A Chicago scholar has disputed the assertion of a Jerusalem music authority that a musical selection heard at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York was the earliest known work of Jewish music. The performance was based on a 12th century manuscript fragment identified as the work of Obadiah the Norman, a monk converted to Judaism about 1102 C.E., and found in the Conservative Seminary’s geniza archives. At the time that the selection was presented here late last year, the Seminary quoted Dr. Adler in a report published by JTA as saying that the fragment of music not only helped understand Jewish liturgical tradition but served as a key to its relationship with church music, particularly the Gregorian plainsong.
Dr. Adler is the head of the music department and national sound archives of the Jewish National and University Library in Israel, and is director of Jewish music research at Hebrew University. His disputant is Dr. Norman Golb, associate professor of medieval Jewish studies, department of Near Eastern languages and civilization, University of Chicago.
Dr. Golb, who claims to have been the first to identify the fragment’s scribe as Obadiah, said that “competent Jewish musicologists” who had recognized the Gregorian chant characteristics of the fragment were “led astray” by “eastern Hebrew handwriting” on the fragment into thinking that the music was “Jewish.” What Obadiah did, the scholar claims, was to merely “adapt the melodies of his youth to the Hebrew poetry learned by him after his conversion.” The music, he said, is not “of demonstrably Jewish origin.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
