Jewish Music Journal: The legacy of bildung and the American Cantorate
When Jacob Beimel (1875-1944) founded his short-lived Jewish Music Journal in 1934, he had been living in New York for the past 19 years and was an established member of the cantorial community. His biography was included in the 1924 cantorial lexicon Di geshikhte fun khazones (The History of Cantorial Art Music), published by the Jewish Ministers Cantor Association of America and Canada, also known by its informal Yiddish name, der khazonim farband (the cantors union). Beimel was unusual in his energy as a community organizer and in his agenda for change within the synagogue music world. He imagined his Jewish Music Journal as an organ for the voice of a new generation of American cantors. The editorial vision of the Journal presented an ambitious agenda for a new cantorate that would eschew the preservation of cantorial aesthetics in favor of a different, emergent approach to music and pastoral professionalism that would reflect the shifting norms of life for Jewish Americans.
As part of the research for my current book project on the history of gramophone era cantorial music and culture, I recently read through the five editions of the Jewish Music Journal that Beimel completed between July of 1934 and November of 1935. The timing of the first edition suggests that Beimel’s undertaking was inspired by the Warsaw based cantorial journal Di khazonim velt (The cantors world) which premiered in 1933. But unlike Di khazonim velt, which was intended as an international compendium of cantorial news and ideas and published writings by cantors and Yiddish critics from around the world, the Jewish Music Journal was focused on the American cantorial scene. As such, the publication was bilingual, with an English language section printed left to right, and on the reverse side of the booklet, a Yiddish section printed right to left. Beyond its geographic point of concentration and bilingualism, Beimel’s publication offered a very specific vision of the role of the cantor and the future of the profession.
Beimel imagined an American cantorial future that would be grounded in the sounds of European art music, while simultaneously reorganizing the position of the cantor towards a role as communal functionary and educator. His vision of the cantorate was remarkably influential and helped shape the conventions and norms of the post-World War Two cantorial professional associations. Beimel’s vision was shaped by a highly selective approach to assessing the musical life of Jewish Americans that dismissed signs of the persistence of Yiddish culture and instead focused on the production of new forms of American Judaism, rooted in European art music.
The internal contradictions of Beimel’s vision of the American cantor are apparent in the differences between the English and Yiddish sections of the first edition of the Journal. The lead-off article in the English section of the first edition (July 1934), “Toward the Revaluation of the Cantorial Art,” was written by A.W. Binder, Beimel’s colleague and fellow ideologue of the “new” American cantorate. Like Beimel, Binder was invested in the project of attending to the changing cultural needs of American Jews through new liturgical styles that would lean on the vocabulary of European art music. Binder prefaced the article with a few words of memorialization of the recently departed Yossele Rosenblatt, who he described as “one of the few remaining possessors of the real cantoreal (SIC) art.” Implicitly, Binder paints the death of Rosenblatt as symbolic of the death of the old, immigrant-era cantorial sound, and the harbinger of a new American generation. Binder ends his article with the warning that “the need of the cantor is unfortunately gradually vanishing. For he is not alive to the real prevailing situations. He fails to realize that if he is to maintain his position and prestige as of old, he must gather his old threads and re-weave them into new patterns.” Beimel’s prescription to avoid the imminent dereliction of the cantorate is for cantors to attain higher musical education standards, presumably in western art music, and more careful attention to the “requirements of this time and age.”
In the second edition of the Journal (March 1935) the anti-cantorial discourse had sharpened. The lead article, “Progress in Synagogue Music,” by Jacob Singer, a cantor in Chicago, is a diatribe against the low aesthetic standards of American cantors. The second edition also includes a positive review of Lazare Saminsky’s Music of the Ghetto and the Bible, penned by Beimel. Saminsky book takes a strikingly negative view of cantorial music and proclaims the need for biblically inspired music that looks to the era of the ancient Israelite kingdom, echoing the territorial-based ideology of normative nationalist ideologies. Saminsky was one of many Jewish musicians and intellectuals in the early 20th century advocating for a turn towards musical nationalism and the invention of new expressions of Jewish identity in music that unapologetically repudiate extent musical traditions. Music of the Ghetto and the Bible heaps particular scorn on cantors as representative of a corrupted and decadent diaspora culture. Beimel’s embrace of this anti-cantorial discourse seems paradoxical but makes sense within the context of his stated ambition of rebranding cantors as a new breed of American cultural activists.
