ABSTRACT
The best known tract on Jews and Music, Wagner's 1850 essay Das Judentum in der Musik, served as a useless model and examples of musicological work that attempted to bind music to any race were haphazard and inconclusive. Despite the fact that Potter speaks of Nazi musicology, her position that Wagner was "useless model" is the prevailing one. The reason for this belief is Wagner's apparent failure in Das Judentum in der Musik to provide concrete musical examples to support his claims. Das Judentum in der Musik was originally published pseudonymously in 1850, and then reissued under Wagner's own name in 1869. Wagner's Judentum ends with the image of Ahasverus, or Wandering Jew, the Christian symbol for the unredeemable Jew who is forced to wander the earth eternally as punishment for rejecting Jesus. Adolf Hitler had written in Mein Kampf that the Jewish people, despite all apparent intellectual qualities, are without any true culture, and without culture of its own.
