Minkovsky, Blumenthal, Lazarus, and the dangers of Jewish music
Working my way through various archival rabbit holes while doing research for my new book project, I came upon a handwritten essay in German by the influential Odessa-based Cantor Pinchas Minkovsky (1859-1924), in the archive of the National Library of Israel. The document would probably have slipped through my fingers, as just so much more ephemeral sands of the past, especially since my German is terrible, but something caught my eye and encouraged me to slog through a reading. Minkovksy mentions Moritz Lazarus (1824-1903), the German Jewish philosopher who played an important role both in the development of modern theories of identity and psychology, and in the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment movement. I was intrigued to find a direct contemporary link between Lazarus’s theories and Jewish liturgical music, but what I found in Minkovsky’s essay, rather than providing an affirmation of the close relationship of synagogue musical reform and the Jewish Enlightenment, threw a monkey wrench in the story of cultural affinity between modern Jewish philosophy and music.
Cantor Pinchas Minkovsky
To the extent that Pinchas Minkovsky is remembered at all today it is primarily in connection with the early 20th century controversy over the ethics of recording cantorial music. Memorably, he alleged that records of Jewish sacred music were being played in brothels and bars. Minkovsky was passionately against this incursion of technology and pop culture into the sacred and published a book-lengthy anti-gramophone screed in 1910, in which he denounced record star cantors as a degradation to the spiritual purity of the community. Beyond the gramophone, Minkovsky was both a leading intellectual and a controversy hound, honing his skills of insult against his colleagues in his serious works of criticism. While his role in the gramophone controversy might suggest a conservative preservationist perspective, nothing could be further from the truth. Over the course of a controversial career, Minkovsky was consistently a liberal innovator, embracing modernizing choral music early in his career, leading to him being driven out of his first job in Berdichev by his Hasidic former fans. Later, in his major pulpit job in Odessa, he introduced women choir members and the organ into the synagogue. Minkovsky published essays of criticism and music history prolifically in Yiddish, Hebrew and German, sometimes writing for journals edited by his friend, the influential Hebrew poet Hayim Nahman Bialik.
Cantor Nissan Blumenthal
The essay I found in the archive is a tribute to Cantor Nissan Blumenthal (1805-1903), Minkovsky’s predecessor at the Brody Synagogue in Odessa. Perhaps the essay was written around the time of Blumenthal’s death. Blumenthal was the first cantor of the Brody, founded in 1841 by the affluent and educated Galicianer community in Odessa as a modernizing, Enlightenment-oriented alternative to the older Beit Knesset ha-Gadol. Unlike in the older institution, the Brody Synagogue featured a “decorous” approach to services, with an ideal of regulated bodily comportment and silence from worshippers in contrast to the noise and movement that typified Jewish prayer, intellectually sophisticated sermons delivered in the prestigious German language, and modern worship music. Blumenthal is credited for popularizing four-part choral harmony composition in the European art music tradition into the Eastern European synagogue. His innovations paved the way for the transformative influence of the Austrian Cantor Salomon Sulzer’s approach to synagogue music in the Russian Empire, bringing the soundscape of modernizing Central European Jewish communities into the Pale of Settlement, the site of the majority of the world’s Jewish population at the time. Blumenthal’s best-known composition is a setting of Etz Chayim Hi (Hebrew, it is a tree of life), a central part of the Torah service liturgy, that is still sung in many synagogues (often in a folklorized form without its original four-part choral arrangement).
True to form, Minkovsky’s tribute to his revered predecessor is interlaced with not-so-subtle criticism. He writes that Blumenthal was neither an especially masterful vocalist nor an original composer. Rather what was unique in his work was his ability to synthesize Jewish liturgical traditions and “general music,” meaning the sounds of European classical art and church music. Minkovsky outlines an impressive intellectual lineage for Blumenthal’s ouevre, including Talmudic dialectic, the classic Jewish commentaries, as well as leading names in the Jewish Enlightenment such as Zecharias Frankel and Heinrich Graetz, and moving further from the Jewish world, into the 18th century Enlightenment philosophers. Blumenthal did not believe in the “darkness of faith” as the ideal of the Jewish religion. Minkovsky claims that the depth of his engagement with European intellectual high culture was what helped him shape intelligent and aesthetically coherent choices about how to include elements of European art music into his work for the synagogues. Minkovsky saw the work of musical experimentation, which consisted in large part of a program of modernization through borrowing and adaptation of already existing music, as being dangerously subject to aesthetic and spiritual error.
