Music 4,000 Years Ago Soothing the Savage Within or Riling Them Up

 Nadene Goldfoot                                             

      Someone in this family group will hum and sing.  They will sing in the minor key as they are in Mesopotamia. 

Here we go;  the ancient music of Mesopotamia: A depiction of a singer and a lyre player entertaining guests at a banquet c. 2500 BCE. Music was a normal part of social life in Mesopotamia. Detail from the Standard of Ur. British Museum, London.

                                               

Musicians of the Assyrian army c. 645 BCE. Nineveh, bas relief in Gypsum alabaster. Palace of Ashurbanipal, Nineveh.The Assyrians made battle music a real influence in the determination of conquest. Their footmen struck to the sound of drum, cymbal and shrill double-flutes, and when the fierce Assyrian horsemen charged they did so to the clashing of iron bells (like modern sleigh-bells), with which their harness was hung. From 1100 B.C. until its conquest by the Persians, Asia danced to the tune of the Assyrian war-pipes, and blood flowed where they sounded. 

The Babylonians, Hittites, Canaanites, Syrian Phoenicians, Jews, Egyptians and Lydian Greeks yielded up their goods and treasure to these martial pipings, and gold, silver, lapis lazuli, gums, spices, war-chariots, horses, cattle and slaves pour into the Assyrian capital to the tempo of their military.

             Ofra Haza, parents from Yemen, sang the yearning Jewish Yemenite songs in Israel. She was interpreting traditional Yemeni Jewish songs with lyrics coming from the poetry of 16th century Rabbi Shalom Shabazi.  The album was recorded with both traditional and modern musical instruments; wooden and metal percussion, Yemenite tin and tambala, strings, brass and woodwind as well as drum machines and synthesizers. The songs are sung in Hebrew with a Yemenite accent and in Arabic.

The history of music is as old as humanity itself. Archaeologists have found primitive flutes made of bone and ivory dating back as far as 43,000 years, and it’s likely that many ancient musical styles have been preserved in oral traditions.  The earliest fragment of musical notation is found on a 4,000-year-old Sumerian clay tablet, which includes instructions and tunings for a hymn honoring the ruler Lipit-Ishtar.Cantor David Roitman's voice was a flexible Iyric tenor with a wide range, an exceptional coloratura and a pure pianissimo from which he was able to pass directly into the forte voice.Born in 1884 David Roitman held position as Chazzan in Vilna, and then later St. Petersburg where he served until the Russian Revolution of 1917. For three years he stayed in Odessa until the situation there became very difficult, and he crossed the border to Romania.

         Cantor Schwartz sings “T'fillat Tal" ("Prayer for Dew")

The human voice has sung.  It discovered the minor key throughout the Middle East, while the West chose the major keys.  Jews sing their prayers, and this is done by the Cantor in the synagogue, so man probably did the same long ago.  Many of the Eastern European Yiddish liturgy were sung in a minor key. It expresses suffering. It expresses the the heartfelt yearning and plea to connect with God in prayer.

     Blowing the ram's horn on special occasions in a certain melody alerted people like a warning siren.  They discovered another musical instrument this way.  On Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur we hear the ram's horn.  

                     Getting attention in the Temple,  They would sing the prayers, too.                                                                

The geographical origin of the drum is Egypt, Turkey and Armenia, although it became very popular throughout the oriental music market in many different countries  .According to academic circles, its origins trace back to three percussion instruments played in the Arab world during the Middle Ages:  Darij, Kuba and Kabar.  Many iconographic elements testify to the existence of these instrument in ancient Egypt, from the Middle Kingdom, as well as Babylon, with "drums to drink" (approx 1100 BC), and even in Sumerian cultures. The Mesopotamian, Anatolian and central Asian civilizations also played similar instruments.

Floor pavement representing female harpist. Marble mosaic, ca. 260 AD (CE)  (Sasanian Era). From the iwan of the so-called palace of Shapur at Bishapur, Iran.

This leads us into David (reined from 1010 BCE to 970 BCE)  playing a harp.  Harps had been invented, lyres, such stringed instruments.  Harp strings were made from sheep gut.  It turns out that real people have been making instruments out of bones for centuries: flutes made from femurs and percussion instruments from skulls. 

Original Klezmer music, the music of the Jewish soul.  Klezmer is the music of Eastern European Jews of the 1800s, often played by a small band or orchestra featuring stringed instruments such as violins, guitar and wind instruments such as clarinet. By the early 1900s immigrants had brought Klezmer music to the United States and began to meld it with American jazz influences. Of course, it's in the minor key.  it's my soul music.                            

Today's animals even enjoy listening to music.  I wonder what their favorite type is?  The howls of wolves, maybe?  Bach, Chopin,  Jazz? Dogs in particular hear very high notes we can't hear.  That's why we can't hear the dog whistle, but they do.                                   

