Jewish Identities: Nationalism, Racism, and Utopianism in Twentieth-Century Music

Abstract

A formidable challenge to prevailing essentialist assumptions about Jewish music, which maintain that ethnic groups, nations, or religious communities possess an essence that must manifest itself in art created by members of that group. This examination of Jewish identity reorders ideas about 20th-c. Jewish music in three case studies: first, Russian Jewish composers of the first two decades of the 20th c.; second, the Swiss American Ernest Bloch; and third, Arnold Schoenberg. Examining these composers in the context of emerging Jewish nationalism, widespread racial theories, and utopian tendencies in modernist art and 20th-c. politics provides a trajectory from paradigmatic nationalist techniques, through assumptions about the unintended presence of racial essences, to an abstract notion of Judaism. A review article is cited as RILM [ref]2012-02695[/ref].