Diese, eigentlich technische Arbeit muß musikalisch so wähl wie liturgisch besonders berück sichtigt werden im der nemen Transformation der Schein der Näturlichkeit zu werleihen, wenn sie nicht als zufällig Philisterei gelten möchte, und dadurch mehr Schwierigkeiten als die Schaffung der originellen Melodien verursacht. Und hier liegt der Kontrast zwischen Blumental und anderen Kantoren Compilators. Wahrend er blaß das Gute nahm wo er es fand—obwohl wir auch damit bei weiten nicht amerstanden die sind—nahmen andere auch das Schlechte wo sie es fanden und waren diten es ungeschückt für den heiligen Fest, es fehlte ihnen der blumentalische didaktische und ästhetische Sinn.
This work, which is primarily technical, must take into account both musical and liturgical issues in order to give the transformation the feeling of naturalness and to avoid accidental philistinism, and thereby cause more difficulties than the creation of original melodies. And here lies the contrast between Blumenthal and other cantorial compilers. While he calmly took the good where he found it – even when we were far from being able to understand it – others also took the bad where they found it and adopted it unadorned into the holy festival, because they lacked Blumenthal’s didactic and aesthetic sense.
Minkovsky makes a hazy distinction in the essay between “composer” and “compiler” in the cantorial context. The cantorial composer is driven by the dictates of Jewish tradition—the cantor’s creativity must be driven by the dictates of modes and melodic forms that are encoded as norms of prayer performance through oral tradition. In contrast, the compiler is a kind of cultural explorer, reaching into the tool kit of non-Jewish European art music to enhance and refresh the experience of Jewish prayer music and the life of the synagogue. The choices that cantorial “compilers” make must be informed by an elite education, both Jewish and “general,” and a special aesthetic sense only possessed by the remarkable few. Minkovsky uses Blumenthal as an example to expound his rules of cantorial ethics. It is only through a remarkable ethical sensitivity that Blumenthal was able to make choices about how to borrow and experiment musically that were in spiritual harmony with the dignity and sublimity of religious musical expression. Blumenthal is a foil that Minkovsky can use to castigate and critique other cantors, whose low-brow practices of contrafacta (borrowing melodies and applying them to different texts) are described as demeaning. It is in connection to the choices made about how to manage the multiple imperatives of being a cantorial compiler that Minkovsky makes mention of the famed German Jewish philosopher Moritz Lazarus.
Moritz Lazarus
Lazarus’s once influential theory of “folk psychology” has largely fallen out of popular consciousness but is periodically resuscitated by scholars and cited as a predecessor to modern theories of culture and identity. In his study of 19th century cantor Abraham Baer, historian Anders Hammarlund cites Lazarus as a pivotal example of the forward mindedness of the Haskalah, going so far as to claim him as a forerunner to Benedict Anderson’s ubiquitous theory of “imagined communities.” Lazarus’s conception of the “folk,” or the ethnic-national collective, asserts that group identity develops out of culture, language and education, rather than being an expression of a biological essence that is inescapably part of a genetic inheritance. This approach was of major significance to modernizing Jewish intellectuals who were seeking to redefine themselves as members of modern European national groups. Lazarus’s theory is also helpful in analyzing cantors who were transforming Jewish ritual music in response to the changing status of Jews in the context of Emancipation (in Western Europe) and other forms of modern social transformation in the Pale of Settlement. As self-aware participants in the formation of a national “folk,” it would make sense for Jews to participate in the lively musical expressions of both elite and popular cultures.
One important element in Lazarus’s work on identity is the idea of “symbolic apperception.” Apperception is a complex theory of cognition, but on one foot it can be summarized as the idea that perception is guided by culture. Lazarus suggests that what appears to oneself as the purely natural set of assumptions and beliefs that occur while making observations during daily life are actually part of a vast network of interlocked ideas and behaviors that are contingent upon the norms of one’s environment and that are taught since birth alongside language and other forms of informal education.
Apparently fearing the potential of symbolic apperception to act as an invitation to democratically co-create culture, Minkovksky took a surprisingly negative view of the implications of Lazarus’s theory for the field of cantorial music. While Minkovsky praised Blumenthal for his immersion into European elite culture, he seems to fear what entrusting the increasingly acculturated Jewish masses with creative agency might mean for Jewish music
Eine Liturgie, die keinen anderen zinseck an erfolgt als Aransieren sei ihren heiligen Namen umwürdig. Symbolische Apperzeption, die wach Lazarus (in seinem Buch Das Leben der Seele) ganz und gar nam Härer abhänge, muß in der Synagoge absolut zuruck genoisen werden. Die Überlassung des letzte Urteils über die Wahl der synagogalen Musik dem Publikum hiesse so mich die Liturgie in eine Vorstellung zu im tauschen, da die Masse mehr Empfang lichkeit fur Amüsemant als fur ethischen Musik ihren bekundet. Un es sei die Pflicht der synagogalen Komponisten für die Verfeinerung der Empfänglichkeit des Publikum sorge un Veredelung seines Rezeptionen aesthetischen Sinnes zu tragen.
