The College of William & Mary in Virginia, nestled in the semi-rural tourist mecca of Colonial Williamsburg, is the second-oldest university in America, chartered in 1693 and preceded only by Harvard. With the comparative responses of their respective presidents to October 7th (here and here), I’m at least as proud as fellow alum Thomas Jefferson was that I went to W&M:
I sometimes joke that Williamsburg in Virginia is just like Williamsburg in New York—both places feature people who dress the same way they did four hundred years ago. But jibes like this belie the fact that W&M is not commonly known for being a Jewish place. When you say that you went to William and Mary, inquiring minds will often ask: “Isn’t that a Catholic school?”
Ironically, some of W&M’s well-known Jewish alumni seem to be either clergy or stand-up comedians. The latter are Jon Liebowitz (i.e. Jon Stewart) and my classmate Michelle Wolf, and the former include HUC-JIR Chancellor Emeritus Rabbi David Ellenson, together with a steady stream of rabbis (3) and cantors (2) since 2004.
This last fact belies the more positive aspects of being a member of “The Tribe” who is also a Member of the Tribe (MOT). My own era (2002-2006) saw an active Hillel, the founding of AEPi Tau Pi (which I joined), and significant engagement with off-campus synagogues and outreach. Recent years have seen the addition of a campus rabbi, a Chabad, and the construction of Hillel’s new Shenkman Jewish Center. According to Hillel International, the school’s Jewish population stands at 9.6% (up from 5% twenty years ago).
My own experience at W&M was largely that of being a token Jew. This was years before the disturbing crescendo of on-campus antisemitism in America; in the early 2000s, I felt safe and valued for my faith and background. But as part of a small on-campus minority, I had to actively work to develop my identity.
This was ultimately a good thing. After all, I had chosen to go to William & Mary over Brandeis, where my Jewish experience would have been totally different (and where I might have met my wife twenty years too early). Instead, in Jewishly-arid soil of Williamsburg, I joined other double-tribeniks who miraculously made the Virginian desert bloom. Hard-working students wrote grants for funding, put on weekly Shabbat dinners, recruited their classmates, brought in speakers, and organized trips and events. This all, perhaps unsurprisingly, gave us a stronger sense of Jewishness.
This phenomenon of developing oneself against the grain, to my mind, also partially accounts for the stream of Green & Gold rabbis and cantors over the last two decades. After all, being a public (and often token) Jew is not so far from the experience of being a clergyperson.
Fun fact: Did you know that William and Mary was also the inspiration for the architecture of the Jewish Theological Seminary? During the 1920s, the building committee apparently traveled across the country to find just the right style, reviewing over a hundred varieties of colonial brick. They finally settled on the look at William and Mary, both employing its brick aesthetics and copying the Wren Building’s use of an arcaded gallery (or colonnade). Needless to say, I was quite surprised on my JTS campus tour to learn of this unexpected connection between former and future alma maters.1
My positive connection with W&M continued in the years since graduation, and even yielded some collaborative fruits. My first boss, Rabbi Bill Rudolph z”l, graciously passed to me the opportunity to give an annual guest lecture at the College on Conservative Judaism, which I did right up until the pandemic. My former conductor once invited me back as a soloist with the William & Mary choir (a.k.a. kwah ) for some Jewish choral music. And I even got to bring the W&M Middle Eastern Music Ensemble to my synagogue for a concert of Andalusian & Sephardic music, together with my bar mitzvah cantor, the brilliant Ramón Tasat.
All of this is by way of background that I realized this week that William and Mary wasn’t just part of my past. Its royal namesakes, quite unexpectedly, also came flooding back into my consciousness in my PhD research on cantorial history.
You see, those who wonder if William and Mary is Catholic couldn’t be farther from the truth: The school was named for William & Mary of Orange, Dutch nobles who assumed the English throne during the Glorious Revolution of 1689. In a bloodless coup, English politicians invited the Dutch army to invade England, deposing the Catholic James II and crowning King William III & Queen Mary II as part of a renewed Protestant monarchy. The new king and queen also famously accepted the English Bill of Rights, which ushered in both new religious toleration and the norms of British parliamentary democracy.2
The reign of William & Mary (1689-1702) wasn’t just momentous for Protestants, but also for Jews. Shortly before the College of William and Mary was chartered in the colonies, the first Ashkenazic synagogue in London was founded in 1690 in Duke’s Place. The small numbers of Ashkenazic Jews in London had previously attended Bevis Marks, the synagogue of the Sephardic community. Sephardim were the Jewish incumbents in England, resettled decades prior through the efforts of Oliver Cromwell and Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel. The Ashkenazim, often referred to as the “German” or “Dutch” Jews, were largely immigrants from the prosperous port of Hamburg (home of Glikl of Hameln and Rabbi Jacob Emden), with some others from Amsterdam or Poland. Now with their own dedicated space, their community could begin to grow roots and flourish.
In constructing a history of Ashkenazi cantors of this period, per se, the English sphere has left us remarkably few clues. Between the reigns of William & Mary (1689-1702), Queen Anne (1702-1714), and George I (1714-1727), there are only a handful of primary or secondary sources which describe the Duke’s Place synagogue, its cantors, or its culture of worship.3 However, what little we we do know, combined with evidence from the continental culture of the Ashkenazi cantors, provides colorful insight into the musical dynamics of this budding community.
