d pilgrimage,
through the lands and the centuries, along an endless, thorny path,
drenched with blood, watered with tears, across nations and thrones,
lonely, terrible, sublime with the stern sublimity of tragic scenes.
They are not the sights and experiences to inspire joyous songs--melody
is muffled by terror. Only lamentation finds voice, an endless,
oppressive, anxious wail, sounding adown, through two thousand years,
like a long-drawn sigh, reverberating in far-reaching echoes: "How long,
O Lord, how long!" and "When shall a redeemer arise for this people?"
These elegiac refrains Israel never wearies of repeating on all his
journeyings. Occasionally a fitful gleam of sunlight glides into the
crowded Jewish quarters, and at once a more joyous note is heard, rising
triumphant above the doleful plaint, a note which asserts itself
exultingly on the celebration in memory of the Maccabean heroes, on the
days of _Purim_, at wedding banquets, at the love-feasts of the pious
brotherhood. This fusion of melancholy and of rejoicing is the keynote
of mediaeval Jewish music growing out of the grotesque contrasts of
Jewish history. Yet, despite its romantic woe, it is informed with the
spirit of a remote past, making it the legitimate offspring of ancient
Hebrew music, whose characteristics, to be sure, we arrive at only by
guesswork. Of that mediaeval music of ours, the poet's words are true:
"It rejoices so pathetically, it laments so joyfully."

Whoever has heard, will never forget Israel's melodies, breaking forth
into rejoicing, then cast down with sadness: flinging out their notes to
the skies, then sinking into an abyss of grief: now elated, now
oppressed; now holding out hope, now moaning forth sorrow and pain. They
convey the whole of Judah's history--his glorious past, his mournful
present, his exalted future promised by God. As their tones flood our
soul, a succession of visions passes before our mental view: the Temple
in all its unexampled splendor, the exultant chorus of Levites, the
priests discharging their holy office, the venerable forms of the
patriarchs, the lawgiver-guide of the people, prophets with uplifted
finger of warning, worthy rabbis, pale-faced martyrs of the middle ages;
but the melodies conjuring before our minds all these shadowy figures
have but one burden: "How should we sing the song of the Lord on the
soil of the stranger?"

That is the ever-recurring _motif_ of the Jewish music of the middl