EILI EILI LOMO ASOVTONI?

“How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” I couldn’t help recalling these words of the Psalmist, these and the opening, “By the rivers of Babylon,” in which is compressed the immemorial melancholy of an enslaved race, when I heard Sophie Braslau intone with her luscious contralto, a touching Hebrew lament, “Eili Eili Lomo Asovtoni?” at a concert last winter. Naturally I believed the melody to be the echo of some tribal chant sung in the days of the Babylonian captivity, and perhaps before that in the days of the prehistoric Sumerians and the epic of Gilgamesh. Others have made the same error. Judge of my surprise when in a copy of The American Jewish News I read that the composer of Eili Eili is living, that his name is Jacob Kopel Sandler, that he wrote the music for a historical drama, Die B’ne Moishe (The Sons of Moses), which deals with the Chinese Jews. Mr. Sandler had written the song for Sophie Carp, a Yiddish actress and singer. The Sons of Moses was a failure, and a new piece, Brocha, the Jewish King of Poland, was prepared. (Not alluding to Pan Dmowski.) It was produced at the Windsor Theatre in the Bowery. The song, not the play, was a success. Then the music drifted into queer company, for music is a living organism and wanders when it is not controlled. Finally Sophie Braslau got hold of it, and the composer, who was directing a choir in a Bronx synagogue, was astounded to hear of the acclamations of a Metropolitan Opera House Sunday night audience. His daughter has listened to Eili Eili and brought home the good news. After troublesome preliminaries “Meyer Beer,” the pen name of the musical editor of The American Jewish News, was able to prove beyond peradventure of a doubt the artistic parentage of the song, and Jacob Sandler is in a fair way of being idolized in his community, as he should be.

Eili Eili lomo asovtoni? may be found in Psalm 22, the first line of the second verse in Hebrew. In the English version the words of David are in the first verse: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” And in the St. Mark’s Gospel we read: “And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?’ which is, being interpreted: ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’” (Chapter 15, verse 34.) The exegetists and apologists, as well as sciolists, have made of this immortal phrase a bone of theological contention. Schmiedel, who with Harnack believes the words to have been uttered by our Saviour, nevertheless points out various details which prefigure the same things in the crucifix—the just man hanging on the stake, the perforated hands and feet, the mocking crowd, the soldiers gambling for the clothes, everything takes place as described in the Psalm. Lublinski (in Dogma, p. 93) and Arthur Drews (in The Historicity of Jesus, p. 150) demur to the orthodox Christian conclusions of Harnack and Schmiedel. A beloved master, the late Solomon Schechter, disposed of the question in his usual open style. “The world is big enough,” he has said to me, for both Jehovah and Jesus, “for two such grand faiths as the Hebrew and the Christian.” But he saw Christianity only in its historical sequence, and not as a continuator of Judaism; rather, a branching away from the main trunk. If it had not been for Constantine, the world might be worshipping Mithra to-day, was the erudite and worthy man’s belief. Enveloped in the mists of the first two centuries Christianity seems to have had a narrow escape from the doctrines of Mithraism. That Salomon Reinach practically admits in his Orpheus, a most significant study of comparative religions from the pen of this French savant.

Once upon a time I played the organ in a “shool,” a reformed, not an orthodox, synagogue; played indifferently well. But my acquaintance with the Jewish liturgy dates back to my boyhood in Philadelphia, where I studied Hebrew, in company with Latin. The reason? My mother fondly hoped that I might become a priest—the very thought of which makes me shudder now. The religious in me found vent in music, and my love of change was gratified by playing the Hebrew service on Shabbas (Saturday) and the Roman Catholic on our Sabbath. Probably that is why I was affected by Sophie Braslau’s singing of Eili Eili. Rosa Raisa has put the song in her repertory, and only on Easter Sunday last did Sarah Borni sing it, although it appeared on the programme as a composition of Kurt Schindler’s, an error quickly rectified by Miss Borni, who did not know the authorship till too late. “Such songs,” commented this soprano, “come but once in a man’s lifetime.” Dorothy Jardon will no doubt sing Eili Eili, as she sang for the first time a Jahrzeit, a Kaddish by Rhea Silberta, at the Hippodrome last Sunday. Mr. Sandler has come into his own, and it is gratifying to record that the credit is largely due to Meyer Beer and The American Jewish News.