Israel Philharmonic Orchestra - Itzhak Perlman - Beethoven - Egmont & 6th Symphony, 22.3.2010

Watch

Notice, our teeny Israel is made up of music from the East with Ofra's Yemenite strain to Klesmer of Poland; with thinking from Left to Right, all in one of the smallest countries on earth.  What an orchestra they have!  

Resource:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCrnR_-oVec

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_of_Mesopotamia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_music

https://www.gotjudaica.com/Product.asp?dept=3040&Product=lp-david-roitman

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=819873332206685

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_instrument

Questions Jews Ask Themselves Through the Centuries

 Nadene Goldfoot                                             

      Joshua Malina in the play,    'Leopoldstadt' on Broadway. (Rebecca J Michelson) 

For a long time, Jews have been asking themselves questions like Where are we safe? Are we really accepted? How do we feel about our Judaism? 

Tom Stoppard wrote a play, a critically-acclaimed play about a Jewish family in Vienna taking place in the early 1900s and what they were asking themselves.  Joshua Malina, Jewish himself, is playing the main part.  He was an actor in The West Wing and Sports Night.

His Leopoldstadt character, though, converts to Catholicism. “You can sit in the audience and go ‘I know where this is headed, I know my history, and this guy is foolish,’” Malina said. “But I think it also makes you think as you’re sitting there, having probably paid a fair amount of money to watch this piece of theater, how complacent am I feeling?”

Joshua Charles Malina (born January 17, 1966)

Joshua doesn't have a Jewish-sounding surname.  Malina sounds more Hispanic, so he may not have experienced all the anti-Semitic sentiments others have experienced.  However, Malina was born in New York City. His parents, Fran and Robert Malina, were founding members of Young Israel of Scarsdale in New Rochelle, where he grew up.  His father was an attorney, investment banker and Broadway producer. 

Malina attended middle school at Westchester Day School and high school at the Horace Mann School. He earned a B.A. in Theater from Yale University. At Yale, he was a member of The Spizzwinks, an a cappella group, together with fellow actor Noah Emmerich.

He's an American film and stage actor known for playing Will Bailey on the NBC drama The West Wing, Jeremy Goodwin on Sports Night, US Attorney General David Rosen on Scandal, and Caltech President Siebert on The Big Bang Theory.

In 2004, Malina was a participant in the first-ever national television advertising campaign supporting donations to Jewish federations. The program featured "film and television personalities celebrating their Jewish heritage and promoting charitable giving to the Jewish community" and included Greg Grunberg, Marlee Matlin, Kevin Weisman, and Jonathan Silverman.

Melissa Merwin is known for Point of No Return (1993), Bad Girls (1994) and Love Field (1992). She has been married to Joshua Malina since 1 December 1996. They have two children. IMDbProStarmeterSee rank.

"In 1992, Malina met costume designer Melissa Merwin through his friendship with her sister Jennifer, and Jennifer's then-husband actor Timothy Busfield. Merwin converted to Judaism under Conservative auspices. They married in 1996 and have two children, Isabel and Avi".  Now, this was a very couragous act on the part of Melissa.  People don't usually convert these days because they marry a Jew.  First, it had to be important to Joshua to have an all-Jewish family and second, Melissa had to be interested enough in Judaism to withstand the frowns her parents might have about the conversion.  Joshua's real life turns out to be the opposite of his play-character, a man who converted to Catholicism. 

Getting back to Tom Stoppard, the author of the play, Tom is the son of Martha Becková and Eugen Sträussler, a doctor employed by the Bata shoe company. His parents were non-observant Jews. Just before the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, the town's patron, Jan Antonín Baťa, transferred his Jewish employees, mostly physicians, to branches of his firm outside Europe. On 15 March 1939, the day the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia, the Sträussler family fled to Singapore, where Bata had a factory. 

Stoppard's mother died in 1996. The family had not talked about their history and neither brother knew what had happened to the family left behind in Czechoslovakia. In the early 1990s, with the fall of communism, Stoppard found out that all four of his grandparents had been Jewish and had died in Terezin, Auschwitz, and other camps, along with three of his mother's sisters.

The Forward's Benyamin Cohen wrote that Joshua was one of Hollywood's most outspoken Jews and that this was a very Jewish play, and that this was their lead story.  

This is a good example of what has been happening in many Jewish American marriages since the 1930s.  The sexes have had the occasion to be attracted to each other regardless of religions, and that sex is a strong attraction.  Judaism had never had the occasion to come together with other religions like America has provided.  You'll notice this in DNA testing which has only been available recently .  Founded in 2000, FamilyTreeDNA pioneered the field of genetic genealogy—the use of DNA testing to establish relationships between individuals and determine ancestry.            

