The Polish Jewish violinist Bronislaw Huberman (1882–1947) is today largely unknown, even within the music world. But in his day, Huberman was an international celebrity whose fame was rivalled by few other classical virtuosos. If he is remembered today, it is mostly for his critical role in the foundation of the Palestine Symphony Orchestra in 1936, renamed the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in 1948. Huberman was not only the organizational driving force behind orchestra’s foundation. He also endowed the orchestra with an idea that went beyond the traditional purposes of musical institutions he intended the orchestra to represent.
Although Huberman was an all-European music figure according to his biography, he brought distinct American influences to Mandatory Palestine’s music scene. These American influences, while indirect, stemmed from his encounters and perceptions of the United States, which he visited repeatedly beginning in the 1920s. These visits greatly influenced his political outlook, turning him into one of the most vocal spokesmen of the Pan-Europe movement during the 1920s, and later a vocal critic of the Nazi regime. He further translated his beliefs onto a political–social understanding of an orchestra. He was eventually the intellectual and organizational force behind the orchestra’s founding. The story of the Palestine Symphony Orchestra and its American entanglement begins with the Polish Jewish violinist Bronislaw Huberman. This article explores a paradox at the heart of Huberman’s vision – the fact that a Central European musician developed his ideals for a united Europe through encounters with the United States – and then transferred them and their cosmopolitan ideals to a musical project in 1930s Palestine.
It is perhaps worth noting that Huberman’s musical project took place in a region and period marked by multiple layers of complexity and tension. Western and Zionist in nature and inspiration, it took shape in Mandatory Palestine during the period of British colonial rule. This was a time marked by growing Jewish immigration, Zionist state-building, and increasing resistance from the Palestinian Arab population to both. It was a region that had only recently been part of the Ottoman Empire. The establishment of Huberman’s Palestine Orchestra in this context was inevitably going to be much more complex and fraught than its founder could have imagined or perceived. How, for instance, was it perceived by the – often recently immigrated – Jewish population on the one hand, and by the local Palestinian communities, on the other? Was it perceived by the latter – despite the orchestra’s overtly cosmopolitan and transnational origins – as a facet of a white and culturally colonial project in a non-European colonial context? What kind of musical or even political disputes did it give rise to, especially against the backdrop of increasing conflict, especially the Great Revolt in 1936? While of clearly substantial interest, these questions lie outside the scope of this article, which consciously focuses on and retraces the experiences and evolution of Huberman’s thinking that eventually led to the design and creation of the orchestra.
While the orchestra was founded primarily to aid displaced German musicians under Nazi rule, its political and musical vision was shaped by Huberman’s experiences in the 1920s and 1930s in the United States. Although the orchestra’s German roots have been extensively studied, the American aspect is far less recognized. This American influence emerged not through the musicians who performed in the orchestra but through Huberman’s biography and intellectual career. I argue that there was a decidedly American imprint in the emergence of the Palestine Orchestra. The orchestral world in Mandatory Palestine was not yet fully developed, and America – that is, American influences, people, and political values – played a significant role in the emergence of the Palestine Orchestra and later the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.
State of the research and historical context: the Palestine Orchestra and Bronislaw Huberman
Scholarship on the role of classical music orchestras in society typically focuses on a narrow range of geographical contexts, primarily Western Europe and North America. Most of this literature engages in identifying and analysing orchestra tours and performances as examples of musical diplomacy. Prominent examples are Western orchestras performing goodwill tours in the Soviet Union during the Cold War.Footnote 1 The Boston Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of Charles Munch, became the first U.S. orchestra to perform such a tour in the USSR in 1956. Other cases included the Philadelphia Orchestra’s 1973 tour to China as an attempt to normalize relations with the United States, and the New York Philharmonic’s performance in North Korea in 2008.
The history of the Palestine Orchestra is notable for its transnational connection with the United States during the British Mandate period. Existing scholarship primarily interprets its creation through a Zionist lens, viewing it as a consequence of German-Jewish immigration to Mandatory Palestine, which often overlooks American influences. Three key works by musicologists focus on this perspective: Philip Bohlman examines how German-Jewish immigrants aimed to restore high cultural institutions they had left behind, while Peter Gradenwitz discusses the development of cultural life in Palestine as part of ‘the beginnings of the new national home’ that shaped national identity. Jehoash Hirshberg offers an overview of musical life in Palestine from 1880 to 1948.Footnote 2
Scholarship on Bronislaw Huberman is rather sparse. A recent monograph by the German political scientist Hans-Wolfgang Platzer offers a study of Huberman’s engagement with Pan-Europeanism, making use of his political writings.Footnote 3 Among the non-academic treatments of Huberman’s life, Josh Aronson’s documentary Orchestra of Exiles and its subsequent volume of the same title deserve mention.Footnote 4
While Huberman focused on high European art music as a form of cultural diplomacy and internationalism, emphasizing the diversity of Jewish immigration to Mandatory Palestine, other musical initiatives in the region reflected different ideologies and aims. Indeed, Huberman’s disinterest in ‘Jewish music’ and his unabashed embrace of European repertoire stood in sharp contrast to the concerns of other musical projects in the Yishuv. Composers such as Paul Ben-Haim (1897–1984), Stefan Wolpe (1902–1972), Alexander Uriah Boskovich (1907–1964), and Joseph Tal (1910–2008) – Huberman’s contemporaries – contributed to an emerging Jewish musical culture through modernist experimentation and the reimagining of Jewish musical traditions. Ben-Haim, for example, collaborated with Israeli folk singer Bracha Zefira (1910–1990) to incorporate Middle Eastern Jewish musical idioms. Wolpe, although a modernist composer, became well known for arranging folk songs for kibbutz choirs.Footnote 5 Within Palestinian Arab communities, meanwhile, a rich tradition of Arab art music flourished during the Mandate period.Footnote 6
Musical life was active not only among composers, but also among ethnomusicologists. Abraham Zvi Idelsohn (1882–1938) studied the music of Sephardic and Middle Eastern Jews in Jerusalem.Footnote 7 Meanwhile, Judah Magnes (1877–1948), the American president of Hebrew University, supported Robert Lachmann’s (1892–1939) Archive of Oriental Music at Hebrew University, which documented Arab and Sephardic musical traditions. These diverse musical visions reveal a rich and highly contested cultural landscape in Mandatory Palestine, which stood in contrast to and was often at odds with Huberman’s Eurocentric internationalism. Archival materials of the Palestine Orchestra and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra are located in various archives in Israel and the United States. The official collection of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, situated in the Bronfman Auditorium in Tel Aviv, contains programmes, posters, recordings, photographs, and newspaper articles. While some materials about Huberman are found here, most of the violinist’s personal papers are held at the Felicja Blumental Music Center Archives and Library in Tel Aviv.
