By Alex Gordon
HAIFA, Israel — In the USSR, Jewish life, Jewish religion and Jewish education were forbidden. Anyone who wanted to learn about Jewishness had to seek out ways to learn about it at his or her own risk. Jewish melodies could pour from different and unexpected sources. Lord George Gordon Byron suddenly turned out to be one such source for me.
A compendium of verses under the name Hebrew Melodies came out in London in 1815-16. It was a collaboration between the poet Byron and composer Isaac Nathan. In 1813, son of the cantor, 20-year-old musician and composer (in the future – the founder of Australian music) Isaac Nathan had appealed to Walter Scott with the request to write verses to the old melodies they had collected.
The composer claimed to have arranged Jewish songs from the Second Temple period, but the lyrics needed poetic treatment. Scott rejected Nathan’s offer of collaboration. On June 30, 1813, Nathan wrote a letter to Byron in which he made a similar proposal: “I have with great difficulty collected quite a number of very beautiful Jewish melodies, doubtless very ancient, a number of which were sung by the Jews before the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. […] Because of their majestic beauty, I am sure you will be interested in them, and I am convinced that none but Lord Byron will be able to do them justice”.
A Selection of Hebrew Melodies begins with one of the most popular poems in English She walks in beauty. With the 23 poems of the cycle Hebrew Melodies one can begin the study of Zionism. From them the reader learns about Zion, the scattered race of Israelites, Jerusalem, the Holy Land, kings Saul, David and Solomon, the prophet Samuel, the lamentation of Job, the vanity of Ecclesiastes, the daughter of Jephthah, the silenced harp of Judah, the wounded feet of Israel, the hills of Judah, the fateful feast of King Belshazzar of Babylon from chapter 5 of the Book of Daniel, the defeat of the Assyrian king Sennacherib at Jerusalem at Passover 701. B.C. from the 37th chapter of the Book of Isaiah, about the destruction of the Temple by Titus, the lamentation on the rivers of Babylon, and the banks of the Jordan.
The first performance of the melodies took place in 1817. The performer was the famous tenor, the Jew John Braham. The melodies could not have been as ancient as Nathan believed them to be. The tune On the Banks of the Jordan is the well-known Hanukkah song Maoz Tzur Yehoshuati (The Pillar of Salvation). This song is based on the words of the 13th century poet Mordechai bar Yitzchak, whose name appears in the acrostic, and has been sung by Jews for about 500 years on the holiday of Hanukkah.
Nathan, of course, did not know that this “Jewish” melody was a sixteenth-century German folk song. Byron turned religious hymns into songs of Jewish national liberation. He poetically rendered episodes from the Bible, removing the sacredness. Some critics called Byron’s Hebrew Melodies “the battle cry of Jewish nationalism.” Byron’s Hebrew poems were not translated into Russian in the USSR, but they could be read in English.
Another Jewish source for me was the German poet Heinrich Heine’s Romanzero (1851), a collection authorized in the USSR. The poet didn’t need a Jewish composer to supply Jewish material – Heine took it from his Jewish childhood. The Romanzero cycle consists of three movements, the last of which is called Hebräische Melodien following Byron. Melodies consists of three small poems, Princess Shabbat (Sabbath), Yehuda ben Halevi, and Disputation. These works are a veritable Jewish encyclopedia. There you can learn about the Exodus from Egypt, the Talmud, the Halacha, the Mishnah, the Haggadah, the day of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, the suffering of the people of Israel, the Sabbath prayer Lecha Dodi Likrat Kala (Come, beloved to greet the bride! Let us receive the Shabbat, which is a traditional Jewish song, i.e. a part of the Kabbalat Shabbat service held on Friday nights), which I studied in the synagogue upon my arrival in Israel. Heine’s reflections on the fate of the Jewish people are reflected in Princess Shabbat. The poem Yehuda ben Halevi is a story about Jewish poets of XI-XII centuries – Yehuda Halevi, Ibn Ezra and Ibn Gabirol, about their talent and tragic fate. Disputation depicts the ideological struggle between Christianity and Judaism.
Byron-Nathan’s Hebrew Melodies is a poetic piece of music. Heine’s Hebrew Melodies is a work of poetry. But Heine’s poetry is musical. Franz Schubert, Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, Richard Wagner, Peter Tchaikovsky, Alexander Borodin and Sergei Rachmaninoff wrote their works on Heine’s poetry. Heine ranks first among poets in the world in terms of the number of musical works written to his poems: about 10,000 of them! In September 1857, the German writer Ludolf Winbarg wrote about Heine: “Only in the later years of his life, being already seriously ill, he opened the veil, hiding his inner world, and expressed both human and poetic sympathy for the people of his fathers. In Romanzero he became a romantic of Jewry.”
With the Hebrew Melodies of the collection Romanzero began the rapprochement of the baptized Heine with the Jewish people. In 1854, the poet wrote in Confessions: “Since then I have more correctly appreciated them (the Jews), and if all pride in one’s birth were not a foolish incongruity in the champion of the revolution and its democratic principles, then the writer of these lines could be proud that his ancestors belonged to the noble house of Israel, that he is a descendant of those martyrs who gave the world God and morality, who fought and suffered in all the battlefields of human thought. […] The Jews are made of the dough out of which gods are made. […] The Jews were the only ones who defended the freedom of their religion at a time when Europe was becoming Christianized.”
Heine’s Hebrew Melodies, not set to music, became the melodies of Jewishness, created by one of the most musical of poets.
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Alex Gordon is professor emeritus of physics at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the academic college of education, and the author of 10 books.