Papers by Francesco Spagnolo
The Lives of Jewish Things. Curating and Collecting Material Culture, 2024
Seachanges: Music in the Mediterranean and Atlantic Colonial Worlds, 1550- 1800, 2022
Chapter 3 of "Seachanges: Music in the Mediterranean and Atlantic Colonial Worlds, 1550- 1800," e... more Chapter 3 of "Seachanges: Music in the Mediterranean and Atlantic Colonial Worlds, 1550- 1800," edited by Kate Van Order, I Tatti - The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Officina Libraria-Harvard University Press, 2022
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674278400
Music and Jewish Culture in Early Modern Italy, 2022
Chapter 1 in: Lynette Bowring, Rebecca Cypess, and Liza Malamut eds. Music and Jewish Culture in ... more Chapter 1 in: Lynette Bowring, Rebecca Cypess, and Liza Malamut eds. Music and Jewish Culture in Early Modern Italy, Indiana University Press, 2022: 23-36
Annali d'Italianistica, 2018
As emancipated Jews joined Italy's mainstream cultural, economic and political life, their centur... more As emancipated Jews joined Italy's mainstream cultural, economic and political life, their centuries-old traditions became confined to the realm of the synagogue. There, Italian Jews could explore their modern identity without fully breaking away from the past. Liturgical music of this epoch, handed down in oral tradition and manuscript sources, presents a fascinating link between the age of the ghettos and modern times. Musica sacra, a new kind of"sacred music" composed for the synagogue, sonically represented the aspirations of the era. Inside the new "monumental" synagogues, composers wrote music inspired by opera, church liturgy, and Risorgimento marches, sung by choirs with organ accompaniment. This essay focuses on a now forgotten liturgical repertoire especially created to mark the 1848 Emancipation with annual synagogue celebrations that included a dedicated ritual, new poetry (in Hebrew and in Italian), and new music that is reminiscent ofltaly's own national anthem.
Beyond the Ghetto: Inside & Out, 2020
In: Contessa, Andreina, Simonetta Della Seta, Carlotta Ferrara degli Uberti, Sharon Reichel eds. ... more In: Contessa, Andreina, Simonetta Della Seta, Carlotta Ferrara degli Uberti, Sharon Reichel eds. "Beyond the Ghetto: Inside & Out," Silvana, Milan 2020: 78-83
Garment and Core: Jews and Their Musical Experiences, 2012
’Those Note in Minor Tones…’ Oriental Themes, Liturgical Debates and Musical Icons in 19th-Centur... more ’Those Note in Minor Tones…’ Oriental Themes, Liturgical Debates and Musical Icons in 19th-Century Jewish Italy” in Garment and Core. Jews and their Musical Experiences, Ed. E. Avitsur, M. Ritzarev and E. Seroussi, Ramat Gan, Bar-Ilan University Press 2012: 83-100
Musics in Contact. Jewish Traditions in Italy in Leo Levi's Recordings. Methodological Issues and... more Musics in Contact. Jewish Traditions in Italy in Leo Levi's Recordings. Methodological Issues and Research Perspectives
Donatella Calabi ed. "Venice, The Jews, and Europe," Venice, Marsilio 2016: 264-269.
English version of Hebrew article published in Roni Weinstein ed. Italiyah [Italy], Ben Zvi Insti... more English version of Hebrew article published in Roni Weinstein ed. Italiyah [Italy], Ben Zvi Institute, Jerusalem 2012: 143-150.
This essay presents a "fascinating treatment of the Israeli relationship to the musical Mediterra... more This essay presents a "fascinating treatment of the Israeli relationship to the musical Mediterranean as a cultural interzone. Spagnolo’s intriguing documentation of Italian-Israeli musical links reveals the presence of an important regional European dimension to Israeli music that is often ignored in the focus on its global, transnational dimensions or its immediate contacts with Arab and Middle Eastern music." (From the editor's preface).
