The Minkovsky Gramophone Controversy: Cantorial Beefs
The history of Jewish music is replete with controversies about ethics and aesthetics that veer into the terrain of personal attacks. Music has a special capacity to be perceived as both deeply personal and as a representation of collective identity. This combination of qualities lends itself to a combustible dynamic. Music making can be perceived as an assaultive force, capable of achieving political or spiritual crimes. For Jewish musicians, controversies about the ethics of music making are a theme that seem to recur in every generation and diasporic geography.
Well known examples of controversies in the history of Jewish music include the rabbinic condemnations hurled at Rabbi Israel Najara, the Renaissance-era composer of paraliturgical poetry who frequently set his lyrics to popular Ottoman melodies; or the controversy between composer and ethnographer Yoel Engel and popular songwriter Mark Warshavsky in Russia in the first decade of the 20th century, concerning the appropriateness of presenting newly composed Yiddish vernacular songs as “folklore.” In both of these instances, arguments about musical aesthetics invoked larger conflicts concerning the borders of the sacred, and ideological questions about how to constitute and define the Jewish nation in the context of the political uncertainties of diaspora. The terms of the arguments in these examples and others were frankly personal, often involving rival colleagues. They raised pointed questions about who counts as a legitimate authority regarding questions of religion and culture in the subjective and emotionally heightened terrain of music making.
Recently, I have been reading the autobiography of Cantor Gershon Sirota (1874-1943) that was serialized in the Warsaw daily newspaper Der Moment in the year 1926 (Sirota’s autobiography Mayn Lebn is not to be confused with the autobiography of the same name by Cantor Zawel Kwartin). There are many vignettes from Sirota’s career that I have been anticipating encountering from his perspective as I slowly wind my way through the smudged newsprint and (to me) exotic Warsaw Yiddish. One particularly pungent and pregnant moment in Sirota’s career is a controversy with Cantor Pinchas Minkovsky (1859-1924) of Odessa. Sirota and Zawel Kwartin, the other major cantorial recording star of the first decade of the 20th century, were the subject of a published polemic by Minkovsky titled Moderne liturgia in unsere synagogen (Modern Liturgy in our Synagogues) that besmirched the gramophone as a source of outrageous corruption of Jewish tradition. Finding Sirota’s response to Minkovsky’s war of words inspired this blog post.
Influential cantor and author Pinchas Minkovsky served at the Broder Synagogue in Odessa (Minkovsky was the subject of a recent post in the Conversations series). His writings and career are an important source for learning about the intellectual debates that animated cantors and Jewish intellectual circles around the turn of the 20th century. Minkovsky embraced both a culture of artistic elitism, appealing to conceptions of musical achievement in the rarified classical music tradition, and at the same time embraced a conception of Jewish nationalist music that celebrated the particularism of Jewish sound and upheld the cantorial voice as the paradigmatic sound of Jewish musical achievement. He walked a fine line between embracing assimilative musical elitism and nationalist folklore in his body of writings that portended to define and historicize Jewish music. Equivocating between these two conflicting ideals, of Jewish particularism and embrace of “universal” (read: non-Jewish) aesthetics, Minkovsky was defensive in his musical philosophy, framing his work and ideas as oppositional to the work of Salomon Sulzer, the paragon of 19th century Jewish musical reform and Minkovsky’s most prominent musical influence. Perhaps in part as a result of this ideological anxiety, he was perpetually on the offense, attacking his elders, his contemporaries and the younger generation of cantors, either by accusing cantors of inauthenticity in their representation of Jewish music, or by assailing their ethical purity. Both of these lines of attack, Jewish authenticity and ethics, were topics that he had been censured for over the course of a career that had started in Hasidic prayer communities and culminated in one of the most prominent sites of liturgical reform in the Russian Empire.
Minkovsky attacked cantors for the same kinds of musical reforms that he himself had embraced, often using ad hominem attacks to drive home his point and colorful language to preempt counter arguments. Minkovsky was an impressive and at times hilarious Yiddish insult stylist; his prose is at its most inspired when he gets a whiff of blood. Along the way he made some serious enemies. The controversy over gramophones that I document in this blog post is not the only Minkovsky screed that has survived in the archival record.
Here, I am sharing not only a translation of Sirota’s reflections on the conflict, but also a small collection of primary texts that relate to the Minkovsky gramophone controversy, translated into English from the original Yiddish.
