In 1912-with the permission of the Tsar Nicholas II; through the offices of the Jewish Historico-Ethnographic Society; in the name of the recently deceased Baron Horace Guenzberg, member of a distinguished Russian Jewish family of bankers and philanthropists, and with sponsorship from his estate -there went out, from the imperial capital of St. Petersburg, into the vast expanses of the Russian Empire, an expedition.

What was this expedition for? Its mission was articulated by Shlomo An-Ski, who, a few years later, wrote The Dybbuk, the play on which his fame mostly rests today. He was part of the expedition; he was, in fact, in charge of what could be called its literary side. According to An-Ski, the purposes of the Guenzberg project were: "to visit the important cities and towns of the Jewish Pale of Settlement and to collect all which has survived of our life, both spiritually and materially, to record tales, historical facts, folk poetry, folk sayings, to notate old Jewish 'nigunim,' to photograph old synagogues, tombstones, folk types, folk scenes of Jewish life, to collect orthography, documents and old Hebrew holy objects for a national Jewish museum."

The Caucasion chant presented here is one of the musical fruits of the Guenzberg expedition. This chant was found far from the capitals of European or Russian culture. Far also from what we regarded as the centers of Jewish life a hundred years ago. It was found in Georgia, in the Caucasus. It was notated, arranged and published in 1913 by Lazare Saminsky, one of the people in charge of the musical side of the expedition.