Jewish Religious Music in Nineteenth-Century America

Restoring the Synagogue Soundtrack

Judah M. Cohen

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN:
  9780253040237
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

This study of synagogue music in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century "sets a high standard for historical musicology" ( Musica Judaica).

In Jewish Religious Music in Nineteenth-Century America: Restoring the Synagogue Soundtrack, Judah M. Cohen demonstrates that Jews constructed a robust religious musical conversation in the United States during the mid- to late-nineteenth century. While previous studies of American Jewish music history have looked to Europe as a source of innovation during this time, Cohen's careful analysis of primary archival sources tells a different story. Far from seeing a fallow musical landscape, Cohen finds that Central European Jews in the United States spearheaded a major revision of the sounds and traditions of synagogue music during this period of rapid liturgical change.

Focusing on the influences of both individuals and texts, Cohen demonstrates how American Jewish musicians sought to balance artistry and group singing, rather than "progressing" from solo chant to choir and organ. Congregations shifted between musical genres and practices during this period in response to such factors as finances, personnel, and communal cohesiveness. Cohen concludes that the "soundtrack" of nineteenth-century Jewish American music heavily shapes how we look at Jewish American music and life in the first part of the twenty-first century, arguing that how we see, and especially hear, history plays a key role in our understanding of the contemporary world around us. Supplemented with an interactive website that includes the primary source materials, recordings of the music discussed, and a map that highlights the movement of key individuals, Cohen's research defines more clearly the sound of nineteenth-century American Jewry.

1

EARLY STRATA

Of Choirs and Reform through the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Are we to have German, English, French, or Italian songs introduced into the service in the place of the Psalms, like the Christie Street Temple [Emanu-El] in New York, or are the old and time-honoured forms to be continued? What are we to have in the place of our present beautiful ritual? Is it the present silent, musical style of the St. Helen’s Place [i.e., Great] Synagogue, of London, or the two hour recreation on Kippur, of the Hamburg Temple? Is it the “British” improved system of Burton Street[’s West London Synagogue], of London, or the more accommodating (to business men) style of Berlin, and that on a Sunday, and for forty minutes? or, perhaps, the present or former form of [Temple Beth-El,] Albany, where two years since they had about a dozen singing girls and boys on the reading desk, with three men to assist, the table full of loose sheets of music; the whole resembling the study of some music mad “amateur,” much more than a place from which was to be read the law of the living God of Israel? The truth of the matter is, that for the last few years we have had too much talk about reform . . . for, notwithstanding all the improvements of music and English, the seats on each Sabbath present a most meagre appearance, and the improver, as if ashamed of what he has done, has already a strong desire of quitting the wreck (now in its most improved condition).

—Simeon Abrahams, letter to The Occident and American Jewish Advocate, June 1849

WRITING NEAR THE MIDPOINT OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, New York–born Simeon Abrahams (1810–67) derided not so much the idea of Jewish reform as its patchwork of haphazard applications—a perspective shared by other concerned observers including Occident publisher Isaac Leeser. Much of the blame for this attenuated state, Abrahams implied, lay in the willingness of leadership to concede “old and time-honoured forms” to popular sentiment. “We have too many agrarians, or levellers, among us,” he warned, rhetorically calling out “those who would rather bring things down to their standard, than take the time and trouble of raising themselves, and becoming acquainted with the why and wherefore of the different parts of our system of public worship.”¹ Music, misapplied, could erode the integrity of worship—a claim that followed an editorial two years earlier, where he railed against unreliable and poorly prepared “hazanim” whose “chief qualifications” were the “ability to favour the congregation with some operatic tunes (tunes generally fit for any other place than one of religious worship).”² The solution, according to Abrahams, involved a more rigorous and uniform clerical education that gave religious leaders a deep knowledge befitting Judaism’s distinctive “nationality.”³ Music could give that education shape and significance during religious rituals, thus imbuing Jewish populations with a distinct spiritual consciousness as they sought to inure themselves to the modern age.

Abrahams’s concerns emphasized music’s immediacy in transmitting and reinforcing Jewish identity in a pluralistic society. At a time when synagogue doors became open portals to broad civic discourse, prayer leaders faced the challenge of making Jewish liturgy distinct and orderly, unique, and yet understandable to outsiders. Synagogue boards of trustees, regardless of reform leanings, made regular adjustments to their congregations’ musical vocabularies, frequently considering new solo, ensemble, and/or instrumental presentations of texts as a way to make prayer culturally relevant and aesthetically conversant with other local practices. Jewish musical change hardly began in this era; however, these years marked a period of musical elaboration that allowed Jewish populations to engage reasonably with their time and environment.⁴

