Voices of the Magid: Jewish Musical Speech
In his autobiography, Klangn fun mayn lebn, famed Yiddish theater composer Joseph Rumshinsky (1881-1956) begins the story of his life with a description of the sound world of his childhood home in Vilna. His father, a furrier, sang all day while working and his mother was an amateur singer with a reputation for a powerful memory who would teach songs to women in their community. I was particularly struck by his description of his father at work in his workshop:
I will always remember my father—brown haired, of short stature, “happy with his lot” [Pirkei Avos 4:1], satisfied with his destiny, possessing a pleasant demeanor; he expressed his feeling with his singing, along with his five or six workers, in the furrier trade. When life went according to its usual ways, he used to sing pieces and verses of Pirkei Avos that he knew by heart; he would start in Hebrew and then translate into Yiddish, and he would improvise the music in his own style, with his resounding high-tenor little voice. When things were going less well in the business, or God forbid, there was illness in the home, my father would sing chapters of the Psalms, but singing not reciting. And as before, he would start in Hebrew and translate into mame-loshn with his own improvisations, and in the house, there would be a deathly stillness. With the harmony of the workers, my heart would melt from the uncanny sweetness… (Klangn fun mayn lebn, pages 7-8)
Although Rumshinsky’s father was not a professional musician, his life involved musical performance in an informal setting on a daily basis. Rumshinsky attributes his own sensitivity to the sounds of Jewish life to these early home experiences: he was able to put the patterns of sound heard in his daily life into the music he composed for the ethnic Jewish theater, creating works that offered a stylized mirror, or parody, of culturally intimate Jewish sounds. In turn, these sounds of Jewish intimacy could convene an American Jewish listening public through appeal to a broadly understood sonic image of the Jewish past that was, at least in part, based in the personal memories of immigrants. The adults in Rumshinsky’s life participated in a culture in which daily life was permeated by music and musical speech, a foundation that the architects of a modern nationalist musical culture, such as himself, could build upon.
I am intrigued by the category of Jewish musical speech—vocal performance that falls somewhere between recitation and song and that was a part of Jewish men’s and women’s customs and ritual life. Jewish musical speech could be defined as partially improvised sung musical patterns supporting the recitation or improvisation of text. In a recent essay in the Conversations series, I discussed tkhines, a genre of Yiddish language women’s prayer that has largely disappeared from Jewish practice. Tkhines, as they are studied today by scholars and a growing cohort of revivalist prayer practitioners, are defined by their texts. As I noted in my essay, there seem to have been sonic conventions of musical recitation of tkhines that were broadly recognizable to Yiddish-speaking Jews in Europe and immigrants in the early 20th century American scene. So much so, that tkhines became the subject for at least two “dialect records” marketed to Jewish immigrants in the United States in which male Jewish actors performed the role of elderly Jewish women chanting tkhines. These records offer a conceptually rich layering of Jewish history in sonic form—but are perhaps most fascinating as testimony about what tkhines sounded like, albeit in a parodic form.
Rumshinsky’s memoir paints a picture in which musical speech was a part of daily life. As has been noted in many accounts of Eastern European Jewish life, learning sacred texts with a melodic chant was a constituent element of the soundscape of traditional forms of religious education. Another form of musical speech was the para-liturgical sermon performances of the magid—a male professional public preacher, sometimes itinerant. In the stylized descriptions of the magid in Yiddish popular literature, for example in Abraham Reisen’s poem Der magid, he is personified as an otherworldly holy man who translated mystical concepts into layman’s terms, entrancing and comforting the common people. The magid was also considered to be a specialist in inspiring penitence who would use “fire and brimstone” rhetoric about the wages of sin to elicit piety and ethical conduct from the people.