Huberman’s intellectual and political path: from America and Europe to Palestine
The politics of music: Bronislaw Huberman’s musical internationalism
Huberman was an international celebrity in the 1920s and 1930s whose fame was rivalled only by a few other classical violin virtuosi such as Fritz Kreisler (1875–1962) and Jascha Heifetz (1901–1987). Leading a nomadic life, he lived in various Western cities such as Berlin, Vienna, and New York. Born into a secular Jewish family in Czestochowa (then part of the Russian Empire), he began studying the violin at the age of six. In 1892, when he was ten, he moved to Berlin to study with the renowned violinist Joseph Joachim (1831–1907).Footnote 8
Huberman began his itinerant virtuoso lifestyle shortly after leaving Berlin, with a series of small recitals in Belgium and France. In 1895, he performed at Adelina Patti’s farewell concert in Vienna, gaining attention from prominent journalists. He was soon invited to perform at important concerts that would solidify his status as an important young virtuoso, where he was expected to perform at a high level, but also speak and socialize with important composers like Brahms after concerts, in addition to journalists and dignitaries.
These were the necessary preconditions for the rise of international celebrities in classical music, with Huberman being a prime case.Footnote 9 The development of a transnational classical music world, facilitated by improved travel and communication, enabled European figures like Huberman to engage deeply with the United States and its musical scene. Huberman’s frequent visits to the United States led him to appreciate American society and its democratic values, which influenced his political activism and his strategic vision for the orchestra.
Bronislaw Huberman, American influences, and the formation of his musico-political vision
Huberman’s American connection began in 1896 with his Carnegie Hall debut during a U.S. tour, followed by numerous European tours.Footnote 10 A pivotal visit in 1921, his first prolonged stay at the age of 39, left him deeply impressed by the country’s democratic practices. He arrived on 11 October for a forty-concert tour, concluding on 2 January 1922, which included five performances with Richard Strauss.Footnote 11 Huberman returned for consecutive visits in October 1922, October 1923, and November 1924. These early 1920s trips significantly shaped his musico-political thought as he later established the Palestine Orchestra.
Huberman’s early public exposure throughout Europe and the United States no doubt helped train him to become a ‘musical diplomat’. He began publishing his ideas about the techniques and vocation of musical virtuosity in articles and interviews in various international newspapers.Footnote 12 Huberman was unusual in the sense that only an articulate and outspoken person like him, a musical ‘thinker’ and ‘politician’, could have taken the initiative to create an orchestra in Palestine.
Huberman began exploring the connections between music and politics even prior to his first adult American concert tour in 1921. His short piece, ‘Artists and Concert Life: As Affected by the War’, was his first appearance on the ‘political stage’, and the beginning of what would eventually crystallize into a defined political programme. The essay was published six months before his formative 1921 sojourn to the United States. In it, he wrote about the effects of war on artists and concert life. He rightly attributed the current economic plight in Europe to the outcome of World War I, stressing the impact it had on the music world and travelling musicians.
Huberman interpreted the economic post-war crisis as having a two-fold impact, affecting musicians and audiences alike. Travelling musicians, he complained, were suffering from poor sleeping facilities, overcrowded trains and ships, and from an overwhelmed bureaucracy that caused concert cancellations. While even before the war an artist’s existence had ‘involved the fight for life and assertion of his personality’, it had now become ‘almost a martyrdom’.Footnote 13 Additionally, high ticket prices meant that concert audiences were made up overwhelmingly by the wealthy strata of society who, in Huberman’s view, were often not cultured enough to appreciate and understand the music’s meaning. This further promoted a classical music culture based on class. To make things worse, as Huberman pointed out, economic hardships also led to rising nationalism in the political sphere, which meant that musicians who performed around Europe were pressured to play ‘national’ music.Footnote 14
Huberman was hinting at a larger issue beyond mere ‘chauvinism’ in national music. Classical music played a significant role in nationalist movements from the early nineteenth century, such as Chopin’s revolutionary étude inspired by the 1831 Russian–Polish war and Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, prompted by the 1848 revolutions.Footnote 15 Wagner’s essay ‘Judaism in Music’ (1850) exemplifies how music was used to express nationalist beliefs and antisemitic views prevalent in early Romantic discourse.Footnote 16 While Wagner’s views were extreme, they represented a broader current of nationalist ideas in German culture and politics during Huberman’s lifetime, which he actively opposed.
