The Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music

Volume 29 (2023) No. 1

Music and Jewish Culture in Early Modern Italy: New Perspectives. Edited by Lynette Bowring, Rebecca Cypess, and Liza Malamut. Music and the Early Modern Imagination. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2022. [318 pp. ISBN 978-02-53060-10-5.]

Reviewed by Paul G. Feller-Simmons*

1.1 More than a collection of disparate essays, Music and Jewish Culture in Early Modern Italy is a much-needed contribution to research on the cultural engagement of Italian Jewish communities with early-modern musical practices, and a call to action as a whole. This volume advocates for a generative approach to history that draws from developments in Jewish studies that invite scholars to focus on the local specificities of past Jewish cultures. By balancing etic and emic perspectives, several studies in this collection move away from the traditional valuing of Jewish musicianship in terms of their alleged contribution to a monolithic Western civilization. The volume is successful in showcasing the multiple and sometimes differing ways in which early modern Jewish people interacted with and conceived of music in Italy between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries. Moreover, most essays also consider how music bridged the musical experiences between Jewish and non-Jewish spaces.

1.2 After an introduction by Rebecca Cypess, ten chronologically ordered chapters explore case studies. Francesco Spagnolo opens by delivering an extensive survey of notated musical sources related to Jewish history throughout the early modern period. The author proposes that this evidence, albeit fragmentary, interacts with patterns of oral transmission and reveals the extent of the engagement between Jewish and non-Jewish musicians and music theorists. Spagnolo’s essay crystallizes the general outlook of Music and Jewish Culture in Early Modern Italy by bringing together material ranging from synagogue music generated by Jewish cantors to synagogue chant transcribed by Christian scholars. Furthermore, Spagnolo asks about the prospective audiences of these sources, suggesting that they were not produced exclusively for the Jewish communities. This wide-ranging documentation of liturgical traditions would stem from an encounter of musical cultures that blurs the lines between categories of Jewish and Christian music, which is a transversal theme to this volume.

1.3 The second and third chapters investigate the reception and assimilation of Jewish cultural practices by non-Jewish people. Eleonora M. Beck, starting in the fourteenth century, posits that Giovanni Boccaccio drew from Hebrew literary traditions to write his Decameron. Although Boccaccio would have encountered these sources through a Christian lens, their Jewish substratum remains underneath the narrative. The ballatas in the Decameron, in particular, function as songs of praise, echoing Miriam’s performance of the Song at the Sea in the biblical book of Exodus. Jumping to the late fifteenth century, Drew Stephen examines traces of Jewish musicianship at the court of Federico da Montefeltro in Urbino. The chapter underscores the duke’s patronage of musicians of Jewish origin, including the dancing master Guglielmo Ebreo da Pesaro, and the integration of the Jewish population into the city’s artistic culture.

1.4 Also focusing on Jewish-Christian interactions, the contributions by Dongmyung Ahn and Luigi Sisto offer a glance into the role that musicians and instrument-makers of Jewish origin played in England and Southern Italy. Ahn looks at the case of the Bassano family that moved from Venice to the court of Henry VIII in the 1530s. Through an exegetical reading of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, the author argues that several factors contributed to making this move feasible. These circumstances included the king’s wish to secure Italian performers for his court, improved economic conditions in England, and a push towards interfaith collaboration. Returning to the Italian Peninsula, Sisto reviews the position of instrument makers and musicians of Sephardic Jewish descent in the areas surrounding the Kingdom of Naples between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. From Sisto’s perspective, the involvement of the latter was of paramount importance to the definition and circulation of musical instrument design between the Iberian and Italian Peninsulas.

1.5 The essays by Bonnie Blackburn and Avery Gosfield turn the issue of reception upside down to investigate how Pietro Aaron and Elye Bokher utilized music-related models that demonstrate the permeability of confessional spheres in Italy. Blackburn presents documentation to back her hypothesis that Aaron had converted from Judaism to Christianity. Aaron’s ancestry would have thus shaped his career by posing obstacles such as problems of early access to music education and ecclesiastical institutions. Looking at the Jewish polymath Elye Bokher, Gosfield explores the production of Yiddish musical-poetic works that refer to specifically Jewish religious traditions and Ashkenazic cultural themes. In this regard, Gosfield argues that Bokher directed his poetry toward an “insider” readership. Yet, Bokher adopted Italian verse forms such as the strambotto and the ottava rima. Gosfield thus shows that Bokher’s poems were part of the continuous of the Italian poetic tradition.