As with tkhines, the magid is primarily remembered today as a figure that appears in the Jewish textual tradition. Two great European rabbis, early Hasidic master Dov Ber (c.1704-1772) and Lithuanian rabbi and storyteller Jacob Kranz (1741-1801) were known respectively as the Magid of Mezeritch and the Magid of Dubno. Their importance as Jewish historical figures has helped preserve the memory of the semi-official status of the magid, and their teachings and storytelling parables have been preserved in written sources. The sounds of the magid’s preaching, however, has not remained a part of Jewish practice.
In this blog post, I offer evidence from three sources that can help listeners in the present day reclaim some sense of what the magid tradition in Eastern Europe sounded like. The first source I bring here is a perhaps unique field recording of an elder magid born in Eastern Europe who was still active working as a preacher in the United States, recorded in the late 1940s. The others are commercial recordings, similar to the tkhines records I have written about in that they are performances by Yiddish theater actors that parody the sounds of traditional Jewish life.
Housed on the Yeshivah University Libraries Digital Collection is a recording of the Bialystoker Magid, the professional title of Rabbi Majrim Hillel Rappaport (c. 1879-1963). I was alerted to this important document of Jewish sound by Yiddishist critic and playwright Rokhl Kafrissen. The recording was made in New York City in the late 1940s apparently at a wedding feast or sheva bracha celebration. Apparently, the Magid had been invited to deliver a celebratory oration.
The little information that I was able to track down about Rabbi Rappaport was from a page on Kevarim.com, a website that compiles information about the graves of rabbis. The grave site webpage has become an informal site for his descendants to list information and resources about their ancestor. According to the April 1928 edition of a New York rabbinic monthly journal titled Degel Yisroel, Rabbi Hillel had recently immigrated to the United States after serving as the town magid of Bialystok for 14 years. The notice concludes, “Hopefully in America, a land of speeches and lectures, he will find broad territory to spread his talent.”
Which brings us to the unique sonic qualities of Rappaport’s only known recording, and the question of what constitutes speech, in distinction from music? If Rappaport’s supporters and fans would describe his speech performance as a lecture, it is a very different kind of conception than is current in American Jewish life. Here is an excerpt from the recording, the second of two parts of the Magid’s speech.
Both sections of Rappaports recording can be heard as streaming media on the YU archival website:
https://digital.library.yu.edu/collections/bialystoker-maggid-audio
Right at the beginning of this excerpt we hear a stylized form of oration that fits in a broadly construed conception of speech. At 1:09 in the recording, after wishing the marriage pair a series of blessings for good fortune, the Magid begins to chant using pitched speech. The musical speech begins with the words, un ale tsuzamen (and all together), as if we was going to lead the assembled group in song. He continues to employ a more or less pitched use of his voice for the rest of the recording, occasionally moving into less clearly pitched passages, issuing forth shouts or screams for emphasis. Like a cantor, the magid “modulates” to different pitch areas, starting in a minor mode for the opening section, then moving up to the fourth and building a new minor key tonal center from this new position, in a stark form of harmonic-melodic development. His melodic gestural style starts on a tonal center and creates a strong sense of tonal gravity through the insistent use of monotonal, almost percussive recitation tones. He plays with a sense of tonic, dancing around to other melodic pitches that receive the same insistent recitation tone treatment throughout the piece. The pitch moves to the fourth early in the sung section of the recording, at about 1:32, reorienting the sound of his performance to this new tonal center. At 3:04 he moves to the relative major (of the fourth), in a gesture reminiscent of the well-known melody for the end of chanting the haftora (readings from the prophets), that modulates to the relative major of the minor mode chant. At 4:22 the piece ends with a modulation from the original tonic to the fourth, now being used as the tonic of a major key passage, a typical cantorial gesture. The recording breaks off suddenly after this dramatic chromatic shift.