Huberman’s American-inspired musical politics: from My Road to Pan Europe (1925) to Vaterland Europa (1932)
Huberman’s first major concert tour in the United States eventually led him to write and publish his first serious political treatises. In fact, Huberman did not return home after his first major U.S. concert tour, which began in October 1921 and ended in January 1922. Instead, he stayed on privately until May 1922, exploring the country and its society. This period allowed him to flesh out some of the ideas he had already expressed in the April 1921 essay, ‘Artists and Concert Life: As Affected by the War’.Footnote 17 The seven-month-long stay in the United States in 1921–1922, coming as it did at a time of widespread economic and political crisis in Europe in the wake of the destructive Great War, greatly stimulated Huberman’s political consciousness. The trip’s impressions provided the necessary elements to turn him in the following decades into a dedicated political intellectual and activist. Huberman eventually became one of the most vocal advocates of a united Europe in his day, certainly the most articulate musician in the service of the Pan-Europe movement after he officially joined the movement in 1924.Footnote 18 Huberman, of course, did not ‘invent’ the concept of Pan-Europe; however, his understanding of it was deeply rooted in his American experiences. Paradoxically, it was his U.S. trip that sparked his transformation into a Pan-Europeanist, as his convictions were profoundly influenced and shaped by the encounters and observations he made during his time in America. As someone who was educated and lived in many places and countries, he perhaps felt ‘at home’ almost everywhere. Most importantly, he was at home in music – an art notably independent of the linguistic barriers inhibiting other arts, and cultural boundaries that often coincide with national borders. It should therefore not surprise us if his lifestyle preconditioned his susceptibility for Pan-European thought.
The Pan-Europe movement was initiated by the Austrian-Japanese politician and philosopher Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, who founded the movement in response to the growing, violent nationalism he observed after the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. Coudenhove-Kalergi viewed this nationalism with alarm, as creating ‘a new and dangerous disorder’ rather than the conditions necessary for a durable general peace.Footnote 19 His Pan-Europe movement sought to provide a constructive response to the catastrophe Europe had suffered through the Great War by advocating for the political and economic unification of the continent.Footnote 20 The movement’s ideas were disseminated through its monthly journal Paneuropa and through its congresses.Footnote 21 The final congress, tellingly, took place outside of Europe – in New York City in 1943 – where Coudenhove-Kalergi was at that time a visiting professor at New York University. The Pan-Europe movement attracted several politicians from the Left and Right, and numerous thinkers, writers, and historians, including Thomas Mann and Bernard Shaw.Footnote 22 Besides Huberman, other famous musicians supporting the movement included Bruno Walter, Fritz Kreisler, and Richard Strauss, but these artists were not as articulate in their support for the Pan-Europe movement. Indeed, Coudenhove-Kalergi remarked that Huberman ‘devoted himself enthusiastically to the cause of Pan-Europe’.Footnote 23
Huberman expressed his ideas, and showed their American origins, in two publications – My Road to Pan-Europe, published in 1925, and Vaterland Europa, in 1932.Footnote 24 In My Road to Pan-Europe, Huberman returned to his positive impressions of the United States during his American tours which led him to advocate a United States of Europe even before Coudenhove-Kalergi founded the Pan-Europe movement.Footnote 25 He wrote that his American impressions ‘were the basis on which the idea arose in me of the “United States of Europe” as the only possibility and necessity, our poor part of the world, the minimum required for life, which was missing up to now.’Footnote 26 He gave his analysis of the social and economic ills of his time while arguing for the benefits of a federal Europe. According to Huberman, a united Europe would help save the continent from the political and economic degradation experienced in consequence of the First World War and the surge of nationalism.
Writing about his American impressions, he stated: ‘What struck me most forcibly in America was not the enormous opulence of the individual, of which we hear many erroneous tales in Europe, but rather the general prosperity of the masses’.Footnote 27 Huberman wrote of his astonishment at the wealth of some of these American ‘proletarians’ – ‘the floor-waiter serving me’, for instance, who ‘declined my offer of a free ticket for a symphony concert in which I took part, for the simple reason that he had a season ticket for all the concerts’.Footnote 28 Or his encounter with a former and rather mediocre violinist of the Warsaw Philharmonic, who continued to be a last-chair violinist in an American orchestra, but who was nevertheless able to afford a car with his salary. America’s wealth, for Huberman, was even greater given the favourable relation between wages and prices: the high wages of the average American worker and the low prices of the final product resulted in the typical American being ‘16 to 40 times better off than the European!’Footnote 29 Huberman saw Ford’s auto factory as the quintessentially American company and as a perfect example of mass production for a mass market.
By contrast, he lamented that the European ‘multiplicity of separate states’ produced not only wars, but inevitably also ‘custom duties and war taxes’, which held the continent back economically.Footnote 30 A united and – therefore – economically prosperous Europe, Huberman argued, would mean ‘for the proletariat no more and no less than liberation from an age-long servitude which cannot be eliminated in any other way’.Footnote 31 Apart from the economic and social benefits, a united Europe would also relegate war to history – because ‘where there are no frontiers there can be no wars and covert hatred is mitigated into tolerance’.Footnote 32 Like Coudenhove-Kalergi, Huberman concluded the extended essay by stating what he believed were eight benefits that would result from a united Europe: ‘1) Higher wages, 2) Lower Prices, 3) Free Competition, 4) Greater Wealth, 5) Higher standard of living, 6) Conversion of the destructive political wage conflicts into constructive economic ones, 7) Automatic decline of communism, 8) Pacifism’.Footnote 33 Huberman’s very own contribution to Coudenhove-Kalergi’s arguments was an explanation of the role that the arts were to play in the unification of the United States, and of unifying Europe.Footnote 34
Elaborating on these ideas in his second publication seven years later, Vaterland Europa, Huberman repeatedly asserted that it was his duty as a musician to participate in politics. Art, according to him, always had a political purpose. Huberman’s insistence on the broader purpose and responsibility of art ran counter to the nineteenth-century ideal of ‘art for art’s sake’. The artist’s foremost social role was ‘to service man’, to ‘[create] for men and women, to bring them joy and inspiration and forgetfulness of their cares. . . . Thus art, truly conceived, is bound up with a social function’.Footnote 35 Huberman’s definition of art implies, therefore, a political potential for music (and opposes the view of l’art pour l’art). But while he asserted his Pan-European convictions as a political internationalist, Huberman maintained a national conception of art. The oft-repeated phrase ‘art is international’ was incorrect, since for him, all true art was rooted in the nation. There could be ‘no manner of doubt that, in the case of a voluntary union of the nations, each would keep its own culture intact. Moreover, there would be nothing to hinder the incorporation of cultural clauses in the constitution of the different countries’.Footnote 36
Huberman’s two musico-political writings are important because they demonstrate how his life as an internationally active virtuoso and, in particular, his observations of the United States, informed his identity as a political activist. Huberman’s international experiences and his time in the United States left an indelible impression on him. Ultimately, his American experiences – as well as the political outlook that resulted from them – influenced his plan, concepts, form, and ‘design’ for the future Palestine Orchestra. But before he would arrive at this decision, two crucial events in 1929 and 1933 had to take place, which pushed Huberman to embrace Zionism.
