The Making of a Reform Jewish Cantor. Judah M. Cohen

      To Fashion a Cantor

      For 2000 years, the cantor has served as the Jewish people’s prayer leader before God, as composer of liturgical poetry and song, and as educator and communal leader. Today, the cantor is part of a professional synagogue team working to enhance Jewish life.… As a calling and a career, the cantorate continues “to wed the worlds of spirit and art”—the mission for which the School of Sacred Music prepares its students.

      —Publicity Brochure for the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion School of Sacred Music, c. 1999

      As framed by the School of Sacred Music, the figure of the cantor at the start of the twenty-first century served as a force for maintaining Jewish religious musical traditions, and a powerful public symbol of Jewish religious continuity. This portrait, cultivated since the mid-late-nineteenth century, originally emerged as part of a trend toward scientific precision within Central and Eastern European Jewish scholarship. Cantors and other researchers, compiling over two millennia of written and spiritual sources, progressively distilled a cantorial figure from a wide array of titles, responsibilities, and musical concepts. Their work not only gave the cantor an identity, but also established a historical, social, musical, and religious space for discussing “Jewish” liturgical sound. At the twentieth century’s end, therefore, cantors increasingly saw themselves as figures both in history and of history. Through both publicity and action, they claimed on one hand an age-old embodiment of artistic sound within Jewish worship, and on the other hand a means for preserving and propagating that sound within contemporary society.

      Before delving into the meaning of becoming a cantor within Reform Judaism, I will chronicle the layers of communal knowledge and activity into which the cantor has come to dwell. When combined, these layers establish a platform for creating the “modern” cantor, ultimately supporting the intentions and ambitions of the School of Sacred Music’s founders in the 1940s, and continuing to shape the meaning of the cantorate ever since. During the time of my research, these well-defined contours of cantorial scholarship provided an ethnohistorical and religious framework for anchoring emerging cantorial identity.

      The idea of “Jewish history,” as David Biale has argued, implies a quest for a unified narrative—one that somehow threads together a varied and far-flung series of populations and cultural practices across space and time (Biale 2002: xxiii–xxiv). To consolidate these communities through a common set of religious beliefs, ideologies, experiences, or genetic traits requires a great deal of nuance and imagination. Yet people have sought a common “Jewish” past and sense of experience for scholarly, personal, political, communal, and religious purposes. The cantorial narrative offers one example of this process, and illustrates the tensions involved in bringing together Jewish identity and history. Recent scholarly accounts have linked the cantorial figure over time to several different occupations (both amateur and professional), numerous leadership responsibilities and activities (religious or otherwise), many forms of knowledge and talent (not always musical), broad interpretations of moral leadership, and several types of musical aesthetics and repertoire. Combined and recombined in different ways depending upon the author and context, these broad attributes created a variable narrative inscribing the cantor with historical depth and an intimate knowledge of a Jewish sonic “essence.” The School of Sacred Music’s own publicity pamphlet, for example, began by promoting the figure it intended to produce as a link between ancient and modern Jewish life: at once a spiritual representative and a wage-earner, a member of the clergy and an artist, a figure for the ages and a figurehead for today. How and why the School brings these two thousand years of “cantorial” activity to the charge of the modern cantor offers insight into the ways a “usable past” (Roskies 1996) became the impetus for a useful, and perhaps forward-seeking, present.

       Constructing the Cantor: The Pre-Modern Layers

      Researchers trying to construct cantorial practices before the eighteenth century often had to conflate linguistic and cultural history, tracing words or concepts perceived as connected with the cantor across canonical Jewish texts. These texts, which largely comprised legal interpretive works written by religious authorities, claimed linear descent from the Torah (The Five Books of Moses): including the Mishnah (Judea, c. 200 CE), the Talmud (Israel/Babylonia, c. 500 CE), The Guide for the Perplexed (Cairo, Moses Maimonides, 1185–1190 CE), the Shulchan Aruch (Venice, Joseph Caro, 1565) and numerous subsidiary writings. Using references from these sources led researchers to a unique, albeit slanted, composite narrative that gave a broad context for exploring cantorial religious norms, social roles, and cultural values. These sources’ status as a foundation for much contemporary Jewish religious life, moreover, gave them additional capital as “definitive” parts of the Jewish historical narrative.

      Twentieth-century scholars wishing to describe the “origins” of the cantorate typically framed their discussion around two terms: chazan¹ and shaliach tzibbur. As Max Schlesinger noted in 1904, Talmudic references to these terms appeared to describe ambiguous “communal officials” (or “servants”) who may have performed Jewish sacred rituals, but carried no explicitly musical responsibilities (Schlesinger 1904). Liturgist Ismar Elbogen later destabilized even these early mentions by suggesting they may have resulted from later modifications inserted by copyists (Elbogen 1941: 17–18). Regardless of the obscurity and variation such references presented, however, scholars seeking a cantorial lineage found the sheer presence of chazan and shaliach tzibbur in early canonical works enough to establish a retrospective linguistic anchor for a continuous cantorial history.

      From these beginnings, scholars subsequently pieced together several versions of a “rise of the cantor” narrative. Abraham Z. Idelsohn, for example, devoted an entire chapter to the cantor’s emergence in his landmark 1929 book Jewish Music in Its Historical Development. Idelsohn’s interpretation of cantor-related terms started with the shaliach tzibbur as a non-musical maintenance worker whose title eventually changed to chazan; at that point, Idelsohn claimed, the chazan began to gain musical associations, and eventually developed into a musical precentor (Idelsohn 1992 [1929]b: 101–109). Hyman Kublin, in 1971, took a somewhat different tack by claiming that although the chazan and shaliach tzibbur described separate figures, chazanim (pl.) eventually became de facto occupiers of shaliach tzibbur positions by the Middle Ages (Kublin 1971); Hyman Sky, in a much more extensive study, came up with similar findings (1992). Mark Slobin, in the late 1980s, provided his own nuance to the discussion, supplementing Idelsohn’s schema by outlining social and liturgical factors that might have led to the “invention of the hazzan” at the start of the seventh century. Emphasizing the philological