Vol. 38 (Fall 2013), 2013
This essay investigates the ways in which Italian Jews used Ladino song as a vehicle to define th... more This essay investigates the ways in which Italian Jews used Ladino song as a vehicle to define their cultural identity during the 20th century. The revitalization of a musical repertoire sung in Ladino happened twice during the last century. During the 1920's, a small corpus of Judeo-Spanish songs were incorporated in a new Judeo-Italian folk repertoire, created by the writer, ethnographer and community activist, Guido Bedarida (1900-1962). Bedarida's original research drew on the history of Livorno as a center of Ladino press since the 18th century. Decades later, beginning in the 1980's, a handful of Jewish performers - mostly women - helped spreading the repertoire of the international Ladino revival to Italy. These performers often incorporated both Ladino and Yiddish songs in their performances and recordings, based on commercially released sources from Israel and the United States. The two waves of Ladino revival in Italy have served distinctly different purposes. The first revival centered on Sephardic culture as a more "noble" form of Jewish heritage than the local Italian one was perceived to be (by Italian Jews themselves), which could serve as a vehicle resuscitating the pride in the local culture. The second revival can instead be seen as an attempt to create a "new" Jewish culture after the loss of Italian Jewish traditions since the Holocaust. In both instances, however, songs in Ladino have contributed to the creation of a virtual Jewish identity, based on ethnographic sources that are removed from local Italian Jewish culture.
Rivista Italiana Di Musicologia, May 28, 2014
Over the past decade, a new genre - «klezmer music» - has surfaced in the music world. Rooted in ... more Over the past decade, a new genre - «klezmer music» - has surfaced in the music world. Rooted in easter European Jewish instrumental music and Yiddish song, klezmer has become popular throughout the world, even in countries where Jews are note (or are no longer) present, and where this form of music originally did not exist. Italy - where the extreme popularity this music enjoys has overshadowed local Jewish traditions - presents an interesting study case. «Klezmer» has become a synonym for «Jewish», and denotes a (musical) culture that is believed to live in a transnational and multicultural world outside history. This article reviews recent scholarship on the definition and history of traditional klezmer repertoires, explores general trends in the klezmer revival, and shows how the Italian «klezmer scene» tends to present a repertoire devoid of traditional and Jewish content, while at the same time shaping a «usable tradition» and a new «aesthetic of the old».
Over the past decade, a new genre - «klezmer music» - has surfaced in the music world. Rooted in ... more Over the past decade, a new genre - «klezmer music» - has surfaced in the music world. Rooted in easter European Jewish instrumental music and Yiddish song, klezmer has become popular throughout the world, even in countries where Jews are note (or are no longer) present, and where this form of music originally did not exist. Italy - where the extreme popularity this music enjoys has overshadowed local Jewish traditions - presents an interesting study case. «Klezmer» has become a synonym for «Jewish», and denotes a (musical) culture that is believed to live in a transnational and multicultural world outside history. This article reviews recent scholarship on the definition and history of traditional klezmer repertoires, explores general trends in the klezmer revival, and shows how the Italian «klezmer scene» tends to present a repertoire devoid of traditional and Jewish content, while at the same time shaping a «usable tradition» and a new «aesthetic of the old».
Musiche della tradizione ebraica a Venezia Le registrazioni di Leo Levi (1954-1959), Gabriele Mancuso ed., 2018
"The Sound of the 'Melting Pot.' Synagogue Song in Venice and Leo Levi's Field Recordings (1954-1... more "The Sound of the 'Melting Pot.' Synagogue Song in Venice and Leo Levi's Field Recordings (1954-1959).
A historical overview of the development of synagogue song in Venice, Italy, and of the documentary evidence of local oral traditions as represented by archival field recordings made by Leo Levi in the 1950s. Of the many oral traditions brought to or created in the Venice ghetto by Jewish immigrants who settled there since the early 17th century, only vestiges survive in archival field recordings. The essay attempts to reconstruct the variety of diaspora oral traditions in the ghetto, their persistence, and evolution over time, and the role they played into the 20th century, in shaping one of the earliest urban "melting pots" in modern history.
