Cantors, Opera, & Dancing Maidens
New synagogue melodies have always come from the darndest places
Every time I sit down to write one of these posts, I begin with one subject matter in mind and seem end up with another entirely. Since last month, dear reader, you have been promised an introduction to the 17th-18th century Jewish experiments in Western art music — the third scene in an unfolding drama on Jews and harmony. But some of my research this week has yielded a delightful intermezzo, one which I hope will illuminate the sonic worlds of our musical ancestors.
Over past month in PhD Land, I’ve been squirreling away at translating cantorial ethicists from the early 18th century. Often these sources get one footnote, or at best a page, in overviews of early modern Jewish music. But the amount of sheer detail they offer concerning the musical and religious texture of their world can be breathtaking. The source I’m reading now, Cantor Yehuda Leib Zelichower (Minden), is a great case in point.
Zelichower worked as a cantor in the Jewish community of Hamburg, which featured more upwardly mobile Jews active in the port city’s burgeoning mercantile activities. This was the Jewish community to which the famed Jewish author and businesswoman, Glückel of Hameln, belonged, prior to her second marriage. Cantor Zelichower, at least for a time, would have been one of her cantors.
Like Glückel’s family and much of Jewish Hamburg, Zelichower was caught up in the messianic craze of the failed messiah, Shabbethai Tzvi, in 1666. As Elisheva Carlebach points out, the Sabbatian movement left an intensified pietism in its wake, emphasizing the power of prayer and ascribing a redemptive role to the cantor’s vocation. Thus, in 1697, Zelichower published Sefer Shirei Yehuda (1697), a pair of pious Hebrew songs with commentary combined, together with an extensive ethical guide in Yiddish and Hebrew. The largest section of this guide was devoted to exhorting wayward cantors to rise to their sacred calling. As it stood, Zelichower was concerned that his fellows were delaying the redemption (again!), especially by introducing new, non-traditional melodies.1
In describing the transgressions of his cantorial contemporaries, Cantor Zelichower ‘s Sefer Shirei Yehuda (1697) intimates the sources of these new-fangled melodic creations:
“But now in this generation, on account of our many sins, innovators have come who go about in darkness without knowledge or understanding. They abandon the old melodies and cast them behind their backs, and make fun of them, saying: “This is an old thing; and we are not satisfied with it.” And they choose other melodies in their place, either of their own devising or taken from their theaters, and they bring them to the Lord’s Temple; and they are like those melodies that accompany the dancing of young maidens. And there are those of them that study melodies from non-Jews, before those who go door to door in search of food, and sing them in our house of worship. Has an evil thing like this or appearing like it ever been heard of? Should the LORD desire such songs as these?”2
Hamburg was the home of the first public opera theater in Germany, bringing the grand sounds of the court to the common people. The Oper am Gänsemarkt, opened in 1678, put up many operas with religious and political themes for the Hamburg masses; it is also the theater to which an eighteen-year old George Friedrich Handel first came in 1703 to work as a cembalist and violinist and, shortly after, as a composer.3 Yet opera for the masses was a contentious innovation whose merits were heavily debated among Hamburg’s Christian clergy. Jewish clergy had their own challenges with this new theater — namely keeping their young women away, and keeping their flock from attending on Shabbat and holidays! Sumptuary laws issued by the Jewish community attempted to curtail this transgression, and, by the year 1715, became so strict as to ban it entirely, even on Hanukkah and Purim. It is interesting that these holidays, which deal with Jewish resistance to non-Jewish hegemony and persecution, should be specifically enumerated; they are, perhaps relatedly, the holidays in which gambling was also permitted.
Despite both religious dictum and communal ordinance, Jews could not be kept out of the Hamburg opera. I have not yet found other theaters operating in Cantor Zelichower’s Hamburg (which doesn’t mean there weren’t any). Nevertheless, the melodies of Oper am Gänsemarkt (like this aria from Handel’s first opera, Almira, premiered in 1705) remain prime candidates for the impious synagogue tunes that tormented Zelichower’s religious spirit.
The opera provided the Jews of Hamburg new access to the cultivated art of music, yet cantors also learned their melodies from the soundscape of the public square. Zelichower further observes that these melodies sound like those which accompany the dancing of young maidens (ניגונים שהולכים במחול עם בתולות). I’m still at the beginning of researching German (and/or Jewish) women’s dance music at the turn of the 18th century; it is probable that he observed this sort of dancing at a public festival. Zelichower’s description also appears to draw parallels between the form of this repertoire and the opera theater repertoire — unsurprising in operatic scenes of courtship, yet for the moment tantalizingly mute.
Zelichower’s most telling description is of cantors who study with non-Jews, “before those who go door to door in search of food.” It may sound striking that Jews should study with beggars, but it was just this economic strata of society who often comprised the ranks of musicians employed by the city for municipal music-making. Hamburg’s Ashkenazic Jews were not limited by ghetto walls, but would still not (yet) have access to the cultivated music literacy of the court and church choir. The town bugle player or the busker on the street were more ready and accessible teachers. As we will see next week, even the more affluent Sephardic Jews of 17th century Hamburg, who were quite conversant in Baroque style, would have to commission complex works of Hebraic Baroque music from Christian composers (although, showing some dispersal of musical literacy in their ranks, they were conceivably able to successfully perform these works themselves).
As Ashkenazic Jews like Zelichower and his fellow cantors secured a more permanent economic and social place aside Christians, the diffusion of new sounds into the synagogue represented a major threat to Jewish sonic identity. The people had enshrined their old melodies as sacred custom (minhag), carrying them on their backs through prior eras of regular persecution and expulsion. Cantors like Yehuda Zelichower believed that these new melodies, and the violations of Jewish law they precipitated, were so consequential as to delay the messianic redemption — a redemption only recently snatched away by a false messiah.
Next week the “Jewish Baroque” will finally make an appearance. In the meantime, feel free to leave a comment about what new music you think Zelichower’s cantorial antagonists could have been picking up in Hamburg.
For those of you interested in more ethics for cantors, I’ll be teaching an online class on another major 18th-century text and its wisdom about the Jewish High Holidays on August 29th at 12:30pm for Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion.
Just forgive the unintentional humor of the advertisement. I am not a 300-year old cantor. But maybe if I start researching the hazzan of the Second Temple, I can get an even better billing (like Mel Brooks) as a 2000 year old man.
See Elisheva Carlebach, “Two Amens that Delayed the Redemption: Jewish Messianism and Popular Spirituality in the Post-Sabbatian Century” The Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol. 82, No. 3/4 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992): 241-261.
Yehuda Leib Zelichower, Sefer Shirei Yehuda (Amsterdam: Kosman Emerich 1697): 26b.
Prior to arriving in Hamburg, Handel spent a one-year stint studying law in his hometown at the University of Halle, where coincidentally I’m currently writing my doctorate. Founded less than a decade before Handel’s arrival, the university eventually merged with the University of Wittenberg (home of Martin Luther & his 95 theses) in 1817. The university has a fascinating Jewish history, which I’ll write about at another time.
Kol hakawod for your continuous researching