1. Pinchas Minkovsky sets the terms of the debate.
Striking a blow at the reputation of his younger contemporary Gershon Sirota, Minkovsky describes cantorial phonograph records as a form of pornography that transforms the experience of the sacred into a forbidden exercise of the erotic imagination. He couples his ideological jab with an injunction to his fellow cantors to resist the temptations of stardom and refuse to make records. His polemic is couched as a call to arms to cantors to reform their profession by rejecting lowbrow populism.
Pinchas Minkovsky, “Moderne liturgia in unsere synagogen,” (1910). Reproduced in Akiva Zimmermann ed., Perakim Be-Shir: Sefer Pinkhas Minkovski (Tel Aviv: Shaʻare Ron, 2011).
The demoralization that arose in Russia particularly since the Sino-Russian War and the Russian Revolution gave life to two pornographic businesses: “Illusions and Gramophones.” The first business had to do with the visible and takes the form of licentious erotic pictures which no man would present in a healthy, moral time. But now they are shown openly, in ostentation and dazzle in the theater, in the big city on every street, and a badly demoralized society looks upon it without shame or embarrassment.
The other business has to do with the sense of hearing, with the ears. Lieder, arias, couplets of prostitution and drunkenness, and gypsies and chanson singers, and all kinds of fools together with the most holy Jewish melodies, Synagogue melodies from prayers, selikhes, tekhines and kines mixed together in the guts of the gramophone like in Noah’s ark, or even worse, like in a garbage can—and this is presented to the public through the squeaky, piercing sounds; licentious songs together with the blasts of the shofar, and the ears become infected, the better sensibilities poisoned. At the head of the Jewish Gramophone singers stands the one from Warsaw, formerly of Vilna, Reb Gronim Shrayer [Gronim the Screamer, an insulting nickname for Gershon Sirota, utilizing his initials gimel shin]. He robbed the shul like Pompey did the Temple in his time, or as the Jews did earlier to the Egyptians, and he smuggled everything that he could out of the shul in a gramophone record. He robbed and besmirched their treasures.
With time “public” companies were founded, and their agents and commissioners sought to increase the stock-value of their business by advertising the Gramophone in every newspaper in the world. The gramophone was a pleasure machine, an entertainment machine and soon it was to be found in princely palaces, in mansions, coffee houses, clubs, billiard houses, taverns, dairy restaurants, bakeries, restaurants, beer halls, wine bars, bicycle clubs, in the playgrounds, in the workshops of tailors and shoemakers, seamstresses and fashion designers, in the cellars and in the attics, in the stable, in the house of prostitution, that place where according to the principles of Liszter’s Torah, they cultivate wine, women and song—the holy trinity. Like a pestilence, the gramophone has conquered the street, the bathhouse, the toilet with its whinnying and its hiss; wherever one’s feet leads one, you must be prepared to be greeted by Gramophonic voices singing melodies of the theater and the barroom wafting into the Synagogue, or nusakh from the Synagogue that can be heard in the barroom.
Thus, was I deceived about the ethical and aesthetic feelings of our Cantors. It causes me sorrow, but I am even more astonished at the Jewish community and the Rabbis of the “Jerusalem of Lithuania,” who have watched with indifference and not even found it necessary to protest!
2. Gershon Sirota sees “the sickness of human egotism.”
Sirota presages his description of his conflict with Pinchas Minkovsky by mentioning Minkovsky’s predecessor, Nissan Blumental the beloved former cantor of the prestigious and wealthy Broder synagogue who had introduced liturgical music reforms inspired by the “Vienna Rite” of Salomon Sulzer. In his later years, the gabaim (wardens) of the synagogue were anxious about Blumental’s old age. They hired Minkovsky, who was at that time working in America. Minkovsky was officially hired as “second cantor” but was the de facto successor and new leader at the pulpit. Sirota implies that this decision hastened Blumental’s death.
Gershon Sirota, “Mayn Lebn,” Der Moment [Warsaw] (February 7, 1926), 4.
Pinye Minkovsky was a very fine cantor with a great musical knowledge. He did much to expand the field of Jewish music, but he lacked craftsmanship in the voice, and that is something that cannot be replaced, no matter how learned or cultured one is. Exactly like an author who does not possess God given talent but instead shoots out only novelties and repeats what is already well known—leaving the cold feeling that their work does not spring from the living source called talent—similarly lacking is the singer who cannot move the hearts of their listener with novelties and learnedness.
Pinye Minkovsky was the literate khazn, or as he was mockingly called: “A great cantor with a small voice.”