Materia Giudaica, 2004
The Jewish Press as a Source in Reconstructing Synagogue Life in Italy during the Emancipation
World Congress of Jewish Studies, 2017
Following his hiring at San Francisco’s Congregation Emanu-El in 1913, Cantor Reuben R. Rinder (1... more Following his hiring at San Francisco’s Congregation Emanu-El in 1913, Cantor Reuben R. Rinder (1887-1966) became an influential figure in the shaping of 20th-century Jewish musical culture. Through insights gained from the Reuben R. Rinder papers and Rose Rinder’s oral history (Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley), this paper aims at connecting Rinder’s innovative approach to Jewish musical leadership with the global yearnings of the San Francisco Jewish community in the first part of the 20th century.
Born in Galicia, Reuben Rinder studied at a local Yeshiva and acquired cantorial skills from his immediate family. Orphaned early in life, he moved to the United States in 1902, and pursued the study of Jewish liturgical music. Rinder held a cantorial positions at Temple Beth-El, Brooklyn (1910), and Congregation B’nai Jeshurun in Manhattan (1912). In 1913, at the age of 26, he visited San Francisco, where he remained the cantor of Congregation Emanu-El until his death in 1966.
During his 50-year tenure, Reuben Rinder commissioned works from world-renown composers, including Ernest Bloch, Darius Milhaud, Paul Ben-Haim and Marc Lavry, and helped launching the career of violinists Yehudi Menuhin and Isaac Stern. These achievements, for which Rinder is remembered, were the coronation of a multifaceted cultural strategy.
The establishment of the “Society for the Advancement of Synagogue Music” by Rinder in 1927 (in partnership with the New York-based Joseph Achron, A. W. Binder, Leon Kramer, and Lazare Saminsky) built upon his early connections with Steven Wise and was modeled after Mordecai Kaplan’s Society for the Advancement of Judaism (1922). At the same time, it also set a new agenda for synagogue music that was also deeply rooted in the cosmopolitan outlook of the San Francisco Jewish community and its philanthropic tradition. The confluence of these factors enabled Rinder to pursue a path of musical innovation based on the conception of Jewish communal life as a platform for commissioning new works, building interfaith (and political) connections, and creating deep cultural ties between the United States, Europe, and the nascent State of Israel.
Journal of Jewish Identities
Donatella Calabi ed. "Venice, The Jews, and Europe," Venice, Marsilio 2016: 203.
Bancroftiana, No. 143 (Fall 2013), 2013
A visually striking item in The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life is an amulet for the pro... more A visually striking item in The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life is an amulet for the protection of pregnant women and newborn children (68.83, A5), written and illustrated on vellum, with texts in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Judeo-Spanish. While the manuscript, which probably dates from the second half of the 18th century, was collected in India (ca. 1976), its texts and visual content point to a different geographical origin. This article describes the manuscript and suggests some hypothesis in investigating its possible sources and provenance.
Italy’s “Giorno della Memoria” was voted into law by the Parliament last July (Law 211/20.7.00). ... more Italy’s “Giorno della Memoria” was voted into law by the Parliament last July (Law 211/20.7.00). Its official scope is “to remember the Shoah (the extermination of the Jewish People), the anti-Semitic racial laws, the Italian persecution of Jewish citizens, and the Italians who suffered deportation, imprisonment, death, as well as those who opposed the extermination plan and who risked their lives to save other†lives and to protect the persecuted.” (Art. 1). It is possibly the first time that a Hebrew word –"shoah"– has entered national legislation. Moreover, a deeply Jewish concept – the imperative to remember, in Hebrew zakhor, as part of the Ten Commandments (Ex. 20:8) – has appeared in our official lives.
