Arnold Schoenberg was preoccupied with Judaism and biblical themes all his life, despite his conversion to Protestantism in 1898. Religious motives inspired an abortive symphonic project as early as 1912, long before the profoundly disturbing "A Survivor from Warsaw" which was composed in 1947. The essays collected in this volume represent a comprehensive attempt to shed light on the work and personality of the composer in this pertinent yet neglected context. Deeply sympathetic to his beliefs and understanding of his attitude to the politics of Jewish survival, Ringer holds that Schoenberg was both a religious artist on the one hand and, on the other, the product of an emancipated Central European Jewry, which, after decades of overt popular as well as governmental oppression, was to suffer virtually complete extinction. Widely knowledgeable about the historical, political and philosophical background, the author produces a book which will be of interest to musicologists and to students of 20th-century music and Jewish studies.