The Yiddish Beethoven: Jewish Identity, European Music, and Belonging

• In Event: Memoir, Biography, and Biographical Interpretations

Abstract

In the first pages of David Kassel’s children’s book DI KINDHAYT FUN A GROYSEN MENSHEN (The Childhood of a Great Man, c. 1910), a fictionalized version of the young Ludwig van Beethoven examines himself in a mirror and despairs of his curly, unruly hair and darker skin tone—physical differences that separate him from his brothers and playmates. Throughout the book, he feels an acute sense of alienation from those around him, longs for a stable place to call his own, and suffers at the hands of his family and peers, but his musical brilliance sustains him. In this book, Kassel channeled anxieties about Jewish difference, depicting Beethoven as a sort of honorary Jew and a relatable figure for young Jewish readers. Yet why was Beethoven—a clearly non-Jewish composer—selected for such treatment?

This paper examines portrayals of Beethoven in Yiddish culture, including literature, film, and journalism, as a lens on larger debates about Jewish identity, music, and belonging. Beethoven’s widespread popularity means that many different groups and individuals have attached a range of ideals and values to his music. His music can and has symbolized fundamental Enlightenment values like freedom, civic equality, and universalism—ideals with substantial appeal for European Jews seeking to counter antisemitism. At the same time, Beethoven and his music presented a challenge for Yiddish speakers seeking to define Jewish music. He could represent the dangers of assimilation in a film like DER VILNER SHTOT KHAZN (The Vilna city cantor, 1940), even as Yiddish journalists pored over his biography for details to prove that he was friendly to Jews. Most poignantly, Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto advanced claims that their German tormentors had forfeited their claim on Beethoven through their brutality, and that Jews deserved recognition as the true inheritors and interpreters of Beethoven’s humanistic musical legacy. Placing these texts in conversation with scholarship on claims that Beethoven was Black, this paper argues that Yiddish speakers negotiated their relationship to the European musical canon—and their sense of belonging in European culture—through the figure of Beethoven.

Author

• Jules Riegel, Harvard University