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Papers by Francesco Spagnolo
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674278400
A historical overview of the development of synagogue song in Venice, Italy, and of the documentary evidence of local oral traditions as represented by archival field recordings made by Leo Levi in the 1950s. Of the many oral traditions brought to or created in the Venice ghetto by Jewish immigrants who settled there since the early 17th century, only vestiges survive in archival field recordings. The essay attempts to reconstruct the variety of diaspora oral traditions in the ghetto, their persistence, and evolution over time, and the role they played into the 20th century, in shaping one of the earliest urban "melting pots" in modern history.
Born in Galicia, Reuben Rinder studied at a local Yeshiva and acquired cantorial skills from his immediate family. Orphaned early in life, he moved to the United States in 1902, and pursued the study of Jewish liturgical music. Rinder held a cantorial positions at Temple Beth-El, Brooklyn (1910), and Congregation B’nai Jeshurun in Manhattan (1912). In 1913, at the age of 26, he visited San Francisco, where he remained the cantor of Congregation Emanu-El until his death in 1966.
During his 50-year tenure, Reuben Rinder commissioned works from world-renown composers, including Ernest Bloch, Darius Milhaud, Paul Ben-Haim and Marc Lavry, and helped launching the career of violinists Yehudi Menuhin and Isaac Stern. These achievements, for which Rinder is remembered, were the coronation of a multifaceted cultural strategy.
The establishment of the “Society for the Advancement of Synagogue Music” by Rinder in 1927 (in partnership with the New York-based Joseph Achron, A. W. Binder, Leon Kramer, and Lazare Saminsky) built upon his early connections with Steven Wise and was modeled after Mordecai Kaplan’s Society for the Advancement of Judaism (1922). At the same time, it also set a new agenda for synagogue music that was also deeply rooted in the cosmopolitan outlook of the San Francisco Jewish community and its philanthropic tradition. The confluence of these factors enabled Rinder to pursue a path of musical innovation based on the conception of Jewish communal life as a platform for commissioning new works, building interfaith (and political) connections, and creating deep cultural ties between the United States, Europe, and the nascent State of Israel.
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674278400
A historical overview of the development of synagogue song in Venice, Italy, and of the documentary evidence of local oral traditions as represented by archival field recordings made by Leo Levi in the 1950s. Of the many oral traditions brought to or created in the Venice ghetto by Jewish immigrants who settled there since the early 17th century, only vestiges survive in archival field recordings. The essay attempts to reconstruct the variety of diaspora oral traditions in the ghetto, their persistence, and evolution over time, and the role they played into the 20th century, in shaping one of the earliest urban "melting pots" in modern history.
Born in Galicia, Reuben Rinder studied at a local Yeshiva and acquired cantorial skills from his immediate family. Orphaned early in life, he moved to the United States in 1902, and pursued the study of Jewish liturgical music. Rinder held a cantorial positions at Temple Beth-El, Brooklyn (1910), and Congregation B’nai Jeshurun in Manhattan (1912). In 1913, at the age of 26, he visited San Francisco, where he remained the cantor of Congregation Emanu-El until his death in 1966.
During his 50-year tenure, Reuben Rinder commissioned works from world-renown composers, including Ernest Bloch, Darius Milhaud, Paul Ben-Haim and Marc Lavry, and helped launching the career of violinists Yehudi Menuhin and Isaac Stern. These achievements, for which Rinder is remembered, were the coronation of a multifaceted cultural strategy.
The establishment of the “Society for the Advancement of Synagogue Music” by Rinder in 1927 (in partnership with the New York-based Joseph Achron, A. W. Binder, Leon Kramer, and Lazare Saminsky) built upon his early connections with Steven Wise and was modeled after Mordecai Kaplan’s Society for the Advancement of Judaism (1922). At the same time, it also set a new agenda for synagogue music that was also deeply rooted in the cosmopolitan outlook of the San Francisco Jewish community and its philanthropic tradition. The confluence of these factors enabled Rinder to pursue a path of musical innovation based on the conception of Jewish communal life as a platform for commissioning new works, building interfaith (and political) connections, and creating deep cultural ties between the United States, Europe, and the nascent State of Israel.