Here's what can happen in the USA:  case A:  Jewish man, not religious-minded as too worried about making a living in those days of depression, etc,  marries gentile woman in 1930s and she converts, mikva and conversation about Judaism.  They have 2 children.  Each child marries a gentile that doesn't convert.  Their children have no religious faith.  They in turn marry a gentile.  The faith is lost.  The faith has faded away and not even known about, not even in their memory. 

 At the time of WWII, rabbis were active personally with Jews in their area, even making home visits, but after that with congregations growing and all, lose that personal touch.  It had in the 30s kept Jews together to know that they did indeed have a rabbi.  Often it was a visit to sell a particular bible set, but that's all right.  It was a personal touch.  

It's because that at this time, Jews were breaking away from the Jewish neighborhood that may have existed and moved out into a non-Jewish upscale neighborhood.  Then they lost touch with their common culture which also held Jews together.  Freedom caused the meltdown of Jewishness.  

No other time or place has given Jews such freedom.  Everywhere else, such anti-Semitism kept people apart.  Jews were not even afforded citizenship in Europe.  They were the wandering Jews, the 2nd class ones. 

I believe its written somewhere that a Jew is to walk to synagogue each week, so the neighborhood must be provided with a synagogue, a place of congregation as 10 male Jews make a much needed minion.  In moving away, all that was forgotten.  Cars replaced walking.  Walking had its very deep purpose.  Who knew?  

Interesting as the youth of today are breaking their necks in finding time to hike.   People immersed in their health practice walking every day.  Even their watches can count how many steps they take every day, and they have a number in mind they want to reach.  They must walk.  Walking preceeds all activity.  It's almost become a religion.  "How many steps have you walked today?" is the new question asked. 

I'm not advocating anti-Semitism, G-d forbid!  I'm exposing our facts of life.  It could be a good reason to live in Israel where this wouldn't happen.  It's a place where everyone walks a lot, too, and here, because they need to.  

Resource:

https://forward.com/forward-newsletters/forwarding-the-news/?utm_source=Iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=ForwardingtheNews_6405774

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Stoppard

Queen of Sheba Ethiopian Jews and One of the Lost Ten Tribes, The Lemba of Africa

 Nademe Goldfoot                                  

          Samaria today was northern Israel.   Samaria was the name of their capital  after the Civil War when Solomon died and then the whole area came to be called Samaria. Their last king was Hoshea (730-721 BCE) when the Assyrians had attacked. He finally rebelled against the Assyrians and was put in prison by Shalmaneser who then captured Samaria.    

Now called the West Bank by some, Judea and Samaria were separated from the tribe of Judah, parts of Benjamin and parts of Simeon when King Solomon died in 920 BCE and the northern 10 Tribes parted ways from the southern end of these three of which Judah was the largest.  They even fought a Civil War.  

Then Assyria ( name means land bathed in blood)  attacked in 721 BCE.  Assyria turns out to be today's Iraq and Syria. They were a most aggressive kingdom in the 20th century BCE and expanded rapidly from the 13th to 19th centuries.  The kings of Israel thought they were friends and had worked together, until Assyria attacked them and carried away the best of the population for their own designs. 

This caused what was later called the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.   It was when Shalmaneser III attacked Ben-Hadad II of Damascus in 853 BCE that King Ahab of Israel (876-853 BCE)  had supported them in the battle of Karkar.   Following that, King Hosea of Israel (730 to721 BCE), Israel's last king, in 726 BCE tried to throw off the yoke which led to Shalmaneser V's siege of Samaria and its capture in 721 by his successor, Sargon.  Sargon annexed the country and deported 27,290 Israelites to Assyria and Media and replaced them with Syrian and Babylonian prisoners.  This was followed up with the revolt of Ashdod that was supported by King Hezekiah of Judah (720 to 692 BCE)  that was suppressed in 715 BCE. 

We have discovered the Lemba tribe of Africa.  They have been practicing Judaism.  How can this be that a black tribe is Jewish?  They took the proper DNA test and their Y haplogroup (male line) shows that not only are they sharing Jewish genes, but those of the Cohens, the priests, J1 haplogroup.  Evidently Jewish traders went into Africa and took native wives, and now there are    Lemba tribesmen who are Jewish.  "Many of the Lemba, who number more than 50,000 people, are Christians, but they see no contradiction in professing Judaism, too. "

Dr. Parfitt visited their homes, which are in northern South Africa and Zimbabwe.  Author of "The Lost Ark Of The Covenant," Of their tradition, they reported, "''We came from the north, from a place called Senna. We left Senna, we crossed Pusela, we came to Africa and there we rebuilt Senna.'' Parfitt was in Yemen and told a Jewish leader their story.  "mentioned the Lemba tradition of Senna to the religious leader of the holy city of Tarim. The leader was surprised to hear it because, he told Dr. Parfitt, there was a nearby village called Senna." So their original people could have come from Jewish Yemen Cohenim who were traders in Africa.  

