The Traditional Yiddish Folk Song

Eastern European Jews, dwellers of shtetls (small market towns), created a distinctive repertoire of traditional folk songs in eastern Yiddish that flourished from early modern times until the Holocaust. During this prolonged period, its various genres developed interconnections, both poetic and musical. Marked by conservatism and internal inspirations, traditional songs shared a creative adaptation of old western European elements, adopted before the Ashkenazi immigration to central-eastern Europe (i.e., before the sixteenth–seventeenth centuries), to their Slavic surroundings. A comparative analysis of poetics, music, performance contexts, and cultural backgrounds of three representative repertoires—lullabies, lyric songs, and ballads—reveals their idiosyncratic aesthetics and semiotics, which, although they cannot be confirmed by living members of the eastern European communities, can be deduced using an interdisciplinary approach, combining fieldwork among descendants and the examination of archival materials from folkloristic and historical-ethnomusicological perspectives.