Huberman’s turn to Zionism: the influence of American encounters
Throughout his solo concert tour in 1929 to Mandatory Palestine, Huberman gained a first-hand experience of Zionism in action. This visit was followed by two additional solo concert tours in 1931 and 1934. In speeches and articles, he commented on the economic, social, and educational effects of Zionism as he observed them in Palestine. While Huberman was impressed by the idealistic and creative environment during his 1929 visit, he was rather indifferent to the Jewish national movement during this time. However, the Nazi seizure of power in Germany in 1933 transformed Huberman’s attitude towards Zionism. It ended any possibility for the Pan-European movement to succeed in Europe. It also made him identify consciously as Jewish and be actively interested in Zionism.
In 1934, Huberman finally publicly declared his support for Zionism. This speech took place when, in October 1934, Huberman returned to the United States for the first time in eight years for a sixty-day tour of forty concerts.Footnote 37 On 9 December, he spoke to the American Palestine Music Association (MAILAMM) at the Jewish Club in New York.Footnote 38 At the MAILAMM-organized event, Huberman addressed an audience consisting of potential American donors who could help fund the orchestral project. Openly acknowledging the positive attributes of Zionism, Huberman began by admitting his past indifference to the movement, not because he believed it was inherently contradictory to the Pan-Europe movement, but simply due to his devotion to Pan-Europeanism.
The observations Huberman made in the 1934 MAILAMM speech were strikingly similar to his positive impressions of the United States in his two political treatises of 1925 and 1932 discussed in the last section.Footnote 39 Huberman emphasized that his impressions of Palestine and America were positive and similar because both places appeared to him as ‘young’ societies, unburdened by the hierarchical traditions of ‘old’ European society. Thus, for example, he admired the way chauffeurs in Tel Aviv were able to organize a union to buy high-quality American cars on credit and slowly pay off the debts so that all could enjoy shared ownership of the cars. Such comments echoed those of his earlier observations in My Road to Pan Europe about America where, ‘the workers are organised in the most powerful trade-unions, with whose help they maintain their high standard of living’.Footnote 40 Hence Huberman’s comments demonstrate admiration for two positive and shared characteristics in both the United States and Palestine. First, it is evident that Huberman admired labour unions and their benefits to working people. Second, he possibly admired the relative, modest wealth he observed somewhat superficially in the United States and Mandatory Palestine as compared, one must assume, to poorer conditions in Europe at those respective points in time.Footnote 41
Huberman continued his critique by stating his hopes for the new Jewish state: ‘I believe firmly that Palestine will in a very short time be the first country where the human humiliation of a culture limited only to a class section will disappear . . . one cannot help [but] imagine that this may be the proper atmosphere for the creation of a new, a definite gospel of salvation of humanity’.Footnote 42 Huberman’s statements on Palestine are in line with his earlier pronouncements where he praised the material availability of classical music to working people in the United States and condemned the ‘class character’ of classical music in Europe. In the speech, Huberman made repeated references to the great number of workers who attended his Palestinian concerts and expressed his hope that Palestine would create a culture based on community rather than class. These statements also echoed his earlier views in My Road to Pan Europe that a united Europe was necessary if the class character of culture, which for Huberman had reflected the great gap between the bourgeoisie and proletariat, was to be overcome.Footnote 43
From America via Pan-Europe to Palestine: the American influences on the birth of the Palestine Orchestra
Pan-Europe through music: Huberman’s decision to create the Palestine Orchestra
Huberman’s cherished vision of Pan-Europe grew out of his impressions in, and understanding of, the United States in the early 1920s. But after 1933, Huberman’s vision of a ‘promised land’ – Pan-Europe – was trampled upon by the Nazi regime. Moreover, the Nazi regime’s persecution of Jews created a constant stream of refugees. Thus, nearly a year after Hitler’s rise to power, Huberman creatively resolved his intellectual dilemma by ‘transferring’ his vision for a Pan-Europe onto Palestine.Footnote 44 It is during this time that Huberman decided to establish the orchestra. The intellectual ‘journey’ that the United States made through Huberman from his experiences there in the early 1920s, to shaping his ideas about Pan-Europe, eventually led to a vision for an orchestra to be created in Palestine.
Huberman was not the only, or even the first, artist with the goal of creating an orchestra in Palestine. A few failed attempts were made to establish orchestras before Huberman’s time, mostly by Russian immigrants.Footnote 45 But the orchestra that posed a challenge to Huberman’s ambitions was the Jerusalem-based orchestra of the Palestine Broadcasting Service (PBS) founded in 1936. The orchestra of the PBS (today the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra) was smaller and tended to perform chamber music and works for chamber orchestra.Footnote 46 Despite these earlier attempts, Huberman was the first artist to possess a broad, ideological vision for a classical music orchestra in Mandatory Palestine. In addition, he was ultimately the most successful founder of an orchestra in Mandatory Palestine.
