trying to construct cantorial practices before the eighteenth century often had to conflate linguistic and cultural history, tracing words or concepts perceived as connected with the cantor across canonical Jewish texts. These texts, which largely comprised legal interpretive works written by religious authorities, claimed linear descent from the Torah (The Five Books of Moses): including the Mishnah (Judea, c. 200 CE), the Talmud (Israel/Babylonia, c. 500 CE), The Guide for the Perplexed (Cairo, Moses Maimonides, 1185–1190 CE), the Shulchan Aruch (Venice, Joseph Caro, 1565) and numerous subsidiary writings. Using references from these sources led researchers to a unique, albeit slanted, composite narrative that gave a broad context for exploring cantorial religious norms, social roles, and cultural values. These sources’ status as a foundation for much contemporary Jewish religious life, moreover, gave them additional capital as “definitive” parts of the Jewish historical narrative.
Twentieth-century scholars wishing to describe the “origins” of the cantorate typically framed their discussion around two terms: chazan1 and shaliach tzibbur. As Max Schlesinger noted in 1904, Talmudic references to these terms appeared to describe ambiguous “communal officials” (or “servants”) who may have performed Jewish sacred rituals, but carried no explicitly musical responsibilities (Schlesinger 1904). Liturgist Ismar Elbogen later destabilized even these early mentions by suggesting they may have resulted from later modifications inserted by copyists (Elbogen 1941: 17–18). Regardless of the obscurity and variation such references presented, however, scholars seeking a cantorial lineage found the sheer presence of chazan and shaliach tzibbur in early canonical works enough to establish a retrospective linguistic anchor for a continuous cantorial history.
From these beginnings, scholars subsequently pieced together several versions of a “rise of the cantor” narrative. Abraham Z. Idelsohn, for example, devoted an entire chapter to the cantor’s emergence in his landmark 1929 book Jewish Music in Its Historical Development. Idelsohn’s interpretation of cantor-related terms started with the shaliach tzibbur as a non-musical maintenance worker whose title eventually changed to chazan; at that point, Idelsohn claimed, the chazan began to gain musical associations, and eventually developed into a musical precentor (Idelsohn 1992 [1929]b: 101–109). Hyman Kublin, in 1971, took a somewhat different tack by claiming that although the chazan and shaliach tzibbur described separate figures, chazanim (pl.) eventually became de facto occupiers of shaliach tzibbur positions by the Middle Ages (Kublin 1971); Hyman Sky, in a much more extensive study, came up with similar findings (1992). Mark Slobin, in the late 1980s, provided his own nuance to the discussion, supplementing Idelsohn’s schema by outlining social and liturgical factors that might have led to the “invention of the hazzan” at the start of the seventh century. Emphasizing the philological tradition from which such approaches emerged, Slobin marked the convergence of function and title by suggesting that at that time, “[t]he term hazzan itself was ready for specialization” (Slobin 1989: 5).
Inscribing the cantor as a specifically musical figure also allowed scholars to link cantorial identity with specialized musical repertoires. Kublin, for example, used such logic to explain how a word characterizing the modern cantorial repertoire—chazanut—emerged from an early poetic form specifically associated with chazanim:
When piyyutim [paraliturgical poems/lyrics] began to take an important place in the liturgy of the synagogue [c. 6th century CE], it was the hazzan who would recite them and provide suitable melodies. Some of the paytanim [liturgical poets] themselves were hazzanim [pl.]. The recitation of piyyutim was called hizana … by the Arabic-speaking paytanim and the Hebrew equivalent hazzanut … came to refer to the traditional form of chanting the whole service, and later to the profession of cantor also. (Kublin 1971: n.p.)2
In other cases, scholars characterized the premodern cantor as a figure devoted to preserving and presenting musical repertoires with similarly long but ambiguous histories. To Gershon Appel, for example, the medieval cantor served as a defender against changes to the nusach tradition—an argument based on Appel’s interpretation of the writings of fourteenth/fifteenth-century rabbinic sage Maharil (Jacob ben Moses Moelin, c. 1365–1427), “who was himself a renowned hazzan” (Appel 1979–1980: 7). Scholars’ attempts to bring musical, social, and intellectual processes into a coherent early history of the cantor thus relied on the careful arrangement of a fragmented and scattered series of canonical references. Their efforts gave the cantorate the historical and liturgical weight necessary for presaging its emergence into the modern world.