The Queen of Sheba had left her home in Ethiopia and traveled to meet King Solomon,  With her she brought frankincense, myrrh, gold and precious jewels. King Solomon had heard of Sheba and her great kingdom.     

Josh Bernstein,  of the TV program, Digging For The Truth on History.com, is an Israeli-born anthropologist with Israeli parents,  explorer, author, executive producer, survival expert and TV host whose program I watched on Youtube which was on The Quest for King Solomon's gold and frankincense.  

This documentary series travels the globe to explore and delve deeper into ancient mysteries such as the Lost Ark of the Covenant, the building of the pyramids of Egypt and the long quest for the Holy Grail. The host, Josh Bernstein, is the main explorer for the first three seasons before being replaced by Hunter Ellis.    He later appeared for one season as the host of the Discovery Channel's Into the Unknown with Josh Bernstein. He's great; evidently American raised.  

     Zimbabwe used to be southern Rhodesia.  Up north see Suez Canal, and the land along the Mediterranean Sea is unmarked but is Israel.  That's where the Lemba have been living.  

He followed the trail to see frankincense being separated from dirt, being finished off as it would have been done 3,000 years ago.  What impressed me was that anytime Josh saw people working on his subject, he would offer to do some of the work, too.  That was quite an experience, and the native people enjoyed and admired him for doing just this.  Then he tracked down where Solomon's mines were, only to find the the mine in Israel produced copper but not gold.  Maybe that's why Sheba's gift of so much gold was so appreciated.  The gold of Sheba was traced to Ophir in the Bible which turns out to be today's Axum. Axum or Aksum (pronounced: /ˈæksuːm/) is a town in the Tigray Region of Ethiopia with a population of 66,900 residents (as of 2015). It is the site of the historic capital of the Aksumite Empire, a naval and trading power that ruled the whole region from about 400 BCE into the 10th century. Solomon (961-920 BCE) was king, and alluring to Sheba, so it was ruled by Sheba during this time also, way before 400 BCE if we are to believe where her gold came from.  

In the Bible, sailors for Sheba would be gone for 3 years and return with ivory and apes along with gold, true traders.  

He had to track down where Sheba had really come from; whether it was Ethiopia or Zimbabwe (southern Rhodesia) , and it was Ethiopia.                                    

A leader of the Lemba people, wearing a prayer shawl, gathers with his fellow Jews. DNA tests have confirmed the Semitic heritage of these sub-Saharan Africans.

Jekesai Njikizana /AFP/Getty Images

The Lemba tribe has the Cohen DNA, but the Ethiopians do not yet show they have the connecting DNA to the Jewish people.   Tudor Parfitt spoke of the Lemba in his book about the Ark.  Though the Lemba may be descended from Jewish ancestors, they have not practiced Judaism for many centuries. Lately, some have wanted to shift towards mainstream Judaism. Today, many Lemba are Christians or Muslims.  Ethiopians have returned to Israel through several air lifts and many past years. They have kept up Jewish cultural practices better than most American Jews besides their personal history of genealogical connection to the Queen of Sheba. A study of Lucotte and Smets has shown, however, that the genetic father of Beta Israel (Ethiopian Jews) was close to the Ethiopian non-Jewish populations. This is consistent with the theory that Beta Israel are descendants of ancient inhabitants of Ethiopia, not the Middle East. 

Resource:

The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia-Queen of Sheba

https://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/09/us/dna-backs-a-tribe-s-tradition-of-early-descent-from-the-jews.html#:~:text=Many%20of%20the%20Lemba%2C%20who,contradiction%20in%20professing%20Judaism%2C%20too.

youtube Digging for the Truth with Josh Bernstein

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axum#:~:text=Axum%20or%20Aksum%20(pronounced%3A%20%2F,residents%20(as%20of%202015).&text=It%20is%20the%20site%20of,BCE%20into%20the%2010th%20century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josh_Bernstein

https://www.pbs.org/mythsandheroes/myths_four_sheba.html#:~:text=With%20her%20she%20brings%20frankincense,Sheba%20and%20her%20great%20kingdom.

https://www.anumuseum.org.il/the-myth-of-the-ten-lost-tribes-article/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term=jew%20tribes&utm_campaign=g&device=c&gclid=Cj0KCQjwyt-ZBhCNARIsAKH1175OBwAWXB0Xs1wAPb3esVcTchEeueVFvY1SJ7d2-K9K

Dr. Shalva Weil, conference in Jerusalem on Lost 10 Tribes, and Pashtuns.  Senior Researcher at The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_studies_on_Jews#:~:text=in%20one%20sample.-,Y%2DDNA%20of%20Ethiopian%20Jews,Ethiopia%2C%20not%20the%20Middle%20East.---Ethiopian Jews