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“The Soul Seeks Its Melodies”: Music in Jewish Thought. Dov Schwartz. Translated by Batya Stein. Brookline, MA: Academic Studies Press. 2022.

Reviewed by Aubrey L. Glazer

When we listen deeply to music, we realize the truth that “[e]very musical phenomenon points to something beyond itself by reminding us of something, contrasting itself with something or arousing our expectations.” [1] Such a reflection from German Jewish philosopher and pianist Theodor Adorno’s prolific musical thinking appears in a 1963 essay collected in the book Quasi Una Fantasia. Adorno was a prolific Jewish thinker who spent a lifetime reflecting on how music is itself a thought process by which content is defined “not because its particular elements express something symbolically” but through a paradoxical process of “distancing itself from language that its resemblance to language finds it fulfillment.” [2] To enter into the realm of analyzing music in Jewish thought, one would therefore expect these kinds of approaches to musical thinking to be engaged as a starting point. It is striking, then, to suggest that music can be a power to “communicate without words,” as Dov Schwartz concludes in his recent book “The Soul Seeks Its Melodies”: Music in Jewish Thought, writing that this is “one of the deepest meanings of music as a language” (299). The contrast between these distinct approaches to musical thinking and its language in Adorno and Schwartz would have been a natural starting point to fill an entire book. However, Adorno’s absence from this monograph reveals much about the foundations of Dov Schwartz’s philosophical approach.