Is it possible to conduct ethnomusicological research on Jewish music from home without doing the obligatory fieldwork? Throughout my doctoral dissertation trajectory, I visited only one physical library and collected all data through online digital archives. I did not need to do ethnographic research on Jewish music in Russia, Eastern Europe, and America, the places of my topic. Due to the relatively long distance between my home and a university library, I was more or less forced to obtain the data of my research in other ways. Consequently, I was dependent on online digital archives around the world. After completing my dissertation in early 2020, I claim that it is possible to conduct “ethnographic” research from home using online digital archives in combination with a physical home library.

In my dissertation titled From Oy to Joy: Jewish Musical Style in American Popular Songs, 1892-1945, I drew on cross-cultural research by comparing characteristic musical elements from the canon of Ashkenazic Jewish music with American popular songs in the first half of the twentieth century. From Oy to Joy was divided into two parts. The first part treated Jewish music traits in Russia and Eastern Europe as a whole. Therefore, I coined and used the “periodic table of Jewish musical elements” as a method wherein Ta ‘Amim, Kol Nidre, and “Havah Nagilah” motifs, shofar blasts, and Bulgar rhythm were placed side by side. In this part, I employed online information from, for example, the Judaica Universitätsbibliothek, part of the Goethe Universität at Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

The second part dealt with the emerging and expanding American popular music industry. I compared quintessential musical elements from Yiddish theater and films with songs in the ragtime, jazz, and swing periods. Through using the “lead sheet method” in combination with the periodic table, I examined digitized sheet music from the online Lester S. Levy Sheet Music Collection part of Special Collections at the Milton S. Eisenhower Library of The Johns Hopkins University. Also, I collected data from the Yiddish American Sheet Music Collection of the Library of Congress, Washington DC. To hear different musical arrangements, I listened to the Recorded Sound Archives (RSA), part of Florida Atlantic University Libraries (FAU), and the Internet Archive (Digital Library of Free Books, Movies, Music, and Wayback machine). I also retrieved songs on audio streaming platforms such as YouTube and Spotify.

Next to articles in academic journals through JSTOR and e-books via EBSCOhost, I used online bookstores such as Abebooks, Better World Books, and Amazon not only to acquire rare books but also as digital archives to find research material from other disciplines and to build a physical home library. Digitized newspapers and magazines such as The New York Times, The Jewish Telegraph Agency, and Variety provided information to imagine New York life in the 1920s and 1930s and to compare the academic literature with.

Before entering the Corona COVID-19 era, From Oy to Joy was accomplished from home sitting behind a computer screen through the use of online archives. Therefore, this paper demonstrates a shift in doing ethnomusicological research and writing a dissertation in the field of Jewish Studies in the Digital Age.

Defining a Jewish Musical Style Using Digital Archives

The international conference #DHJewish - Jewish Studies in the Digital Age will bring together more than 60 scholars and heritage practitioners to discuss how the digital turn affects the field of Jewish Studies. The conference is organised by the [Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH).](https://www.c2dh.uni.lu/) 

[For more information, and a PDF download of the program, please see also here.](https://www.c2dh.uni.lu/events/dhjewish-jewish-studies-digital-age) 



In order to meet other participants and for informal chats in the breaks, join us in our [wonder.me room](https://www.wonder.me/r?id=73a12756-8d93-4871-9374-143253bfbf59).