The Jewish Baroque

What it is, why you haven’t heard of it, and the musicologist who mapped it all.

After three weeks, we’ve finally reached an appraisal of the 17th and 18th century Jewish experiments in musical artistry.

I’m quite fond of this era: You can perform its repertoire. It uncovers unique occasions for musical artistry in Jewish life, such as synagogue inaugurations, circumcisions, Purim, and even Hoshanah Rabbah. But most of all, it was a time when Jews were engaging in pre-nationalist, vital religious questions about music and its power to both create and destroy personal piety, communal cohesion, and time-honored tradition. This, for me, represents Judaism wrestling with music’s true self, in all of its beauty and mess.

These questions are at the center of my PhD dissertation, which deals with the Ashkenazic cantors and their musical professionalization in the early modern era, which, by the end of the 18th century, yielded a ton of Baroque-inflected (or infected) music. We saw a little of the stakes of this transformation last week. For those interested in a further preview, I’m publishing a piece of my dissertation in the upcoming Fall 2024 Journal of Synagogue Music, which will drop online sometime after the Jewish High Holy Days.

The Jewish Baroque is a huge topic. There are people who have written and spoken about it far more comprehensively than me. I will instead offer a concise map of the territory over the next two weeks, identifying the cultural contexts for these Jewish art music experiments, including why we don’t often hear about them (and the occasions when we do). I ask your forgiveness in advance if the broad brushstrokes of this quick portrait of the Jewish Baroque end up a little like “summarizing Proust.”

And now for something completely different.

“A baroque music is that in which the harmony is confused, charged with modulations and dissonances, the melody is harsh and little natural, the intonation difficult, and the movement constrained."

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Dictionnaire de la Musique (1768)

The “Jewish Baroque” is a term that describes the 17th and 18th century transformation of Jewish music in Western Europe, marked by the slow and disparate diffusion of Western aesthetics and artistry into Jewish cultures. Most of the music of this era has only been rediscovered or re-evaluated in the last fifty years. This is partly from a prior lack of published sources, but predominantly due to a long-suffered polemic spanning two centuries.

As Jews came to feel more a sonic part of Western Europe, the “music libel against the Jews” — that Jews were producers of “noise” rather than harmony - became more and more internalized by the Jews themselves.¹ Sephardic communities in port cities like Hamburg, Amsterdam, and London actively cultivated Baroque style in their worship and looked askance, together with many Christians, at the poorer musical aesthetics of their Ashkenazic neighbors. By the nineteenth century, the Western Ashkenazic Jews had greatly absorbed the libel as well. This led to the meteoric efforts of reformers like Salomon Sulzer, Louis Lewandowski, and others to create dignified, European Jewish music which was consonant with the cultural citizenship conferred upon Jews by Emancipation, and to prune the exaggerated accretions of eighteenth-century synagogue music that were seen seen as extravagant, decadent, and “noisy.”

This critique was further carried through the 19th and 20th centuries into the earliest narratives of Jewish musicology, including those of Francis Cohen, A.Z. Idelsohn; and Eric Werner.² The decadence of the Jewish Baroque — its sometimes middling compositional quality and, at least among Ashkenazim, excess of ornamentation and effacing of the liturgy, was an affront to the dignity of Jewish music in the eyes of the world. Such Jewish compositional functionalism or mediocrity could conjure back up the long-banished ghost of the music libel once more, putting the integrity of the Jewish contribution to civilization in peril.

I agree that this was an era of acculturation and decadence. That is certainly what makes writing about it so entertaining. But I’m perhaps less afraid of it because it shows the truth of what is really behind musical transformation, including critical changes in technology, theology, psychology, and society.

The first foundations of musicological work on the Jewish Baroque repertoire that we know today were made by Eduard Birnbaum & A.Z. Idelsohn. But one cannot approach the art music of European Jews today without passing through the gates opened by the monumental contributions of Dr. Israel Adler.

Israel Adler (1925-2009)

Trained in yeshiva, the National Conservatory of France, and the Sorbonne, Israel Adler helped to establish the major institutions of Jewish musicology in Israel over the course of the twentieth century, including the Jewish Music Research Centre at Hebrew University. And he mapped almost the entire known territory of Jewish books and manuscripts of pre-modern Jewish music.

Adler’s major works include: (1) his overview of 17th-18th century European Jewish art music, La pratique musicale savante dans quelques communautés juives en Europe aux XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles (2 vols. Paris-La Haye, 1966); (2) his compilation of all(!) manuscript music sources of synagogue music prior to 1840 - Hebrew Notated Manuscript Sources Up to Circa 1840: A Descriptive Catalogue with a Checklist of Printed Sources, 2 vols. (RISM B IX1, prepared with the assistance of Lea Shalem); and (3) Hebrew Writings Concerning Music in Manuscripts and Printed Books from Geonic Times up to 1800. (RISM B IX2). In addition to these books and many articles, Adler also prepared performance editions of many of the early works of Jewish art music that he researched or rediscovered.

Some of Adler’s major works, including his extensive catalog of worldwide Hebrew notated music manuscripts, his major book about Jewish art music, and editions of early Hebrew art music. Plus a homemade axolotl, courtesy of my daughter, as a nod to the well-placed animals of Elam Rotem.

