Spanish-Portuguese Synagogue Music in Nineteenth-Century Reform Sources from Hamburg: Ancient Tradition in the Dawn of Modernity

In 1974 the Jewish Music Research Centre of the Hebrew University (Jerusalem), collaboration with the Jewish National and University Library, launched the Yuval Monograph Series, beginning with Israel Adler's Musical Life and Traditions of the Portuguese Jewish Community ofAmsterdam the XVIIIth Century. (This was actually a revised and enlarged English version of Part IV of the first of Adler's earlier two-volume study, La Pratique musicale savante dans quelques communautisjuives en aux XVIIe et XVIIFe siecles [Paris-The Hague: Mouton], published 1966.) Adler's brief preliminary survey of the community's secular and religious musical life included a chronological and thematic inventory of its musical manuscripts, together with information concerning the composers (Jewish and non-Jewish) whose compositions were incorporated therein. The community initially comprised conversos (former converts to Christianity, forced or voluntary) who emigrated from the Iberian Peninsula and other European centers during the latter part of the sixteenth century and whose purpose it was to return to Judaism and to integrate into the burgeoning economic structure of western and its commercial links with the New World. Holland, unlike many other European countries, was most tolerant to their religious beliefs, even though Calvinism was the official state religion. Maintaining a separate religious, economic, and cultural existence from that of their Ashkenazic brethren from Germany and Eastern Europe, Amsterdam's Sephardic community retained its prominence throughout the eighteenth century. In the recently published monograph (Vol. IX of the series), Edwin Seroussi has contributed a noteworthy companion study, focusing on the synagogue music of Hamburg's Portuguese community, whose roots, together with its cultural and economic ties, were inextricably linked to Amsterdam, situated almost 400 kilometers to the southwest. (Surely Seroussi's placement of Hamburg in the upper-most corner of northeastern Europe [p. 134] was made unwittingly.) In this German port city and mercantile center, a Portuguese-Jewish presence dated from the early seventeenth century. By mid-century its initial core, consisting of conversos, had grown to a sizeable community. Yet, what is fascinating about Seroussi's study is that it furnishes us with a relatively unknown facet of Sephardic history, namely, how this community played a prominent role the emerging movement of Reform Judaism. Building upon Adler's earlier study and sources, Seroussi brings to light additional documentation,