Writings, 44–51. 37 See, for instance, Kirnberger, “Musik,” in Allgemeine Theorie, 3:431–34. See also Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), esp. chap. 3, 62–97. 38 Mendelssohn, “Lowth: Rezension,” 1.2:276–7. 39 40 See Midrash on Psalm 94:23, in The Midrash on Psalms, trans. William G. Braude, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 2:134–35. 41 Compare to Judah Halevi, The Book of the Kuzari, Essay Two, trans. Hartwig Hirschfeld (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1905). 42 Azariah de’ Rossi, The Light of the Eyes, trans., introduction, and annotations by Joanna Weinberg (New Haven: Yale University Press), 712–13. Mendelssohn slightly alters de’ Rossi’s formulation: in the original, Rossi writes “my heart told me that the songs of holy scripture do undoubtedly have measures and structures, but that they do not depend on the number of long and short vowels.” 43 Joel Bril, Introduction One, Sefer Zemirot Israel (Berlin, 1791), 1b (hereafter: SZI). 44 After 1 Samuel 10:5: “you will encounter a band of prophets coming down from the shrine, preceded by lyres, timbrels, flutes, and harps … the spirit of the Lord will grip you” (trans. New Jewish Publication Society of America [NJPS]). 45 After 1 Samuel 16:14, 23: “and an evil spirit from the Lord began to terrify him… . David would take the lyre and play it; Saul would find relief” (trans. NJPS). 46 Introduction One, SZI, 9a. 47 Mendelssohn, On the Main Principles of Fine Arts (1761), in Philosophical Writings, 187. See also Kirnberger’s entry “Musik,” in Allgemeine Theorie, 3:427–34. 48 Kirnberger, “Musik,” in Allgemeine Theorie, 3:431. 49 Introduction One, SZI, 9b. 50 After Jeremiah 10:16: “Not like these is the portion of Jacob.” 51 Introduction One, SZI, 9b–10. 52 For instance, in Mendelssohn’s introduction to the Pentateuch translation Or la-Netiva (A Light for the Path), see JubA 14:218. The notion of Scripture as “living script” is fully elaborated in Mendelssohn’s political–theological treatise Jerusalem, or On Religious Power and Judaism (Berlin, 1783), and in the introduction to the Hebrew commentary on the Song of the Sea, mentioned above. See also Freudenthal, No Religion without Idolatry, 91–92; and Elias Sacks, Moses Mendelssohn’s Living Script: Philosophy, Practice, Religion, Judaism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016). 53 Introduction One, SZI, 10. 54 For a similar reading from a literary-historical perspective, see Banbaji, “In Praise of Melitsah.” 55 Mendelssohn, “Introduction to Exodus 15,” in Sefer Netivot ha-Shalom; English translation modified after Moses Mendelssohn’s Hebrew Writings, trans. Edward Breuer, introduced and annotated by Edward Breuer and David Sorkin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 346. 56 Mendelssohn, On the Main Principles of Fine Arts (1761), in Philosophical Writings, 187. 57 Kirnberger, “Instrumentalmusik,” in Allgemeine Theorie, 2:677. 58 Moses Mendelssohn’s Hebrew Writings, 346. 59 Mendelssohn, “Introduction to Exodus 15,” in Sefer Netivot ha-Shalom (Berlin, 1780–83); English translation based on Moses Mendelssohn, Writings on Judaism, Christianity, and the Bible, ed. Michah Gottlieb (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2011), 215. 60 Introduction Two, SZI, 17b. In this characterization of the prophet, Bril echoes early modern Italian-Jewish rhetoricians, poets, and commentators, such as the fifteenth-century Judah Messer Leon or the eighteenth-century Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, as well as non-Jewish eighteenth-century theories of language as formulated by Herder, Condillac, Rousseau, and Diderot, who locate the mental faculties of thought in the sense of hearing—in the oral faculties. See, for instance, Grit Schorch, Moses Mendelssohns Sprachpolitik, Studia Judaica (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), esp. 89–95; and Avi Lifschitz, Language and Enlightenment: The Berlin Debates of the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 61 See Benedict Spinoza, Theological–Political Treatise (1670), ed. and trans. Jonathan Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 13 and 261. 62 Maimonides’s A Guide for the Perplexed would be printed by the Hebrew printing press in Berlin only a few years later, as Moreh ha-Nevuchim im shnei perushim, ed. Isaac Euchel (Berlin, 1796). 63 Introduction Two, SZI, 19, as described in 1 Samuel 9. 64 Introduction Two, SZI, 19b. 65 Introduction Two, SZI, 20. 66 Introduction Two, SZI, 20. 67 Introduction One, SZI, 3. 68 Mendelssohn, “Introduction to Exodus 15”; English trans. after Moses Mendelssohn’s Hebrew Writings, 352. 69 Introduction Three, SZI, 46b–47; Bril translated the original German into Hebrew from Mendelssohn, “An den Leser,” in Die Psalmen (1783), JubA 10.1:7–8. 70 After 2 Samuel 6:11–17. 71 Introduction Two, SZI, 20. Eichhorn, by contrast, rejects the idea that David recorded his experiences in the poetry of psalms; see Einleitung, 557–58. 72 Eichhorn, Einleitung, 559. See also Cramer, “Vorrede,” in Poetische Übersetzung. 73 Eichhorn, Einleitung, 559. 74 I use “Musical” after, and in contrast to, Max Weber’s ambivalent admission in his “unmusical” attitude toward religion; Max Weber, Briefe 1909–1910, Max Weber Gesamtausgabe, ed. Horst Baier, M. Rainer Lepsius, a.o. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1994), 6:65. See also Michael P. Steinberg, Judaism Musical and Unmusical (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 75 The engraver was Moses Samuel Löwe, member of the Society for the Promotion of the Good and the Beneficent. See Lohmann, “Chevrat Schocharej ha-Tov we-ha-Tuschija,” 835. I am grateful to Uta Lohmann for information on the identity of the artist. 76 The new sense of redemption that seems to be inscribed in Sefer Zemirot Israel is from within, and thus differs profoundly from the idea of redemption by Gentile rulers found, for instance, in Wessely’s Words of Peace and Truth, as discussed in Olga Litvak, Haskalah: The Romantic Movement in Judaism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012), 89–102. 77 “Der Mensch forschet nach Wahrheit, billiget das Gute und Schöne, will alles Gute und thut das Beste.” These are the closing words in Moses Mendelssohn, Morgenstunden, oder Vorlesungen über das Dasein Gottes (Berlin, 1785); JubA 3.2:176. 78 Leopold Zunz, Etwas über die rabbinische Litteratur (Berlin, 1818), in idem, Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin, 1875), 1:17. 79 Zunz, “Die synagogale Poesie des Mittelalters” (1855), in Gesammelte Schriften, 1:119. Zunz’s description echoes, in turn, Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Gemeindetheologie and the role of the arts, above all music, being a sensual reiteration of religious experience, in the constitution of a (Christian) religious community. See Schleiermacher, Der christliche Glaube nach den Grundsätzen der evangelischen Kirche im Zusammenhange dargestellt (Berlin, 1821/22, rev. ed. 1830/31). © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Songs of the Nation: The Book of Psalms in Late Eighteenth-Century Jewish Enlightenment
JF - The Musical Quarterly
DO - 10.1093/musqtl/gdz004
DA - 2019-06-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/songs-of-the-nation-the-book-of-psalms-in-late-eighteenth-century-6d8VnQekDL
SP - 331
VL - 101
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -