Joel Engel

Born in Berdyansk in the Russian Empire into a secularized and Russified family, Joel (Yoel, Iulii Dmitrievich) Engel completed his degree in law in Kharkov (today Kharkiv, Ukraine) in 1890 and then attended the Moscow Conservatory. After graduating, Engel became the music critic, and then an editor, for the leading Russian liberal newspaper in Moscow, Russkie vedomosti. In the 1890s, drawn to Zionist ideas of Jewish national revival, Engel began collecting Yiddish folk music and, working with cultural historians Shaul Ginsburg and Peysakh Marek, came to be the leading Jewish ethnomusicologist in Russia. In this context, he famously polemicized against conflating new Jewish popular music—particularly the vastly popular songs of Mark Varshavsky (author of “Oyfn pripteshik”)—with real Jewish folk song. He continued his ethnomusicological activism as a participant in S. An-ski’s ethnographic expeditions to the Pale of Settlement shortly before World War I. He also played a central role in efforts by a growing circle of Jewish composers to conceptualize and create Jewish art music in a classical mode. Alongside extensive collecting, editing, and disseminating of Jewish folk music and new Jewish compositions to Russian Jews, Engel composed his own work, including incidental music for the famed Ha-Bimah production of An-ski’s The Dybbuk and classical vocal settings of Yiddish and Hebrew song. He moved to Tel Aviv in 1924.