The amount of scholarship poured into the above works is staggering; it would take me many weeks to even attempt to summarize them. All I can say is that we all who care about Judaism, music, and art owe Adler a great debt.³

While Salamone Rossi is great, a lot went on between his Hebrew madrigals (1623) and the next era of Jewish musical “enlightenment” starting in 1840. This era, skipped over in typical concert narratives, included new efforts by certain groups of Jews to commission or create works of musical artistry. These works were largely produced by (or for) economically empowered groups of Jews with newly claimed art music aesthetics from their European environment. The major works known today came from Jews in the Comtat Venaissin in Southern France; from Casale Monferrato, Venice, and Sienna in Italy; and a large body of work from the Portuguese community in Amsterdam. These groups commissioned both Jewish and non-Jewish composers like Abraham Caceres, Carlo Grossi, Louis Saladin, and Cristiano Giuseppe Lidarti to compose cantatas for major liturgical and para-liturgical events.

The Portuguese Jews in particular had a close affinity to the sounds of the Baroque. They returned to Judaism from being “New Christians” and reconstructed their religious soundscape from a combination of sources. They firstly recruited trusted prayer leaders from established Sephardic communities in the Mediterranean, such as Tunis and Salonica (Thessaloniki). But they also self consciously incorporated elements of contemporary Baroque music into their reconstructed tradition, in keeping with their Christian pasts and the circles they kept as successful traders in port cities like Hamburg, Amsterdam, and London.

I learned a delightful smidgeon of this Baroque Sephardic repertoire as a first year cantorial student in Israel, under the direction of Adler’s successor, Edwin Seroussi. My fellow students and I prepared a kabbalat shabbat that was a mélange of Moroccan psalmody & Western Sephardic cantorial music, including a few Baroque tunes from eighteenth-century manuscripts. Let’s just say this was not your typical Friday night service with nigunim or guitars.

One of these melodies was a Sephardic kaddish tune from Hamburg, indicated as the melody of “Orlebuski.” That is to say it came from Conrad Friedrich Hurlebusch (1691-1765), a German composer and organist whose music would have been heard in the salons of affluent Portuguese Jews in Hamburg and Amsterdam. You can actually hear a recording of the melody sung by my classmate in this recent lecture by Dr. Seroussi (Start at minute mark 13:15). ⁴

This is a thrilling example of how consciously these Baroque tastes (and non-Jewish composers) were adopted into the synagogue, and emblematic of their alternative path to modernity, to borrow the term from Yosef Kaplan, taken by the Portuguese Jews.

Of all of the Jewish Baroque cantatas and synagogue pieces discovered by Adler, his last major discovery was perhaps the most fascinating. This is the score to Giuseppe Lidarti’s Hebrew oratorio Ester, which he discovered in 1997 in the library of Cambridge University. The oratorio, commissioned in Amsterdam in 1779, was based on a Hebrew libretto by the Italian rabbi Jacob Saraval. And Rabbi Saraval made his translation directly from the libretto of Esther, the 1732 biblical oratorio by George Friedrich Handel. To summarize: It’s Handel’s libretto, translated into Hebrew by a rabbi, and set to new music several decades later by a Christian composer for Dutch Jews. You can’t make this stuff up.

If you want to listen to the entire thing, you can watch the premiere of the piece given in honor of the 75th Jubilee of the Hebrew University (a better choice than tracking down the now rare commercial recording by Friedemann Layer). For a taste, you can hear the two soprano arias (at 5:02 and 7:38) sung by my colleague, Cantor Jessica Silverberg, in her capstone cantorial recital.

Due to the work of Adler, Seroussi, and many others, we live in an era where this music is more accessible than ever. The National Library of Israel has recently made its first, second, and third major Jewish Baroque recordings and liner notes free to access online. Performers can find some arrangements are published by Transcontinental Music, and many larger works are available through the Israel Music Institute. But YouTube alone is a witness to the many ensembles who convened to interpret this genre (a shout out to Four and Twenty Strings in Boston for their recent concert!).

These largely Sephardic Jewish Baroque pieces, works of art in music notation, make a cozy home with those seeking to paint Jewish music as part and parcel of Western civilization and sound. Next week, we’ll peer in to the slightly less graceful Ashkenazic world, which will upend that table with beautiful disharmony.

1. Eastern European Jews also experienced a change in their synagogue aesthetics during these two centuries, mostly driven by the musical specialization of the Czech & Polish cantorate and the development of the meshorerim (Ashkenazic chorister). The development of cantorial style in 18th century Eastern Europe, particularly in its divergence from the Western Ashkenazic cantorial style, is not yet well researched.

2. Werner is at least self-aware of his biases in this area, and further attributes the reasons for this “decay” to the stratification of Jewish life into different classes and the rise of the itinerant cantorate. For more see Eric Werner, A Voice Still Heard : the sacred songs of the Ashkenazic Jews (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976): 168-189.

3. I also owe a great debt to my good friend, Cantor Abraham Lubin, who has given me his personal copies of most of Adler’s scholarly output, including the aforementioned books, on permanent loan. I will write more extensively about Cantor Lubin’s storied career at some future point, but what stands out most about him, other than his consummate cantorial style, is that he is a total mensch.

4. The singer of the kaddish is actually Sidney Ezer, Cantor of Beth Tzedec in Toronto, ON.