Abraham Zevi Idelsohn, also known as A. Z. Idelsohn, is considered the ‘father’ of Jewish ethnomusicology. His interest in the plurality of Jewish music drew him to Eres Yisrael, where Jewish people from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA, sometimes MENAT to clarify the inclusion of Turkey) had migrated in the period leading up to the 1900s. He collected melodies from various communities in Jerusalem and transcribed them using the Western musical notation. Some odd symbols in his key signatures are used to signify things such as half flats/quarter tones, as his books were published before those symbols were created and standardized for transcribing North African and West, South, and Central Asian music.
We, as Jewish people in the diaspora and who live in Eres Yisrael, grapple with Idelsohn’s attitudes toward Sefaradim and Mizrahim while understanding his work as a snapshot in time – of European Zionist attitudes toward Mizrahim and Sefaradim, of Zionist interest in a pan-Jewish and Ur-Jewish musical and national identity, and at times of pronunciations that have fallen out of popular use (for example, the glottal stop is now on equal standing with the voiceless uvular stop for reading ‘q’ in the Halabi community). We use Idelsohn’s work as a resource while wrestling with the reality of his politics as an individual and the diversity and plurality of a global Jewish presence.
ZIMRA MULTI-RESOURCE 