Scholars have frequently portrayed early modern German Jewish history as underresearched and fragmentary, with an underdeveloped pool of historical sources. Even the very productive historian Stefan Rohrbacher, for example, has rued that “[t]he early modern period numbers among the till now very little researched epochs in the history of the Jews in Germany. It has recently received increased attention from historians, however, this interest is distributed very unevenly in the various areas and aspects of Jewish life.”

In this essay, I explore the history of what has conventionally been described as “Jewish music” research in relation to parallel developments in both ethnomusicology and Jewish studies in the American academic world during the twentieth century. As a case study, I argue, the issues inherent in understanding Jewish music's historical trajectory offer a complex portrait of scholarship that spans the discourses of community, practice, identity, and ideology. Subject to the principles of Wissenschaft since the second half of the nineteenth century, Jewish music study has constantly negotiated the lines between the scholar and practitioner; between the seminary, the conservatory, and the university; between the good of science, the assertion of a coherent Jewish narrative in history, and the perceived need to reconnect an attenuating Jewish populace with its reinvented traditions; and between the core questions of musicology, comparative musicology, theology, and modern ethnomusicology.

With these words, Alexander Kohut engaged the radical Reform stance of Kaufman Kohler in the spring of 1885. The exchange with Kohler crystallized Kohut's raison d'être for Conservative Judaism: an authentic alternative to what he termed “stupid Orthodoxy and insane Reform.” Kohut articulated a fully developed version of this view in Ethics of the Fathers, a compilation of his polemics against Kohler that he published a few months later. This earned Kohut a place among the Conservative movement's pantheon of nineteenth-century founders, along with Sabato Morais, Benjamin Szold, and Marcus Jastrow.

This work discusses some aspects of the life of Luis de Carvajal, the head of the well-known Carvajal family. This man was Portuguese by birth, which meant that he was not allowed to go to the Spanish New World. Nevertheless, in 1579, Philip II awarded him a vast territorial entity in New Spain, called Nuevo Reino de León, and allowed him to bring to it a large number of people without having to certify their being Old Christians. Nearly ten years later, he was apprehended by orders of Viceroy Manrique de Zuñiga and brought to Mexico City, where he was jailed in the Crown's prison. On April 14, 1589, he was transferred to the secret jails of the Spanish Inquisition, where he was subjected to a nine-month-long trial, accused of heresy, of knowingly bringing Jews to New Spain, and of concealing their religious activities. Ultimately, he was found guilty of the last two charges and was sentenced to a six-year exile from New Spain. However, before the sentence was carried out, he was returned to the Crown's jail, where he died a year later.

In this paper we shall study an aggadic tradition from the Babylonian Talmud while trying to find traces of early Iranian mythological conceptions that were absorbed by the talmudic sages as a part of their own biblically enrooted knowledge. We shall also attempt to gain a better understanding of the talmudic text by presuming that it reflects ideas absorbed from the Iranian—or, rather, “Iraqian”—environment. Occasionally, however, early Iranian myths do not always survive in their original, complete forms, and sometimes only fragmentary remains in medieval Zoroastrian literature can be used for their reconstruction. The so-called ninth-century books in Pahlavi were edited by Zoroastrian priests at a rather late date, and in a quite tendentious manner. Significantly, the bulk of the numerous “pagan” strains were excised, probably because the editing work took place in a Muslim environment, and our knowledge of the actual popular religions of Sasanian—or, for our purpose, talmudic—western Iran and Mesopotamia/Iraq is far from adequate. Thus, every piece of secondary evidence regarding the popular Iranian beliefs is precious.

The study of Moses ben Maimon's works is ultimately tied into scholars' assumptions about whether they are reading the writings of Maimonides, the medieval Jewish philosopher par excellence, or Rambam, the premier medieval codifier of halakhah. Three approaches to interpreting his works have dominated scholarship for the last century. Some read the works as consisting of two essentially independent oeuvres: halakhic works written for one audience and philosophical works for another. Thus, Maimonides did not need to be consistent in his views. The supporters of Maimonides the philosopher read his halakhic works as secretly containing philosophical truths consistent with those in the Guide of the Perplexed (referred to as GP herein). The supporters of Rambam prefer to see the Mishneh Torah as the foremost statement of his views and the philosophical stance expressed in the Guide as disingenuous. In the words of Menachem Kellner, Maimonides is presented as “everything from a late convert to Kabbalah to a halakhist, who in truth disdained philosophy, to an Aristotelian philosopher, whose own innermost thoughts stood in conscious opposition to normative Jewish teachings.”

Gershon Hundert, one of the leading scholars of Eastern European Jewry, has portrayed Hasidism as “one of many movements of religious enthusiasm that arose in the eighteenth century.” Though most scholars today agree with this description, they diverge regarding the goals of the movement, the causes of its emergence and spread, and its impact on Eastern European Jewry. Simon Dubnow, the father-founder of modern Eastern European Jewish historiography, considered Hasidism to be a response to the seventeenth-century communal crisis. He portrayed Hasidism as a spiritual movement of ordinary Jews who rebelled against the stringencies of rabbinic Judaism and sought spiritual accommodation from charismatic yet uneducated leaders. Benzion Dinur saw Hasidism as a popular revolution against the corrupt power of the kahal, the umbrella self-governing organization of Polish Jewry. Gershom Scholem maintained that it was the popularization of Kabbalah that was responsible for the phenomenal success of Hasidism, its rapid spread, and the mass following of the zaddikim, the hasidic masters. By the end of the late twentieth century, most scholars agreed that Hasidism was a popular movement triggered by the economic breakdown of Polish Jewry, directed against the legal authorities, and led by mystically oriented leaders with no significant rabbinic pedigree or deep knowledge of traditional Jewish sources.