The short-lived Palestine Philharmonic Symphony Union framework, founded in 1934, provided an organizational basis from which Huberman could work.Footnote 47 Roughly fifty musicians, led by the German-Jewish refugee conductor Wolfgang Friedlaender (1907–1991), created the Symphony Union.Footnote 48 Friedlaender, along with the immigrant conductors Mordechai Golinkin (the founder of the Palestine Opera), Ilja D. Jacobsohn, and Michael Taube (1890–1972), began performing subscription concerts in December 1934.Footnote 49 Taube had previously been active in the Berlin State Opera, and his forced emigration from Berlin in 1934 allowed Friedlaender’s orchestra to expand its activities. The small amateur ensemble played a variety of old and new classical compositions including works by Paul Hindemith. But the orchestra’s low-quality wind and string players often lacked dedication to the project. Most importantly, immigration quotas hindered Friedlaender’s ability to attract top professional musicians. The British administration in Palestine ‘classified each application according to four categories, and only applicants who had a capital of at least 1,000 pounds or professionals backed by local employers in Mandatory Palestine were granted certificates without any difficulty’.Footnote 50 It appeared that without money and the ability to attract high-calibre musicians, the institution would soon collapse.
After his visit to Palestine in January 1934, Huberman began a campaign to establish the orchestra in earnest by writing to several renowned musical figures such as the Spanish cellist Pablo Casals and the Hungarian-born composer and conductor George Szell, while receiving advice from Friedlaender and Taube. But according to a booklet issued on the occasion of the Israel Philharmonic’s twenty-fifth anniversary in 1961, Huberman was often met with ‘inertia, derision and disbelief in the possibility of executing his plans’.Footnote 51 Nevertheless, he was able to convince the conductors William Steinberg, Michael Taube, and Issay Dobrowen to help him find and audition high-calibre refugee musicians from throughout Europe, most of whom had just arrived in Palestine from Nazi Germany.Footnote 52 Huberman himself travelled to European cities, conducting the final round of auditions and persuading talented but hesitant musicians to move to Palestine.Footnote 53 The actual process of bringing Jewish musicians from Nazi Germany and then Central Europe was a complicated and gradual process that took many years, and there was still a large turnover of musicians after the Palestine Orchestra’s first season owing to the difficulties of bringing Jewish musicians to Palestine.Footnote 54 The orchestra’s musicians from 1936 onwards drew not only from musicians from Germany and throughout Europe and the United States, but also from musicians already living in Palestine. In total, seventy-three musicians initially joined the orchestra, with fifty-three who had arrived from Europe, including nineteen from Poland and sixteen from Germany.Footnote 55
In addition to auditioning and selecting musicians, Huberman also embarked on a fundraising initiative. Initial financial help for the orchestra came primarily from Israel Sieff (1889–1972) and Rebecca Sieff (1890–1966) of London, the latter of whom was the founder of the Women’s International Zionist Organization.Footnote 56 By 30 April 1934, Huberman had already sent the Sieffs a draft outlining the financial and concert plans for the Palestine Orchestra. The letter to the Sieffs contained a detailed outline of Huberman’s plans for the first and subsequent seasons, going into such issues as the pricing of tickets, the number of concerts that should be open to workers, and the creation of orchestra committees in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa.Footnote 57 These plans fit into his goal of creating an orchestra that would reflect and embody his ideological commitments to the Pan-European movement. For instance, Huberman’s commitment to low ticket prices would enable the lower classes to attend concerts, thus breaking up the class character of music. These plans show that for Huberman, Pan-Europeanism was more than just the breaking down of borders – there was a social component to it – and one that was heavily influenced by his American experiences.
Huberman’s 1934 tour to Palestine resulted in impressions that had elements of his American-inspired Pan-European vision. Concluding his tour to Palestine in January 1934, the violinist gave a speech at the home of Gershon Agron – then editor of The Palestine Post – just two days after his final solo concert there, on 20 January 1934.Footnote 58 Huberman continued to profess his belief in Pan-Europeanism, yet at the same time expressed admiration for the Zionist movement. He proclaimed at the end of the speech the importance of cultural nation-building stating, ‘let’s work for music in Palestine’, an indication that he would soon create an orchestra in Palestine.Footnote 59 Barely two months later, in a speech delivered in London on 16 March 1934, Huberman explained that, during his concert tour, he saw his vision for a united Europe and his support for a Jewish nation-state in the making almost meld in Palestine:
What I saw in Palestine I regard as a new and better Europe. There is an idealism that will perhaps also pull its weight in getting Europe out of the chaos in which it finds itself. And if ever a Pan-Europe is achieved, it will be the wealthier for another federated state – Palestine. Today Palestine is the one European oasis in Asia.Footnote 60
In other words, ‘Europe’ for Huberman was defined crucially by its cultural foundations, by a certain spiritual condition – an ‘idealism’ now found in Palestine. His description of a future Israel as a ‘federated state’ is a reference to the principle that he saw as underlying a Pan-Europe. Mandatory Palestine was redefined as ‘Europe’, reflecting the Eurocentric vision of Zionism. Huberman perceived it as the epitome of European essence, which he believed was crucial for the foundation of a future Pan-Europe. Here, once again, we see how closely the musician’s Pan-Europeanist vision was bound up with his conceptions of culture and society. Huberman’s conceptions of culture and society were partially shaped by his American impressions; what he observed in the United States – regardless of its validity upon critical examination – impressed him as a positive model of culture and society.
The Palestine Orchestra and Huberman’s American-influenced musico-political vision: social composition and concert programming
The creation of the orchestra allowed Huberman to reconcile a continued commitment to his American-inspired Pan-European ideals with his support for the national Zionist movement. But this resolution did not take place as a purely intellectual or political movement in a vacuum. Ultimately, this reconciliation happened alongside his shock and anger about the antisemitic persecution and far-right nationalism of Nazi Germany. Consequently, Huberman’s determination to aid Jewish musical colleagues within Nazi Germany was further amplified.
In drawing up plans for the Palestinian orchestra, Huberman devoted considerable thought to three aspects: its social and national composition, its concert plans, and its repertoire for the inaugural concerts. All three of these show that Huberman envisioned not just an orchestra in Palestine that would serve as a safe musical haven for refugee musicians from Germany. He sought to imbue the orchestra project with his politico-cultural vision. It was only to be expected that this consciously and actively political man, who believed in an intimate linkage between the arts, society, and politics, should have endowed his most ambitious musical project with political meaning.
