Kol Nidrei, Op. 47

Max Bruch was a Protestant Christian, given the middle name Christian by his own parents, with no Jewish ancestry on any documented branch of his family. He is nonetheless remembered today at least as much for Kol Nidrei, a cello piece built around one of the most solemn moments in the Jewish liturgical year, as for any of the purely instrumental concert works that made up the rest of his career.

The connection began with a friendship rather than a commission. While serving as music director of Berlin's Stern Choral Society from 1878 to 1880, Bruch was introduced by his own teacher Ferdinand Hiller to the Lichtenstein family, whose head, Cantor Abraham Jacob Lichtenstein, led Berlin's reform Jewish community and gave Bruch direct access to synagogue chant and Jewish folk melody. Bruch completed the piece in 1880 in Liverpool, where he had just taken up a conducting post, and dedicated it to the cellist Robert Hausmann, who gave its first performance.

Bruch defended the project in his own words, quoted since: "Even though I am a Protestant, as an artist I deeply felt the outstanding beauty of these melodies and therefore I gladly spread them through my arrangement." The Kol Nidre declaration itself, an Aramaic legal formula annulling unfulfilled vows recited as Yom Kippur evening worship opens, was not Bruch's to set as a matter of personal devotion; it became, in his hands, an outsider's tribute to a solemnity he could admire but never himself observe.

Max Bruch died in 1920, thirteen years before the Nazi party took power in Germany, and so never lived to see what became of his most famous piece under that regime. Nazi cultural authorities, purging German musical life of Jewish composers and Jewish-associated music, encountered Kol Nidrei's evident depth of feeling for a Jewish liturgical theme and drew the only conclusion their own ideology permitted them to draw: that no Christian composer could have written something so moving about a Jewish subject, and that Bruch must therefore have been secretly Jewish himself.

The reasoning was false at every step, and the record shows it plainly. Bruch was raised Protestant, given the explicitly Christian middle name Christian, and no documented ancestry connects him to Jewish descent on any side. What actually explains the piece is more mundane and, in its way, more interesting: a genuine personal friendship with a Berlin cantor in the late 1870s gave Bruch access to melodies he found beautiful enough to want to preserve and share, exactly as he said himself at the time. None of that mattered to authorities working from racial theory rather than biography. Bruch's music, Kol Nidrei above all, was forbidden on German airwaves for the duration of the regime.

The irony did not go unnoticed once the war ended and the ban lifted. A piece written as one outsider's tribute to a tradition not his own had been silenced by a regime that assumed genuine cross-tradition admiration of that kind was itself impossible, then vindicated by the simple fact of its own survival past the ban.