Hebrew Melodies

Hebrew Melodies is a collection of 30 poems by Lord Byron. They were largely created by Byron to accompany music composed by Isaac Nathan, who played the poet melodies which he claimed dated back to the service of the Temple in Jerusalem.

Nathan was an aspiring composer who was the son of a hazzan (synagogue cantor) of Canterbury, of Polish-Jewish ancestry, and was originally educated to be a rabbi. He had published an advertisement in the London Gentleman's Magazine in May 1813 that he was "about to publish 'Hebrew Melodies', all of them upward of 1000 years old and some of them performed by the Ancient Hebrews before the destruction of the Temple." At this stage, he had no words to go with the melodies which he intended to adapt from synagogue usage (although in fact many of these tunes had originated as European folk-melodies and did not have the ancestry he claimed for them). He initially approached Walter Scott, before writing to Byron in 1814. Eventually Byron was encouraged by his friend Douglas Kinnaird to take up Nathan's proposal. Many of the poems were written during the period of Byron's sessions with Nathan between October 1814 and February 1815; a few, including "She Walks in Beauty" and "I speak not – I trace not – I breathe not", predate their meeting.

Nathan's motives were commercial – he was hoping to cash in on a fashion for exotic folk music. (A critical review of the first edition, mocking the concept, commented, "If we should now see the melodies of Kamschatska, or of Madagascar, or of the Hottentots advertised, [...] we should know what to expect: – minstrels, and languishing maidens, the bright tear, the dark blue eye [...]") To this end Nathan persuaded the well-known singer John Braham (who was also Jewish) to lend his name to the title page in return for 50% of any profits.

Byron's motives for cooperating are less clear, but he seems to have been genuinely sympathetic to the cause of the Jews. Byron gave the copyright of the poems to Nathan, and also left him a £50 note when the scandal of the poet's relationship with his half-sister Augusta caused him to flee England in 1816 – an event which also boosted sales of the "Melodies".

The first volume of twelve musical settings by Nathan for voice and piano was published in April 1815 by Nathan himself. In May of the same year Byron's complete lyrics were published as a book of poems by John Murray, and an edition containing 24 musical settings was published by Nathan in April 1816. This edition, which sold for a guinea, named Braham as a joint-composer in a frontispiece designed by Edward Blore, which also carried a dedication, by Royal permission, to the Princess Royal, Princess Charlotte, to whom Nathan had given some singing lessons.

To the 24 poems published by 1816 Nathan subsequently added six other poems in later editions, the last being "Bright be the place of thy soul", included in Nathan's Fugitive Pieces and Reminiscences of Lord Byron in 1829.

The poems were not intended to have a religious message, nor were they written from a consistent perspective. In Thomas Ashton's analysis, "First Byron gave Nathan the secular love lyrics he had written in [...] 1814. Then, warming to the composer, he provided some vaguely Jewish poems. Finally, after [his] marriage [...] he sent Nathan poems dealing directly with Old Testament subjects."

Byron wrote to Augusta that the Hebrew Melodies were written "partly from Job &c. & partly my own imagination". They reflected his general sympathy with the downtrodden: as he once wrote, "The Greeks [...] have as small a chance of redemption from the Turks as the Jews have from mankind in general." Thomas Ashton writes "Byron put together nationalism and Jews to write poems about Jewish nationalism, but in those poems he joined Jewish nationalism and a Calvinistically inclined understanding of the Old Testament to create metaphors of man and man's condition [..] In the plight of the exiled Jews, Byron found man's plight, and the tears he shed for fallen nationhood were shed for fallen man as well."