The accordion is an instrument of sorrow and celebration — does that make it Jewish?
Reportedly invented in 1822, the accordion has been associated with Jewish music throughout its history
The accordion was invented in Germany in the 1820s and reached American shores in the 1840s. Illustration by Alex Rudin
By Benjamin Ivry October 22, 2024
The news that Maugein, the last accordion manufacturer in France, will cease doing business, raises the question of whether the “box of sobs,” as the French call it, is more Gallic or Jewish in its musical inspiration.
The accordion has long been a favored vehicle for expressing Yiddishkeit, and is used as a metaphor in Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi’s meditation on Jewish history and Jewish memory Zakhor. “The rabbis seem to play with Time as though with an accordion, expanding and collapsing it at will,” Yerushalmi observes.
The accordion also appears in unrabbinical evocations of Frenchiness, such as in Woody Allen’s film Midnight in Paris and Darren Star’s TV series Emily in Paris
The apotheosis of the accordion in French popular song was created by the Jewish composer Michel Emer (born Rosenstein), who penned songs for Édith Piaf, especially “The Accordion Player” (L’Accordéoniste) and “Dance in my Street” (Bal dans ma rue), in which the instrument is an iconic protagonist whose power dwarfs mere human misery.
Reportedly invented in Berlin around 1822, accordions were first heard in the United Kingdom and Russia around 1830, and by the mid-1840s, had reached the shores of Manhattan.
Jews in all these places quickly identified with the instrument’s captivating drone and found the accordion to be bewitchingly apt for expressing Jewish messages. The 19th century English journalist Henry Mayhew reported on crowds of Jewish street vendors of accordions in his study, “London Labour and the London Poor.”
Meanwhile, as musicologist Joshua Horowitz observes, the accordion was “present at every stage of klezmer music in both the Old and New Worlds for at least the last hundred years.” This continuity belies much-vaunted claims of a klezmer “revival,” since this music so beloved internationally never needed rebirth.
In Russia, serious musicians who were passionate about folklore conquered the instrument. For example, Susman (Zinoviy Aronovich) Kiselgof, a Russian-Jewish folk song collector associated with the Society for Jewish Folk Music in St. Petersburg. Kiselgof participated in the ethnographic expeditions of the folklorist S. An-sky to preserve Jewish traditional creativity.
More than merely a folkloric vehicle or retail product, the accordion could also have weighty symbolism. The Italian-born Israeli diplomat Dan Vittorio Segre’s Memoirs of a Fortunate Jew recount how in the 1930s, he served in the Jewish Brigade of the British Army before the state of Israel was established.
Segre describes how an Austrian-born Jewish soldier named Ben-Yosef was inseparable from his accordion, on which he composed tunes to inspire his fellow troops. When asked by Segre why he composed and sang military songs on the accordion, Ben-Yosef replied that the instrument “soothes the pain of a soul wounded by memories of a beautiful time which none of us will ever know again.”
One day before Israeli independence was declared in 1948, Ben-Yosef was killed while playing his accordion during the Kfar Etzion massacre, when residents and Haganah militia defended a West Bank kibbutz from combined forces of the Arab Legion and local Arab combatants.
Different versions of Ben-Yosef’s nostalgic Edenic viewpoint spread as the accordion became essential to African tribal ritual, as well as zydeco and Cajun melodies in Louisiana. In the latter genres, instruments imported by Jewish tradespeople were essential elements.
The Americanist Ryan Andre Brasseaux asserts that Cajun musicians were supplied with accordions by F. M. Levy and Mervine Kahn, German Jewish merchants who opened stores in Rayne, Louisiana in the 1880s.
Before long, accordions were heard in early jazz recordings, in ensembles led by Irving Mills (born Iadore Minsky in Odessa, Ukraine). Not every listener was conquered by its plangent tones. The authoritative 1911 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica condescendingly commented: “The timbre of the accordion is coarse and devoid of beauty, but in the hands of a skillful performer the best instruments are not entirely without artistic merit.”
As historian Michael Zalampas notes, accordions became so identified with European Jewry during the early 20th century that they were even incorporated in Nazi propaganda. A case in point was Trust No Fox on his Green Heath and No Jew on his Oath! A Picture Book for Old and Young, an antisemitic children’s picture book published in 1936 in Hitler’s Germany.
Written and illustrated by Elvira Bauer, a German kindergarten teacher, it was published by Julius Streicher, the editor of the Jew-hating newspaper Der Stürmer. The kiddie book’s final page featured the image of an Aryan boy playing an accordion in a superseding role reversal, as a procession of oppressed Jews marched along a road marked with the sign: “One Way Street to Palestine.”
Bauer’s volume was a bestseller, with 50,000 copies purchased by German parents for their children in the first month after publication. As Fascism spread across Europe, looting of Jewish homes by their Christian neighbors included accordions among other prized domestic items.
Historian Saul Friedlander specifies that in 1941, a 13-year-old Polish Catholic schoolboy wrote to the German district commissar of Pinsk, demanding that an accordion belonging to a local Jew be seized so that he could make money by playing it in a municipal band.
A few Jewish musicians were so attached to their accordions that they even brought them along when they were deported to concentration camps. Ruth Elias, who survived Theresienstadt ghetto and Auschwitz, was not among these. Yet Elias would recall in a memoir that before the war, her family in the Czech Republic was informed by a “shocked” synagogue cantor that an accordion was not a “suitable instrument for a Jewish girl to play.”
By contrast, the biochemist Joan Lorch Staple, of German Jewish origin, was not criticized for her girlhood affinity for the accordion. Staple only stopped playing accordion with a group in Oppenheim in 1937 when she became uncomfortable with a “new repertoire of Nazi songs.”
In the more open-minded postwar world, klezmer accordionists are no longer limited by gender and in East Europe, they are often non-Jews, seemingly in search of a lost world with the instrument as talisman against future pogroms.
In one poem, the Russian Jewish poet David Shrayer-Petrov stated: “a Jewish accordionist once used to play in the circus./ A Jewish accordionist – in a touring big top circus./ He presses the keys and sings sotto voce:/ ‘Oh, it will never happen again.’”
Among those likewise ensuring the survival of a culture was Flory Jagoda, a Bosnian Jewish performer of Sephardic songs, which she accompanied on the accordion. The Israeli Moroccan band Sfataim (Lips), was formed by Moroccan Jews from Sderot in southern Israel.
Reinforcing the contemporaneity of Jews and accordions were ever-popular klezmorim, from early performers to more recent Di Nigunim, an ensemble with accordion founded in San Diego in 2007 as an “anarcho-klezmer punk” group.
A July 2003 article in “Die Zeit” on Jewish culture in Germany mentions a klezmer jam session where, amidst the sound of other instruments, three accordions played simultaneously. The effect was a collaboration by “members of a chaotic, but stable and fundamentally democratic, organization.”
As such, accordionists, whether in klezmer groups or other Jewish music ensembles, represent a societal, as well as musical, ideal.
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