A liturgy that takes place in no other way than by consensus is unworthy of its holy name. Symbolic apperception, which according to Lazarus (in his book The Life of the Soul) depends entirely on the listener, must be absolutely revoked in the synagogue. Leaving the final judgment on the choice of synagogue music to the audience would mean exchanging the liturgy for a performance, since the masses express more receptivity to amusing music than to ethical music. It is the duty of the synagogue composers to ensure the refinement of the audience’s receptivity and the refinement of its aesthetic reception.
Something about Lazarus’s theory of a shared culture created through enculturation seems to have alarmed Minkovsky. There is an off-kilter quality to his invocation of the famed German philosopher. While Minkovsky may have partially (perhaps willfully) misunderstood Lazarus’s writings on apperception, his mistrust of the agency of the public stands out clearly in this passage. In Minkovsky’s worldview, elites must be responsible for the development of cultural innovations. Rather than being seen as an unambiguous benefit, the Enlightenment is represented as both a good and a potential danger for Jewish people. Attempts by “the masses” to influence the development of expressive culture under the influence of new educational and cultural experiences must be carefully prevented.
According to Minkovsky, the increasing involvement of urban Jews in “general” European culture could not be trusted to create the same degree of sophistication and aesthetic clarity as was achieved by elites such as Blumenthal (and himself). While an education in Enlightenment philosophy could be beneficial for some Jews, Minkovsky assumes that the audience for cantorial music will not have the same education or will not be able to make sense of the confusing profusion of new cultural and intellectual forms they encounter in the expanded horizon of the modern urban experience in cities like Odessa. In 19th century Odessa, as historian Steven Zipperstein has demonstrated, Jews participated in the life of the city both inside and outside of the structures of the Jewish community, especially as consumers of music. For Minkovsky, new forms of Jewish enculturation were seen as threatening. In his argument about Lazarus, we see a foreshadowing of Minkovsky’s anti-gramophone arguments—culture is a danger and cantors have an ethical responsibility to sculpt Jewish engagement with music, both popular and elite. Only through a careful maintenance of ethics can cantors protect Jews by acting as gate keepers, carefully sifting through the products of “general” culture and sifting out potentially corrupting elements.
N.B. The names of Minkovksky and Blumenthal appear with various spellings in the literature, including Pinhas Minkowksi, Pinchas Minkowsky, Nisson Blumental, and other variants.
Works Cited/Further Reading
Mathias Berek, “Moritz Lazarus: A Marginal Man in the Centre of German Society,” Journal of Cultural Analysis and Social Change, Volume 8, Issue 2 (Dec 2023). https://doi.org/10.20897/jcasc/14066
Anders Hammarlund, A Prayer for Modernity: Politics and Culture in the World of Abraham Baer (1834-1894) (Stockholm: Svenskt visarkiv/Statens musikverk, 2013). https://carkiv.musikverk.se/www/epublikationer/Hammarlund_Anders_A_Prayer_for_Modernity_2013.pdf
Martin Kusch, “From Völkerpsychologie to the Sociology of Knowledge,” HOPOS: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 9:2 (2019 ), 250-274. https://philarchive.org/archive/KUSFVT
James Loeffler, “The Lust Machine: Commerce, Sound and Nationhood in Jewish Eastern Europe,” Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 32 (2018): 257–78.
Pinchas Minkovsky, “Nisson Blumental,” Archive of Pinkhas Minkowski, Series B: Articles and essays (manuscripts), item no. 9, The National Library of Israel. https://www.nli.org.il/en/manuscripts/NNL_MUSIC_AL990035970290205171/NLI#$FL188654835
Anat Rubinstein, “The Cantor as a National Leader: Thought and Music of Cantor Pinhas Minkowsky,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 40, no. 2 (2022): 38–57. https://www.academia.edu/92542344/The_Cantor_as_a_National_Leader_Thought_and_Music_of_Cantor_Pinhas_Minkowsky
Jeffrey Shandler, “A Tale of Two Cantors: Pinhas Minkowski and Yosele Rosenblatt,” in Academic Angles (New York: Museum at Eldridge Street, 2008), 24–28. https://www.najculture.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/338696e0-334b-4965-a3da-60d87bbf139f/content