100-473: Gurvich , Gurovich , Gurwich , Gurwitch , Gurwitsch or Gurevich is a Yiddish surname, a Russian form of the surname " Horowitz " ( Гу́рвич ), see the latter article about its etymology. The surname may refer to: Yiddish Yiddish ( ייִדיש , יידיש or אידיש , yidish or idish , pronounced [ˈ(j)ɪdɪʃ] , lit. ' Jewish ' ; ייִדיש-טײַטש , historically also Yidish-Taytsh , lit. ' Judeo-German ' )
200-440: A Yiddish context. After 1948, Soviet Jewish culture entered a phase of repression, meaning that Jewish music concerts, whether tied to Hebrew, Yiddish, or instrumental klezmer, were no longer allowed to be performed. Moisei Beregovsky's academic work was shut down in 1949 and he was arrested and deported to Siberia in 1951. The repression was eased in the mid-1950s as some Jewish and Yiddish performances were allowed to return to
300-961: A barber and cornet player from a klezmer family in Ukraine whose 1913 recording Fon der Choope (From the Wedding) has been recognized by the Library of Congress . Among the European-born klezmers recording during that decade were some from the Ukrainian territory of the Russian Empire (Abe Elenkrig, Dave Tarras , Shloimke Beckerman , Joseph Frankel , and Israel J. Hochman ), some from Austro-Hungarian Galicia ( Naftule Brandwein , Harry Kandel and Berish Katz), and some from Romania ( Abe Schwartz , Max Leibowitz , Max Yankowitz , Joseph Moskowitz ). The mid-1920s also saw
400-545: A collection of narrative poems on themes from the Hebrew Bible and the Haggadah . The advent of the printing press in the 16th century enabled the large-scale production of works, at a cheaper cost, some of which have survived. One particularly popular work was Elia Levita 's Bovo-Bukh ( בָּבָֿא-בּוך ), composed around 1507–08 and printed several times, beginning in 1541 (under the title Bovo d'Antona ). Levita,
500-649: A complex system of modes which were used in its compositions. Many of its melodies do not fit well in the major and minor terminology used in Western music, nor is the music systematically microtonal in the way that Middle Eastern music is. Nusach terminology, as developed for Cantorial music in the nineteenth century, is often used instead, and indeed many klezmer compositions draw heavily on religious music. But it also incorporates elements of Baroque and Eastern European folk musics, making description based only on religious terminology incomplete. Still, since
600-496: A component of Jewish practice. The nineteenth century also saw the rise of a number of klezmer violin virtuosos who combined the techniques of classical violinists such as Ivan Khandoshkin and of Bessarabian folk violinists, and who composed dance and display pieces that became widespread even after the composers were gone. Among these figures were Aron-Moyshe Kholodenko " Pedotser ", Yosef Drucker " Stempenyu ", Alter Goyzman " Alter Chudnover " and Josef Gusikov . Unlike in
700-538: A cymbal or piece of metal mounted on top, which is struck by a beater or a small cymbal strapped to the hand. Klezmer music is a genre that developed partly in the Western musical tradition but also in the Ottoman Empire , and is primarily an oral tradition which does not have a well-established literature to explain its modes and modal progression. But, as with other types of Ashkenazic Jewish music, it has
800-409: A larger Eastern European Jewish musical culture that included Jewish cantorial music , Hasidic Niguns , and later Yiddish theatre music, it also borrowed from the surrounding folk musics of Central and Eastern Europe and from cosmopolitan European musical forms. Therefore it evolved into an overall style which has recognizable elements from all of those other genres. Few klezmer musicians before
900-565: A lead violinist, second violin, cello, and cimbalom . In the mid-nineteenth century, the Clarinet started to appear in those small Klezmer ensembles as well. By the last decades of the century, in Ukraine, the orchestras had grown larger, averaging seven to twelve members, and incorporating brass instruments and up to twenty for a prestigious occasion. (However, for poor weddings a large klezmer ensemble might only send three or four of its junior members. ) In these larger orchestras, on top of
1000-492: A lesser extent, the United Kingdom. This has resulted in some difficulty in communication between Yiddish speakers from Israel and those from other countries. There is significant phonological variation among the various Yiddish dialects . The description that follows is of a modern Standard Yiddish that was devised during the early 20th century and is frequently encountered in pedagogical contexts. Uvular As in
1100-620: A minor key, whether natural minor or others, that around a quarter of the material was in Freygish , and that around a fifth of the repertoire was in a major key. Another set of terminology sometimes used to describe klezmer music is that of the Makams used in Ottoman and other Middle Eastern music . This approach dates back to Idelsohn in the early twentieth century, who was very familiar with Middle Eastern music, and has been developed in
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#17328020023011200-550: A mixture of New Orleans funk, jazz, and klezmer styles. Starting in 2008, "The Other Europeans" project, funded by several EU cultural institutions, spent a year doing intensive field research in the region of Moldavia under the leadership of Alan Bern and scholar Zev Feldman. They wanted to explore klezmer and lăutari roots, and fuse the music of the two "other European" groups. The resulting band now performs internationally. A separate klezmer tradition had developed in Israel in
1300-467: A number of popular novelty "Klezmer" groups which performed on the radio or vaudeville stages. These included Joseph Cherniavsky 's Yiddish-American Jazz Band, whose members would dress as parodies of Cossacks or Hasidim . Another such group was the Boibriker Kapelle, which performed on the radio and in concerts trying to recreate a nostalgic, old-fashioned Galician Klezmer sound. With
