May 13, 2013
To say that the violin has always been a Jewish instrument, as Russian Israeli violinist Vadim Gluzman declared, might be a stretch. But there has certainly been an affinity — from the Jewish refugees, many of them musicians, fleeing Spain in the late fifteenth century to those twentieth-century titans, Heifetz, Menuhin, Milstein, Oistrakh and Stern. From the earliest days, when violin makers acquired their craft from box makers to the eighteenth-century makers and nineteenth-century dealers who turned it into a global collectible, David Schoenbaum has combined the business, politics, and art of the world’s most versatile instrument into a global history of the past five centuries.