The Magid’s performance references a variety of Jewish melodic forms in a sophisticated manner, painting with the mixture of musical modes to bring out different resonances in his speech. Much of his work with mode and shifting harmonic centers is familiar from the cantorial nusachos, the melodic-modal styles of recitation used for different prayer services. The Magid’s musicality is very much like that of a cantor’s but his work differs profoundly in the textual element, in the timbre of voice, and in the function of his performance. The text is avowedly the most important part of a magid’s work. He is speaking in what sounds like a formulaic but partially improvised style—in this kind of rhetorical performance, musical sound is secondary and supportive to a style of verbal creativity that responds in real time to the situation in which the speech is being made. Rappaport’s speech, in addition to praising the marriage pair and their families, also talks about the importance of maintaining Jewish education in America, references the hardships of the recent Holocaust, talks about the importance of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine, and ends with supplications for the speedy coming of the Messiah.
As this example indicates, a magid’s oration is intended to elicit religious affects. A story about the Magid of Mezeritch offers an account of a magid being hired to come to a town during a drought to chastise the community and inspire penitence, with the understanding that sufficient emotional outpouring will incur Divine mercy and bring down life giving rains (the Magid of Mezeritch rejects the condemnation of the itinerant magid who is depicted as being unjust in his accusations against the people Israel, a recurrent theme in early Hasidic theology). Being able to inspire feeling and religious contemplation is the reason for the work of the magid, and what a magid is paid to achieve.
The performative skill of being a magid, at least in the case of Rabbi Rappaport but perhaps more broadly, lay in the intertwining of improvised, or partially spontaneous but formulaic, Yiddish devotional oration with an intertextual overlay of musical gestures that quote a variety of forms of Jewish singing and musical speech. This recorded example of a magid’s performance makes reference to the work of bal tefiles (prayer leaders, typically non-professional) and cantors (typically professional or semi-professional), the sounds of the cantillation of scriptures (of which there are multiple variants for different sacred texts), the patterns of gemore nigun (the stylized melodic speech associated with traditional men’s Torah study), and, likely, the women’s repertoires of tkhines and klognishn (ritual lament).
This field recording of Rappaport seems to be a unique documentation of a magid in the United States, but a preliminary search of the audio archive of the National Library of Israel suggests that more field recordings of Eastern European-born magidim exist. With some digging more field recording evidence of this once seemingly widespread musical speech genre may yet be forthcoming.
As with tkhines, the magid’s sacred musical speech was also made the subject of parodic “dialect records,” by two Yiddish theater actors, Maurice Schwartz (1890-1960) and Noah Nachbush (1885-1970). On both records, the actors play the role of a magid and perform a stylized version of the sound of Jewish musical speech.
Maurice Schwartz, born in the Pale of Settlement in the former Russian Empire and having immigrated to New York in 1902. He was the founder of the Yiddish Art Theater in New York, a company that took on the goal of raising the aesthetic standards of Jewish theater by performing highbrow drama by major world literary figures. But Schwartz was not above the stock and trade of ethnic humor. He commanded a repertoire of Jewish “character” pieces; comedic monologues that poke fun at tropes of Jewish life, in a manner that relies heavily on stereotype and the recognizability of elements of in-group culture to a Jewish audience. Among his cast of characters, alongside a drunken cantor, a pious taylor, and another cantor with a persistent cough, was a send-up of a magid, titled Der Fom-Fivater Magid, which can be heard uploaded to archive.org.
The stylized and parodic representation of a magid heard on this record includes musical gestures that are familiar from the recording of The Bialystoker Magid. Schwartz uses a similar staccato rhythmic recitation tone and melodic movement in a minor key to the fourth, establishing a new harmonic center. While the purpose of the record is ethnic humor, it makes reference to what seems to be a site of memory that would be recognizable to Jewish record buyers. The joke depends on some degree of verisimilitude in order to land; without intimate knowledge of the cultural archetype the caricature would be toothless. Schwartz recorded two versions of his magid musical speech monologue. The first was made in September 1929, recording for the major label Brunswick, and then again in 1947 for the Jewish specialty Banner Record label
The other magid-themed parody record is by Noah Nachbush, a founding member of the Vilner Troupe, another important Yiddish theater company, who later had a career on the stage in New York. Nachbush’s piece takes a similar musical and textual strategy to Schwartz’s record. His recording of “Kelmer Magid” was released in 1947 on 78rpm and reissued on an LP collection of Nachbush’s recordings. Both of these releases seem to have been on Nachbush’s own vanity labels.
