Abstract
This paper focuses on the emergence of Seattle’s Sephardic community as an alternative liturgical center in network with even newer Middle Eastern and North African immigrant coreligionists in the United States and abroad. Historically operating within a hierarchical relationship to an older, institutionally endowed Spanish-Portuguese congregation in New York City, Seattle’s musical liturgies developed relatively autonomously through oral transmission in conjunction with national Spanish-Portuguese prayerbooks aimed at standardizing a Sephardic-American religious rite. The study probes a common early modern Mediterranean past among Ottoman and Northern European Sephardim and their progressive regional divergences to elucidate the understudied significance of selective cultural genealogies to the development of Sephardic religious institutions, liturgical practices, and intra-communal tensions on American soil. The local publication of five prayerbooks since 2000 represents not a reactive assertion of provincial particularity in the Pacific Northwest but rather the coming of age of Seattle’s religious press as a liturgical source for successive waves of Jewish immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa seeking usable prayer texts.
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Notes
Observations are those of the author. Also see Emily K. Alhadeff, "Closing the Circle: Seattle's Sephardic Liturgy Is Complete," Jewish Transcript News, November 14, 2014.
In the Seattle community, ‘Turkish’ refers to descendents from immigrants hailing from Tekirdağ and Marmara located to the west and south of Istanbul respectively. The first two prayerbooks (Zehut Yosef and Zihron Rahel) are based on both traditions, while the final three publications are exclusively based on the Rhodes tradition.
Eviatar Zerubavel’s (2012) creative research into socially constructed genealogies is relevant to the liturgical ancestries under discussion here.
This liturgical case study, focusing primarily on congregations in Seattle and New York, represents a specific cultural story within a larger history of diverse Sephardic immigrants to the United States. For a recent comprehensive study, see Aviva Ben-Ur (2009). A changing complexity of terms (Levantine, Oriental, Sephardic, Mizrahi) has been used and debated in communal and scholarly worlds to identify diverse Jews from Northern Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and West Asia (Ben-Ur 2009; Lehmann 2008). For the purposes of this paper the term ‘Sephardic’ and ‘Spanish-Portuguese’ will be used to prioritize the typical perspective of ethnographic and communal sources tied to a collective sense of descent from Iberian Spain after the Spanish Inquisition in 1492.
A particular melody by Najara, for example, was in vogue in Amsterdam and London in the mid-18th century, while another was adopted as the hymn of the Sabbateans and followers of Jacob Frank (Seroussi 1996).
In seeking musical sources and cross-regional commonalities Seroussi correlates notated 19th century European sources with current practitioners in both Europe and former Ottoman territories, thereby placing certain melodies within an identifiable “class of equivalence” which refers to “the ‘melody’ from an emic point of view…(retaining) enough formal characteristics (sequences of intervals, rhythmic patterns, duration and order of melodic units such as motifs and phrases) that once decoded by a performer in a latter period an authorized informant can associate it with its ‘class’” (Seroussi 1996).
Samuel Benaroya (1908–2003), a Turkish-Jewish émigré to Seattle from his birthplace in Ottoman Edirne, confirms that such interchange extended well into the 20th century: he regularly accompanied his maternal uncle to the lodge as well as witnessed mutual visits of other Jewish singers to the lodge and of Mevlevi singers to the synagogue (Benaroya, Interview with Edwin Seroussi 1992). For a comprehensive collection of historical examples and their sources, see Maureen Jackson (2013, p. 181, n15).
For example, songs were generally organized by makam with indication of usul (rhythm pattern), genre, and composer, all of which represented memory aids in an orally transmitted musical practice.
Some non-Jewish composers were connected directly with synagogues; for example the Christian composer C.F. Hurlebusch (1696–1765) was associated with the Sephardic congregation in Amsterdam. A number of Jewish composers were conservatory-trained hazzanim (Seroussi 1996).
It goes without saying that notated scores would not halt oral learning among Spanish-Portuguese Jewry in Northern Europe, but rather would co-exist in a context of mixed transmission patterns.
Generally referred to as the Haskalah, or ‘Jewish Enlightenment,’ these reform trends represent, in the broadest terms, a concern with framing Judaism and Jewish religious practice within European nation-states presenting values of national citizenship, a scientific worldview, and Protestant forms of religious administration and liturgy. The latter included a particular ‘aestheticization’ of services emphasizing decorum and formality, restricting the roles of ‘wandering hazzanim,’ and minimizing the spontaneous and emotive. It is important to note that “Protestant norms” were not necessarily unchanging or uniform.