1400-644: Is Avroham ben Schemuel Pikartei, who published a paraphrase on the Book of Job in 1557. Women in the Ashkenazi community were traditionally not literate in Hebrew but did read and write Yiddish. A body of literature therefore developed for which women were a primary audience. This included secular works, such as the Bovo-Bukh , and religious writing specifically for women, such as the צאנה וראינה Tseno Ureno and
1500-475: Is a West Germanic language historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews . It originated in 9th century Central Europe , and provided the nascent Ashkenazi community with a vernacular based on High German fused with many elements taken from Hebrew (notably Mishnaic ) and to some extent Aramaic . Most varieties of Yiddish include elements of Slavic languages and the vocabulary contains traces of Romance languages . Yiddish has traditionally been written using
1600-487: Is also used in the adjectival sense, synonymously with "Ashkenazi Jewish", to designate attributes of Yiddishkeit ("Ashkenazi culture"; for example, Yiddish cooking and "Yiddish music" – klezmer ). Hebrew Judeo-Aramaic Judeo-Arabic Other Jewish diaspora languages Jewish folklore Jewish poetry By the 10th century, a distinctive Jewish culture had formed in Central Europe. By
1700-570: Is an instrumental musical tradition of the Ashkenazi Jews of Central and Eastern Europe. The essential elements of the tradition include dance tunes, ritual melodies, and virtuosic improvisations played for listening; these would have been played at weddings and other social functions. The musical genre incorporated elements of many other musical genres including Ottoman (especially Greek and Romanian ) music, Baroque music , German and Slavic folk dances, and religious Jewish music. As
1800-481: Is generally assigned to the lead violin, although occasionally the flute and eventually clarinet. The other instrumentalists provide harmony, rhythm, and some counterpoint (the latter usually coming from the second violin or viola). The clarinet now often plays the melody. Brass instruments—such as the French valved cornet and keyed German trumpet—eventually inherited a counter-voice role. Modern klezmer instrumentation
1900-408: Is more commonly influenced by the instruments of the 19th-century military bands than the earlier orchestras. Percussion in early 20th-century klezmer recordings was generally minimal—no more than a wood block or snare drum . In Eastern Europe, percussion was often provided by a drummer who played a frame drum , or poyk , sometimes called baraban . A poyk is similar to a bass drum and often has
2000-500: Is printed in Hebrew script.) According to a study by the German media association Internationale Medienhilfe (IMH), more than 40 printed Yiddish newspapers and magazines were published worldwide in 2024, and the trend is rising. The Western Yiddish dialect—sometimes pejoratively labeled Mauscheldeutsch , i. e. "Moses German" —declined in the 18th century, as the Age of Enlightenment and
2100-511: Is pronounced [haɡˈdɔmɜ] . The vowel phonemes of Standard Yiddish are: In addition, the sonorants /l/ and /n/ can function as syllable nuclei : [m] and [ŋ] appear as syllable nuclei as well, but only as allophones of /n/ , after bilabial consonants and dorsal consonants , respectively. The syllabic sonorants are always unstressed. Stressed vowels in the Yiddish dialects may be understood by considering their common origins in
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#17328020023012200-588: Is reflected in some Ashkenazi personal names (e.g., Kalonymos and Yiddish Todres ). Hebrew, on the other hand, was regarded as a holy language reserved for ritual and spiritual purposes and not for common use. The established view is that, as with other Jewish languages , Jews speaking distinct languages learned new co-territorial vernaculars, which they then Judaized. In the case of Yiddish, this scenario sees it as emerging when speakers of Zarphatic (Judeo-French) and other Judeo-Romance languages began to acquire varieties of Middle High German , and from these groups
2300-592: Is that it makes it harder to see how Klezmer melodic structures can work as five-note pentachords , how parts of different modes typically interact, and what the cultural significance of a given mode might be in a traditional Klezmer context. The Bible has several descriptions of orchestras and Levites making music, but after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE , many rabbis discouraged musical instruments. Therefore, while there may have been Jewish musicians in different times and places since then,
2400-498: Is uncertain). An additional distinctive semicursive typeface was, and still is, used for rabbinical commentary on religious texts when Hebrew and Yiddish appear on the same page. This is commonly termed Rashi script , from the name of the most renowned early author, whose commentary is usually printed using this script. (Rashi is also the typeface normally used when the Sephardic counterpart to Yiddish, Judaeo-Spanish or Ladino ,
2500-567: The Haskalah led to a view of Yiddish as a corrupt dialect. The 19th century Prussian-Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz , for example, wrote that "the language of the Jews [in Poland] ... degenerat[ed] into a ridiculous jargon, a mixture of German, Polish, and Talmudical elements, an unpleasant stammering, rendered still more repulsive by forced attempts at wit." A Maskil (one who takes part in