Broad concerns for human rights are woven into Szyk’s entire production. In paintings and political cartoons, the artist exposed the Nazi genocide, supported the Polish resistance, exalted the establishment of the United Nations, and ridiculed dictators of all stripes. His unwavering denunciation of Fascist crimes in Europe, the suppression of national rights worldwide, and the endless violations of civil rights in America, are rooted in the experience of marginalization that characterized Jewish life in Eastern Europe in modern times. In our times, these concerns are still resounding strongly.
Szyk’s modular aesthetics are deeply connected with the political scope of his art. References to medieval and Renaissance techniques, multilingual literary quotations, witty visual allegories, as well as modernist depictions of technology regularly recur in his works, and are often paired with enticing decorative themes that have made his oeuvre both popular and successful during, and well after, the span of the artist’s life.
http://bit.ly/inrealtimes
Case Study no. 10
The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, UC Berkeley, 2019-2020
Curators: Shir Gal Kochavi and Francesco Spagnolo
Undergraduate Curatorial Assistant: Ronnie Hecht
Registrar: Julie Franklin
Assistant Registrar: Natalie Gleason
Exhibition Specialist: Ernest Jolly
Design: Gavin Lee, Ellen Woodson, Carole Jeung
More at https://magnes.berkeley.edu/exhibitions/bezalel-utopia
Siegfried S. Strauss (1893-1969) began collecting Jewish objects in Germany in 1913, and continued through the rise of the Nazi regime, whose anti-Semitic policies forced Jewish collectors to find temporary shelters for their possessions. Before he was interned in Buchenwald in 1938, Strauss secured safe passage for his collection, moving it to England. Once released, he followed it there, and later brought it to the United States, first to New York, and later to Los Angeles. In 1968, The Magnes acquired more than four hundred ritual objects, books, and manuscripts from the Siegfried S. Strauss collection, as well as a detailed inventory, which reflected Strauss’s knowledge of the materials (excerpts of this original inventory are included in the exhibition texts). These objects comprise the foundational Judaica holdings of The Magnes.
"Memory Objects" closely investigates a selection of the twice-displaced objects in the Strauss Collection, revealing the compelling personal stories of migration and dispossession that are often embedded within museum objects, and questioning the very meaning of cultural heritage in a time of fluctuating borders and identities.
The exhibition also highlights the recent gift of Ernst Freudenheim’s Photosammlung, the photographic catalog of a Judaica art dealer who was active in Germany at the time of Strauss’ own collecting. The overlaps are significant, and help broaden our understanding of the intersections of dealership, private collecting, and public preservation of the Jewish past.
Finally, the display is augmented by a precious porcelain set that belonged to the Camondo family (of Istanbul and Paris), whose history of displacement addresses the broad implications of Jewish collecting activities up to the Holocaust, and by new video work created by Citizen Film (San Francisco) in the context of a UC Berkeley course, "Mapping Diasporas," which highlights how memory objects continue to be relevant to the refugee experience to this day.
Centering on coins in The Magnes Collection, this exhibition explores how the Jewish revolts against Hellenism and the Roman occupation of Palestine (Judaea Capta) echo from antiquity into the present.
Pièces de Résistance highlights a variety of collection items ranging from ancient coins and their replicas, to ritual objects for Purim and Hanukkah. It also prominently features art by Marc Chagall, Lazar Krestin, and Arthur Szyk that offer a modern visual representation of Jewish might in the face of persecution.
art and material culture from North Africa, the Middle
East, and the Indian subcontinent. Their legendary “rescue missions”—collecting trips aimed at retrieving Jewish cultural objects in locations where Jews had once thrived— were further complemented by careful acquisitions carried out by exploring the catalogs of major and lesser-known auction houses, and especially by visiting art dealers in Israel, where many Jews from the lands of Islam had resettled.
