Conference Agenda

Cantor Eduard Birnbaum (1855–1920) was the most prolific nineteenth-century collector of European Jewish music manuscripts and literature. His archive, now housed at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, preserves an encyclopedic record of the liturgical and secular music of various Jewish communities during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Scholarship on Birnbaum has typically focused on his collecting of the “music itself." This paper instead reexamines the intellectual genealogy of modern Jewish music research by foregrounding an overlooked facet of his archival practice: his systematic collecting, annotating, and historicizing of Christian sources on Jewish music.

While prevailing narratives credit Birnbaum and his contemporaries with inaugurating an empiricist, “scientific” approach to Jewish music through the documentation of repertoires (Bohlman, 2002; 2008; Seroussi, 2009), I argue that his archival work was more expansive—and more subversive—than mere collection. Drawing on Susannah Heschel’s (1998) and Philip V. Bohlman’s (2008) concepts of “counterhistory,” I theorize “archival counterhistory” as both a critical posture and a historiographical method in which the archive becomes an active site for transforming hegemonic Christian narratives into objects of historical critique.

I analyze Birnbaum’s unfinished bibliographical project, “Literaturgeschichte der hebräischen und synagogalen Musik,” together with his annotated manuscripts and materials from the Mus. 77 subcollection, to show how he reframed Christian writings into historicized artifacts and integrated them alongside Jewish sources to form more entangled genealogy of Jewish music scholarship. Through close readings of his engagement with figures such as Johann Gottfried Herder and Johannes Reuchlin, I trace how Birnbaum moved between critique and strategic appropriation to expose the theological and ideological underpinnings of Christian scholarship while also mining these sources for rare examples of Jewish music.

By shifting attention from Birnbaum’s role as a collector of musical sources to his work as a critical bibliographer of Christian literature on Hebrew music, this paper emphasizes his role as a foundational theorist of Jewish music historiography rather than simply its documentary precursor. It thus reconfigures both Birnbaum’s place within Jewish music studies and the broader narrative of how musicological knowledge about Jewish traditions was constructed in dialogue with Christian scholarship.