2600-660: The Haskalah ) would write about and promote acclimatization to the outside world. Jewish children began attending secular schools where the primary language spoken and taught was German, not Yiddish. Yiddish grates on our ears and distorts. This jargon is incapable in fact of expressing sublime thoughts. It is our obligation to cast off these old rags, a heritage of the dark Middle Ages. – Osip Aronovich Rabinovich , in an article titled "Russia – Our Native Land: Just as We Breathe Its Air, We Must Speak Its Language" in
2700-547: The Hebrew alphabet . Prior to World War II , there were 11–13 million speakers. Eighty-five percent of the approximately six million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust were Yiddish speakers, leading to a massive decline in the use of the language. Assimilation following World War II and aliyah (immigration to Israel) further decreased the use of Yiddish among survivors after adapting to Hebrew in Israel. However,
2800-632: The High Holy Days ) and בֵּיתֿ הַכְּנֶסֶתֿ , 'synagogue' (read in Yiddish as beis hakneses ) – had been included. The niqqud appears as though it might have been added by a second scribe, in which case it may need to be dated separately and may not be indicative of the pronunciation of the rhyme at the time of its initial annotation. Over the course of the 14th and 15th centuries, songs and poems in Yiddish, and macaronic pieces in Hebrew and German, began to appear. These were collected in
2900-583: The Klezmer Conservatory Band . They drew their repertoire from recordings and surviving musicians of U.S. klezmer. In particular, clarinetists such as Dave Tarras and Max Epstein became mentors to this new generation of klezmer musicians. In 1985, Henry Sapoznik and Adrienne Cooper founded KlezKamp to teach klezmer and other Yiddish music. The 1980s saw a second wave of revival, as interest grew in more traditionally inspired performances with string instruments, largely with non-Jews of
3000-493: The Klezmer revival of the 1970s, the terms for Jewish prayer modes are the most common to describe those used in klezmer. The terms used in Yiddish for these modes include nusach ( נוסח ); shteyger ( שטײגער ), "manner, mode of life", which describes the typical melodic character, important notes and scale; and gust ( גוסט ), a word meaning "taste" which was commonly used by Moisei Beregovsky . Beregovsky, who
3100-586: The Middle High German diphthong ei and long vowel î to /aɪ/ , Yiddish has maintained the distinction between them; and likewise, the Standard German /ɔʏ/ corresponds to both the MHG diphthong öu and the long vowel iu , which in Yiddish have merged with their unrounded counterparts ei and î , respectively. Lastly, the Standard German /aʊ/ corresponds to both the MHG diphthong ou and
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3200-536: The Odessan journal Рассвет (dawn), 1861. Owing to both assimilation to German and the revival of Hebrew , Western Yiddish survived only as a language of "intimate family circles or of closely knit trade groups". In eastern Europe, the response to these forces took the opposite direction, with Yiddish becoming the cohesive force in a secular culture (see the Yiddishist movement ). Notable Yiddish writers of
3300-641: The Piano Quintet in G minor, op. 57 (1940), the Piano Trio No. 2 in E minor, op. 67 (1944), and the String Quartet No. 8 in C minor, op. 110 (1960). The compositions of Israeli-born composer Ofer Ben-Amots incorporate aspects of klezmer music, most notably his 2006 composition Klezmer Concerto . The piece is for klezmer clarinet (written for Jewish clarinetist David Krakauer ), string orchestra, harp and percussion. The figure of
3400-484: The Slavic languages with which Yiddish was long in contact (Russian, Belarusian , Polish , and Ukrainian ), but unlike German, voiceless stops have little to no aspiration ; unlike many such languages, voiced stops are not devoiced in final position. Moreover, Yiddish has regressive voicing assimilation , so that, for example, זאָגט /zɔɡt/ ('says') is pronounced [zɔkt] and הקדמה /hakˈdɔmɜ/ ('foreword')
3500-592: The Yiddish language , has a Hebrew etymology: klei , meaning "tools, utensils or instruments of" and zemer , "melody"; leading to k'lei zemer כְּלֵי זֶמֶר , meaning " musical instruments ". This expression would have been familiar to literate Jews across the diaspora, not only Ashkenazi Jews in Eastern Europe. Over time the usage of " klezmer " in a Yiddish context evolved to describe musicians instead of their instruments, first in Bohemia in
3600-565: The high medieval period , their area of settlement, centered on the Rhineland ( Mainz ) and the Palatinate (notably Worms and Speyer ), came to be known as Ashkenaz , originally a term used of Scythia , and later of various areas of Eastern Europe and Anatolia. In the medieval Hebrew of Rashi (d. 1105), Ashkenaz becomes a term for Germany, and אשכּנזי Ashkenazi for the Jews settling in this area. Ashkenaz bordered on
3700-431: The תחנות Tkhines . One of the best-known early woman authors was Glückel of Hameln , whose memoirs are still in print. The segmentation of the Yiddish readership, between women who read מאַמע־לשון mame-loshn but not לשון־קדש loshn-koydesh , and men who read both, was significant enough that distinctive typefaces were used for each. The name commonly given to the semicursive form used exclusively for Yiddish
3800-523: The "Klezmer" arose much more recently. The earliest written record of the use of the word was identified by Isaac Rivkind [ he ] as being in a Jewish council meeting from Kraków in 1595. They may have existed even earlier in Prague , as references to them have been found as early as 1511 and 1533. It was in the 1600s that the situation of Jewish musicians in Poland improved, as they gained
3900-404: The "freilach swing" playing of other Jewish artists of the period such as trumpeter Ziggy Elman . At the same time, non-Jewish composers were also turning to klezmer for a prolific source of fascinating thematic material. Dmitri Shostakovich in particular admired klezmer music for embracing both the ecstasy and the despair of human life, and quoted several melodies in his chamber masterpieces,
