These two selections are taken from Songs of Zion—the Souvenir [book] of the Jewish Women’s Congress held under the Auspices of the World’s Parliament of Religions, an auxiliary (“The World’s Congress Auxiliary”) of the World’s Columbian Exhibition (World’s Fair) in Chicago in 1893. This sui generis, rather quizzical, and now rare volume was commissioned and sponsored by that Jewish women’s organization through its designated volunteer committee of sixteen women from prominent and philanthropic Chicago families in the city’s business and Reform Jewish community—most if not all of whom could boast German-Jewish lineage. (Included in that committee was the wife of Rabbi Moses—author of the preliminary but replaced edition of the Union Prayerbook—as well as one member identified as “Miss Sadie American.”)

Compiled and edited by Cantors Alois Kaiser and William Sparger, the volume was conceived as a classically acceptable demonstration to the world of Jewish liturgical music heritage and its place in Western culture. With the World’s Fair and the related Parliament of Religions as a convenient forum and an inviting opportunity, it was intended to introduce the Parliament’s non-Jewish delegates and attendees—including distinguished clergymen from many parts of the world, representing virtually every “legitimate” world religion—to what they perceived as Judaism’s sacred music legacy. Preceded by an introductory essay by the editors on the history of synagogue music, the principal section comprised fifty authentic melodies of minhag Ashkenaz (which in turn included a few adopted tunes from the Western/Amsterdam, or “Portuguese” tradition). These were all highly stylized in Western-type four-part arrangements and settings, with conventional harmonies and trite harmonic clichés to ensure the appearance of respectability and to mediate anything that might otherwise come across as overly exotic or unrefined in Western terms.

Most of the settings were presented with piano or organ accompaniment; and all Hebrew texts were excised and replaced with pompous, flowery, uncredited English lyrics that were typical of contemporaneous tastes but appear hollow and artificial today. Indeed, the eminent scholar and eventual president of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, Cyrus Adler, voiced strong reservations about those English lyrics in his otherwise congratulatory preface. Although he underscored the volume’s importance as a public presentation—a “further step in the direction of the rehabilitation of the music of the synagogue,”—he observed that the compilers “were also embarrassed by the necessity . . . of preparing an English text to suit the music.” Still, in connection with a subsequent report to Congress with reference to the Smithsonian Institution, in which he emphasized his conception of Jews as a “biblical nationality,” he opined that the souvenir volume was by then widely considered the first such vehicle “to have made the case for the importance of placing Jewish culture on display in modern America.”

The editors, in addition to their own stylizations of traditional melodies in the main body of the volume, included several settings by well-known 19th-century European synagogue composers (including Sulzer, Lewandowski, Naumbourg, and Moritz Deutsch, a learned cantor in Breslau) and concluded with a final section of nine entirely original synagogue compositions. The two recorded samples in this volume are from that section: A. J. Davis’s “As the Hart Panteth,” liberally based on an English version of Psalm 42; and Kaiser’s “Thou Art Enthroned Above,” which is subtitled in Hebrew characters only as ein kelohenu—though the English text is not even remotely connected to that Hebrew hymn. The Hebrew subtitle appears to have no rationale, unless the piece is based on an as yet unidentified German ein kelohenu tune; or perhaps Kaiser merely intended it as a substitution altogether for the habitual singing of ein kelohenu in western European and American synagogues. (There was no tradition of singing this hymn text to any tune in eastern Europe, where it was perfunctorily and quickly recited.)