Abraham Zvi Idelsohn

Abraham Zvi Idelsohn (1882-1938) was a cantor and researcher of Jewish music. He was born in Filsberg, Latvia and began his study of Jewish music in Libau, where he trained as a cantor. He continued his education at the Stern Conservatory in Berlin and at the Leipzig Academy. Idelsohn served as cantor at the Adat Jeshurun Synagogue in Leipzig, and also in South Africa before emigrating to Israel in 1906. In Jerusalem he began working as a cantor and music teacher at the Hebrew Teachers’ College. Idelsohn was greatly influenced by the diversity of the Jewish community of Palestine and embarked on a massive project to record their unique musical and linguistic traditions. To this end, he was awarded a research grant from the Academy of Science in Vienna. In 1949 Idelsohn published the first volume of his seminal ten-volume work, Thesaurus of Hebrew Oriental Melodies, which was a comprehensive study of the Yemenite community. In subsequent volumes Idelsohn surveyed the musical traditions of Babylonian, Persian, Bukharan, Oriental Sephardi, Moroccan, German, Eastern European, and Hassidic communities in Palestine as well as the Diaspora.

In 1924, Idelsohn was contracted to catalogue the Eduard Birnbaum collection of Jewish music at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. Shortly thereafter he was appointed professor of Jewish music and liturgy at HUC, a position he held until 1934. With access to the Birnbaum collection, Idelsohn wrote extensively on the historical development of Jewish liturgical and cantorial music. While at HUC, he published the last five volumes of the Thesaurus, as well as two other major works, Jewish Music in its Historical Development (1929) and Jewish Liturgy (1932).