On Kelmer Magid, Nachbush delivers a comically over-the-top sanctimonious speech about the evils of marrying a non-Jew. He gives an exhortation directed towards Jewish men considering marrying a non-Jewish woman, comparing the prospective spouse to the female demon Lilith, a mainstay of Jewish mythology. “Esteemed gentlemen, what will become of a Jew who has sinned with a woman when he enters the Other World?…the fire knocks him around from side to side…and Lilith, may her name be blotted out, is dancing from side to side with a host of demons…may my ethical teaching see you through the world and may you have the merit of hearing the shofar of the Messiah, speedily and in our days. Amen.” Nachbush travesties the extremism of the magid’s monologue morality play, but he also captures a vivid sonic image of the magid, complete with recognizable musical signatures of the style. The record makes reference to the minor modality, the modulation to the fourth, the sudden leaps in dynamic and shifts in timbre from singing to screams that seem to have all been recognizable and expected sonic sound posts of the musical speech of a magid.
I am interested in these recordings because they are material evidence of a partially lost concept of Jewish musical speech that seems to have been pervasive across a variety of cultural contexts among Yiddish speaking Eastern European Jews. Musical speech largely fell out of practice but took on a second life as the basis for theatrical ethnic parody. But beyond its presence in a handful of Yiddish theater records, Jewish musical speech seems to hold a broader relationship to Jewish musical creativity that must be further explored. The specific parameters of its musical grammar bear a relationship to the professional, developed Jewish art music of cantors and Yiddish theater composers. Jewish musical speech seems to have had a special importance as a sonic signifier that can be referred to by Jewish artists in order to achieve legitimation and recognizability to a Jewish listening audience.
Uncovering more detailed testimony of what Jewish musical speech consisted of may yield clues about how modern conceptions of Jewish sound were constructed. What elements of ambient non-professional performance in Eastern Europe were taken up by professional artists, and which rejected, and why? Jewish musical speech largely has disappeared from day-to-day life, with a few important retentions such as badkhan (wedding jeter) performance in the separatist Haredi community. An entextualized version of scripture cantillation that is practiced in most synagogues also relates to Jewish musical speech, but with its basis in the sounds of Yiddish language and expressive culture obscured (I am courting controversy with this terse description of Torah and Haftorah cantillation—a subject for another day!). I offer these historic recordings to your attention in the hopes that returning musical speech to the conversation about Jewish music will stimulate inquiry into what the constituent elements might be that have given rise to a modern Jewish culture, and how that culture can be refreshed and revised in the current moment.
WORKS CITED/FURTHER READING
Ruthie Abeliovich, “The Yiddish Theater Republic of Sounds and the Performance of Listening,” in Tina Frühauf, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Music Studies (Oxford and New York: Oxford Handbooks, 2024).
Martin Boris, Once a Kingdom: The Life of Maurice Schwartz and the Yiddish Art Theatre (New York: self-published, 2002). https://www.museumoffamilyhistory.com/mschwartz-ok-toc.htm
Zeev Gries, “Preachers and Preaching,” in YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (2010). https://encyclopedia.yivo.org/article/314
Abraham Reisen, Gezamlte shriftn, vol. 11 (New York: Frayhayt, 1928).https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/collections/yiddish-books/spb-nybc210207/reisen-abraham-gezamlte-shriftn-vol-11
Joseph Rumshinsky, Ḳlangen fun mayn lebn (New York: A.Y. Biderman, 1944).https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/collections/yiddish-books/spb-klangenfunmayn00rums/rumshinsky-joseph-klangen-fun-mayn-lebn