"Jewish Voices in the New World" Chants and Prayers from the American Colonial Era The birth of the American Jewish community dates to 1654, when a group of...
"Jewish Voices in the New World"
Chants and Prayers from the American Colonial Era
The birth of the American
Jewish community dates to 1654, when a group of 23 Jews - most of them Amsterdam
Portuguese Sephardim -- arrived in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam from the
Jewish community in Recife, Brazil, which had just come under Portuguese control.
By 1776, the Colonial American Jewish population was estimated at 2,000, and
by the mid-18th century there were functioning synagogues in five cities. One
of the most important elements of early Jewish life in America was the maintenance
of the authentic Western Sephardi liturgical music tradition that had developed
chiefly in Amsterdam (and to a lesser degree, London) during the late 16th
and 17th centuries. This tradition, brought here by those first
Jewish settlers, in fact served as the primary vehicle for defining Jewish identity
in this country.
This Milken Archive CD
features synagogue melodies and biblical chants that would typically have been
heard in Colonial-era synagogues up to circa 1830. They include Psalm texts,
Torah readings (biblical texts), prayers from the Sabbath eve and Rosh
Hashana (Jewish New Year) services, and prayers recited on Tisha B'av,
a solemn day in the Jewish calendar commemorating the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. The liturgy is authentically rendered, as it would have been in 18th
century America, by a cantor and men's (sometimes with children) choir singing
in unison, without harmonization. Hazzan Ira Rohde of New York's Shearith Israel, America's oldest congregation, is heard with the Schola Hebraeica conducted by Neil Levin.
The development of the
Western Sephardi musical tradition echoes Jewish history in the Diaspora.
After the demise of the so-called Golden Age of Spanish Jewry and the
expulsions from Spain (1492) and Portugal (1497) of all Jews who declined
conversion to Christianity, the largest number of Jewish exiles, now called
Sephardim (from Sepharad--Spain in Hebrew), resettled in Moslem-ruled lands of North
Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, including various parts of the Ottoman
Turkish Empire. Among those Jews who converted and remained on the Iberian Peninsula, some practiced Jewish customs and ceremonies in secret, but the
synagogue was non-existent and its musical traditions could have no role in
their lives. Toward the middle of the 16th century, these conversos began
to leave their homeland, settling in Amsterdam, Venice, and southern France,
other Western European cities including London, Paris, Vienna and Hamburg;
Brazil and the Caribbean; and eventually, North America. Known in their new
communities as "Portuguese" Jews, they are best described as "western
Sephardi," to distinguish them from their North African and eastern
Mediterranean counterparts.
The foundations of the
western Sephardi liturgical music tradition were laid in its "mother" community
in Amsterdam. The conversos who arrived there possessed little
knowledge of Jewish rituals, but sought to reestablish authentic links to their
lost Jewish heritage. Looking eastward, they recruited knowledgeable cantors
and rabbis from some of the principal North African and Ottoman Sephardi
centers, and the musical repertoire that emerged was thus based partly on those
traditions. The eastern style of vocal rendition - heavily ornamented,
rhythmically ambiguous and marked by "exotic" timbres and modes - probably
seemed foreign to the more western-attuned sensibilities of the Amsterdam
Jews. Over time, these eastern musical characteristics were streamlined and
"westernized," and the repertoire was expanded to include original creations by
local cantors familiar with western European art music, as well as "foreign"
accretions such as Ashkenazi liturgical tunes and non-Jewish, secular folksongs.
The engagement of cantors
trained in Amsterdam in the Western Sephardi tradition by that city's "sister"
communities, including New York, contributed to the stability and relative
uniformity of their liturgical repertoires, and helped maintain the tradition
in America through the Colonial period and beyond. We can thus be reasonably
assured that the music on this Milken Archive recording -- all of which is
preserved intact in the current repertoires of two major American western
Sephardi synagogues that date from the Colonial period -- New York's Shearith
Israel (1654) and Philadelphia's Mikve Israel (1782) -- is essentially the same
as that sung in the Colonies throughout much of the 18th century.
Among the highlights of this CD are various prayers and readings associated
with the observance of Tisha B'av, the annual fast day of mourning that
commemorates the destruction of the first and second Temples in Jerusalem.
For Sephardim, the day has an additional significance: it coincides with the
accepted date of the 1492 expulsion edict. Special synagogue services for this
day include the reading (i.e., chanting) of the Book of Lamentations, whose
lyric poetry laments the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem, as well as later
elegies by medieval Hebrew poets that refer to both ancient calamities and subsequent
catastrophes in the Diaspora. Each of the principal Jewish rites (Ashkenazi,
Sephardi, Persian, Yemenite, etc.) has its own special cantillation pattern
for the Book of Lamentations; the one heard here is unique to the Portuguese
tradition as it was known in the American Colonies.