A Moroccan Piyyut, a Hasidic Nign , an Austrian Intellectual, Israeli TV: Unbounded Modern Jewish Mobility and the Agency of Objects

A musical image included in Ludwig August Frankl’s Nach Jerusalem! (1858) triggers an investigation into a widespread network of agents connected through an abiotic object. Departing from the hypothetical possibility of the agency of objects, I show how subjects unrelated to each other on the surface—a Moroccan Hebrew poet, Hasidic immigrants to the Land of Israel, Sephardim moving from the Ottoman Empire to central Europe, an Austrian Jewish intellectual on a colonial philanthropic mission, contemporary Hasidic music connoisseurs, and Israeli scholars of the modern Hebrew song—intersect and interact vis-à-vis a printed musical image. The human chain generated around a musical object illuminates unexpected encounters resulting from the unbound dis- and re-location of modern Jews as well as the cultural transfers that derived from such movements of bodies and objects.