I have always entertained a peculiar admiration for the Jews and Judaism. It began with the study of Semitic literature of the Talmud, above all of Hebrew poetry, the most sublime in our language, as Matthew Arnold asserts in his comparative estimate of Greek and Hebraic cultures. My dearest friends have been, still are, of that race. Prejudice, social or political, against the Jew, I not only detest, but I have never been able to comprehend. My early playmates were Jewish boys and girls. I have stood under the “Choopah” (marriage canopy), and have seen many a Bar-Mitzvah; even sat “Shivah” for the dead father of intimate friends. From Rafael Joseffy to Georg Brandes; from the brilliant Hungarian virtuoso that was Joseffy—whose father, a learned rabbi, I visited at Budapest—in Pest-Ofen—in 1903, when he was eighty-four, an Orientalist, a linguist with twenty-six languages, ancient and modern, at the tip of his tongue—to Professor Brandes, the Danish scholar, an intellectual giant, and a critic in the direct line of Sainte-Beuve and Taine—both men I knew and loved. Whether the Jew has attained the summits as a creator in the seven arts I cannot speak authoritatively, although the Old Testament furnishes abundant evidences that he has in poetry. Disraeli (Beaconsfield), who liked to tease Gladstone by calling him “Frohstein” and pointing to his rugged Jewish prophet’s features, has written of his race most eloquently. I should like to quote a passage in its entirety, but time and space forbid. But an excerpt I permit myself the luxury of reproduction: “The ear, the voice, the fancy teeming with combinations, the inspiration fervid with picture and emotion, that came from Caucasus, and which we have preserved unpolluted, have endowed us with almost the exclusive privilege of music; that science of harmonious sounds which the ancients recognized as most divine and deified in the person of their most beautiful creation....” He goes on: “There is not a company of singers, not an orchestra in a single capital, that is not crowded with our children under feigned names which they adopt to conciliate the dark aversion which your posterity will some day disclaim with shame and disgust....”

Lord Beaconsfield mentions Rossini, Meyerbeer, Mendelssohn as Jewish composers, and Pasta and Grisi among the singers. Probably he had not heard Rossini’s witticism uttered on his deathbed: “For heaven’s sake, don’t bury me in the Jewish cemetery!” Nor did Beaconsfield look far enough ahead when he wrote “dark aversion”—which is wonderful. To-day the boot is on the other leg. It may be Gentiles who will be forced to change their names to Jewish. I could easily sign myself “Shamus Hanuchah”—leaving out the “lichts”—or pattern after the name Paderewski jokingly wrote on his photograph: “For Jacob Hunekerstein.”

And I am ashamed to confess that I know Jews who themselves are ashamed of having been born Jews. Incredible! In Vienna I have seen St. Stefan’s Cathedral crowded at the 11 o’clock high mass by most fervent worshippers, the majority of whom seemed Semitic, which prompted me to propound the riddle: When is a Jew not a Jew? Answer: When he is a Roman Catholic in Vienna. But you never can tell. As Joseffy used to say when some musician with a nose like the Ten Commandments was introduced, as, for example, Monsieur Fontaine, “He means Brunnen, or, in Hebrew, Pischa. He is not a Jew, but his grandmother wore a ‘scheitel’” (the wig still worn by orthodox Jewish women). The truth is that among the virtuosi, singers, actors, the Jew holds first place. Liszt and Paganini are the exceptions, and Paganini could easily pass in an east side crowd as Jehudah. As to the Wagner controversy, not started by Nietzsche, but by Rossini and Meyerbeer, who referred to Wagner as Jewish, that was settled by O. G. Sonneck in his little book, Was Wagner a Jew? but only after I had introduced to the columns of the New York Times Sunday Magazine in 1913, a book by Otto Bournot, entitled Ludwig Geyer. Geyer was, as you may remember, the stepfather of Richard Wagner. Bournot had access to the Baireuth archives and delved into the newspapers of Geyer’s days. August Böttiger’s Necrology had hitherto been the chief source. Mary Burrell’s Life of Wagner was the first to give the true spelling of the name of Wagner’s mother, which was Bertz, which may be Jewish or German, as you like.

The Geyers as far back as 1700 were pious folk. The first of the family mentioned in local history was a certain Benjamin Geyer, who about 1700 was a trombone player and organist. Indeed, the Geyers were largely connected with the evangelical church. Ludwig Geyer, virtually acknowledged by Baireuth as the real father of Richard Wagner, looked Jewish (which proves nothing, as I have seen dark, Semitic fisher-folk on the coast of Galway) and displayed Jewish versatility. For that matter the composer von Weber looked like a Jew, as does Camille Saint-Saëns. When I ventured to write of this racial trait—much more marked in his youth—the French composer sent me a denial, sarcastically asking how a man with such a “holy” name as “Saint-Saëns” could be Jewish. But Leopold Godowsky, who was intimate with him, has told me that he took his mother’s name. As to Wagner, a little story may suffice. In 1896 I attended the Wagner festival at Baireuth. Between performances I tramped the Franconian hills. My toes hurt me. Looking for a corn-cutter, I found one not far from the Wagner house. The old chap seated me in his doorway, probably to get better light, and as he crouched over my feet in the street I asked him if he had known Richard Wagner. “Know Wagner!” he irascibly replied. “He passed my shop every day. Many the times I cut his corns. Oh, no! not here; over yonder”—he jerked his head in the direction of Wahnfried. I inquired what kind of a looking man was Wagner. “He was a little bow-legged Jew, and he always wore a long cloak to hide his crooked legs.” Enfin! the truth from the mouth of babes. This beats Nietzsche and his “Vulture” Geyer.