The earliest cantor of the London Ashkenazic community was Rabbi Yehuda Leib ben Moshe of Lissa (Leszno) in Poland, who served from 1695-1706. Of his life, only one letter has come down to us — a 1703 missive to a rabbinic colleague in Dublin on the subject of arranging a marriage.4 Rabbi Yehudah Leib’s son, known as Jacob London, would grow up to be a quite colorful character, a traveling scholar once accused of being a spy, and who authored a number of Hebraic hymns and books, including an ethical treatise, The Contending of the King of the South with the King of the North (I know it sounds a spinoff series from Game of Thrones). Of the two cantors who served over the next fifteen 15, Menachem Mendel and Joseph, even less is known.
What we do know is that prior to 1722, the Ashkenazic synagogue began to feature some of the transgressive cantorial practices developed in continental Europe. The musical culture of Jewish Hamburg was full of novel activity, including melodies from the opera, tavern, and street. Poland and parts of Germany were also now awash with the spread of the meshorerim — choristers who musically accompanied the cantor in prayer, often in ways objectionable to rabbinic authorities. A bass singer, Michael, was recorded on the payroll at the Duke’s Place synagogue for a number of these years. Yet the practice was banned by the community in 1722 —albeit only for a short while.
The controversial nature of the meshorerim in early modern London is revealed by a little known polemic, Letter of a Sage Calling Out Ashkenazic Cantors (JTS Ms. 3582).
This rhymed critique lays into Ashkenazi cantors for their loud, vociferous vocal style, ridiculous gestures, outlandish new melodies, and comically impious choral assistants. It further praises Sephardic cantors, including those of the Ottoman Empire (malchut yishma’el), who are pious and who sing melodies which respect the words of prayer.
Such a source reveals the cultural and musical divides between Sephardim and Ashkenazim in this era. Written in 1717, the critique was authored by Solomon da Costa Attias, a successful broker from a prominent Sephardic family who had emigrated to London as a young man. As I wrote about previously, the Portuguese Sephardic community in Hamburg and Amsterdam had reconstructed its musical tradition through a combination of trusted Mediterranean cantors recruited from the Sephardic diaspora and the adaptation of Baroque and Rococo music. Attias, who championed Sephardic cantors in his letter, would have had little patience for the uncultured, Baroque street music and indecorous aesthetics current among the Ashkenazim. These practices and had led to similar polemics among the Jes during his youth in Amsterdam, one of which had led to warring parties at the Ashkenazi synagogue going so far as to throw lecterns at each other on Shabbat Shuvah over the synagogue’s choice of cantor.5
Coming to London, Attias would have had occasion to visit his co-religionists in Duke’s Place, as it was located close to Bevis Marks. What he heard there clearly offended his religious and cultural sensibilities. London Sephardim like Attias largely looked down on the lower class Ashkenazi Jews, whose cultural otherness, indecorous aesthetics, and reputation as sometime vagabonds were only redeemed by their small cadre of wealthy financiers. Now, the music of this growing Ashkenazi community was a becoming a fly in the musical ointment of London Jewry — a less integrable element whose difference threatened both Sephardic religious ideals and successful Jewish interface with Christian society.6
The desire for decorum seems to have bubbled up in the years following Attias’ scathing critique. The 1722 Takkanot of the Ashkenazi community, in addition to banning the meshorerim, set down that: “Divine worship in the synagogue should be so conducted as to ensure the decorum and devotional feeling, so essential to the elevation of the mind and the purification of the heart.” Yet meshorerim were back on the payroll within the decade, and the next hundred years of Ashkenazic Jewish life saw the flourishing of Jewish cantors and singers, some of whom made the leap from the bima to the opera stage.7
William & Mary reigned during the beginning of these stirring developments in the Ashkenazic music of England. Perhaps they were even aware of such Jews from their long-established community in Amsterdam. Regardless, theirs was an era of new norms and growing possibilities for Jewish life.
In our own era of Jewish uncertainty on campus, it is my prayer that the College will stay true to the tolerant and democratic principles of its royal ancestors, and ensure student security and free religious expression in these difficult times. For then the poetic verse will be fulfilled:
We honor thee, not for our gain
But to make known thy majesty,
Thy truth and courage that remain
However harsh the fates may be.
Tradition Renewed: A History of the Jewish Theological Seminary, ed. Jack Wertheimer (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1997): 281-2.
This document was the future inspiration for the U.S. Bill of Rights, written almost exactly one hundred years later.
The two major secondary sources of information on cantors of this era are Cecil Roth’s The Great Synagogue London 1640-1940 (and H. Mayerowitsch’s “The Chazanim of the Great Synagogue, London,” which were published immediately prior and immediately following, the ultimate destruction of the Great Synagogue during the Blitz of 1941. For all of the wonders of our digital era, I have not yet been able to locate Roth’s earliest sources, which included the synagogue’s Takkanoth (community ordinances) from 1722.
J. Maitlis, 'London Yiddish Letters of the Early Eighteenth Century', The Journal of Jewish Studies, vi (1955), pp. 153-65 and 237-52.
See Jacob Emden’s recollection from his youth in Amsterdam in his autobiographical Megillat Sefer.
This trope repeats itself across Jewish history, with the more acculturated communities seeing the disintegrated, immigrant community as a threat to their acceptance in broader society. The funding of the Jewish Theological Seminary itself by Reform mega-donor Jacob H. Schiff was partially from the desire to create a seminary for rabbis that could minister to (and civilize) the large East European immigrant population which stood as a cultural foil to the more integrated and modern German Jewish community.
New scholarship in this field is currently being undertaken by Uri Erman, who is studying opera and Jewishness in nineteenth century Britain.