Sabbatian Songs of Faith: Ritual, Community, and Interreligious Encounters in the Late Ottoman Empire unveils the hidden world of the Ma’aminim—followers of the 17th-century Jewish messianic figure, Sabbatai Tzvi. After Tzvi’s dramatic conversion to Islam in 1666, many of his followers returned to mainstream Judaism. However, a dedicated group followed in his footsteps, converted to Islam, and established a new path, blending Sabbatian, Jewish, and Islamic elements within a distinct Ottoman-Sephardi cultural framework. For centuries, the Ma’aminim maintained secrecy, forming distinct communities (known as the Dönme) and playing a multifaceted role in Jewish and Ottoman histories. This book sheds new light on their social life and esoteric traditions through a comprehensive, interdisciplinary analysis of previously mostly unexamined mystical manuscripts in Ladino, Hebrew, and Ottoman Turkish. It explores their sacred songs, radical theology, rituals, folklore, and musical practices as reflections of communal reality and developments. By placing the Ma’aminim within a broader historical and cross-cultural perspective, Sabbatian Songs of Faith offers fresh insights into religious transformation, intercommunal exchanges, and the interplay between faith, ritual, and popular culture in the late Ottoman world and beyond.

Preludes is the story of the composer and conductor Noam Sheriff (1935-2018), whose life was dedicated to art and music almost from the moment he could think of it. In the first person Sheriff recounts a personal initiation story, which begins in the small Tel Aviv of the days of the British Mandate and the divided Jerusalem of the first years of the State of Israel, followed by the most renown and magnificent concert halls in Israel and around the world. In doing so, he describes some of the personalities who stood at the heart of world of music: Leonard Bernstein, Gary Bartini, Paul Ben-Haim, Arik Einstein and others. This is a story of pioneering musical activity, part of an enterprise of building Israeli culture. This is also the story of an artist who, looking back from a sober, unapologetic and unselfish perspective - recounts his achievements, doubts and personal and artistic choices.

This wide-ranging book shows how, since the first centuries of the Christian era, gentiles have associated Jews with noise. The study focuses on a “musical libel" - a variation on the Passion story that recurs in various forms and cultures in which an innocent Christian boy is killed by a Jew in order to silence his “harmonious musicality.” In paying close attention to how and where this libel surfaces, Ruth HaCohen covers a wide swath of Western cultural history. The author combines in her analysis the perspectives of musicology, literary criticism, philosophy, psychology, and anthropology, tracing the tensions between Jewish “noise" and idealized Christian “harmony” and their artistic manifestations from the high Middle Ages through Shakespeare, Bach, Wagner, George Eliot, Kafka, Schoenberg and others. She explores testimonies by outsider visitors of synagogues, operas, caricatures, and Nazi movies. Her analysis shows how entrenched aesthetic-theological assumptions have persistently defined European culture and its internal moral and political orientations. Following the publication of the book, the author received two prestigious awards: the Polonsky Award for Creativity and Originality in the Humanities, and the Kinkelday Award from the American Musicological Society for the best book in musicology published in 2011 .

The study of liturgy is intrinsically interdisciplinary and comprises elements of music, drama, theater and devotion that are of great consequence to believers and scholars far and wide. Liturgy is both history and theology, purporting to reflect and propagate values that inform individuals and communities alike, playing a vital role in the construction of sacred and lay memory and identity. As a multi-sensory experience, liturgy maintains a dynamic relationship with the surrounding space and its visual components, including art, artifacts and architecture. The essays in this book examine diverse aspects of liturgy and the arts, and were written by scholars working in the disciplines of musicology, social and cultural history, art history, material culture, and the history of the Jews and Christians in the Middle Ages and beyond. The articles engage in a comparative and interdisciplinary discourse, in order to contextualize the liturgical practices within the production of medieval cultural memory, and within the symbolic traditions expressed through liturgy and the arts. Primary sources include texts, rituals, music and visual media from Western Europe (Christian and Jewish) and the Latin Levant. The study of written, visual and musical constructs identifies the values and ideals conveyed and instilled through Jewish and Christian liturgical commemoration, and explores how these activated the faithful's idea of community and their place within it.