Moreover, an indispensable precondition for Huberman’s ambitious project was an international group of high-calibre Jewish musicians, including some from the United States. Huberman sought more than just a Jewish orchestra in Palestine, primarily composed of refugees; he aimed for a high-class ensemble, necessitating a broader search for talent beyond German refugees. This orchestra resembled a Jewish ‘Europe en miniature’ – a musical Pan-Europe in Palestine. Many musicians in the inaugural concert season were not only refugees from Nazi persecution but also hailed from around the world, including top Jewish talents from Warsaw, Budapest, Zagreb, The Hague, Paris, Buenos Aires, and Tbilisi. Among them were two wind players from the United States – a flautist from Chicago and an oboist from Ohio – who participated in the first concert.Footnote 61 For Huberman and the musicians, this orchestra of first-class Jewish talent, many of whom were refugees, represented a powerful rebuttal to antisemitic lies, showcasing the absurdity of Nazi propaganda that dismissed talented Jewish musicians.Footnote 62
Huberman’s writings reveal concertizing plans that included non-Jewish soloists performing, and that concerts would occasionally be led by non-Jewish conductors.Footnote 63 He also planned for the orchestra to tour other countries as a symbol of international brotherhood and to serve ‘as an eloquent accusation against the barbarism of the Hitler regime’.Footnote 64 In particular, three aspects from the Palestine Orchestra’s early history show how Huberman sought to shape the orchestra into a marker of international understanding, an expression of Jewish musical achievement, and a powerful rebuttal to Nazi propaganda: He invited the Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini (1867–1957) to conduct the new orchestra’s inaugural concert; he extended an invitation to the outspokenly anti-Nazi, German, and non-Jewish violinist Adolf Busch to solo during the first season; and finally, he led the orchestra to concertize in Egypt – then, as Palestine, still under British control – during its first season.
Indeed, Huberman’s vision regarded the orchestra’s international guest artists and presence as an essential element and goal of the institution’s identity to demonstrate that music could, should, and in fact did overcome national borders and differences. Huberman publicly explained the importance he attached to having the internationally famous Toscanini, co-music director of the New York Philharmonic from 1926 to 1936, conduct the inaugural season of the Palestine Symphony Orchestra.
In an article published on 26 May 1936, in the American magazine The Reform Advocate, Huberman argued that Toscanini’s presence during the symbolically important inaugural concert would enable the new cultural institution to function ‘in the same spirit I have been fighting and working for these many years in Europe – international understanding and brotherhood’.Footnote 65 The Italian-born, U.S.-based Toscanini was an excellent choice for the inaugural concert. Like Huberman, Toscanini was not just leading an itinerant lifestyle as a virtuoso. He was also a committed anti-fascist, and his public attacks on Mussolini and Hitler showed a courageous personality that refused to float with the political tide.Footnote 66 Toscanini, who understood Huberman’s invitation in political terms, accepted on 22 February 1936, and news of the decision reverberated through the American and Palestinian Jewish press. Thus, The New York Times proclaimed on 23 February 1936, ‘Conductor Accepts Invitation for Opening Symphony of Tel-Aviv in October – Declares It His Duty to “Fight” for Cause of Artists Persecuted by Nazis’.Footnote 67 An article published on 24 December 1936 in The Palestine Post described Toscanini’s decision to conduct the inaugural concert as logical, given his anti-Nazi stance, and a 4 January 1937 article pointed to the great symbolic significance of Toscanini’s presence.Footnote 68 Toscanini visited Palestine for the first time a few months later, after the agreement with Huberman was made.
The choice of soloist for the inaugural concerts was as symbolically significant as that of the conductor. In several articles, Huberman stated that he wanted a non-Jewish soloist to show the orchestra’s international and intercultural openness.Footnote 69 He convinced Adolf Busch (1891–1952), a non-Jewish, anti-Fascist violinist, to perform. Busch, who had fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and sought refuge in the United States, refused to perform in Nazi-occupied territories. A New York Times article after his first performance with the orchestra in early 1937 remarked that ‘although both he and his wife were entirely non-Jewish, they left Germany in April 1933, never to return as long as the swastika flew there, and artists were persecuted because of their religion or ancestry’.Footnote 70 Like Toscanini, Busch agreed to perform without compensation, seeing his participation in clear political terms. Busch first performed on 17 January 1937, in the Levant Fair Hall in Tel Aviv, where he played the Brahms violin concerto. Nazi newspapers derisively called him the ‘Zionists’ publicity goy’, highlighting the orchestra’s stance against everything the Nazis stood for: international brotherhood and liberal Zionism.Footnote 71
Last, Huberman’s travel plans for the orchestra were also designed to underscore his vision of the Palestine Orchestra as an institution embodying international brotherhood. He had more than once argued that the Palestine Orchestra’s concerts abroad would serve ‘as the most eloquent accusation against the barbarism of the Hitler regime, as the most effective defense of the creative and constructive Jewish genius’.Footnote 72 Concerts outside of Palestine, Huberman thought, would also demonstrate in the clearest possible way ‘the mission of music as an instrument of international goodwill’.Footnote 73 In an article published in 1940 in the South African Jewish Chronicle, Huberman went further, arguing that the orchestra’s inaugural season concerts in Egypt ‘could help to bring about better relations between Jews and Moslems’.Footnote 74 This was how Huberman envisaged the orchestra’s ‘politics of music’: as an ensemble that served an internationalist and Jewish agenda, as a tool of both a musical diplomacy for understanding and goodwill, and a ‘musical propaganda’ to combat Nazi lies and defending Jewish culture.Footnote 75
The first concert: the 1937 public repertoire debate and Huberman’s reaction
The Palestinian Arab revolt, which began in April 1936, led the British army to impose strict restrictions, and resulted in the inaugural concert being moved from April to December.Footnote 76 Before the inaugural concert, the important dress rehearsal concert took place on 25 December before a private audience including the first chancellor of Hebrew University: the American Judah Magnes. The inaugural concert, conducted by Toscanini, was held on 26 December 1936, in a 2,500-seat pavilion built for the recent Levant Fair. David Ben-Gurion, then President of the Jewish Agency, Chaim Weizmann, and British High Commissioner Sir Arthur Wauchope were the main political guests for the 26 December concert.Footnote 77 It was followed by seven days of concerts in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa, which were attended by an estimated total of 15,000 people. Toscanini left Palestine on 6 January to take the orchestra on its first foreign tour to Cairo and Alexandria from 7 to 12 January.