4000-575: The 1910s and 1920s; many never recorded or published music, although some are remembered through family or community history, such as the Lemish klezmer family of Iași , Romania, who arrived in Philadelphia in the 1880s and established a klezmer dynasty there. The vitality of the Jewish music industry in major American cities attracted ever more klezmers from Europe in the 1910s. This coincided with
4100-655: The 1925 founding of the Yiddish Scientific Institute, YIVO . In Vilnius , there was debate over which language should take primacy, Hebrew or Yiddish. Yiddish changed significantly during the 20th century. Michael Wex writes, "As increasing numbers of Yiddish speakers moved from the Slavic-speaking East to Western Europe and the Americas in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they were so quick to jettison Slavic vocabulary that
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4200-611: The 1990s, musicians from the San Francisco Bay Area helped further interest in klezmer music by taking it into new territory. Groups such as the New Klezmer Trio inspired a new wave of bands merging klezmer with other forms of music, such as John Zorn 's Masada and Bar Kokhba, Naftule's Dream, Don Byron's Mickey Katz project and violinist Daniel Hoffman's klezmer/jazz/Middle-Eastern fusion band Davka. The New Orleans Klezmer All-Stars also formed in 1991 with
4300-606: The 20th century. Clarinetists Moshe Berlin and Avrum Leib Burstein are known exponents of the klezmer style in Israel. To preserve and promote klezmer music in Israel, Burstein founded the Jerusalem Klezmer Association, which has become a center for learning and performance of klezmer music in the country. Since the late 1980s, an annual klezmer festival is held every summer in Safed , in the north of Israel . While traditional performances may have been on
4400-592: The Ashkenazi community took shape. Exactly what German substrate underlies the earliest form of Yiddish is disputed. The Jewish community in the Rhineland would have encountered the Middle High German dialects from which the Rhenish German dialects of the modern period would emerge. Jewish communities of the high medieval period would have been speaking their own versions of these German dialects, mixed with linguistic elements that they themselves brought into
4500-555: The Proto-Yiddish sound system. Yiddish linguistic scholarship uses a system developed by Max Weinreich in 1960 to indicate the descendent diaphonemes of the Proto-Yiddish stressed vowels. Each Proto-Yiddish vowel is given a unique two-digit identifier, and its reflexes use it as a subscript, for example Southeastern o 11 is the vowel /o/, descended from Proto-Yiddish */a/. The first digit indicates Proto-Yiddish quality (1-=*[a], 2-=*[e], 3-=*[i], 4-=*[o], 5-=*[u]), and
4600-597: The Russian Empire, the Kingdom of Romania and Austria-Hungary . Some of them found work in restaurants, dance halls, union rallies, wine cellars, and other modern venues in places like New York's Lower East Side . But the major source of income for klezmer musicians seems to have remained weddings and Simchas , as in Europe. Those early generations of klezmers are much more poorly documented than those working in
4700-510: The Russian-Jewish Orchestra, Jewish Wedding Orchestra, and Titunshnayder's Orchestra. The loosening of restrictions on Jews in the Russian Empire , and their newfound access to academic and conservatory training, created a class of scholars who began to reexamine and evaluate klezmer using modern techniques. Abraham Zevi Idelsohn was one such figure, who sought to find an ancient Middle Eastern origin for Jewish music in
4800-696: The United States and Germany. Musicians began to track down older European klezmer, by listening to recordings, finding transcriptions, and making field recordings of the few klezmorim left in Eastern Europe. Key performers in this style are Joel Rubin , Budowitz , Khevrisa, Di Naye Kapelye, Yale Strom, The Chicago Klezmer Ensemble, The Maxwell Street Klezmer Band , the violinists Alicia Svigals , Steven Greenman, Cookie Segelstein and Elie Rosenblatt , flutist Adrianne Greenbaum, and tsimbl player Pete Rushefsky . Bands like Brave Old World , Hot Pstromi and The Klezmatics also emerged during this period. In
4900-513: The United States, where there was a robust Klezmer recording industry, there was relatively less recorded in Europe in the early twentieth century. The majority of European recordings of Jewish music consisted of Cantorial and Yiddish Theatre music, with only a few dozen known to exist of Klezmer music. These include violin pieces by artists such as Oscar Zehngut , Jacob Gegna , H. Steiner , Leon Ahl, and Josef Solinski; flute pieces by S. Kosch, and ensemble recordings by Belf's Romanian Orchestra ,
5000-637: The Yiddish term Freilech music ("Cheerful music"). Twentieth century Russian scholars sometimes used the term klezmer; Ivan Lipaev did not use it, but Moisei Beregovsky did when publishing in Yiddish or Ukrainian . The first postwar recordings to use the term "klezmer" to refer to the music were The Klezmorim 's East Side Wedding and Streets of Gold in 1977/78, followed by Andy Statman and Zev Feldman's Jewish Klezmer Music in 1979. The traditional style of playing klezmer music, including tone, typical cadences , and ornamentation , sets it apart from other genres. Although klezmer music emerged from
5100-517: The accompanist or orchestra could be fairly impromptu, called צוהאַלטן ( tsuhaltn , holding onto). The repertoire of klezmer musicians was very diverse and tied to specific social functions and dances, especially of the traditional wedding. These melodies might have a non-Jewish origin, or have been composed by a klezmer, but only rarely are they attributed to a specific composer. Generally klezmer music can be divided into two broad categories: music for specific dances, and music for listening (at