In contrast, the Yiddish section of the first edition of the Journal presents a vision of cantorial life that is thriving. A brief introductory section on the activities of musical organizations reports that 10,000 people had recently shown up for a special Yom Kipur Koton (a minor day of mourning that was sometimes used as the basis for elaborate cantorial prayer leading) service produced by the khazonim farband at the Romanian Shul on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The service, which was promoted as a fundraiser and show of solidarity for the Jews of Germany enduring the hardening of Nazi-era antisemitic laws. In January of 1934, laws had been put in place in Germany making employment for Jewish salaried laborers nearly impossible, disrupting the basic functioning of life. Only 3,000 attendees were able to squeeze into the synagogue to hear the luminaries of the cantorial music scene. Performers included Cantor Jacob Rappaport, the president of the khazanim farband, and Joseph Rumshinsky, leading Yiddish theater composer who was also active as a cantorial composer and choir director. Rather than a dying ember of a lost world, as Beimel and Binder suggest, some performers of khazones (cantorial art music) seems to have been doing a thriving business with a mass fan base and cultural relevance as a force for convening social movements.
The articles in the Yiddish section of the first edition of the Journal are written by luminaries of the immigrant cantorial scene. Authors included Elias Zaludkovski, who penned an article titled Unzere nusakhos (Our musical style), which makes claims about the antiquity of the cantorial prayer modes, and Jacob Rappaport, whose article titled Shulen darf khazonim (Synagogues need cantors) presents a normative vision of interdependence between Jewish artists and the people. Rappaport writes “when he [the Jewish person] is in his shul and hears the nusakh hatefilah [Hebrew, manner of prayer, here meant to suggest cantorial traditional prayer melodies and modes], the Jewish melody, the krekhts [Yiddish, moan, here meant to suggest culturally intimate vocal noises that are specific to Jewish vocal music] of his cantor, he knows who he is and what he is!
But by the second edition of the Journal, published almost a year after the first, Beimel had tightened the ideological leash on the Yiddish section, including by writing his own pieces in Yiddish, his native language. In his article, “A bagrist tsu a khazn – a klal tuer,” (Yiddish, Warm words of reception for a cantor who is a community activist), Beimel claims that cantors are out of touch with their communities. He celebrates the rise of cantors who are activists and serve a role as educators for their communities. These arguments articulated by Beimel in the 1930s became part of the standards and norms of the Cantors Assembly, the union of Conservative movement cantors, founded in 1947.
I view Beimel’s embrace of a modernizing approach to cantorial music, and his punitive approach to the immigrant cantorial scene, as an attempt to revive 19th century Central European discourses of cantorial music as a form of bildung, or cultural cultivation. As has been discussed in the works of Esther Schmidt, Philip Bohlman, Ruth HaCohen, and the generation of musicologists who followed in their footsteps, for Jews in 19th century Austria, Germany and France and other Central and Western European nations, liturgical music functioned as part of a multi-pronged effort of communal uplift. Cantors were activists developing new musical repertoires that would signal the moral and intellectual preparedness of Jews to participate in the civic life of their countries of residence.
The cultivation of a Jewish classical music for the synagogue by composer-cantor pioneers Salomon Sulzer (1804-1890), Louis Lewandowski (1821-1894), Samuel Naumbourg (1817-1880), and their countless musical disciples, represent the political aspirations of Jews for cultural integration and the rights of citizenship. Musical experience in the synagogue created a culture of bildung that transformed the intimate spaces of Jewish life, creating a transformed sense of the meaning of Jewishness. As historian Marion Kaplan noted, “Bildung served not only as their entree into cultured German society. It became for many Jews ‘synonymous with their Jewishness’. To be a cultivated middle-class family was an essential part of their Jewish identity. It was often an extension of their religious life and, increasingly, a substitute for it.”
Jacob Beimel was deeply involved in the project of German Jewish musical bildung. He spent years working as a cantor in Berlin where he also edited Jüdische Melodieen, a musical anthology that musicologist Edwin Seroussi describes as an important point of connection between Eastern and Central European Jewish musics, but one that is adapted to the classical music oriented aesthetic norms of the German Jewish community.