Reviews of the concert were positive, for example, The Palestine Post’s concert review, which described the orchestra as ‘a musical institution inaugurated under more auspicious circumstances’.Footnote 78 The New York Times praised the musicians for performing for the first time under the famed Toscanini: ‘as most of the musicians were playing for the first time in public under Toscanini, nevertheless all fears were dispelled with the rendition of Rossini’s overture, which proved immediately the high quality of the musicians’.Footnote 79 The orchestra even caught the attention of the British authorities, many of whom attended the inaugural concerts, and was referenced in the Peel Commission, where the report stated that ‘the cultural achievement of this little community of 400,000 people is one of the most remarkable features of the National Home’.Footnote 80
Huberman and members of the orchestra understood that mastery of a standard orchestral repertoire was still the safest way to be taken seriously by other international ensembles. The inaugural concert in Tel Aviv included a sampling of five works: Rossini’s Overture to La Scala di seta, Brahms’s Symphony No. 2, Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Weber’s Overture to Oberon. The repertoire was mostly repeated during the week-long concerts except for a special Beethoven concert in Tel Aviv on 2 January, which included Symphony No. 3 (Eroica), Egmont, Op. 84, Symphony No. 1, and Overture Leonore No. 3.Footnote 81
The orchestra’s public perception of the inaugural concerts by contemporaries was mixed at best. Musicologist Jehoash Hirshberg speaks of a ‘repertory quagmire’ emerging from the public dissatisfaction with the selection of Western classical music works.Footnote 82 Indeed, the orchestra’s heavy focus on Western classical and, in particular, German repertoire almost immediately became an object of criticism and contention. Public concern in Palestine about Huberman’s choice of repertoire became so prominent that a public debate on the new orchestra was arranged on 2 June 1937, at the Ohel Shem auditorium in Tel Aviv. It is not entirely clear who convened the public debate in which an unknown number of audience participants discussed the ‘worthiness’ of this newly formed cultural institution on account of what, in the eyes of the critics, were misguided concert repertoire choices. The major voices in this forum were a judge, Zedekiah Harkabi, a prosecutor, D. Levin, a music critic, Menashe Ravina, and another critic, Dr Hans Steinitz.Footnote 83 The forum was organized as a neutral ‘show trial’, where critics expressed their approval or disapproval of the young orchestra.Footnote 84
Levin criticized the lack of Jewish music performed by the orchestra. Ravina commented that Jewish music was not played at the inaugural concerts because of its ‘weakness’.Footnote 85 In general, those present expressed concern about what they saw as the over-representation of non-Jewish composers in the repertoire: three German composers, one Austrian, and one Italian – only one of whom, Mendelssohn, was Jewish. Some even alleged that Huberman intended ‘to turn Palestine into the capital of German music’Footnote 86 – a particularly explosive indictment given the context of Nazi rule in Germany – and called on Jewish composers to create music for the benefit of the country. For these critics in Palestine who tried to create a distinctly national Jewish culture, Mendelssohn and other German composers stood for German culture – not for the cosmopolitan culture that Huberman discerned in their music and the internationalism that he was attempting to promote by playing them.
The debate demonstrated that building an orchestra that bore the imprint of Huberman’s musical internationalism could easily cause bewilderment and opposition in an environment where nation-building, cultural and otherwise, was the primary concern and raison d’être of the Zionist movement. To be sure, Huberman was not alone in supporting the Zionist cause while questioning nationalism. Other such figures included the American rabbi Judah Magnes (1877–1948), first chancellor of Hebrew University and advocate for a binational state in Palestine, and the German-Jewish writer Arnold Zweig (1887–1968), a pacifist and socialist Zionist, both of whom represented similar positions.Footnote 87
Zionism was a house with many rooms, spacious enough to accommodate rather different and sometimes incompatible positions under its roof. But as some of the public reactions to the Palestine Orchestra’s first performances showed, Huberman’s politics of musical internationalism found little favour with many. This is what brought the disputatious participants to the Tel Aviv theatre building Ohel Shem to discuss the orchestra’s ‘worthiness’ in the first place; and it was also why they disputed the ‘worthiness’ of an orchestra that played almost all German classical music and refrained from playing just ‘Jewish music’.
Huberman criticized the high esteem in which ‘Jewish’ music had been held for many years, both before and after this debate. In 1940, he stated that he regarded ‘Jewish music’ – which for him was nothing but simple folk and synagogue music – as unworthy of orchestral performance.Footnote 88 Asked in a March 1937 speech in Boston, months before the public debate in June, whether the orchestra would perform ‘Jewish music’, Huberman explained:
What is Jewish music? . . . Is it the temple chants, the ditties of folklore? But those are not art music. In the past the Jew has made music in the image of the people with whom he dwelt. Give us security and the chance to assert the virtues of our race in song. Then perhaps we may do something worthwhile. Beethovens are the product of long disciplines; they represent a spirit that has had time to develop and assert itself. Our time will come.Footnote 89
Huberman believed that Jewish music – and Jewish national culture generally – still needed time to develop before it could reach a standard comparable with that of other nations. This again shows that Huberman was not opposed to ‘national’ music, but preferred classical music. In another newspaper article he was quoted as saying: ‘Perhaps a Jewish music will grow in Palestine; I don’t know . . . I think it is rather better that a great Jewish music should come’.Footnote 90 This also underlines that Huberman did not think there was such a thing as ‘Jewish art music’ yet. As he elaborated in his earlier writings, Huberman in fact believed that ‘all true art is rooted in a national soil’.Footnote 91 For Huberman, Mandatory Palestine would in due time move beyond the folklore of its various countries of immigration origin, and develop a sophisticated national culture, which would include art music.Footnote 92
The choice of a composer like Mendelssohn for the inaugural concerts was therefore obvious for Huberman. Here was a great German-Jewish composer, vilified first by Wagner and then banned by the Nazis. The other German composers played at the inaugural concert, Brahms and Weber, were performed to demonstrate to the world that Jews – even if they were busy building their own nation-state, complete with cultural institutions – could not be confined to ‘Jewish’ music, ‘Jewish’ arts, or ‘Jewish’ culture. Jews, the orchestra’s repertoire proclaimed, could play German music that was falsely appropriated by the Nazi regime.