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#17328020023015200-598: The area inhabited by another distinctive Jewish cultural group, the Sephardi Jews , who ranged into southern France . Ashkenazi culture later spread into Eastern Europe with large-scale population migrations. Nothing is known with certainty about the vernacular of the earliest Jews in Germany, but several theories have been put forward. As noted above, the first language of the Ashkenazim may have been Aramaic ,
5300-461: The core instrumentation of strings and woodwinds, cornets , C clarinets , trombones , a contrabass , a large Turkish drum, and several extra violins. The inclusion of Jews in tsarist army bands during the 19th century may also have led to the introduction of typical military band instruments into klezmer. With such large orchestras, the music was arranged so that the bandleader soloist could still be heard at key moments. In Galicia , and Belarus ,
5400-606: The decline, many Jewish composers who had mainstream success, such as Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland , continued to be influenced by the klezmeric idioms heard during their youth (as Gustav Mahler had been). George Gershwin was familiar with klezmer music, and the opening clarinet glissando of " Rhapsody in Blue " suggests this influence, although the composer did not compose klezmer directly. Some clarinet stylings of swing jazz bandleaders Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw can be interpreted as having been derived from klezmer, as can
5500-525: The destruction of Jewish life in Eastern Europe during the Holocaust , and a general fall in the popularity of klezmer music in the United States, the music began to be popularized again in the late 1970s in the so-called Klezmer Revival. During the 1980s and onwards, musicians experimented with traditional and experimental forms of the genre, releasing fusion albums combining the genre with jazz , punk , and other styles. The term klezmer , as used in
5600-548: The development of the recording industry, which recorded a number of these klezmer orchestras. By the time of the First World War , the industry turned its attention to ethnic dance music and a number of bandleaders were hired by record companies such as Edison Records , Emerson Records , Okeh Records , and the Victor Recording Company to record 78 rpm discs. The first of these was Abe Elenkrig ,
5700-480: The diaspora. There was also new interest in collecting and studying Jewish music and folklore, including Yiddish songs, folk tales, and instrumental music. An early expedition was by Joel Engel , who collected folk melodies in his birthplace of Berdyansk in 1900. The first figure to collect large amounts of klezmer music was Susman Kiselgof , who made several expeditions to the Pale of Settlement from 1907 to 1915. He
5800-556: The earliest named Yiddish author, may also have written פּאַריז און װיענע Pariz un Viene ( Paris and Vienna ). Another Yiddish retelling of a chivalric romance, װידװילט Vidvilt (often referred to as "Widuwilt" by Germanizing scholars), presumably also dates from the 15th century, although the manuscripts are from the 16th. It is also known as Kinig Artus Hof , an adaptation of the Middle High German romance Wigalois by Wirnt von Grafenberg . Another significant writer
5900-532: The end of the high medieval period. It is first recorded in 1272, with the oldest surviving literary document in Yiddish, a blessing found in the Worms machzor (a Hebrew prayer book). This brief rhyme is decoratively embedded in an otherwise purely Hebrew text. Nonetheless, it indicates that the Yiddish of that day was a more or less regular Middle High German written in the Hebrew alphabet into which Hebrew words – מַחֲזוֹר , makhazor (prayerbook for
6000-445: The extensive inclusion of words of Slavic origin. Western Yiddish is divided into Southwestern (Swiss–Alsatian–Southern German), Midwestern (Central German), and Northwestern (Netherlandic–Northern German) dialects. Yiddish is used in a number of Haredi Jewish communities worldwide; it is the first language of the home, school, and in many social settings among many Haredi Jews, and is used in most Hasidic yeshivas . The term "Yiddish"
6100-429: The klezmer was often represented as a romantic and somewhat unsavory figure. However, in nineteenth century works by writers such as Mendele Mocher Sforim and Sholem Aleichem they were also portrayed as great artists and virtuosos who delighted the masses. Klezmers also appeared in non-Jewish Eastern European literature, such as in the epic poem Pan Tadeusz , which depicted a character named Jankiel Cymbalist, or in
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#17328020023016200-638: The klezmer, as a romantic symbol of nineteenth century Jewish life, appeared in the art of a number of twentieth century Jewish artists such as Anatoli Lvovich Kaplan , Issachar Ber Ryback , Marc Chagall , and Chaim Goldberg . Kaplan, making his art in the Soviet Union , was quite taken by the romantic images of the Klezmer in literature, and in particular in Sholem Aleichem 's Stempenyu , and depicted them in rich detail. In Jewish literature,
6300-431: The language's origins, with points of contention being the characterization of its Germanic base, the source of its Hebrew/Aramaic adstrata , and the means and location of this fusion. Some theorists argue that the fusion occurred with a Bavarian dialect base. The two main candidates for the germinal matrix of Yiddish, the Rhineland and Bavaria, are not necessarily incompatible. There may have been parallel developments in
