This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Max Bruch's best known work today is Kol Nidrei, a piece for cello and orchestra built on a melody associated with the Jewish Kol Nidre prayer recited on the eve of Yom Kippur. The piece has provoked an enduring assumption among listeners that its composer must have been Jewish himself, a supposition the documented record of Bruch's own life, born in Cologne in 1838 and raised there, directly contradicts.
Bruch was raised Protestant and had no Jewish ancestry, a fact that stands against the assumption Kol Nidrei has repeatedly generated since its composition. The gap between the piece's religious subject matter, a melody drawn from Jewish liturgical practice for the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, and its composer's own Protestant upbringing marks Kol Nidrei as a documented case of a composer setting material from a religious tradition not his own, one of the better known instances of that pattern in the concert repertoire.
That the assumption of Jewish ancestry has endured despite the plain biographical facts says as much about how listeners read religious subject matter onto a composer's own identity as it does about Bruch himself, whose career of conducting and teaching posts in Liverpool and Berlin, alongside his own Violin Concerto and Scottish Fantasy, left no ambiguity in the documented record about his own Protestant background.