An unofficial ban on Wagner’s music has existed in Israel since Kristallnacht in 1938. This chapter places the ban, its adherents, and its detractors, into the context of the early Zionists during the 1890s, and specifically their relation to Wagner’s music. Theodor Herzl, father of modern political Zionism and author of The Jewish State (1896), wrote of the inspiration he took from Wagner’s music for advancing his project, opening the Second Zionist Congress in 1898 with the overture from Tannhäuser. Wagner’s regeneration writings, the discourse of secular Jews in Vienna in search of ‘the soil’ for an independent state outside Europe, and Nietzsche’s advocacy of freedom from religious or dogmatic identities all combined in unfamiliar ways to advocate a future that abandoned a European past, with Wagner in tacit support.

The Pakistan period saw the emergence of a new ‘vernacular’ elite in East Pakistan. They differed consciously from the ways of the Kolkata-based urban professionals who had dominated colonial Bengali culture, as well as from the ways of the new West Pakistani leaders. These leaders found it impossible to win rural hearts and minds. The vernacular elite, on the other hand, could use their personal and cultural links much more effectively to mobilise the rural population for their vision of cultural renewal, political autonomy and social development.