ABSTRACT
The notion that Jews are musical borrowers from their non-Jewish neighbors has a long history in Jewish music studies, and if anything has intensified with the latter-day trend toward emphasizing Jewish plurality and embeddedness. This article sketches a critique of the borrowing paradigm by tracing its vicissitudes and continuities in the foundational work of Abrahm Zevi Idelsohn and in more recent Jewish music scholarship. Using a textual case study drawn from early modern Algeria in which the boundary between Hebrew and Arabic is not what it appears, the article suggests that the trope of borrowing carries essentializing tendencies that delineate overly sharp boundaries around Jewish and non-Jewish collective subjects. In making the case for a more systematic pluralism in Jewish music studies, the article likewise calls for a rethinking of the alleged dichotomy between autonomy and embeddedness in Jewish studies more broadly.