The Western musical tradition has produced not only music, but also countless writings about music that remain in continuous—and enormously influential—dialogue with their subject. With sweeping scope and philosophical depth, A Language of Its Own traces the past millennium of this ongoing exchange. Ruth Katz argues that the indispensable relationship between intellectual production and musical creation gave rise to the Western conception of music. This evolving and sometimes conflicted process, in turn, shaped the art form itself. As ideas entered music from the contexts in which it existed, its internal language developed in tandem with shifts in intellectual and social history. Katz explores how this infrastructure allowed music to explain itself from within, creating a self-referential and rational foundation that has begun to erode in recent years. A magisterial exploration of a frequently overlooked intersection of Western art and philosophy, A Language of Its Own restores music to its rightful place in the history of ideas.

A dialogue between Michal Zmora-Cohen and Moshe Zuckermann on the development of music in the 20th century. While Zmora-Cohen criticized this development, Zuckermann defended it. The discourse has musicological, historical and philosophical dimensions.

Music, which speaks in the language of tones, tends to elude attempts at a description in words. Precisely for this reason, perhaps, it has always posed a great challenge to authors, who have been writing musical works and performances throughout the generations. Contrary to what might be expected, literature is far from unanimous in praising music. Frequently, it assigns it dark powers and presents it as dangerous. This two-volume study is the most massive attempt yet to survey the moment musicaux (musical moments) of world literature. Volume I contains a thematic mapping of some 250 literary representations of music; volume II offers an in-depth analysis of 30 of them .

The interconnections among music and the visual arts have been a source of inspiration in Western culture for hundreds of years. The medium difference caused artists and theoreticians to investigate analogies, connections and mutual influences among them in diverse artistic and historical contexts. Modernism and technology saw the birth of new ways in combining music, sound and image and open new horizons in the age of multimedia and internet. The interconnections among music and picture are the subject of an extensive research at the last two decades in Israel and abroad. The discourse calls for a wide variety of disciplines, among them the history of art, musicology, philosophy, technology, and cognition, and creates fruitful and updated collaborations. The anthology Ear Sees, Eye Hears: On the Interconnections among Sound and Picture in Art – the first book in Hebrew dedicated to that field – is an example of such a discourse. It contains nine articles, written by expert scholars from Israel and abroad, and four shorter essays written by artists who describe their own creative process. Thus, the book gives a panoramic view of the cutting-age research and combines theory and practice. The book concentrates on Modernism, avant-garde and contemporary art, on the background of wider historical and theoretical contexts, and offers answers as well as questions regarding painting, music, performance art, voice art, cinema, animation, visual music, and multimedia. It is written for scholars, students, teachers, artists of different media and art lovers, and opens a door for additional learning.

The Lachmann Problem tells an unknown story about a well-known German musicologist, Robert Lachmann (1892-1939), best known among scholars whose interest centers on Arabic music. After being ousted by the Nazi regime, Lachmann arrived in Palestine in 1935 to join the staff of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. However, many University officials misunderstood his interests, which was primarily based on a conception that the unfamiliar field of musicology was a “luxury” which the University could ill afford at the time. Presented in this volume are letters and documents, published for the first time, revealing not only a picture of life in Palestine during the 1930’s, but providing new information on the early stages of comparative musicology and offer new insights into the thinking of its founding fathers. Others of these documents betray the daily routines, working style and methodology as well as the unanticipated hardships which Robert Lachmann encountered. These are embedded in letters to parents, correspondence with former colleagues, progress reports, lectures and radio lectures, and petitions to academic and bureaucratic authorities and several brilliant attempts to introduce non-European music to Europeans, and Orientals, Arabs and Jews alike, who were urged to cherish their musical heritage. These documents were chosen primarily for their relevance to an unsung chapter in the history of musicology, which epitomizes Robert Lachmann’s trying times. Audio CD attached on back cover - Features musical examples recorded by Lachman and incorporated in his radio lectures - "Oriental music"

This special collection of studies is dedicated to Prof. Israel Adler, the founder of the Jewish Music Research Centre of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. It includes a variety of articles on diverse issues related to different Jewish musical cultures. General topics such as the problematic and the development of the concept of Jewish music are discussed in this volume amid specific articles on Ashkenazi and Sephardi liturgical music, kabbalistic writings on music, Jewish composers and performers, the presence of non-Jewish music genres in Jewish musical cultures and more.

For four years between 1982 and 1986 the Jewish Music Research Centre hosted research seminars devoted to the Jewish oral traditions. Researchers in different fields (linguistics, musicology, literature and folklore) met and worked together and dealt with shared material that they approached with their own tools and research habits in the attempt to achieve results of an interdisciplinary type. Several topics were chosen – biblical and post-biblical cantillation; aspects of the Judeo-Spanish folk song; specific rituals of the Hassidic communities and the majority of studies are to be found in the present volume.