These collecting patterns are particularly evident in the case of the stunning holdings that document the history and memory of Jewish communities in Morocco. The Fromers and their supporters visited tourist shops near and far across the Moroccan centers where Jews once lived: Tétouan, Tangier, Casablanca, Fez, and Marrakech, and made their way into the remote locations of the Atlas mountains that separate the Mediterranean and Atlantic coastlines of Morocco from the Sahara desert.
The hundreds of ritual objects, textiles, illustrated marriage contracts, and manuscripts that they collected and now reside permanently at The Magnes are the bearers of a narrative that is at once very ancient and extremely modern. Heirs to a history that harkens back to antiquity, the Jewish communities of Morocco carry many layers of memory and change, from
the rise of Islam to the expulsion of Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, the European colonization of Africa, and the Holocaust. Most Moroccan Jews abandoned their ancestral home en masse during the 1950s, with smaller numbers remaining through the 1960s and 70s, relocating primarily to Israel, France, and North America (especially Francophone Quebec). What they left behind, along with an important network of intercultural relations and memories of their ancient presence, included communal buildings, and, most signi cantly, many objects. Brought out of Morocco, these remains display a diaspora within the diaspora, a museum of the invisible, the texture of which is preserved in public and private collections worldwide.
The Invisible Museum project started with a multi-year exploration of the Moroccan holdings at The Magnes. The resulting exhibition offers a probing insight into how cultural objects—once the cherished belongings of individuals, families, and communities—may be abandoned in the process of migration or sold by immigrants seeking to rebuild their lives in a new land before they become part of a museum collection.
~Francesco Spagnolo
A crossroad of world cultures, Italy has been for over two millennia a haven for Italian, Sephardic, and Ashkenazi Jews, in the heartland of Christianity. The Italian-Jewish symbiosis ourished with the Modern Era, in the Renais- sance ghettos, continuing through the 19th century Emancipation, and up to the present.
Thus, Jewish Italy appears before our eyes both as a time capsule, where ancient cultural traits have been safely preserved, and as a laboratory, in which such traits were adapted to constantly changing living conditions. While maintaining centuries-old traditions, Italian Jews also tested out new cultural formats that came to de ne Jewish modernity. Featured prominently among these are the emergence of women as a foundational constituency of the Jewish social fabric, the printing of the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud as hypertexts, the illustration of Hebrew manu- scripts as forms of public Jewish art, the public performance of Jewish culture as entertainment for society at large, and the cultivation of the synagogue as a porous space fostering multicultural encounters.
Italian Jews successfully negotiated their way across tradition, diversity, religious con icts, emancipation, cosmopolitanism, and multiculturalism, all at the very heart of Christianity. Their vicissitudes mirror the history of the Jewish people at large, both because of Italy’s strong cultural in uence upon many European countries, and because of its central place in the Mediterranean. Their cultural wealth progressively lost traction at the turn of the 20th century, and effectively came to a halt with the rise of Fascism and the anti-Semitic laws proclaimed in 1938.
All major Jewish museum collections include important artifacts from Italy, and The Magnes is no exception. This exhibition presents a selection of manuscripts, books, ritual objects, textiles, photographs, and postcards collected by The Magnes over ve decades to investigate the global signi cance of Jewish history in Italy.
This core physical presence of the Bible has offered Jewish life definition and structure, operating in the background to color the experience of time, space, and the self. Biblical texts help navigate the physical world: Jews keep biblical time, cultivate biblical bodies (from circumcision to clothing and food), and build and imagine biblical spaces, in their synagogues, homes, and community centers, and in their attachment to the Holy Land. Even outside of ritual, Jews may lead biblical lives, and experience the everyday power of text in a variety of contexts.
Paradoxically, one can describe the impact of the Bible
on Jewish life almost without books themselves, and most certainly without having to “open” a book. This exhibition brings together objects, clothing, furniture, and tourist mem orabilia from across The Magnes Collection that interpret the Bible with remarkable diversity and creativity. From the most precious ornaments to the very mundane, these objects showcase the ways text can serve as an archive of possibilities and a powerful platform for shaping everyday life.