Layers of Modern Identity
In recounting cantorial history from the around the eighteenth century forward, scholarship relied on significantly different forms of evidence, due largely to political changes allowing Jews greater franchise in their respective governments and social environments (a process often called Emancipation; see for example J. Katz 1973). Descriptions of the cantor beginning in this period derived less from Jewish legal codes than from sources considered standard evidence to European musicologists: musical scores, letters, minute books, eyewitness accounts, and periodicals of both Jewish and non-Jewish interest. Nineteenth-century attempts among Jewish intellectuals to emulate more mainstream forms of scholarship, moreover, spurred Jewish music researchers in Central and Eastern Europe to fashion a methodology compatible with mainstream music research. Scholars’ changing approaches to Jewish musical discourse, coupled with the rising prestige of Western music literacy among Jewish composers and musicians, readjusted the parameters for describing and exploring the modern cantorial figure.
Most significant in the shifting scholarly discussions about the cantorate was the narrowing focus on the cantor as an Ashkenazic (Central and Eastern European) Jewish figure—in no small part because the mainly Ashkenazic scholars, as well as much of the emancipated Jewish community, saw their liturgical music as an important means of connecting to Western classical and Christian liturgical music traditions. Twentieth-century chroniclers of the cantorate often took pains to separate the Ashkenazim and their cantorial practices from the liturgical music practices of the Sephardim (“Spanish” or “Oriental” Jews), sometimes under the justification that Sephardic musicianship represented a less “developed” aesthetic of a people stalled in exotic pre-modernity. Both Idelsohn and later cantorial chronicler Leo Landman (1973), for example, offered substantive descriptions of the Sephardic cantorate through the sixteenth century in their historical reconstructions, yet shifted their attention almost exclusively to the Ashkenazic population from the seventeenth century onward. Idelsohn characterized this shift as the passing of an artistic mantle from a waning Sephardic culture to an increasingly vital Ashkenazic culture—an interpretation similar to other triumphalist Ashkenazic-centric interpretations of the day (Gerber 1995: 12). “In the phlegmatic Orient,” Idelsohn noted, “the Synagogue song of the Sephardic-Oriental communities remained stagnant in the last three centuries.… leaving their attempts to be continued by the youngest and strongest of all Jewish groups—the Ashkenazim” (Idelsohn 1992[1929]a: 128; emphasis in original). In the 1970s, musicologist Eric Werner brought the Ashkenazic centrality of modern Jewish music history to a new height, devoting an entire book to the Ashkenazic synagogue song tradition under the premise that Ashkenazic chant, particularly as propagated by its cantorate, represented Judaism’s greatest musical achievements (Werner 1976). By phasing non-European Jewish forms out of the modern cantorial trajectory, Ashkenazic scholars in a predominantly Ashkenazic world thus “naturalized” the figure into a reflection of their own worldviews and experiences.
Within the Ashkenazic realm of cantorial singing, however, a narrower dichotomy emerged, roughly distinguished between East and West (Idelsohn 1992[1929]a: 246–315; see also Bohlman 2005: esp. 17, 22–23). Adhering to contemporary theoretical constructs, late nineteenth and early twentieth century researchers viewed the East as a seat of “purer” traditional Jewish expression, dominated by a more fervent religiosity and a penchant for oral tradition (Isenberg 2005, esp. 97–104). In this environment, itinerant boy singers learned cantorial