Some early 19th century reform leaders also compared the Sephardic melodies with their own German chorales: simple, rhythmic, easy-to-learn melodies that could either replace or accompany these familiar forms (Seroussi 1996). Within this context of religious reform, Jewish and non-Jewish composers alike continued to write music for the synagogue, among them the influential composer/hazzanim Salomon Sulzer (1804–90) in Vienna, Louis Lewandowsky (1821–94) in Berlin, and Samuel Naumbourg (1815–80) in Paris, who adapted ‘older’ Ashkenazi and Sephardic melodies to a contemporary aesthetic, among other varieties of liturgical, art music compositions.
For example, in one songbook by Eduard Kley (1827) the Sephardic melodies are arranged in multiple parts, presumably for solo voice, choir, and organ (Seroussi 1996).
While a musicological analysis would be necessary, it is possible that such transcription altered older, modal material by fitting it into European scales and rhythms, thus removing it further from a shared Ottoman repertoire (Eisenstein 1999).
Reform synagogues challenged the prohibition against instruments (in this case organs) by claiming their relationship with the original Temple instrument, the magrefah. Unlike Central European reform synagogues, the Spanish-Portuguese congregations of Amsterdam and London established choirs later, in the final decades of the century (Seroussi 1996)—a development in which musical transcription and notated polyphonic arrangements were useful for choral direction and performance. In the Ottoman Empire choral or polyphonic works represented a minor development through the introduction of choral responses in the Middle East and North Africa through the Paris-based Alliance Israélite Universelle schools. For example, an apparently original European Sephardic composition, in a march rhythm, major scale, and three-part arrangement, has been heard in Aleppo, Istanbul, and Jerusalem, presumably introduced through Alliance teachers familiar with musical developments at the Portuguese synagogue in Paris (Seroussi 1996).
From the 1700s to the present-day, Shearith Israel has employed the majority of its hazzanim, and later rabbis as well, from Holland, secondarily from England, and lastly from the United States, North Africa, and the Caribbean (de Sola Pool 1955). Other conversos congregations in Hamburg, London, Brazil and the Caribbean also viewed Amsterdam as a model. For example, the Sephardic congregations in London, Curacao, and New York adopted statutes from the Amsterdam congregation; they also modeled their synagogue’s architecture on the main synagogue (1675) in Amsterdam (Bodian 1989; Turisky 1992).
Before this decision in the second half of the 19th century, the synagogue participated in a heated controversy over the prospect of the popular hazzan Jacques Judah Lyons (1839–1877) sharing the stage with a rabbi. Eventually, at Shearith Israel the hazzan was referred to as “assistant hazzan,” with the rabbi implicitly serving as primary hazzan by performing not the daily Sabbath liturgy, but rather special High Holy Day pieces such as the “Kol Nidre” (Slobin 1989). As former assistant hazzan Abraham Lopes Cardozo notes, “A Sephardic hazzan is not a cantor in the Ashkenazic sense, but rather a reader and a leader of services,” reciting scripture in biblical cantillation and performing solo-breaks with the choir (Slobin 1989).
Previously, Shearith Israel used choirs for not infrequent paraliturgical occasions, such as synagogue commemorations and American national holidays, where the audience would include Christian colleagues and friends. Like Northern European Spanish-Portuguese congregations, Shearith Israel began to transcribe its liturgical music in the mid-19th century, when hazzan Lyons was asked by the lay board to document his melodies, presumably for a kind of canonization and re-creation by subsequent hazzanim. The synagogue’s organ, reportedly donated by George Gershwin in the mid-1880s and used infrequently today (de Sola Pool 1955), may have represented a concession to historically situated debates about Jewish liturgical reform that later became less pressing or divisive. A staff member at Shearith Israel doesn’t remember ever hearing the old organ, although it was recently tuned, perhaps for use at weddings (Personal communication 2002). In Savannah and Charleston, controversy over organs in the synagogue caused single Sephardic congregations to split into two (Corre 1989; Slobin 1989).
Music of the Congregation Shearith Israel: Songs of the Sabbath. Cassette of master tape-recorded in 1963. New York, NY. Music of the Congregation Shearith Israel: The High Holy Days and the Festivals. Cassette of master tape-recorded in 1963. New York, NY.
“Doing everything” meant such activities as serving as rabbi, hazzan, Talmud Torah teacher, visitor to the sick and dying, community mediator, and ritual slaughterer.
For example, Samuel Benaroya worked as the congregation’s bookkeeper to make ends meet (Benaroya, Interview with Eric Offenbacher 1985). Retired hazzan Isaac Azose worked full time for Boeing while serving Ezra Bessaroth (www.ezrabessaroth.com). By ‘semi-professional’ I mean lack of professional credentialing, not lack of ability or status through expertise or experience.
