While contemporary rabbinic law forbids musical instruments at funerals, this was not always the case. Matt Austerklein explains that flutes in particular were in ancient times associated with mourning by Jews, as seen from Jeremiah’s comment, “Like a flute my heart moans.”

In the Mishnaic period (1st-3rd centuries CE), the rabbinic interaction with Hellenism carried [the] practice of funerary flutes even further. These woodwinds became a standard part of professional mourning at Jewish funerals; as Rabbi Yehuda taught, “Even a pauper in Israel should not provide fewer than two flutes and a wailing woman” (Mishnah K’tubot 4:4).

And, Austerklein adds, the plaintive flute returned to Jewish music in the modern era, in the form of a kind of shepherd’s flute tune called doina:

This klezmer genre is closely related to the Romanian doina—a lonely shepherd’s melody often in free meter. In klezmer, the Jewish doina was played as a forshpil (prelude), used to attract the notice of the audience, and to make them concentrate and to ready them for a faster, danceable tune or suite of melodies. In Jewish culture doinas were played at weddings, and were also an opportunity for expressing virtuosic playing.

This genre is featured heavily in traditional East European cantorial singing on the High Holy Days. Cantors would do improvisations or compositions for the text k’vakaras ro’eh edro—“as a shepherd tends his flock”—in the mode and style of shepherd music, the doina.

In 2001, in the immediate wake of al-Qaeda’s attacks on America, Jonathan Rosen was asked to write something about anti-Semitism. So many of the points he raised in the resulting essay, reproduced in full at the link below, ring true today, and make clear just how predictable so much of the global reaction to October 7 has been. Rosen reflects on what he wrote then from the standpoint of 2024:

It is worth remembering that the Nazis saw the Holocaust as self-defense, though Jews were a minuscule fragment of a giant militarized nation. This was irrational, of course, even as they spoke the language of science, redefining Jews as a biological menace, like a virus, making the murder of babies and the elderly necessary, too, because like a microbe only extermination was the cure. It was the existence of Jews that made them a provocation, just as the existence of Israel, in any borders, inspired the Hamas massacre, as its 1988 covenant, never revoked, makes abundantly clear. The towers were a similar provocation.

It was back in 2001 that Rosen found himself “awakened to anti-Semitism,” as he wrote at the time:

I am not being chased down alleyways and called a Christ-killer. . . . But in recent weeks I have been reminded, in ways too plentiful to ignore, about the role Jews play in the fantasy life of the world. Jews were not the cause of World War II, but they were at the metaphysical center of that conflict nonetheless, since the Holocaust was part of Hitler’s agenda and a key motivation of his campaign. Jews are not the cause of World War III, if that’s what we are facing, but they have been placed at the center of it in mysterious and disturbing ways.

I felt this in a different form reading coverage of Israel in European papers. Though public expressions of anti-Semitism are taboo in a post-Holocaust world, many Europeans, in writing about Israel, have felt free to conjure images of determined child killers and mass murderers. Earlier this year, the Spanish daily La Vanguardia published a cartoon depicting a large building labeled “Museum of the Jewish Holocaust” and behind it a building under construction labeled “Future Museum of the Palestinian Holocaust.”