Around this time, representatives of the Broder synagogue came to me and proposed that I become the second cantor, working with Pinye Minkovsky. But—but Pinye Minkovsky’s ambition was very great. He stubbornly let it be understood that he would not allow me in the Broder synagogue. Till this day I don’t understand why he was afraid of me…apparently, he thought it would bring about a crisis…
I was not chastened by his moralizing nor were my ambitions thwarted. However there remained hanging over us in future years the feeling that we were enemies. For many years there was a struggle between us, that was even made public. Minkovsky published a pamphlet about me—titled “Modern Litugy,” it alleged to the Jewish public my so-called “renegade reform,” however, I am grateful to say, I was not brought to shame by these allegations.
[Aligned with Minkovsky, the local cantorial powerbroker Kupervaser, portrayed by Sirota as a fickle tormentor of cantors, turns against Sirota.]
The entirety of human cynicism is revealed in these words. A prayer leader, a cantor, who discharges the commandment to pray on behalf of the entire community, is treated like end of season goods. I perceived in him the entirety of his despotism in the moment he spoke to me, making his impatient decision. He was not aware what golden opportunities that he was sending me onwards towards. I was at that time 22 years of age and I had had not a small amount of success in the wandering paths of life, where all is competition and struggle, where every step of the path is marred by the sickness of human egotism, and that respects no boundaries in its desires. If he doesn’t have money—he wants a lot. If he has a lot of money—he wants respect. If he has respect—he wants to trample and humiliate those who are smaller and weaker.
[Shortly thereafter, Sirota received an offer to serve as the Vilna shtot khazn [Vilna State cantor] position at Congregstion Tsedoke Gadole, at the time the most prestigious cantorial position in the world.]
3. Zawel Kwartin remembers Minkovsky’s petulant jealousy.
In his autobiography, written shortly before his death, Zawel Kwartin (1874-1952) describes his first meeting with Pinchas Minkovsky as one of many trials and tribulations that held him back from being able to pursue his dream of becoming a cantor. Minkovsky’s response to hearing Kwartin sing is shocking and bizarre and foreshadows the later polemic attitude Minkovsky took towards Kwartin.
Zawel Kwartin, Mayn leben (Philadelphia: Aroysgegeben fun a gezelshaftlikhen komitet, 1952), 128-130.
Thus I, an inexperienced young man with a wife and a first child on the way, arrived in the big city Odessa to seek the key to my luck and begin my career. Where would a young man go who wants to be a Cantor, if not to the world-famous Cantor of the time, to Pinchas Minkovsky?
I didn’t know, mind you, what a bitter experience it would be, this first meeting with the greatest living genius of cantorial music of the time. Students were constantly coming in. When I knocked on Minkovsky’s door we encountered a big dog with a dramatic bass voice. I was quite timid. In our small town it was completely unknown for a Jewish cantor to keep a dog to “welcome” people…
I poured out my heart to him and told him the reason for my coming, that I wanted to be a Cantor for the Jews and that I would like him to hear my voice and give me advice about how to proceed.
I can’t say that my interview with the world’s leading liturgical authority of the day was very encouraging. Actually, he soaked me in cold water, and I was completely discouraged. He sat down at the piano and struck various chords. I tried to sing correctly. Then he asked me to sing something cantorial. When I was singing, I noticed a look on his face, but I couldn’t tell what it meant, whether it was enthusiasm, or a different feeling.
When I had finished, he said to me: “Young man, you have a very beautiful voice, but it would be a great sin for you to waste your voice on khazones. What kind of a realistic income is that for a young man to be a cantor for the Jews? It is a thankless livelihood, and it is not a good time to become a cantor. What I do think—there are jobs for cantors who sing well. You have the best chance to be an opera singer. That is a much more honorable career for a young man such as yourself. And as for what I teach—I don’t recommend it to you, nor can I guide you with any help.”
This was the “hospitality” I got from Pinye Minkovsky, from the genius…
4. Kwartin offers a reasoned rejoinder.
After painstakingly establishing his successful career as a cantor and emerging as one of the first stars of Jewish recorded music, Kwartin encounters Minkovsky again, this time as a fierce adversary trying to sway public opinion against him right before a major concert in Odessa. Kwartin is surprisingly generous in his memory of the elder cantor and takes a more forgiving attitude than Sirota does in his memoirs.
Kwartin, Mayn Lebn: 132-135
This occurred many years later, after the first time I met the famous Cantor and scholar of Jewish liturgy, Pinchas Minkovsky of Odessa. I was on a concert tour away from Budapest, in the Russian nation and came to the city of Odessa [Kwartin was cantor in Budapest during the first decade of the 20th century].
