Below is something I posted on social media a few months ago, and I now possess a scan of the book mentioned therein through the Fair Use Act and the generosity of the NLI librarians. (I am looking for collaborators to bring the music to life…)
In the 1930s, a Berlin cantor published a book for laymen to learn about traditional tunes for home use. The cantor used a very Aryan name his whole life, “Hans John,” until Hitler ym’sh forbade Jewish artists from hiding their identities from the public. So he published this book under the name “H. J. Jacobson.” A scathing review in a cantorial newspaper of the period takes to task the use of German folksongs in davening by the South German Jews. Leon Kornitzer, the Vienna-born Chazzan in Hamburg, wrote the review. Below:
Some texts are reproduced in several versions (i.e., not only as the editor heard them in his parental home), such as the “Benschen” according to East German and South German tradition. Here, the Eastern tradition offers advantages because its motivic material has a far more Jewish character, and it avoids the genuinely appalling use of folk songs that have become popular hymns (O Tannenbaum, Im Walde steht ein Männlein, etc.), with which the Southern German “tradition” is so richly blessed here. The situation is similar with the introductory song of Psalm 126, where Jacobsohn presents the charming Eastern Jewish tradition alongside the Ashkenazi one; if this sounds too “Eastern,” Idelsohn (Hebräisch-Orientalischer Melodienschatz) has another two versions that are popular with English and American Jews and are far more valuable than the oh! so popular way with us. – The book could, therefore, have been more comprehensive here, as well as with the Hanukkah hymn, whose variant (p. 35) is by no means, as stated, a “traditional melody.” On the contrary, the noble melody handed down to us by Benedetto Marcello in 1728 would have been appropriate here. The Chad gadjo concludes the Seder songs in the manner of “Hopp hopp hopp, Pferdchen lauf Galopp”. Can you call that a tradition? No, that’s nonsense. It may have become customary in some houses for some inexplicable reason, but it doesn’t have to be handed over to the public. Here, too, there would have been more beautiful, above all, more Jewish things to be found in the relevant literature.
