In 1815, the British poet Lord Byron published a cycle of “Hebrew melodies,” among them a poem mourning the absence of “Israel’s scatter’d race” from “Judah’s hills.” This poem was the product of Byron’s collaboration with a Jewish musician, as Vivian Eden explains (with audio):
Isaac Nathan (1790-1864), music master to Princess Charlotte (1796-1817), was the son of a cantor who claimed to have been a Polish king’s illegitimate son. In a letter, he cold-pitched a collaboration to the poet, whom he had never met: Byron would provide poems and he, Nathan, would provide a “selection from the favorite airs which are still sung in the religious Ceremonies of the Jews. Some of these have . . . been preserved by memory and tradition alone. . . . But the latitude given to the taste and genius of their performers has been the means of engrafting on the original Melodies a certain wildness and pathos, which have at length become the chief characteristic of the Sacred Songs of the Jews.”
An impious Christian but a fan of “wildness and pathos,” as well as a supporter of disenfranchised nations (he died preparing to defend the Greeks against the Turks), Byron befriended Nathan and contributed 29 poems, not all of them connected to “Hebrews.” . . . Hebrew Melodies was a bestseller in its day.
Read more on Haaretz: http://www.haaretz.com/life/culture/poem-of-the-week/1.655873