The Moralization of Jewish Heritage in Germany: Sustaining Jewish Life in the Twenty-First Century. Sarah M. Ross. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 2024.
Reviewed by Kira Álvarez
Many Germans today regard the preservation of Jewish heritage as a moral responsibility. In The Moralization of Jewish Heritage in Germany: Sustaining Jewish Life in the Twenty-First Century, German ethnomusicologist Sarah M. Ross examines how this responsibility has been addressed. She does this by exploring German Reform and Minhag Ashkenaz synagogue music, examining the roles of both Jewish and non-Jewish stakeholders in contemporary Germany. She highlights the creation of a “community of shared values” based on moral responsibility and feelings of belonging. However, Ross demonstrates that these shared values often reveal more about non-Jewish German society than Jewish society. She argues that Germany’s devotion to moralizing Jewish heritage often leads to an overly static understanding of Judaism and Jewish life, influenced by its Christian surroundings and largely confined to the past. Ross brings new insights to the topic of Jewish heritage in Germany, often regarded as a subject already comprehensively researched. She offers a perspective that is both original and urgent for our current times.
The book is organized into four chapters, with the middle two chapters constituting the analytic core. In the first chapter, “Being and Feeling Jewish: Doing Jewish Heritage in Twenty-First Century Germany,” Ross sets the historical background for Jewish life in post-Holocaust Germany. She primarily relies on archival sources from Jewish student and youth associations in Germany during the 1970s and 1980s, as well as on interviews with Jewish adults conducted in 2022. Outlining the evolution of Jewish identity in Germany over the past fifty years, she shows how the identities of the second, third, and fourth generation of Jews living in post-Holocaust Germany have been shaped by the presence and absence of a Jewish cultural heritage. The second generation, for example, was deeply shaped by their parents’ survival of the Shoah. But Jewish life in Germany changed profoundly with the influx of post-Soviet Jewish immigrants in the 1990s under the quota system. Ross shows how they play a central role in shaping Jewish life in the country today. Overall, Jewish cultural heritage in Germany has been influenced both by perceptions of “Jewishness” in broader German society, and by contemporary ideas about Jewish identity within Jewish communities. The non-Jewish public often subscribes to an essentialist view of Jewish heritage in Germany, one that obscures the rich diversity of Jewish practices and heritage and thus remains stuck in the past.
The historical background and interviews in the first chapter lay the groundwork for Ross’ analysis in the second and third chapters. Both chapters focus on the “community of shared values” created through Jewish liturgical music as a key element in the Jewish cultural heritage. The second chapter, “The Moral Obligation to Preserve: The Making of Synagogue Music as Kulturerbe in Germany,” outlines how non-Jewish German stakeholders such as the Leipzig Synagogue choir and even the German Federal Ministry of the Interior—through funding synagogue music concerts performed by non-Jewish ensembles—use Ashkenazi liturgical music as a form of Jewish musical heritage. The third chapter, “Jewish Cantors as ‘Safeguarders’ of German-Jewish Musical Heritage,” explores the ways in which cantors engage with and interpret this music. In both chapters, Ross draws attention to the difference between the German term Jüdisches Kulturerbe (Jewish cultural heritage), which tends to be used by non-Jewish actors, and the Anglo-American term Jewish heritage, which she links more directly to Jewish perspectives on their own traditions. The difference is not just a matter of wording; these two terms signify distinct conceptualizations of how Jewish heritage is constructed and sustained.
In the second chapter, Ross shows that the recognition of Jewish liturgical music as part of Jüdisches Kulturerbe originated within the predominantly Christian German culture, shaped by a “community of shared values.” One example of this is the inclusion of synagogue music of Central and Eastern Europe from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Germany’s Federal Register of Good Practices of Intangible Cultural Heritage in March 2020. Another is the declaration of the ShUM cities (Speyer, Worms, and Mainz) in 2021 as UNESCO World Heritage Sites. These cities were important centers of Jewish life in the medieval period. On June 6, 2021, a UNESCO Heritage Day concert that included a performance of synagogue music from the nineteenth century took place in the famous Speyer cathedral, further confirming that Jüdisches Kulturerbe is rooted in Christianity.
Ross introduces several analytical lenses for interpreting these case studies. These include concepts such as Christo-normativity (Christian-influenced frameworks), philosemitism, emotions such as guilt and angst, and the connection between Jewish heritage and Germany’s Holocaust memory culture. Including synagogue music and the ShUM cities in the concept of the Jüdisches Kulturerbe regards Jewish heritage as something belonging only to the past, and disregards its complexity. Additionally, it provides a safe and familiar way to present Jewish culture within a German context, effectively “Germanizing” it.
In the third chapter, Ross turns to a more ethnographic approach, based on interviews she conducted with present-day Jewish cantors in Germany. Cantors are the practitioners of Jewish liturgical music, which has been framed by Christian German society as Jüdisches Kulturerbe. Ross emphasizes that the concept of belonging assumes even greater importance for those cantors who dedicate themselves to reviving and sustaining the nineteenth-century tradition of Reform Judaism and Minhag Ashkenaz in German synagogue music. Coming from various countries, including the United States, South America, England, and Israel, the cantors were either educated in the German-Jewish synagogue music tradition or taught this tradition as adults at Abraham Geiger College in Potsdam. All strove to integrate German Jewish liturgical traditions in their synagogues. However, these attempts often did not succeed, as most community members came from non-German backgrounds, such as former Soviet Jews, accustomed to Eastern European liturgical music. But their desire to safeguard certain Jewish musical traditions—in this case, Minhag Ashkenaz, which is part of German Jüdisches Kulturerbe—has contributed to “cultural paternalism towards members of the community” (76). Ross argues that the cantors’ dedication to preserving heritage is not sufficient, and requires both an understanding of, and a strong commitment to, cultural sustainability—a concept she explores in the final chapter.
Building on her analyses in the second and third chapters, Ross ultimately advocates for developing a theory of Jewish heritage and sustainability in the final chapter, aptly called “Formulating a Theory for Jewish Heritage and Sustainability.” She argues for the application of sustainability, which involves meeting the needs of the present without compromising future generations. She asserts that Jewish communities should actively shape their self-understanding by engaging with and preserving their shared traditions. By examining both Jewish and non-Jewish perspectives on Jewish musical heritage, Ross contends that, in this context, sustainability means ensuring continuity while allowing opportunities for reinterpretation.
Ross’s call to action for integrating Jewish heritage and sustainability is one of the many unique and important aspects of her book. While she could have remained focused on scholarship alone, Ross expands her role to that of a practitioner and participant in the preservation of Jewish musical traditions. Her book is an innovative and timely addition to Jewish critical heritage studies and memory studies. Through her analysis of Jewish musical heritage and the actors who sustain it, she offers us new ways of understanding how Jewish life is publicly framed in contemporary Germany.
Another notable aspect of the book is Ross’s decision, as an ethnomusicologist, not to include any musical notation in her book. This choice broadens the book’s audience to include non-music specialists, while also challenging music scholars to consider the central stakeholders involved in preserving Jewish musical traditions. Ross offers valuable insights into the contested terrain of Jewish continuity in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. At a wider level, her work serves as a valuable resource for understanding how the cultural heritage of minority communities is leveraged within memory politics.
Kira Álvarez is an interdisciplinary scholar working across history, music, and religious studies. She has taught at Freie Universität Berlin, where she completed her doctorate in history, and also holds degrees from Stanford University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Swarthmore College. Kira is currently working on a book based on her dissertation.