Thesaurus of Hebrew-Oriental Melodies: Songs of the Yemenite Jews

Preface

A systematic collection of the traditional songs of Oriental Jews¹ is of great importance, both for the elucidation of the vocal music used in synagogues and for the study of the origins of vocal music used in the Roman church. Both have roots in Oriental Jews’ sacral songs, whose antique character was faithfully preserved due to the Orient’s strict conservatism.

Jewish communities in the various countries and regions of the Orient lived isolated from one another, perhaps even more isolated than previously thought, as was the case, for example, for Jews in Yemen, in Persia, in the interior of Morocco, in the area around Mosul, and near Lake Urmia, where Jews spoke neo-Aramaic. For fifteen or sixteen centuries, those Jews had no contact at all with Jews in Germany and Poland—and yet we find, in their liturgical vocal music, melodies and whole categories of songs that are also present in the synagogue music of European Jews. This fact supports the conjecture of the antique character of Oriental synagogue songs. Comparative studies of the songs of the Roman Church revealed surprising analogies.

For that reason, it is important to create a comprehensive systematic collection of the entire liturgical vocal music of the Oriental Jews, a task that I believe I have satisfactorily discharged in the present collection.

It is the result of a process, pursued for many years, of learning and researching, of collecting and sorting and analyzing Oriental vocal music, in general, and the traditional repertoire of songs of the Oriental Jews, in particular.

However, I do not wish to claim that I collected the entirety of the material. That would be an impossible undertaking. Due to the complete lack of written or even simply explanatory sources, the researcher’s collection is shaped by the ignorance and memory of singers and cantors. Hence, an exhaustive collection of materials is out of the question. But I hope that I have succeeded in getting hold of the most important and original material, in organizing it systematically, and, in fact, in discovering a system at all in the seemingly improvised vocal music of the Oriental synagogue.

I have arranged the material by regional origin. Historical circumstances divided Oriental Jewry into separate communities that rarely came in contact with one another. Climate, environment, and segregation shaped their idiosyncrasies so that at present we can distinguish several Jewish types in the Orient, such as the Jews of Yemen and Persia, respectively [the region of] Daghestan; Babylonia, respectively [the region of] neo-Aramaic-speaking Syria; Spain (that is, Jews who migrated around 1500 from Spain to the Orient); and the Jews of Morocco, respectively Algiers and Tunis. Accordingly, I have divided the collection into six parts: (1) Songs of the Jews in Yemen; (2) Persia; (3) Babylonia; (4) Syria; (5) Spain; (6) Morocco. Types 1, 2, 3, and 6 are the most exotic because they had never been in touch with Europe. Although types 4 and 5 were very influenced by Europe, their traditional songs remained relatively untouched.

Each part is a complete unit in itself, but the parts refer to each other a number of times, because their common elements are frequently discussed. Hence it is desirable that the parts appear in fairly quick succession, dependent on the interest that wider circles show in this work.

It was only thanks to the support of several societies, especially the Imperial Academy of Science in Vienna, the Society for the Advancement of the Science of Judaism, the Zunz Foundation, the Arthur and Emil Königswart Scholarship Foundation in Frankfurt am Main, the Heinemann Foundation, and the Relief Organization of German Jews [Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden] and some patrons of art and science who want to remain anonymous, that I was able to collect the material in the Orient over the course of many years and to present its first part now to the public.

May this thesaurus of Hebrew-Oriental melodies be not only an enriching treasury for music scholars and composers, but also for every musician and friend of music a yet-unknown cache of melodies from the unexhausted Orient that contains motifs and sounds from the ancient world.