As Rosa Berro (b. 1899 Rhodes), a community member, notes, even a single Rhodes congregation in Seattle represented a reduction of diversity: “Take Rhodes, for example, we are all one community in …. [Seattle], but there are many synagogues on Rhodes. That doesn’t mean anything, just because we are Sephardic we have to be all in one synagogue. I don’t believe in that” (Rosa Berro, Interview with Fannie Roberts 1974). For a study of the relationship of Salonikan Jewish immigrants to their city of origin, see Devin E. Naar (2007).
Isaac Azose, The Liturgy of Ezra Bessaroth. Bellevue, WA, 1999 (2 CD set).
Eastern Mediterranean Jewry also made efforts at institutional unification of their relatively small numbers. See for example the enlargement of the Salonika Brotherhood of America, established in 1915, into the Sephardic Brotherhood of America in 1922 (Naar, pp. 468–69).
In fact, in the context of rising Ashkenazi membership, New York’s Spanish-Portuguese community itself was motivated to consolidate a Sephardic religious rite (Ben-Ur 2009, p. 102).
In a similar vein, a report commissioned by the New York Jewish Federation (Hacker 1926), frames the differences between Jewish immigrants from the Middle East/North Africa and established American Jewry in terms of racial segregation in the United States at the time: “These facts will provoke some curiosity. In New York City’s population of some 1,500,000 Jews, there are 40,000 souls who are almost as alien to their kinsmen as are the Negroes to the average white Southerner. These 40,000 Jews are set apart from New York Jewry by religious, linguistic and psychological differences that vitiate any attempts at mutual understanding.” The report goes on to distinguish these ‘Sephardim’ from the Jewish majority through their language differences (speaking a polyglot assortment of Ladino, Greek, Turkish and Arabic), social habits (neglecting the home in favor of the coffeehouse), and extreme provincialism (organizing religious and welfare institutions based on Ottoman hometown). For additional examples of attitudes toward Sephardic newcomers in New York in this period, see Naar (2007, p. 437, n6).
The relatively recent rhetorical construction is evidenced by its inapplicability to other historical periods, for example the Christian Byzantine Empire (in the ‘East’) and Arab Spain (in the ‘West’). For further discussion see M.E. Yapp (1992).
Isaac Azose, Speech, Nov 2, 2014.
The Union of Sephardic Congregations was established in 1929 with the aims of training Sephardic religious leaders, establishing Sephardic religious schools, and standardizing a national religious rite (Ben-Ur 2009, p. 101).
Ben-Ur (2000, p. 103) echoes this assumption: “The Book of Prayers, published by the Union for Sephardic Congregations, is today in its twelfth impression (1997) and remains one of the most enduring legacies of the merging of the two communities.”
According to Isaac Azose, the Seattle synagogues acquired the de Sola Pool series of prayerbooks (Daily and Sabbath, the Festivals, Rosh Ashanah, and Yom Kippur) in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Speech, Nov 2, 2014.
Observations of the author.
These consultations have led to assumptions about the utility and success of the prayerbook in eastern Mediterranean Sephardic communities.
Editorial codes in the siddur are {R} and [T] for Rhodes and Turkish practices respectively.
Other variations include ritual instructions and changes in vowels, phrases, and specific verses.
The membership of Magen David Sephardic Congregation, for example, was originally from Turkey and Greece with a shift to Moroccan, North African, and Middle Eastern membership after 1940.
Ben-Ur refers to the first two prayerbooks of the Seattle community, but because of sustained oral transmission and the wider relevance of the recently published prayerbooks, their representation exclusively as a reassertion of distinctive liturgies is erroneous (Ben-Ur 2009, p. 104).
Through his political contacts in an era of immigration quotas, de Sola Pool facilitated Benaroya’s entry to the United States under the title of a credentialed ‘Reverend’ (Benaroya, Interview with Eric Offenbacher 1988). Two Washington state congressmen, Henry “Scoop” Jackson and Warren Magnuson, reportedly assisted in the immigration process.
For example, the New York congregation did not publish a prayerbook with notated songs as did the London synagogue at the turn of the 20th century (Gaster 1907).
Post-Ottoman urban centers like Salonika and Rhodes represented cultural networks lost to Ottoman-Turkish immigrant communities in the United States. Seattle resident Henry Benezra mourned the loss of correspondence with coreligionists in cities like Salonika following World War II (Benezra, Interview with Howard Droker 1982). For a further discussion of de Sola Pool’s concerns regarding Sephardic religion, culture, and the Holocaust, see Ben-Ur (2009, p. 104).
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Jackson, M. Reaching Beyond the Local: The Itineraries of an Ottoman-Sephardic-American Minhag . Cont Jewry 35, 89–105 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12397-015-9134-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12397-015-9134-5