1.6 The last three chapters focus on the musical circles built around Leon Modena and Salamone Rossi in seventeenth-century Venice and Mantua. The essays by Stefano Patuzzi, Lynette Bowring, and Rebecca Cypess reframe the position of Rossi and his publication of Hebrew polyphonic works, the Songs of Solomon, primarily as products of their time. Patuzzi considers Rossi a musician who acted as a “marginal mediator.” That is, the musician had to skillfully traverse the different areas of the Gonzaga musical establishment, the expectations from within the Mantuan ghetto, and the challenging task of pioneering the printing of music with Hebrew text. For Bowring and Cypess, moreover, Rossi’s notation and publication of the Songs evince the fluid boundaries between oral and written traditions in Italo-Jewish musical practice. Unlike the case of Elye Bokher, for instance, Rossi eschewed formulaic composition for his Songs, thus moving away from the approach he had previously followed to compose instrumental music. Besides this, as Patuzzi also remarks, for Rossi and his collaborator, Rabbi Leon Modena, the writing down of Hebrew polyphonic music was meant to complement the orally transmitted repertory of liturgical music. Modena and Rossi were hence spearheading a campaign to legitimize the practice of modern polyphony in the eyes of Jewish religious leaders. Likewise, Liza Malamut argues that the Accademia degli Impediti, under the leadership of rabbi Modena in Venice, occupied the mediating position of being a modernizing agent that would close a gap between Jewish and non-Jewish musical practices. Malamut also argues that the Accademia provided a space for Mantuan refugees to display their musical prowess after losing the space previously provided by the Gonzaga family.

1.7 A fundamentally important step that Music and Jewish Culture in Early Modern Italy takes is a concern with understanding the situation of Jewish people and their music on their own terms, as well as within the greater culture they navigated. Some chapters show that the engagement of Italian Jews with cultural practices that have otherwise been described as non-Jewish is but a natural outgrowth of the situation of their communities in the early-modern Italian peninsula. As the case of Leo Modena and Rossi exemplifies, however, the problem for the religious leaders was not the participation in the larger cultural trends but rather the reconciliation of modern practices within Jewish tradition. In this respect, I would have liked to see a more unified push to challenge divisions between specifically Jewish and non-Jewish musical traditions. At some points in the volume, for instance, it is implied that the language of musical notation in Rossi’s Songs of Solomon is somehow “Christian,”^[1] or that Rossi’s usage of polyphonic music exemplifies a tendency toward mimesis of Catholic culture.^[2] Even though the creation of ghettos created a sense of a specifically “Jewish” space, Music and Jewish Culture in Early Modern Italy encourages us to think beyond perceived confessional markers and ask about the elasticity of early-modern musical identities. Jewish “agents of modernity” such as Rossi, Modena, and Bokher, as Malamut puts it, seem to have strived to affirm their Jewish identity together with their sense of belonging to modernity as instantiated in the Italian peninsula.

1.8 The plurality of approaches that Music and Jewish Culture in Early Modern Italy displays around the theme of music as a space for mediation and interaction will result in an indispensable model for considerations of Jewish musicians in the early modern world. Oral and written traditions intersect here to shed light on the multilayered confessional and cultural boundaries of the Italian peninsula. This situation, at the same time, presented a challenge to Jewish musicians as they were required to inhabit the liminality between their Jewish specificity and their engagement with music traditions and spaces beyond their particular communities. If this volume functions as a gauge of current scholarly paths, then, the compass needle points towards an increasing awareness of complexity and inclusivity.

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At its annual meeting in November 2023, the American Musicological Society granted this book the Ruth A. Solie Award, for an outstanding collection of essays.—Ed.