By highlighting over 150 objects from around the world, ranging from cookware, tableware, and kitchen textiles to books, manuscripts, paintings and drawings, this exhibition examines Jewish food rituals as meaningful frameworks with which to contextualize today’s food movement, a phenomenon that is deeply embedded in Berkeley’s history, a city with its own “gourmet ghetto” and powerful tradition of social justice.
http://bit.ly/gourmetghettos
The exhibition, Saved by the Bay, highlights the history of this important intellectual migration through biographical sketches, a film, and over one hundred documents from the University Archives, The Bancroft Library, and the Jean Gray Hargrove Music Library at UC Berkeley. The materials, which include letters, photographs, travel documents, and professional records, document life in Fascist Europe, the strategies of immigration and refugee life, the arrival to Berkeley, and life on Campus from 1933 until the end of the Second World War, of a select number of immigrant faculty at UC Berkeley.
http://bit.ly/savedbythebay
Thanks to a dynamic collecting campaign in the 1960s and 70s, The Magnes has become one of the world’s most extensive repositories of materials about the Jews of Southern India, taking on an important role in the preservation of their culture alongside the historic Jewish sites in Kerala, as well as national and private collections in Israel, where most of the Kerala Jews settled after the founding of the State in 1948.
The Magnes Collection includes hundreds of ritual objects, textiles, photographs, archival records, Hebrew books, and manuscripts, including liturgical texts, illustrated ketubbot (Jewish marriage contracts) and amulets, in Hebrew, Aramaic, Malayalam, Judeo-Spanish, and English.
These materials constitute an invaluable source of information on the Kerala Jewish community, one of the oldest in the world, and its deep connections with India’s society and cultures and with the global Jewish Diaspora, across India, the Middle East, and Europe. Among the most notable items on display are the Torah Ark from the Tekkumbhagam synagogue in Mattancherry, Kochi, an extremely rare amulet on parchment, designed to protect women in childbirth and newborn children, and the diaries of A.B. Salem, who provide a vivid account of Jewish life in Kochi throughout the 20th century.
This exhibition is the culmination of years of curatorial work devoted to assessing and documenting the holdings of The Magnes, conducted in collaboration with experts in Israel and the US. It also inaugurates a new season of research, engaging the scholarly community at UC Berkeley and beyond, and intersecting Jewish and Asian Studies.
The catalog includes an essay by Dr. Barbara Johnson (Ithaca College).
http://bit.ly/global-india
Many of the objects used in the course of synagogue rituals generate sound. Some are designed to produce specific sounds, such as the shofar, the horn blown in the synagogue during the month of Elul (preceding the New Year), and on Rosh Ha-shanah and Yom Kippur, or the noisemakers used during the reading of the Book of Esther on Purim. Since the process of Jewish Emancipation in 19th-century Europe, many synagogues have incorporated musical instruments in the ritual, including the organ. But there are many other ritual objects, especially those dedicated to the embellishing, storing, carrying and reading of the Torah scrolls, as well as to the havdalah ceremony that marks the end of the Sabbath and holidays, which are often designed to emit sound, even though sound-making is not their primary function.
Jewish ritual "sound objects" are not musical instruments per se. Rather, they are made with movable parts, and are at times adorned with pendants or bells. These objects rattle, ring, or otherwise make sound when they are used. Their sonic power is only apparently unintentional. The sounds they emit cannot be avoided, and sound-making parts are constitutive of their shapes, forms, and functions.
While sound emission by voices and musical instruments during ritual is closely regulated by rabbinic authorities, the sounds made by objects are not. A performative approach to the study of ritual objects may thus shed a different light on an important aspect of Jewish life outside the scope of normative religion, and yet located at its very core: ritual, including the public reading of the Hebrew Bible in synagogue liturgy.
http://bit.ly/sound-objects
http://bit.ly/inventory-project