Huberman therefore espoused the music that, for him, breathed the cosmopolitan spirit and served the purposes of his musical internationalism: a carefully curated European repertoire centred on German composers, but occasionally extending to others. In its first five years, the orchestra performed works by Jewish composers such as Paul Ben-Haim (1897–1984), Joseph Kaminski (1903–1972), and Alexander Boskovich (1907–1964).Footnote 93
In creating in Palestine a cultural institution that reflected the values underpinning his earlier commitment to the Pan-Europe movement better than most comparable institutions in Europe itself, Huberman showed how he could transplant an internationalist ideology into a largely national movement that was busy building a new nation-state.
Huberman’s move to the United States: Huberman’s legacy and the orchestra’s American origins
After the inaugural concert in late December 1936, the Palestine Symphony Orchestra completed three successful concert seasons before the Second World War, and even continued performing during the war. In 1941, Leo Kestenberg, the German-Jewish pianist and educator, and general manager of the Palestine Orchestra from 1938 to 1945, declared in The New York Times: ‘We have not made a single cancellation because of war alarms and will consider it among our first duty to continue our activities as normally as possible’.Footnote 94 Just from the start of the war in September 1939 until the end of June 1941, the Palestine Orchestra had performed 244 concerts throughout Mandatory Palestine, performing mostly in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem for students, military personnel, and regular patrons.
Huberman never settled permanently in Israel and did not hold a formal leadership position with the orchestra, continuing instead the life of a nomadic musician who performed internationally in Europe, Australia, and South Africa. His last concerts in Mandatory Palestine took place in 1940, when he performed with the orchestra in Egypt.Footnote 95 Unable to return to war-torn Europe after a solo tour to South Africa, Huberman moved to the United States, where he arrived on 5 September 1940 at the age of 58, received permanent residency in 1941, and obtained citizenship in May 1945.Footnote 96 His choice to move to the United States and not Britain or Switzerland, was deliberate. It had been two decades since his first concert tour of the United States, and he may still have harboured genuine fondness for the country that inspired his commitment to Pan-Europeanism.
In the United States and during the Second World War, Huberman continued to perform and fundraise for the orchestra. However, due to the war he found it difficult to raise funds for the orchestra as he was no longer as prominent a celebrity during the war as he had been in the 1920s and early 1930s.Footnote 97 Ultimately, although the meaning of ‘home’ had always been fragile, Huberman found himself by choice, not by necessity – in the United States. Returning to Europe in 1945, he continued to tour several countries before dying in Switzerland in 1947.
Although Huberman could easily have remained in Palestine during the war, his move from Switzerland to the United States demonstrates a desire to return to the country that inspired his political thoughts. Fifteen years earlier, the impressions that Huberman had made in the United States, and brought back to Europe, had played a decisive role in inspiring his Pan-European commitments. The Pan-European activist in turn brought his political programme and his musical convictions – related as they were – to the orchestra he founded in Mandatory Palestine after the Nazi seizure of power in Germany. Nazi rule in the heart of Europe did not only take any talk of a democratic Pan-Europe from the agenda; the antisemitic persecution that followed, and the suffering of his musical colleagues in Germany, heightened his awareness and appreciation of the Zionist nation/state-building project. If his experiences in the United States gave a critical impetus to his political vision and his agitation in favour of Pan-Europe, Nazi rule in Germany prompted him to translate this impetus into the project of creating an orchestra in Mandatory Palestine.
Conclusion
The Palestine Orchestra’s establishment in 1936 served primarily as an escape route for German and European Jewish musicians from Nazi persecution. Huberman and his project were thus manifestations and conduits of German and European influences on the emerging classical music world in Mandatory Palestine. But, as this article has shown, there was also an American connection – easily overlooked, yet essential to a full appreciation and understanding of the orchestra’s design and intended role.
The United States had made an indelible imprint on the orchestra’s founder, providing a critical impetus for Huberman’s conversion as a Pan-Europeanist. In the wake of his prolonged visits to the United States, he developed an American-inflected, Pan-European political vision in the 1920s, in which classical music had an important societal and international role to play. In the 1930s, faced with the rise of the ultra-nationalist and antisemitic Nazi regime, Huberman adapted his politico-musical vision to inform his Palestinian orchestra project. This vision shaped important aspects of what would later develop into Israel’s premier classical music institution, while Huberman’s American networks proved crucial in securing the financial foundation that made the project viable.
Overall, however, the way in which American influences made themselves felt in the orchestra’s establishment reflected the still-limited American influence on the emergence of the classical music scene in Mandatory Palestine – especially when compared with the dominant German musical immigration on the one hand, and, on the other, the more obvious effects that became apparent in the orchestra’s relations with the United States after the Second World War.
When the Palestine Orchestra became the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in 1948, it further deepened its ties to American Jewry. Leonard Bernstein, who first conducted the orchestra in 1947 and maintained a lifelong association with the institution, proved to be another crucial American figure in the making of the Israel Philharmonic. Bernstein played an important role in placing the orchestra’s ties with the United States on a much broader footing. American financial support became significant from the 1950s onwards, when the orchestra undertook a tour of the United States, marking the beginning of a sustained relationship between the two countries. But that is another chapter – one that built upon Huberman’s pioneering work.
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