In the public ear the plangent cry of the cello has been associated with the diaspora since Max Bruch – the son of a Lutheran cleric – composed his eloquent “Kol Nidrei” in 1881. To this day, many concertgoers assume that he was Jewish, although his equally popular “Scottish Fantasy” raises little speculation that he hailed from Glasgow. Friday evening, aboard Brooklyn’s fabulous chamber-music barge, two Israeli artists, cellist Inbal Segev and pianist Benjamin Hochman, presented a program of actual Jewish music from a disparate set of locales.

Since the names of the composers represented are not exactly household words, Ms. Segev took the time to provide a narration introducing each one of them. Taking my cue from her educative approach, I will thumbnail them as well.

Ernest Bloch – not to be confused with the contemporaneous Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch – was a Jewish composer from Switzerland who eventually came to New York to teach at Mannes. His most famous work is “Schelomo,” a Hebrew rhapsody for cello and orchestra composed in 1916. A similar piece is the “Voice in the Wilderness” (1936), for orchestra with cello obbligato. Bloch also composed two works for cello and piano, “Meditation hebraique” and “From Jewish Life,” which was performed Friday.

Ms. Segev has a deep and powerful tone and was performing on a darkly burnished Postiglione cello. It would be a stretch to say that the sound was beautiful, but it certainly was eloquent. Her sense of this Bloch piece is that it is highly evocative of cantorial chant; she herself pointed out that the quarter-tones are included not as a bit of modernism but rather as mimicry of the human voice.

Joachim Stutschewsky, the most obscure of this group, is apparently a cello specialist. His “Frejlachs” Wedding Dance is extremely percussive, culminating in a whirling frenzy of 32nd notes. Ms. Segev showed not only ample finger dexterity, but also a solid sense of how to build the excitement of what was essentially a folk piece.

Paul Ben-Haim, who changed his name from Frankenburger, is the best example of a Central European Jew who emigrated to Israel and incorporated its native musical language into his own. Trained at the Munich Academy, Ben-Haim left Germany in the early 1930s and, as soon as he came to Palestine, he began an extensive study of its native music. Never abandoning his post-Romantic tradition, he began to weave folk music into his scores and to experiment with Western instrumentation that would closely approximate the local sounds.

The lyre of King David became the concert harp in his most famous piece, “The Sweet Psalmist of Israel.” Ben-Haim uses the Ashkenazi chant of the Central European synagogue to create instrumental melis ma in several of his orchestral pieces. It was his group of Central European emigres that made the conscious decision to move away from the standard European Jewish sound of the augmented second, reasoning that the cry of the outcast was no longer emblematic of the modern Jew, who had finally found his homeland in Israel.

This modern tonic resolution of an ancient musical problem was apparent in his “Three Songs Without Words.” Here the cellist was able to glide effortlessly through a portamento of dissonances and make them sound not only natural but mellifluous. Interestingly, Mr. Hochman, who has recently been asked to join the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, had his own jarring combinations of notes to present, and did so forcefully, even though the more precise diction of the keyboard made many of these minor seconds sound like mistakes. Ms. Segev demonstrated her talents as a transcriptionist in John Williams’s “Theme from Schindler’s List,” although her version did not make the experience any the less cloying.

Born and buried a Protestant, Felix Mendelssohn had Judaism bred in the bone. The pair dug into an almost Brahmsian reading of his D Major Sonata, notable for expansive gesture and broad scope of line. This was big, bold music-making, perfect for the incipient Romantic sensibilities of a composer who still seems to be underplayed even though his fame is universal. Very few of us know our Mendelssohn as well as we should, but Mr. Hochman especially played the stuffing out of this sonata. His solo passagework in the hymnal section of the Adagio was positively inspiring.

My friends are probably tired of hearing me wax poetic about the Fulton Ferry Landing barge, but I hope readers are not. It is the venue here in town that presents most consistently a high quality of exciting and challenging chamber music, accompanied by an espresso shot of enthusiasm and an aperitif of hominess. And this time, I didn’t even mention the view.