Musical Magpies

NORMAN LEBRECHT for StandPoint

It is pitch dark, dead of night, in Safed and my feet are crunching gravel in a graveyard. Not any cemetery. Perhaps the holiest in the Holy Land. At the end of this unlit path lie side by side the twin propulsive forces in Judaism, the great masters of mysticism and legalism, the Holy Lion and the House of Joseph.

A candle flickers at the foot of the adjacent tombs. My companion, Eyal Shiloach, takes out his violin. Eyal used to play in the London Symphony Orchestra until he was drawn to the light of faith. He starts a tune that he tells me was sung by Levites in the Second Temple in Jerusalem. Both he and I know, exchanging glances, that this cannot be true: tonality, colour and pulse place the melody in eastern Europe, early 19th century. But tradition holds that it is Temple music and there is no arguing with tradition. We stand riven between the mysticism of the Holy Lion (Isaac Luria) and the meticulous rationalism of the House of Joseph (whose surname was Caro).

I am in Israel, gathering testimony for a BBC Radio 3 series titled Music and the Jews. Not Jewish music, note. There is insufficient reason, in my view, to delineate a genre whose main streams — klezmer bands, Chasidic songs, cantorial melismas, Ladino ballads — are no more Jewish than pickled herring. Each is a local catch, harvested and embellished by Jews in the lands of their dispersion. Music and the Jews pursues a different story. It explores how music shaped the history and identity of the Jews, and how Jews influenced the course of music in all its forms.

I am not the first on this trail. In 1905, a cantor called Abraham Zvi Idelsohn arrived in Jerusalem from South Africa and found the streets paved — or squatted — by old men from all corners of the earth, each with his native cantillation for singing the Torah. Idelsohn set to work, like Béla Bartók in the Balkans, recording fragile voices on a wire machine. Analysing the results, he concluded that Yemenites had the oldest traditions and that their tropes bore such affinity to early Gregorian chant that it was likely Christians were singing music of the Temple. All hell broke loose at this hypothesis. (Idelsohn went on to compose an Israeli dance, Hava Nagila, the most popular of its kind. The melody is Romanian.

At the National Sound Archive in Jerusalem I spun some of Idelsohn's cylinders, as well as much weirder items by the obsessive Robert Lachmann who, when Hitler's Reich stopped supplying wax for his project, recorded old men's chants on discarded hospital X-rays. I have handled a celluloid disc with the shadow of human ribs on it.

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