Horizontal Realizations

If the actualization of biblical sovereignty in the Zionist present rendered eighteen centuries of exile a nocturnal existence, art music of the 1950s and 1960s interfered with such linearity using the linear properties of non-Western Jewish musical traditions and serial compositional devices. Such a convergence rendered the objectification of non-Western Jewish musical traditions obsolete and consequently severed the exotic and territorial functions they served. By utilizing the linear properties of Arab Jewish musical traditions to animate inner semiotic occurrences, composers suspended extrovert exotic signifiers and invalidated their objectification. With no visible exoteric earmarks to transmit peripherality and Otherness, the binaries by which non-European Jewish immigrants had been perceived (primitivism/modernism, religion/secularism) were deemed progressively inoperative. Through a study on the agency of non-European Jewish musical traditions, chapter 2 uncovers the network that connects the theological grammar of Zionism with the Zionist pecking order, whose lower rungs were allocated to North African and Near Eastern Jews.

Introduction

The introduction lays out both the key variables of the entire book and the overlapping themes that stem from them—the nationalization of the theological in Hebrew culture, secularism, Zionist biblocentrism, the Zionist commitment to Westernness, Arab Jews and the socioethnic hierarchy of Zionism, Zionist historiography, and the gradual resurfacing of Jewish diasporic cultures. In lieu of the constructs that have conditioned the study of Israeli art and culture, the book opts for synchronous narratives that unfold in ways that are constantly unsystematic, nondifferential, and afflicted with various degrees of governmentality. This assemblage moves beyond musical exoticism or identitarian paradigms that often promote territorial nationalism uncritically.

Broken Hebrewist Vessels

Whereas the music Mordecai Seter wrote in 1966 embodies a clash between his unsignified semiotic procedures and the national redemptive trajectories that animated them, Andre Hajdu’s music in 1970 knowingly staged unwanted sonic adjacencies of the Jewish Eastern European soundscape alongside Christian music from late medieval Europe. Both composers sought de-signification—either by eschewing ethnographic imports in the form of folk or liturgical music (Seter), or through violent deconstructions of seemingly opposing musical markers of Jews and Christians (Hajdu). The works of both therefore disclose meaningful disharmonie: both manifest the disabling of Zionist tropes and the concomitant reclaiming of the ethnic specificity of diasporic Ashkenazi culture. This chapter also reads the late music of Seter and Ben-Haim against the background of their notebooks and diaries, in addition to two seminal literary works—Past Continuous (1977) by Yaakov Shabtai and Unto Death (1969) by Amos Oz—that record admixtures of diasporic Jewish subcultures and the fallouts of a post-ideological age.

Non-biblical Tonalities

Chapter 1 revolves around Josef Tal’s 1955 opera Saul at Ein-Dor, whose libretto is word-for-word the narrative given in 1 Samuel 28. Through this opera the chapter examines the actualization of the Bible in Hebrew culture and its promotion of territorial nationalism, as well as the artistic formulations that contested the literalist way Zionists had selectively appropriated the Bible. Under the purview of what Anita Shapira terms “biblical literalism” and Jean-Christophe Attias calls “Zionist biblocentrism,” the literal reading of selected texts facilitated a national allegory that actualized tropes of return, of redemption, and of territorial expansionism. To understand the cultural networks activated by such readings, the chapter studies the works of Ben-Haim, Orgad, Boskovich, and additional works by Tal. A parallel discussion on the portrayals of King Saul in modern Hebrew poetry complements the entire narrative, and a thorough analysis of the post-tonal devices in Tal’s opera concludes the chapter.

Compositional Solutions(in the double sense of the word)

Extending from the early 1980s to the mid-2000s, chapter 4 opens with what thus far in the book has remained subjected to officialdom—the Holocaust. The chapter explores several simultaneous aesthetic modes through which composers and authors confronted the Holocaust in Israel during the late twentieth century. Their formulations ranged from compliance with and duplication of statist views of the Holocaust as a counter-metaphor for political sovereignty to choices opting for exilic imports that garble national encoding and refuse redemption. Composers who distanced themselves from statist triumphalism affirmed the migration of contrafacta traveling political borders, national territorial tropes, and identitarian constructs. Qualities of this kind signaled a new stage in which Jewish exiles became a constituent feature in composers’ modernist agendas while the national soundboard was muted. A final discussion develops this thesis through Andre Hajdu and Betty Olivero’s “solutions” of ethnographic imports.