Isaac Leeser’s Philadelphia-based journal, The Occident and American Jewish Advocate, had contributed to this conversation from its early issues, producing one of the first published pieces of American Jewish liturgical music in its June 1843 issue: a simple setting of the hymn “Adon Olam” for “the voice, with piano accompaniment” (see fig. 1.1).⁵ Dedicated to “The Portuguese Congregation of Philadelphia [Mikve Israel],” the adaptation by local musician Edward Roget used a “Favourite Air” by Italian composer Ferdinando Bertoni (1725–1813) titled, “La verginella come la rosa” (“Where, dear maid, should’st thou forsake me”) as its melody.⁶ The journal probably found preparing the score a pricey but worthwhile experiment, with the special movable type used to make the printing plate significantly more work intensive than setting a page of text: the creators’ decision to syllabify every note in the vocal line, even if simply extending a vowel (“’o-la-a-a-a-am”), implied a level of inexperience. Yet in printing the piece, The Occident broadcast the extent to which Jewish musical practices linked public and private worlds. Roget, one of The Occident’s original subscribers, had achieved some local renown as a music instructor to the Jewish population; and two months earlier, he had coordinated a choir with soloists and an instrumental ensemble for the consecration of the German congregation Rodeph Shalom, leading a reviewer (presumably Leeser) to comment, “it is but seldom that sacred music was better given or had a more soothing effect on the audience.”⁷ His contribution to Mikve Israel’s soundtrack, moreover, may have reflected an intimacy with the community’s existing practices, or at least a tacit recognition that the opera singer who premiered the original tune in London was also “a favorite singer at the [Bevis Marks] Synagogue.”⁸ When presented in an arrangement that encouraged lay performance from The Occident’s pages, therefore, “Adon Olam” appeared to address knowingly the balance that American Jewish communities struck between local knowledge and musical cosmopolitanism.

As Abrahams hinted, the era also inched toward an acceptance of musical professionalism. Congregations typically elected their first service readers from within their ranks, expecting little more than musical competence from them in intoning the prayers. Institutional developments in Europe, however, led to new paradigms that demanded more distinct musical skills. Vienna’s Salomon Sulzer, for example, had been developing his choral program since the late 1820s and published the first volume of his opus Schir Zion in 1840; yet that work and its proponents gained a meaningful place in America’s religious musical landscape only after 1850 (partly spurred by Sulzer himself).⁹ Before then, religious leaders in England and the Netherlands provided early nineteenth-century America with most of its musical ideas, coming up through the Caribbean, the American South, and the East Coast.¹⁰

Prevailing narratives tend to favor these musical changes as symptoms of “reform.” The most closely chronicled case—that of congregation Beth Elohim in Charleston, South Carolina—portrays choral singing as a liberal leap forward by a “Reformed Society of Israelites,” established in the mid-1820s. When Beth Elohim’s members voted in 1840 to install an organ to accompany its liturgy, approved by Prussian-born minister Gustavus Poznanski, music migrated to the center of the congregation’s agenda.¹¹ A broader view of this era, however, offers a contrasting portrayal that sees choral music as a development adopted across the Jewish religious spectrum, with each congregation seeing the form as a way to further its own theological perspectives. Far less attention has been paid to music’s specific contextual considerations, including its pathways, its instrumental forces, and the physical layout of the service.¹² Such topics often incorporated the choir and notions of “reform” into broader debates over leadership hierarchies, sophistication and cultural development, and matters of cultural knowledge. In chronicling that development in America, I begin with a small but influential group of ministers who arrived from England during the 1840s, and I progress just into the post-1848 era, when more specialized Bavarian émigrés joined them (introducing Sulzer’s music in the process). Cultivating choral music during this time allowed musically adept ministers to present themselves as agents of religious orthodoxy for at least part of their careers, while often casting themselves as more conservative than many of their constituents.¹³ Following in the spirit of Abrahams’s push toward uniformity, however, rabbinic figures such as Isaac Mayer Wise and David Einhorn began to tie choral music to progressive ideologies that supported their national visions of American Judaism. Thus politicized, choirs transformed from a general practice to a point of division that rhetorically distinguished reform from an orthodoxy increasingly characterized as premodern.

Figure 1.1. E. Roget, “Adon Olam,” based on the mid-eighteenth-century air “La verginella” by Ferdinando Bertoni. Printed in The Occident and American Jewish Advocate 1, no. 3 (June 1843), 143–44.

From London to America: Translating British Practices Westward

In the first part of the 1800s, the religious and musical path of Jewish authority in the United States often tracked through London—whether through its influential synagogues, the powerful Chief Rabbinate, or the tens of thousands of mainly secular/progressive German Jews who had immigrated to England since the late eighteenth century.¹⁴ Britain shared a language and heritage with its former colonies and maintained an organized religious structure that often led the British Jewish religious establishment to treat America’s Jews paternalistically well into the 1850s. Many American communities in turn looked to British Jewish authorities for resolving disputes about Jewish practice, and others relied on Great Britain as its source of prayer books and religious paraphernalia.¹⁵ Whether acquired as part of a turn to the West London Reform liturgy of David Woolf Marks or through the hiring of traditionalist British-born ministers, then, the sounds and organization of the early nineteenth-century American Jewish synagogue service owed much to British Jewish conventions.

British synagogues of all stripes began to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Accessing Supplemental Materials
• Introduction
• 1. Early Strata: Of Choirs and Reform through the Mid-Nineteenth Century
• 2. The Sound of German Jewry: Hymnals and Singing Societies in Wilhelm Fischer’s Zemirot Yisrael
• 3. Bildungsmusik: G. M. Cohen, B’nai B’rith, and the Voices of American Jewish Cultivation
• 4. Musical Populists: G. S. Ensel, Simon Hecht, and the Quest for the Singing Congregation
• 5. The 1866 Sulzerfeier: The Viennese Model and the Grandeur of the Urban Worship
• 6. A New Cantor, a New Repertoire: Zimrath Yah
• 7. The Path to the Union Hymnal
• Conclusion: Restoring the Soundtrack of Jewish Life in Nineteenth-Century America
• Works Cited
• Index
• About the Author