Cantor Minkovsky had published a little pamphlet around that time on Jewish liturgy that was very professional and instructive. At the same time, in the pamphlet he sharply criticized the young Cantors that appeared in concerts and recorded their voices in Gramophones. He strongly attacked Cantor Gershon Sirota and he also didn’t spare me, as at that time we were the two most popular Jewish cantors who had become well known to the entire Jewish world thanks to the Gramophone discs.
Before my arrival in Odessa for my concert, in the year 1908, Cantor Minkovsky found it necessary to publish in the local Russian newspaper Odeskia Novosti a long article about me saying I profaned the Jewish prayers by appearing on a theatre stage and in a concert hall. He noted that no other religions had been dishonored through the presentation of religious prayers or songs on the stage.
The day before my concert a representative from the same newspaper came to me in my hotel and asked me what answer I had to the charges publicly levied against me by Cantor Minkovsky. I answered him, that first of all it is not true that Sirota and I were the first Jewish Cantors that, in addition to synagogues, also performed religious prayers in theaters and concert halls. Decades earlier the same thing had been done by numerous well-known Cantors, like Nisi Belzer, Zeidel Rovner, Boruch Schorr, Boruch Kinstler [Yiddish, the Artist], also known as Konstantiner. They all toured from city to city and gave concerts, if not in Theaters then in Wedding Halls or Men’s Association Clubs that were very common in the Russian nation.
It is understood that these memorable Cantors grew very well-known and their concerts were attended by high municipal clerks, military figure and even Orthodox Priests.
And about his other charge, that no other religions had been defamed through recording religious prayers on a Gramophone, I answered the Russian newspaper—please know that this is also not correct. I showed him the catalogue of Gramophone discs that is given out by the record company I recorded for, and there one could easily find that one no less than the Pope himself had recorded his church address on a Gramophone disc. There one could also find an assortment of records of religious songs sung by the Vatican choir.
The next day there appeared in the same Odeskia Novosti a report of the conversation with me and my answers to all of the charges that Minkovsky had levied against me.
I have to say, I don’t look on this incident with the bitterness I felt at the beginning of the not so friendly “hospitality” that Cantor Minkovsky gave me in his city of Odessa, as I feel a deep respect for his great artistry as a Cantor and his deep learning in old Jewish sources from which he drew his spiritual nourishment.
5. In cantorial lore, Minkovsky is recalled as an exemplar of sanctimoniousness and professional jealousy.
Samuel Vigoda’s serialized column in the New York Yiddish newspaper Forverts was a compendium of cantorial lore, gossip and repurposed public relations copy. He collected many of his columns, translated by himself into English, in his book Legendary Voices. In it, Vigoda recalls the pettiness of Minkovsky’s attempt to assassinate the character of the younger stars of his generation. (N.B. Unlike the other texts quoted here, this excerpt was published in English, and is not a translation.)
Samuel Vigoda, Legendary Voices: The Fascinating Lives of the Great Cantors (New York, N.Y.: S. Vigoda, 1981).
Minkovsky…was definitely against sin and to make records and give concerts was in his opinion an unforgiveable sin. To illustrate his point and justify his opposition, he related and incident that occurred one Friday evening at his bailiwick, the Broder Synagogue of Odessa. After the conclusion of the services, a soldier came over to Minkovsky and complimented him on his chanting of the service. In the course of the conversation that ensued between them, the soldier particularly praised the “V’shomru” of Sirota. When the cantor asked him, where he heard Sirota sing it, the soldier replied, “The last time I heard it was in a house, which is not a home, and has a red lamp out front. The girls were playing the record for us for our amusement.” Well, that’s all Minkovsky needed. (512-13)
…the real reason for his furious attacks on his colleagues was that he could not stand the sight of Sirota and Kwartin’s…rise to universal fame on the wings of the wizardry of the mechanically reproduced musical sounds. They surmised that he was jealous of their success in the new medium…Pinye Minkowsky was far from being a ‘Tzadik,’ [saint] a strictly observant Jew in his private life. Even in regard to the conduct of religious services he was decried and condemned as a radical reformer for having been the first cantor in Russia to introduce the use of an organ into a house of worship. (517)
Works Cited/Further Reading
James Loeffler, “The Lust Machine: Commerce, Sound and Nationhood in Jewish Eastern Europe,” Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry 32 (2018): 257–78.
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
Samuel Vigoda, Legendary Voices: The Fascinating Lives of the Great Cantors (New York, N.Y.: S. Vigoda, 1981).
Akiva Zimmermann ed., Perakim Be-Shir: Sefer Pinkhas Minkovski (Tel Aviv: Shaʻare Ron, 2011).