Max Bruch was a Protestant Christian, given the middle name Christian by his own parents, with no Jewish ancestry on any documented branch of his family. He is nonetheless remembered today at least as much for Kol Nidrei, a cello piece built around one of the most solemn moments in the Jewish liturgical year, as for any of the purely instrumental concert works that made up the rest of his career.
The connection began with a friendship rather than a commission. While serving as music director of Berlin's Stern Choral Society from 1878 to 1880, Bruch was introduced by his own teacher Ferdinand Hiller to the Lichtenstein family, whose head, Cantor Abraham Jacob Lichtenstein, led Berlin's reform Jewish community and gave Bruch direct access to synagogue chant and Jewish folk melody. Bruch completed the piece in 1880 in Liverpool, where he had just taken up a conducting post, and dedicated it to the cellist Robert Hausmann, who gave its first performance.
Bruch defended the project in his own words, quoted since: "Even though I am a Protestant, as an artist I deeply felt the outstanding beauty of these melodies and therefore I gladly spread them through my arrangement." The Kol Nidre declaration itself, an Aramaic legal formula annulling unfulfilled vows recited as Yom Kippur evening worship opens, was not Bruch's to set as a matter of personal devotion; it became, in his hands, an outsider's tribute to a solemnity he could admire but never himself observe.