Do Zionists Read Music from Right to Left? Abraham Tsvi Idelsohn and the Invention of Israeli Music

"WE IN THE DIASPORA have had no national Jewish art; the Zionists in Palestine are developing one for us. We have had no national Jewish music; they are creating it for us. We have had no national Hebraic literature; they are producing it for us. We have had no living national language; they are reviving it for us."1 So wrote the Zionist rabbi David De Sola Pool in New York in 1917, noting approvingly that "in Palestine alone is this true Jewish culture being created today." A century later, few would deny the reality or success of Hebrew literature and the Hebrew language as basic expressions of Israeli national identity. But Hebrew music remains a contested category that simultaneously inspires great pride and deep consternation among contemporary observers of Israeli culture. The very phrase "Hebrew song" (shir 'ivri or zemer 'ivrC) is instantly recognizable as one of the most familiar, quintessentially Israeli, of cultural forms. The Israeli literary critic Ariel Hirschfeld has gone so far as to term it "the most Israeli of all artistic phenomena."2 And yet there is little consensus - and much anxiety - about both its Jewish paternity and its present-day viability. Witness the controversy that erupted in 2004 when the composer Naomi Shemer confessed shortly before her death that she had lifted a Basque folk melody for use in the iconic anthem "Yerushalayim shel zahav" (Jerusalem of Gold).3 Or the repeated governmental efforts in recent years to legally regulate the quotient and kind of "Hebrew" musical content on Israeli radio and television through administrative measures and attempts at a "Hebrew Song Law."4 Indeed, the very question of terminology, whether zemer 'ivri (Hebrew song) is synonymous with "Israeli Song" (shir yisra'eli), let alone Israeli music, provokes disagreement among scholars and musicians alike.5Many of these debates have centered on the question of Israeli music's national distinctiveness and the nationalist aspiration to an immutable, authentic Jewish-Israeli musical essence. If Naomi Shemer 's song stirs many Israeli hearts but borrows its melody verbatim from a non- Jewish folk song, the argument runs, it loses its legitimacy. So too has "Hatikvah," the Israeli national anthem, continually generated speculation and criticism because of the putative Moldavian origins of its melody. In and of itself, the persistent anxiety about the foreign influences in Israeli music is not surprising. After all, it is in the nature of all forms of cultural nationalism to grapple with the problem of boundaries and influences and to indulge in essentialist reveries about uniquely pure origins. But what is striking in the case of Israeli music is the contrast between present-day confusion and the supreme confidence with which early cultural Zionists believed they had definitively solved this problem once and for all, even decades before the emergence of a true Hebrew-speaking public or a state-sponsored Israeli music industry. In his 1917 essay, for instance, De Sola Pool argued that a new national music was already audible in Palestine. There, he explained, "Abraham Zevi Idelsohn has published a collection of one hundred all- Hebrew songs - songs for children, for their games, for the school-room, lyrics of nature, marches and national songs. These songs, with their Hebrew words, Hebrew spirit and beginnings of Hebrew melody, are being exported from Palestine to Hebraize and Judaize our young in the Diaspora."6 As the quote suggests, these new "all-Hebrew songs" were still only in their infancy (note "beginnings of Hebrew melody"). What captured De Sola Pool's imagination, therefore, was less the songs themselves than the very idea of a Hebrew music (nnuikah "writ) as a logical aural corollary to Zionism's linguistic and aesthetic revolution in the Jewish world. In De Sola Pool's account, this new national music was simultaneously the inevitable product of an organic cultural process and the progeny of one specific individual, whom he identified as the author of the Hebrew musical revolution. …