Ashkenazic and Italian Liturgy

Ashkenazic and Italian Liturgy

Chair: Eliyahu Schleifer


Sharon Bernstein, Cantor for Congregation Sha’ar Zahav in San Francisco
The Cantillation of the Pentateuch According to the Italian Tradition of Turin

Knowledge of the musical traditions of the Jews in Italy, who followed a variety of liturgical minhagim (customs) based on the heritage of the Italian, Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews who settled in the Italian Peninsula, is still at a starting point. The pioneering fieldwork by Leo Levi (1912-1922) was followed by forays into the field by Avenary, Adler, Seroussi and Spagnolo. Only Levi, however, undertook an initial study of a specific aspect of these traditions, namely the reading of the te’amim, or cantillation of Biblical texts, according to the Italian minhag. This minhag was followed by several communities in the Peninsula, including Rome, Pitigliano, Siena, Florence, Ancona, Ferrara, Bologna, Reggio Emilia, Padua, Venice, Mantua, Milan, Turin and Alessandria, which were recorded by Levi in the 1950’s. In this paper, I analyze the melodic structure and the syntax of the cantillation of the t’amim in the community of Turin, the only one in Italy where the Bible is still chanted today according to the Italian minhag. My analysis is based on archival recordings made by Levi with one informant, Aldo Perez, on field recordings I made in Turin with two informants, Hazzan Franco Segre and Rabbi Emanuele Weiss Levy, and on additional fieldwork conducted in Rome in 2002. Additionally, these sources are compared to archival recordings from other Italian communities.
My analysis shows that the Italian minhag represents an independent tradition for the cantillation of the t’amim, in which the accents – only a few of which are actually sung – are given original melodic renditions that differ greatly from those of the Ashkenazi and Sephardic synagogues in Italy (and elsewhere). Beyond the melodic sphere, the Italian minhag also presents a feature that is altogether unique in the Jewish world, since the melodic rendition of the t’amim is also based on their position within the Biblical verse, and thus directly tied to its syntactical structure. These features, which were retained by only a handful of Italian communities, open a new window on the relationship between music and Biblical text, and help re-defining the notion of liturgical minhag as a dynamic area of cultural interaction.


Ruth HaCohen, Department of Musicology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Ashkenazi Liturgical Music: When Historical Perspective Meets Cognitive Considerations

Complementary to Boaz Tarsi’s proposed paper to this congress, and following my own research on sonic encounters of Jews and Christians in North Western Europe since the time of the crusades, this paper wishes to delineate new options to examine basic traits of the legacy of Ashkenazi Liturgical music. Viewed against the sparse contacts of Jews with the surrounding Christian musical world, the emergence of musical performative practice which creates its own coherent system will be discussed from a cognitive perspective, taking into consideration the tacit demands of the underlying liturgical system as shaped by the recently crystallized Minhag Ashkenaz. This examination will be juxtaposed to the permeation of foreign “harmonic” elements to cantorial music since early modern times, as manifest in Chazzanim’s notebooks and other forms of musical hybridity of the period (such as Isaac Nathan/ Lord Byron’s Hebrew Melodies). Again, I will call attention to cognitive and aesthetic criteria to review these hybrids and question the possible impact of such hybridity on the system of Ashkenazi liturgical music.


Boaz Tarsi, Jewish Theological Seminary of America
The primary issues – real and imaginary – that may stand in the way of a productive exploration of the system of Ashkenazi Liturgical music

At the present stage of our unpacking of the system of Ashkenazi liturgical music, I believe, we actually understand better and know more about this system than we ever have; better in fact than we allow ourselves to acknowledge. I also believe that at this stage it would befit the overall objective to identify and survey the basic fundamental conceptual, historical, and terminological issues that stand to pose an obstacle in the way of this process. This kind of inventory-taking begins with identifying two primary groups of issues. The first comprises considerations that are indeed real, in many cases unique to this repertoire, and directly affect the method and conceptual paradigm we use in exploring this system. An awareness of these considerations is necessary and timely. But more important, ways to resolve, overcome, bypass them, or handle the built-in limitations are already available to us. More crucial perhaps is the need to identify the other group: hindering factors that are in fact imaginary, easily resolvable, or are already resolved and settled if we implement what we know in other fields of thought and inquiry. The paper discusses some of these issues using examples from specific problems that arise in the process of exploring this discipline.

3.8.09