Synagogue Music > Articles

The Anglo-Jewish Cantorate
by Victor Tunkel
(December 2004)

In this country, both strands of the Jewish people, Sephardim and Ashkenazim, are represented, and so is their liturgical music. The Sephardim resettled in England from 1656 onwards, establishing their first synagogue in Creechurch Lane and a burial ground in Mile End; the latter unhappily was soon needed when the Great Plague carried off many of the immigrants. The survivors then built their synagogue to its present site in Bevis Marks in 1701. By then, Ashkenazi Jews had begun to arrive, mostly from North Germany . Their first synagogue, ‘The Great’, opened in Duke’s Place, Aldgate, in 1722. It was destroyed in a 1941 air raid.

The Bevis Marks community came from Holland , but were descended from ancestors who had been expelled from Spain and Portugal in 1492 (or who had remained there in pretended conversion). Their liturgical music (and secular ballads in old Spanish) reflects this. Their oldest prayer chants have still an Iberian flavour. But in the 18 th and 19 th centuries, a rich anglicised musical tradition developed with new compositions in four-part harmony. The Bevis Marks chazan's style is restrained and dignified. The Sephardi tradition of full congregational participation calls for their chazan to be a true prayer-leader rather than a solo performer.

The Ashkenazi cantor, on the other hand, is more of a virtuoso. He is expected to inspire the congregation with a depth of expression reflecting the nature and meaning of the many facets of Jewish prayer: pleading, confession, contrition, adoration, triumph, pathos, recollection of times past, hopes for the future, grief at loss beyond words. Within the traditional prayer modes he is allowed, indeed expected, to extemporise freely but always keeping within or returning to the applicable mode, its scale and cadences. This calls for considerable skill and flexibility and vocal dexterity.

The first London Ashkenazi chazan, predating the actual building at Duke’s Place, was Yehuda Leib ben Moshe, of Lissa (1690-1706). The first to officiate in the Great Synagogue was Yechiel Michael ben Moshe Yoseph (1722-1750). Following him, Isaac Polak served for a record 56 years: 1746-1802. Under him served two renowned choristers: ‘Leoni’ (Myer Leon) and John Braham, both of whom were also acclaimed opera singers at Covent Garden .

The German Style : In 1827, Duke’s Place appointed Heinich Eliassohn, of Darmstadt (the title of chazan had by now been anglicised to ‘Reader’). He brought to England with him a 14 year-old boy singer, Julius Mombach. For the next half-century, Mombach under Eliassohn and his successors, Ascher, Green, and Keizer , dominated Anglo-Jewish synagogue music. Influenced by the ‘new wave’ of synagogue composition coming from Sulzer in Vienna, Lewandowski in Berlin and Naumbourg in Paris, Mombach composed numerous settings for the services of the whole year and formed and trained a choir of boys and men to support the chazan. Mombach’s music, together with that of two other London chazanim, Wasserzug and Hast, constitutes much of the home-grown Anglo-Jewish repertoire to this day.

The Eastern Style : At the end of the 19 th Century, many Ashkenazim fled westwards from Tsarist persecution. Of those who came to England , many found the anglicised style of service and the German style of music unappealing. So they founded their own synagogues in which the Eastern Ashkenazic tradition was maintained. This was more fervent and participatory, but less orderly. The prayer modes and set melodies show more Asian and less European influence. The style of chazanut likewise is more intricate, melismatic, and florid. For the Jews in Eastern Europe , cut off from general European culture, concerts, opera, etc., the chazan provided a musical treat, almost an entertainment, to satisfy their senses. Chazanut there had developed to some extent for this very purpose, with non-Jewish tunes occasionally introduced, despite the frowns of rabbis.

In England , the arrival in 1903 of Samuel Alman (born Podolia 1878 and died London 1947) brought into the English synagogue an outstanding trained musician steeped in the music of Eastern Europe . In his many compositions he was able to absorb the Anglo-Jewish tradition and yet to add an eastern flavour, so that under his enduring influence the music of the English synagogue has become a rich hybrid of both styles.

Sound Recording : In addition, the arrival of sound recording at the beginning of the 20 th Century had encouraged a series of Eastern European chazanim with remarkable voices to make gramophone records which were eagerly bought by the masses. The influence of recording may itself have excited these singers to indulge in the most extraordinary vocal acrobatics and coloraturas with prodigious flexibility, much of which may have been unknown before. The first chazan to record was the legendary Sirota in 1902. A golden age of recorded and concert chazanut followed, magnificent voices that we can still hear: Karniol, Meisels, Rutman, Kwartin, Katchko, Steinberg, Rosenblatt, Hershman, Vigoda, Rapaport, Shlisky, Roitman, Pinchik, the four Koussevitsky brothers, Chagy, Alter, Glantz. A later generation gave us Moyshe Oysher, Richard Tucker, Jan Peerce, Leibele Waldman, and others who were able to appear on the opera stage and in films. Some of these listed as well as many others were chazan-composers who reworked the traditional melodies and wrote new ones; and their recorded versions have become ‘traditional’.

Chazanim, home-bred and imported : For many years the teaching of chazanut to English-born students was offered at the London Rabinical Training School , known then as Jews’ College (and now as the London School of Jewish Studies) by such devoted chazan-educators as Mayerowitsch, Pincasovitch and Bryll. However, a steady flow of continental chazanim came to occupy the leading synagogues’ positions. The flow greatly increased with refugee-chazanim from Europe before the war; and even after the war there were a few survivors who came. In the post-war years, a succession of outstanding chazanim arrived from or via Israel to positions in leading London synagogues including Malovany, Hainovitz, Herstik and Korn (sojourning here a while before moving to higher positions in Israel and North America. But as this evening’s concert shows, we have not ceased to produce and nurture some talented English-born chazanim.

Chazanut and changing fashion : In recent years, some congregants have expressed impatience with traditional Ashkenazi chazanut as prolonging services, excluding participation, and being out of touch with modern taste. Yet sales of recordings and attendances at concerts tell a different story. Chazanut is a peculiar treasure of the Jewish people. More directly than any other means it enables us to glimpse a world we have lost and to share the experience and devotion of our forebears. For centuries, Chazanim preserved and evolved the deepest and often agonised expression of the Jew at prayer. For us today, they look to the past and to the future.

I hope this outline, necessarily compressed and selective, will help to give some idea of the depth and strength of the institution of chazan and of the music chazanim have created over the centuries.