The Jews of the Russian Empire had a more ambivalent relationship with musical bildung. The music of Jewish “classical composers” was embraced by urban elite synagogues for its intellectual aesthetic sensibility, but the connotation of the music as preparatory to assimilation into modernity and the attainment of citizenship was curtailed by the political and cultural realities for Russian Jews. At no point were Jews on the cusp of attaining a comprehensive new legal status under the regime of the tsar, thus the idea of bildung as cultural preparation for citizenship was evacuated of its practical purpose and political urgency for Jews in the Pale of Settlement.
By the turn of the 20th century, the cantors associated with the “golden age” style immortalized on gramophone records had articulated a musical philosophy that pushed back on the inevitability of “modernization” as the goal of the cantorate. Instead, they styled themselves as neo-traditionalists, creating aestheticized versions of the music of “pre-modern” Jewish ritual. Stars of the American immigrant scene such as Zawel Kwartin and Samuel Vigoda wrote in their memoirs about their ambitions to move away from the Sulzer model and to “revive” the sounds of small-town Jewish life. The neo-traditionalists gained currency as popular performers through their renditions of a virtuosic soloist vocal performance style of cantorial recitative singing on records and in the synagogue that was understood by their immigrant listeners as preserving sounds of the culturally intimate spaces and sounds of Jewish life in the “old home.”
But for Beimel, the American scene presented the opportunity for a new investment in the discourses of bildung. Beimel used his Jewish Music Journal to forward an argument that cantors in American must change their musical orientation towards elite music genres in order to achieve relevance in the new environment. Implicit in this argument is the assumption that the sounds of the Yiddish-culture oriented khazones that had been embraced as a form of pop music by the Jewish masses was inadequate to the task of preparing Jews for citizenship in the new national home.
Beimel’s argument looks to the recent past and the success of synagogue music as a form of bildung in the German Jewish context. What is striking about Beimel’s agenda is how successful it was, despite its apparent mismatch with the American context, which presumably placed a lower value on European art music than was the case in late 19th century Berlin, where Beimel worked as a cantor. Beimel’s cohort of ambitious cantorial ideologues had an outsize influence on the Cantors Assembly and on the emerging cantorate that served post-WWII Jewish communities in the suburbs. While his campaign to dismiss the “old world” sound of the immigrant cantors and Yiddish populism from the cantorate may no longer be remembered, his influence on the norms of the American synagogue continues to linger, and can even be heard in a handful of pieces that have remained in the repertoire of synagogue “standards” that are still performed regularly.
Works Cited/Further Reading
Jacob Beimel, ed., Jewish Music Journal, five editions (1934-1935). The New York Public Library Digital Collections. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/collections/jewish-music-journal#/?tab=about
Marion A. Kaplan, “Bildung and Jewish History in Imperial Germany,” in Jonathan Frankel, Steven J. Zipperstein eds., Assimilation and Community: The Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
Jeremiah Lockwood, “What is the cantorial ‘Golden Age’? hefker khazones (wanton cantorial music) or ‘the key to the Jewish soul’?” in Matthew Austerklein, ed., Cantors Assembly 75th Anniversary Journal (Cantors Assembly, 2022), 327-336. https://www.academia.edu/86287460/What_Is_the_Cantorial_Golden_Age_Hefker_Khazones_or_the_Key_to_the_Jewish_Soul_
Esther Schmidt, “Nationalism and the Creation of Jewish Music: The Politicization of Music and Language in the German- Jewish Press Prior to the Second World War,” Musica Judaica 15 (2000-2001), 1-31. https://www.academia.edu/109546843/Schmidt_Esther_Nationalism_and_the_Creation_of_Jewish_Music_The_Politicization_of_Music_and_Language_in_the_German_Jewish_Press_Prior_to_the_Second_World_War_Musica_Judaica_15
Edwin Seroussi and Meir Stern, “Songs That Young Gershom Scholem May Have Heard: Jacob Beimel’s Jüdische Melodieen, Jung Juda, and Jewish Musical Predicaments in Early Twentieth-Century Berlin.” Jewish Quarterly Review 110, no. 1 (2020), 64-101.