6400-537: The late 15th century by Menahem ben Naphtali Oldendorf. During the same period, a tradition seems to have emerged of the Jewish community's adapting its own versions of German secular literature. The earliest Yiddish epic poem of this sort is the Dukus Horant , which survives in the famous Cambridge Codex T.-S.10.K.22. This 14th-century manuscript was discovered in the Cairo Geniza in 1896, and also contains
6500-738: The late 19th and early 20th centuries are Sholem Yankev Abramovitch, writing as Mendele Mocher Sforim ; Sholem Rabinovitsh, widely known as Sholem Aleichem , whose stories about טבֿיה דער מילכיקער ( Tevye der milkhiker , " Tevye the Dairyman") inspired the Broadway musical and film Fiddler on the Roof ; and Isaac Leib Peretz . In the early 20th century, especially after the Socialist October Revolution in Russia, Yiddish
6600-429: The late nineteenth century had formal musical training, but they inherited a rich tradition with its own advanced musical techniques. Each musician had their understanding of how the style should be "correctly" performed. The usage of these ornaments was not random; the matters of "taste", self-expression, variation and restraint were and remain important elements of how to interpret the music. Klezmer musicians apply
6700-521: The late nineteenth century which could be investigated through elderly musicians who still remembered it. Jewish music in the Soviet Union, and the continued use of klezmer music, went through several phases of official support or censorship. The officially supported Soviet Jewish musical culture of 1920s involved works based on or satirizing traditional melodies and themes, whereas those of the 1930s were often "Russian" cultural works translated into
6800-522: The limitations of its origins. There were few Yiddish words for animals and birds. It had virtually no military vocabulary. Such voids were filled by borrowing from German , Polish and Russian . Yiddish was particularly good at borrowing: from Arabic , from Hebrew , from Aramaic and from anything with which it intersected. On the other hand, it contributed to English – American . [sic] Its chief virtue lay in its internal subtlety, particularly in its characterization of human types and emotions. It
6900-528: The little finger high above the base note, while the bow does, well, something – which aptly imitates Jewish liturgical singing style." He also noted that the only other place he has heard this particular ornamentation is in Turkish music on the violin. Yale Strom wrote that the use of dreydlekh by American violinists gradually diminished since the 1940s, but with the klezmer revival in 1970, dreydlekh had become prominent again. The accompaniment style of
7000-518: The long vowel û , but in Yiddish, they have not merged. Although Standard Yiddish does not distinguish between those two diphthongs and renders both as /ɔɪ/ , the distinction becomes apparent when the two diphthongs undergo Germanic umlaut , such as in forming plurals: The vowel length distinctions of German do not exist in the Northeastern (Lithuanian) varieties of Yiddish, which form the phonetic basis for Standard Yiddish. In those varieties,
7100-484: The mid-1950s. In Weinreich's view, this Old Yiddish substrate later bifurcated into two distinct versions of the language, Western and Eastern Yiddish. They retained the Semitic vocabulary and constructions needed for religious purposes and created a Judeo-German form of speech, sometimes not accepted as a fully autonomous language. Yiddish was a rich, living language, the chattering tongue of an urban population. It had
7200-586: The most frequently used designation in the literature until the 18th century. In the late 19th and into the 20th century, the language was more commonly called "Jewish", especially in non-Jewish contexts, but "Yiddish" is again the most common designation today. Modern Yiddish has two major forms : Eastern and Western. Eastern Yiddish is far more common today. It includes Southeastern (Ukrainian–Romanian), Mideastern (Polish–Galician–Eastern Hungarian) and Northeastern (Lithuanian–Belarusian) dialects. Eastern Yiddish differs from Western both by its far greater size and by
7300-533: The most prominent Yiddish writers of the time—the founders of modern Yiddish literature, who were still living in Slavic-speaking countries—revised the printed editions of their oeuvres to eliminate obsolete and 'unnecessary' Slavisms." The vocabulary used in Israel absorbed many Modern Hebrew words, and there was a similar but smaller increase in the English component of Yiddish in the United States and, to
7400-408: The music arrived in the United States, it lost some of its traditional ritual elements and adopted elements of American big band and popular music. Among the European-born klezmers who popularized the genre in the United States in the 1910s and 1920s were Dave Tarras and Naftule Brandwein ; they were followed by American-born musicians such as Max Epstein, Sid Beckerman and Ray Musiker. After
7500-461: The number of Yiddish-speakers is increasing in Hasidic communities. In 2014, YIVO stated that "most people who speak Yiddish in their daily lives are Hasidim and other Haredim ", whose population was estimated at the time to be between 500,000 and 1 million. A 2021 estimate from Rutgers University was that there were 250,000 American speakers, 250,000 Israeli speakers, and 100,000 in the rest of
7600-998: The overall style to available specific techniques on each melodic instrument. They incorporate and elaborate the vocal melodies of Jewish religious practice, including khazones , davenen , and paraliturgical song, extending the range of human voice into the musical expression possible on instruments. Among those stylistic elements that are considered typically "Jewish" in klezmer music are those which are shared with cantorial or Hasidic vocal ornaments, including imitations of sighing or laughing. Various Yiddish terms were used for these vocal-like ornaments such as קרעכץ ( Krekhts , "groan" or "moan"), קנײטש ( kneytsh , "wrinkle" or "fold"), and קװעטש ( kvetsh , "pressure" or "stress"). Other ornaments such as trills , grace notes , appoggiaturas , glitshn ( glissandos ), tshoks (a kind of bent notes of cackle-like sound), flageolets ( string harmonics ), pedal notes , mordents , slides and typical klezmer cadences are also important to
