A massive migration of Eastern European Jews across the Atlantic starting in the 1880s brought both parts of the East/West dichotomy together in the United States. In this new frontier, where German Jewish communities had already established themselves, the figure of the cantor would retain its Eastern European image. As in Central and Western Europe, however, cantors would look to the trappings of the West to improve their musical and social prestige.
The American Cantorate
Scholars aiming to recount the history of the cantorate in the United States face a dilemma of conflicting narratives. The supposed constancy of the cantor in Jewish history applies pressure to construct an American cantorial history along accepted lines of American Jewish history (as chronicled, for example, by Jonathan Sarna [2004] and Hasia Diner [2004])—starting with the arrival of Jews in New Amsterdam in 1654. At the same time, however, the very images and sounds American Jews popularly associated with the cantor’s presence in Jewish life at the turn of the twenty-first century derived from a largely different trajectory: one, as just described, based on cultural forms fostered in Eastern Europe that came with Eastern European immigrants to the United States. To reconcile these two narratives, scholars again appealed to etymological archeology: trying to find key terms, this time in American Jewish historical sources, that approximated Jewish religious musical activity. The resulting histories blunted contradictions between these narratives in order to recount the rise of a “modern” musical figure on American soil.
Idelsohn (1992[1929]a: 316–336) and (more completely) Slobin based their American cantorial narratives on occurrences of the term “chazan.” Before the 1840s, however—when Sephardim from Central and Western Europe comprised the best organized Jewish populations in the Americas—this lineage proved semantically questionable (see esp. Slobin 1989: 29–50).4 While a figure called the chazan existed in America during this time, Jewish communities tended to treat him as a learned individual; other studies suggest that the figure’s musical prowess held less importance than his abilities to deliver sermons, lead congregational prayer, and solemnize Jewish lifecycle events (Cohen 2004: 23, 58, 66). Slobin tacitly acknowledged the problems involved in tracing the nineteenth-century American cantor by bringing alternate titles into his narrative, including “reader,” “Reverend,” and “minister” (Slobin 1989: 32, 35, 37, inter alia); and he justified his use of these terms by noting that “each generation of Jewish-Americans has its own understanding of what we are calling the hazzan” (Slobin 1989: 31). Nonetheless, Slobin’s and others’ histories shaped a perspective on cantorial culture that retroactively reencoded the cantorial narrative into early American Judaism, and paralleled attempts by major cantorial organizations to assert the cantor’s longstanding status in American Jewish life.5
The Ashkenazic cultural hegemony of scholarly cantorial history comes into particular relief after 1880. The period spanning approximately 1880–1940, often viewed in recent literature as the “Golden Age” of the cantorate (see, for example, Pasternak & Schall 1991), portrays the profession as reaching its artistic apex—and, just as importantly, coming almost exclusively from the Eastern European cantorate. Samuel Vigoda, in his account of the early part of this era, quietly pointed to New York as successor to the major eighteenth-to-twentieth century European cantorial centers such as Berditchev, Odessa, Kishniev, Vilna (Vilnius) and Warsaw (Vigoda 1981: 579–580). Even contemporary American accounts of this era, such as Idelsohn’s, acknowledged the continuation and popularity of “the style of the Eastern European chazzanuth” in America as presented by immigrant cantors (Idelsohn, 1992[1929]a: 334–335). These cantorial figures, their cultural milieu, and the “style” of chazanut they practiced (seen contemporaneously as many different styles) would eventually establish the standards for cantorial training programs in the mid-twentieth century.
Several factors may have contributed to the codification of Eastern European practices as “representative” of chazanut in its totality. Most noticeable was the demographic factor: the roughly two million Jews who immigrated to the United States from Eastern Europe between 1880 and 1924 dwarfed existing Sephardic and German Jewish populations in America and ostensibly relandscaped American Judaism. As a result, Ashkenazic cultural practices became largely synonymous with American “Jewish” culture, most notably during attempts to revive “Jewish” forms of artistic expression in the 1960s and 1970s (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2002). The Eastern European immigrant cantor, meanwhile, already memorialized in the landmark 1927 film The Jazz Singer (and re-memorialized in remakes of the film in 1954 and 1980), came to represent Judaism by its very ubiquity within Jewish liturgical culture. And the centrality of New York City as a site where a number of regional cantorial “styles” homogenized into an overall “Eastern European style” due to competition and coexistence among the large number of cantors may have played an important role as well.6
Perhaps the most important factor establishing this period as an artistic high point for the cantorate, however, was the creation of durable recordings and films that would serve as longstanding reminders of the period’s “star” culture. The most prominent cantors, in addition to intoning services in the New York area’s most illustrious synagogues,7 be came the subject of considerable attention as arbiters of highbrow “ethnic” culture. Cantors such as Mordecai Hershman and Josef (“Yossele”) Rosenblatt gained great fame and fortune by concertizing in major venues around the world (see, for example, Rosenblatt 1954: 152–188, 234–251). No longer confined solely to the Jewish community, they began to emerge as “Jewish” analogs of opera stars such as Enrico Caruso; several even added opera arias to their programs (see Slobin 1989: 59–60; Rosenblatt 1954: 140–151).8 A number of cantors also committed their vocal performances to recordings (and, less commonly, film) for mass distribution (Sapoznik 1994; Shandler 2009: 16–39);9 as I will explain in a later chapter, transcriptions of these recorded concert-version pieces would eventually become a central part of the cantorial school repertoire. Together, these developments led to a well-documented scene that quickly grew into a repository of memory, and a touchstone of practice.
Idelsohn noted in a critical commentary that concerts and (especially) recordings appeared to solidify an idiomatic “cantorial” sound culture spanning from the synagogue to the public sphere:
[The most famous cantors] gained their reputation and popularity not only because of their achievements in the Synagogue, but also because of their vocal performances in the concert house, and notably because of their phonograph records. By the latter means, they have popularized (and at times also vulgarized) the Synagogue song. Their strength lies in their rendition of the Synagogue modes in unrhythmical improvised form, with accompaniment likewise improvised, on piano or string-instrument. With respect to improvisation, these Orthodox chazzanim are in this country the only protagonists of the traditional Jewish-Oriental song. However, none of them have thus far created music of any originality. They continue to sing in the style of the Eastern European chazzanuth, and some of them, in order to attract the public, do not hesitate to sing arias of opera and musical selections of dubious sources set to prayers, as was customary among the chazzanim in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. (Idelsohn 1992[1929]a: 334–335)
World War II and the tragedy of the Holocaust emphatically closed the door on the Golden Age, and transformed these critiques;10 the era’s link to the recently obliterated “Old World” suddenly appeared to elevate its status to a nostalgic high point of Jewish creativity.11 The cantorial figure embodied the connection to a lost culture for many American Jews, and consequently seemed to create its own argument for preservation.12 Cantorial imagery and historical discourse thus became the basis for building a “new” cantorial culture in the United States. To continue the tradition, however, adherents of the cantorial culture needed to create a new sense of modernity to fit their trajectory of cantorial history. Their discussions would forge a path for adopting and installing the cantorial narrative into contemporary American Jewish culture.
The Rise of the American Cantorial School