Not religion, not nationality, but race, counts in the individual. Wagner looked like a Jew. And there are many red-haired Jews with pug noses and light blue eyes. Renan in Le Judaisme has shown us how non-Jewish elements were in the course of time incorporated within the race. The Chazars of eastern Europe are Jews, only a thousand years old. Dr. Brandes in a confession of his views on the subject has said—in The Journal for Jewish History and Literature, published at Stockholm (Teldscript for Judisk Historia), and quoted by Bernard G. Richards in a capital study of Brandes—“from the fifteenth to the sixteenth year of my life I regarded Judaism purely as a religion.” But when he was abused as a Jew then Georg Brandes felt himself a genuine Jew. Many a man has found himself in a similar position. Atavistic impulses, submerged in subconsciousness, may explain why certain men, Gentiles, scholars, by nature noncombatants, have left their peaceful study, jeopardized their life, ruined their reputation, to battle for an obscure Jew Dreyfus. Zola, of Greek-Levantine origin, perhaps Italian and Jew, was one of those valiant souls who fought for the truth. Anatole France, born Thibault, another. Count Thibault, at the time of the Dreyfus uproar, challenged the great writer who signs himself Anatole France to prove his right to that distinguished Roman Catholic name. That the gentle Anatole is the very spit and spawn of a Jew, so far as appearance goes; that since Heine (baptized a Christian) no such union of mocking irony and tender, poetic emotion can be noted in the work of any writer, are alike valueless as testimony. Nevertheless, many believe in this Hebraic strain; just as they feel it in the subtlety of Cardinal Newman’s writing—he was of Dutch stock—and in the humor of Charles Lamb. Both Englishmen are credited with the “precious quintessence,” as Du Maurier would say.

I have had to stand a lot of good-natured fun poked at me for my Jewish propensity. I can stand it, as I have a solid substratum of history for my speculations. Some years ago The Contemporary Review printed an article entitled “The Jew in Music,” with this motto from Oscar Wilde’s Salome: “The Jews believe only in what they cannot see.” The writer’s name was signed: A. E. Keeton. Not even the assertion that Beethoven was a Belgian is half so iconoclastic as some of the assumptions made in this study. When Mozart first appeared as a prodigy before the future Queen of France, Marie Antoinette, she announced that ‘a genius must not be a Jew.’ The original name, Ozart, was changed. Mozart was baptized! Which anecdote makes the scalp to freeze, though not because of its verisimilitude. Beethoven and Rubinstein looked alike; ergo! But then they didn’t. In the case of Chopin he was certainly Jewish-looking, especially in the Winterhalter and Kwiatowski portraits. His father came from Nancy, in Lorraine, thickly populated by Jews. The original name, Szopen, or Szop, is Jewish. His music, especially the first Scherzo in B minor, has a Heine-like irony, and irony is a prime characteristic of the Chosen (or Choosing as Zangwill puts it) race! But all this is in the key of wildest surmise. Wagner was born in the ghetto at Leipsic; yet that didn’t make him Jewish, any more than the baptism of Mendelssohn made him Christian. Georges Bizet was of Jewish origin, he looked Jewish; but the fact that he married the daughter of Halévy (Ha-Levi), the composer of La Juive, didn’t make the composer of Carmen a Jew. Neither religion nor nationality are any more than superficial factors in the nature of men and women. Race alone counts.

Once upon a time I wrote a Jewish story, The Shofar Blew at Sunset. Maggie Cline liked it; so did Israel Zangwill. I preserve a letter from Mr. Zangwill telling me of his liking. The story appeared in M’lle New York, now defunct. It was afterward translated into Yiddish, though it did not give general satisfaction in either camp, Jewish or Christian. It revelled in the cantillations and employed as leading motive the Shofar, or ram’s-horn blown in the synagogues on Yom Kippur or the Day of Atonement. The scroll of the Torah also appeared. But these liturgical references didn’t offend; it was my surprising denunciation of Jewish materialism in New York that was the rock of offence. I say surprising, for what is a Christian-born doing in another field and finding fault? I’m sure I can’t say why, unless that in writing the tale I unconsciously dramatized myself as a reproaching voice. There was much in my strictures of that son of Hanan who prowled through the streets of the Holy City in the year A. D. 62, crying aloud: “Woe, woe upon Jerusalem!” I remember that I predicted because of the luxury of the American Jew the lofty Jewish idealism might be submerged in a flood of indifference and disbelief. Prosperity would prove the snag. In the heart of the Jew is the true Zion, not in success nor in some far-away land. Naturally, that didn’t please the Zionists. One professional Jewish publication, no longer in existence, said that I preached like a Rabbi (Reb), but thought like a goi. The word “Chutzpah” was also used. Yet, wasn’t I right? It is the spiritual Ark of the Covenant, the spirit of the law, and not the letter that killeth, which should be enshrined in the heart of the Jew. He may dream of Palestine, of its skies of the “few large stars,” a land overflowing with milk and honey; but in the depths of his soul it is the living God to whom he must go for spiritual sustenance. God the eternal reservoir of our earthly certitudes! Schma’ Ysroel!