7700-542: The passing of the Immigration Act of 1924 , which greatly restricted Jewish immigration from Europe, and then the onset of the Great Depression by 1930, the market for Yiddish and klezmer recordings in the United States saw a steep decline, which essentially ended the recording career of many of the popular bandleaders of the 1910s and 1920s, and made the large klezmer orchestra less viable. Along with
7800-506: The past decade by Joshua Horowitz. Finally, some Klezmer music, and especially that composed in the United States from the mid-twentieth century onwards, may not be composed with these traditional modes, but rather built around chords . Because there is no agreed-upon, complete system for describing modes in Klezmer music, this list is imperfect and may conflate concepts which some scholars view as separate. Another problem in listing these terms as simple eight-note ( octatonic ) scales
7900-665: The region, including many Hebrew and Aramaic words, but there is also Romance. In Max Weinreich 's model, Jewish speakers of Old French or Old Italian who were literate in either liturgical Hebrew or Aramaic , or both, migrated through Southern Europe to settle in the Rhine Valley in an area known as Lotharingia (later known in Yiddish as Loter ) extending over parts of Germany and France. There, they encountered and were influenced by Jewish speakers of High German languages and several other German dialects. Both Weinreich and Solomon Birnbaum developed this model further in
8000-453: The right to form Guilds ( Khevre ), and therefore to set their own fees, hire Christians, and so on. Therefore over time this new form of professional musician developed new forms of music and elaborated this tradition across a wide area of Eastern European Jewish life. The rise of Hasidic Judaism in the late eighteenth century and onwards also contributed to the development of klezmer, due to their emphasis on dancing and wordless melodies as
8100-467: The rise of klezmer "big bands" in the 1910s and 1920s, a handful of Jewish clarinet players who had led those bands became celebrities in their own right, with a legacy that lasted into subsequent decades. The most popular among these were Naftule Brandwein , Dave Tarras , and Shloimke Beckerman . In the mid-to-late 1970s there was a klezmer revival in the United States and Europe, led by Giora Feidman , The Klezmorim , Zev Feldman, Andy Statman , and
8200-562: The second half of the sixteenth century and then in Poland , possibly as a response to the new status of the musicians who were at that time forming professional guilds. Previously the musician may have been referred to as a lets ( לץ ) or other terms. After the term klezmer became the preferred term for these professional musicians in Yiddish-speaking Eastern Europe, other types of musicians were more commonly known as muziker or muzikant . It
8300-415: The second refers to quantity or diphthongization (−1=short, −2=long, −3=short but lengthened early in the history of Yiddish, −4=diphthong, −5=special length occurring only in Proto-Yiddish vowel 25). Vowels 23, 33, 43 and 53 have the same reflexes as 22, 32, 42 and 52 in all Yiddish dialects, but they developed distinct values in Middle High German ; Katz (1987) argues that they should be collapsed with
8400-436: The smaller string ensemble with cimbalom remained the norm into the twentieth century. American klezmer as it developed in dancehalls and wedding banquets of the early twentieth century had a more complete orchestration not unlike those used in popular orchestras of the time. They use a clarinet, saxophone, or trumpet for the melody, and make great use of the trombone for slides and other flourishes. The melody in klezmer music
8500-623: The stage once again. However, the main venue for klezmer has always been traditional community events and weddings, not the concert stage or academic institute; those traditional venues were repressed along with Jewish culture in general, according to anti-religious Soviet policy. The first klezmers to arrive in the United States followed the first large waves of Eastern European Jewish immigration which began after 1880, establishing themselves mainly in large cities like New York, Philadelphia and Boston. Klezmers—often younger members of klezmer families, or less established musicians—started to arrive from
8600-691: The style. In particular, the cadences which draw on religious Jewish music identify a piece more strongly as a klezmer tune, even if its broader structure was borrowed from a non-Jewish source. Sometimes the term dreydlekh is used only for trills, while other use it for all klezmer ornaments. Unlike in Classical music, vibrato is used sparingly, and is treated as another type of ornament. In an article about Jewish music in Romania, Bob Cohen of Di Naye Kapelye describes krekhts as "a sort of weeping or hiccoughing combination of backwards slide and flick of
8700-531: The table, in processions, ceremonial, etc.). Klezmer music is an instrumental tradition, without much of a history of songs or singing. In Eastern Europe, Klezmers did traditionally accompany the vocal stylings of the Badchen (wedding entertainer), although their performances were typically improvised couplets and the calling of ceremonies rather than songs. (The importance of the Badchen gradually decreased by
8800-405: The twentieth century, although they still continued in some traditions. ) As for the klezmer orchestra, its size and composition varied by time and place. The klezmer bands of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century were small, with roughly three to five musicians playing woodwind or string instruments . Another common configuration in that era was similar to Hungarian bands today, typically
