![]() ![]() However, his two most influential early publishing projects, a songbook for Jewish schools and massive compendium of liturgical and folk melodies, reveal a more complicated cluster of attitudes towards European music, Diaspora Jewish culture, and the Arab Middle East. In his early writings, Idelsohn called repeatedly for a rejection of Diasporic Jewish music and the recovery of an authentic ancient Hebrew music for the reborn nation in its homeland. I argue in this article that the roots of Israeli music's distinctive national character can be traced to the pre-World War I activities of Abraham Tsvi Idelsohn, the pioneering Zionist scholar and ideological progenitor of a revolutionary new concept of Hebrew music. Music is widely recognized as a central component of Israeli national identity, yet the putative Jewishness of Israeli music remains a subject of enduring cultural controversy and ideological confusion. In what follows, we shall deal only with the poetry cited by men, and in their social setting alone-excluding the religious sphere, and especially what concerns girdle poems (the muwashshaḥ). Another important difference between the separate male and female social settings and their arrangements of poetry was that the poetry cited by men generally expressed the national aspirations of the Jewish people and was detached in terms of its content from the poetry associated with the Muslim environment, while the folk poetry orally transmitted by women expressed the sentiments of their own gender and was, in principle, close to the poetry of Muslim women. ![]() In contrast, those poems chanted by women were to be found only in the Arabic tongue, and had never been put down in writing, since Yemenite Jewish women were banned from attending school, and did not acquire the rudiments of reading and writing. This can certainly be traced back to the fact that rudiments of reading and writing were the legacy of all Yemenite Jewish men, having acquired such skills during their schooling as children. tiklāl), or in other liturgical compositions. dīwān), and in the prayer-rite books (pl. 2 The texts used in the all-male social gathering, which were compiled in Hebrew or in Judeo-Arabic, and occasionally even in Aramaic, were penned in writing and included in the compilations of song anthologies (sing. This all-female social setting incorporated in its system of poetry those matters touching upon society alone, that is to say, events related to human-being life-cycle. In any case, the feminine gender had its own structured poetry system, which also incorporated an impromptu vocal and instrumental performance, as well as dance performance. All of this in accordance with the rules of etiquette laid-out in a male-oriented society, which in principle women had no part in. 1 This system, though not always in its entirety, encompassed every aspect of life among Yemenite Jewry: whether in the realm of religion which included the liturgical readings in the synagogue and during the Sabbath-day and holiday meals within private homes, or in the social realm which included events related to man's life-cycle-birth, marriage and death, as well as to other events such as the dedication of one's house (ḥanūkkath ha-bayit) or any social gathering that was not related to the above events. The Jews of Yemen once preserved a well-defined system of poetry that not only comprised the very poetry itself, but also entailed its vocal and instrumental arrangement, as well as the dance performance. ![]()
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