8900-581: The two regions, seeding the Western and Eastern dialects of Modern Yiddish. Dovid Katz proposes that Yiddish emerged from contact between speakers of High German and Aramaic-speaking Jews from the Middle East. The lines of development proposed by the different theories do not necessarily rule out the others (at least not entirely); an article in The Forward argues that "in the end, a new 'standard theory' of Yiddish's origins will probably be based on
9000-583: The vernacular of the Jews in Roman-era Judea and ancient and early medieval Mesopotamia . The widespread use of Aramaic among the large non-Jewish Syrian trading population of the Roman provinces, including those in Europe, would have reinforced the use of Aramaic among Jews engaged in trade. In Roman times, many of the Jews living in Rome and Southern Italy appear to have been Greek -speakers, and this
9100-722: The vowel qualities in most long/short vowel pairs diverged and so the phonemic distinction has remained. There are consonantal differences between German and Yiddish. Yiddish deaffricates the Middle High German voiceless labiodental affricate /pf/ to /f/ initially (as in פֿונט funt , but this pronunciation is also quasi-standard throughout northern and central Germany); /pf/ surfaces as an unshifted /p/ medially or finally (as in עפּל /ɛpl/ and קאָפּ /kɔp/ ). Additionally, final voiced stops appear in Standard Yiddish but not Northern Standard German. Klezmer Klezmer ( Yiddish : קלעזמער or כּלי־זמר )
9200-608: The work of Weinreich and his challengers alike." Paul Wexler proposed a model in 1991 that took Yiddish, by which he means primarily eastern Yiddish, not to be genetically grounded in a Germanic language at all, but rather as " Judeo-Sorbian " (a proposed West Slavic language ) that had been relexified by High German. In more recent work, Wexler has argued that Eastern Yiddish is unrelated genetically to Western Yiddish. Wexler's model has been met with little academic support, and strong critical challenges, especially among historical linguists. Yiddish orthography developed towards
9300-586: The world (for a total of 600,000). The earliest surviving references date from the 12th century and call the language לשון־אַשכּנז ( loshn-ashknaz , "language of Ashkenaz") or טײַטש ( taytsh ), a variant of tiutsch , the contemporary name for Middle High German . Colloquially, the language is sometimes called מאַמע־לשון ( mame-loshn , lit. "mother tongue"), distinguishing it from לשון־קודש ( loshn koydesh , "holy tongue"), meaning Hebrew and Aramaic. The term "Yiddish", short for Yidish Taitsh ("Jewish German"), did not become
9400-461: The −2 series, leaving only 13 in the −3 series. In vocabulary of Germanic origin, the differences between Standard German and Yiddish pronunciation are mainly in the vowels and diphthongs . All varieties of Yiddish lack the German front rounded vowels /œ, øː/ and /ʏ, yː/ , having merged them with /ɛ, e:/ and /ɪ, i:/ , respectively. Diphthongs have also undergone divergent developments in German and Yiddish. Where Standard German has merged
9500-520: Was ווײַבערטײַטש ( vaybertaytsh , 'women's taytsh ' , shown in the heading and fourth column in the Shemot Devarim ), with square Hebrew letters (shown in the third column) being reserved for text in that language and Aramaic. This distinction was retained in general typographic practice through to the early 19th century, with Yiddish books being set in vaybertaytsh (also termed מעשייט mesheyt or מאַשקעט mashket —the construction
9600-470: Was emerging as a major Eastern European language. Its rich literature was more widely published than ever, Yiddish theatre and Yiddish cinema were booming, and for a time it achieved the status of one of the official languages of the short-lived Galician Soviet Socialist Republic . Educational autonomy for Jews in several countries (notably Poland ) after World War I led to an increase in formal Yiddish-language education, more uniform orthography, and to
9700-418: Was not until the late 20th century that the word "klezmer" became a commonly known English-language term. During that time, through metonymy it came to refer not only to the musician but to the musical genre they played, a meaning which it had not had in Yiddish. Early 20th century recording industry materials and other writings had referred to it as Hebrew, Jewish, or Yiddish dance music, or sometimes using
9800-495: Was soon followed by other scholars such as Moisei Beregovsky and Sofia Magid , Soviet scholars of Yiddish and klezmer music. Most of the materials collected in those expeditions are now held by the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine . Beregovsky, writing in the late 1930s, lamented how little scholars knew about the range of playing technique and social context of Klezmers from past eras, except for
9900-503: Was the language of street wisdom, of the clever underdog, of pathos, resignation and suffering, all of which it palliated by humor, intense irony and superstition. Isaac Bashevis Singer , its greatest practitioner, pointed out that it is the only language never spoken by men in power. – Paul Johnson , A History of the Jews (1988) Later linguistic research has refined the Weinreich model or provided alternative approaches to
10000-471: Was writing in the Stalinist era and was constrained by having to downplay klezmer's religious aspects, did not use the terminology of synagogue modes , except in some early work in 1929. Instead, he relied on German-inspired musical terminology of major , minor, and "other" modes, which he described in technical terms. In his 1940s works he noted that the majority of the klezmer repertoire seemed to be in
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