JEWISH VOICES IN THE NEW WORLD

The Song of Prayer in Colonial and 19th-Century America

Origins and development of North America's first Jewish music

A Virtual Exhibit
Curated by: Jeff Janeczko

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Jewish Voices in the New World looks at two important phases in the history of Jewish liturgical music in America: the Western Sephardi tradition of the Colonial era through circa 1830, and the music of Classical Reform as it developed from the mid-19th century through the First World War.

To those accustomed to Ashkenazi liturgical music, North America’s first Jewish music might sound unfamiliar. It is part of the Western or Amsterdam Sephardi tradition, which traces to the 16th-century conversos and marranos who fled the Iberian Penninsula and settled initially in Amsterdam and, later, in London. As conversos—Jews who had converted to Christianity during the Spanish Inquisition—the Sephardim who moved to Amsterdam lacked significant knowledge of Jewish tradition or ritual. Longing to re-engage with Jewish practice and custom, they recruited cantors and rabbis from North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean region (that is, eastern Sephardim—i.e., Sephardi Jews who had earlier left instead of converting) to assist them in “re-inventing” their rituals, traditions, and music.

“

Their liturgical music tradition appears to have been a potent vehicle for defining their internal Jewish identity. ”

North America's first Jews were of Western Sephardi origin. They were part of a group originally from the Netherlands that had established a sizable community in Recife, Brazil while it was under Dutch rule. But they left after the Portuguese took over and the specter of the Inquisition loomed. The origins of the American Jewish community are generally traced to twenty-three members of this group that arrived in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam—present-day New York—in 1654.

 

A223 Recifeembed
Recife, the center of Jewish life in Brazil until 1654. (Painting by Zachariah Wagener, 17th century)

As Neil W. Levin writes in the Introduction to Volume 1, the group was not meant to remain:

The now-legendary group of twenty-three refugees who landed in New Amsterdam are believed to have headed, at least initially, for the Caribbean and to have been prevented from landing there by the Spanish. Even if their original or ideal destination had been Holland, they were in effect stranded in New Amsterdam as indigent refugees. Though clearly unwelcome, they elected to remain permanently, which became possible only thanks to the economic influence and pressure on their behalf by fellow Jews in Amsterdam. The governor of New Amsterdam, Peter Stuyvesant, had insisted on their evacuation. But he was overruled from Amsterdam by his employer, the Dutch West India Company.

Sephardim founded the continent's first synagogue—New York's Shearith Israel—and remained the pillar of the American Jewish community well into the 19th century. By that time Ashkenazi Jews outnumbered the Sephardim significantly. However, as Levin also points out, early Ashkenazi immigrants simply joined the fold of the established Sephardi congregations. They did not create separate communities or synagogues.

The Western Sephardim were so deeply concerned about maintaining their musical tradition that they imported cantors from Amsterdam and London in order to do so. “In no other area of Jewish practice were they so meticulous,” Levin notes. They did not import rabbis to teach and determine matters related to Jewish law, even though other Sephardi communities in the Western hemisphere had. “Thus their liturgical music tradition appears to have been a potent—perhaps the primary—vehicle for defining their internal Jewish identity."

Shearith3
Shearith Israel: The little synagogue on Mill Street (now called South William Street) was consecrated on the seventh day of Passover, April 8, 1730. It was the first structure designed and built to be a synagogue in continental North America. (Source: http://shearithisrael.org/content/first-mill-street-synagogue)

CHANTS AND ELEGIES FOR TISHA B'AV

Music of mourning for the Destruction of the First and Second Temples, and the expulsion edict of 1492

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Among the distinctive traditions of the Western Sephardi rite are elegies (kinot) that commemorate the destruction of the First and Second Temples (586 B.C.E. and 72 C.E., respectively) and the expulsion edict of 1492, which are observed on the annual day of national morning known as Tisha b’av (the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av). The special synagogue services include chanting from the Book of Lamentations (m’gillat eikha), whose lyric poetry laments the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem and describes the national agony, as well as a series of later elegies by various medieval Hebrew poets, which refer to both ancient events and subsequent catastrophes like the expulsion. These were part of the Amsterdam repertoire by the 17th century and were perpetuated in New York at Shearith Israel.

The cantillation pattern heard in these examples is reserved exclusively for eikha. Each of the principal Jewish rites (Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Persian, Yemenite, etc.) has a special eikha cantillation of its own. This one is unique to Sephardi custom, and its manner of rendition here is unique to the Portuguese tradition—not only in Amsterdam, but also as it was known in the American Colonies certainly by the mid-18th century

The three examples included here are excerpted from a total of fourteen:

  • Aleikhem eda k'dosha was one of the many piyyutim (liturgical poems)—brought to Amsterdam by Hazzan Joseph Gallego in the early 17th century. The poetic structure is modeled on the “four questions” of the Passover Seder. There are also references to 13th- and 14th-century massacres. The Amsterdam and New York melodies are nearly the same.
  • Shirat hayyam (Song of the Sea) is the hymn of praise for God that is quoted in the Torah as sung by Moses and the Israelites upon crossing the Sea of Reeds on their escape from the Egyptians. It forms part of the daily morning service, in compliance with the commandment to “remember all the days of your life the day you left Egypt.”
  • The piyyut Et sha'arei ratzon occurs only in the Sephardi liturgy for Rosh Hashana as a preface to the sounding of the shofar. It concerns the biblical incident known as the binding of Isaac for sacrifice as a test of Abraham’s faith. The tune is unique to the Western tradition; eastern Sephardim have a different one.

 



Selections from Chants and Elegies for Tisha b'av, part of the Western or Amsterdam Sephardi tradition commemorating the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem and the expulsion edict of 1492.

 

During the 19th century most of the tunes considered here were harmonized in three and four parts either for men and boys or for men only. But before that, and certainly throughout the 18th century in Colonial America, these liturgical melodies were rendered without harmonization—even when an ensemble or choir might have served as an adjunct to the hazzan in leading the congregation and in providing variety in vocal timbre. Until the late 19th century, any choral or formalized group singing that might have accompanied and supplemented the hazzan at Shearith Israel in New York would have consisted of unison renditions—in octaves for applicable passages if boys' unchanged voices were included.

In the latter part of the 19th century, Shearith Israel instituted a formal choir as part of regular Sabbath services. These three examples come from its Sabbath evening liturgy.

  • The recitation of Psalm 92 is part of the preliminary kabbalat shabbat service. This one is very old; its unison and nonmetric features are retained to this day in its choral renditions at Shearith Israel, even though nearly all other old tunes there have been sung in metricalized four-part harmonizations, probably since the early 20th century.
  • Hashkivenu is part of every evening service—with some text variations. This Sabbath melody has a long lineage, with a modal variation in the London tradition and yet another in a Bayonne (France) manuscript dating to the 1820s. The Western Sephardi tradition in America has preserved it in the variant heard here.
  • Kaddish Shalem is the same text as the “mourners’ kaddish” toward the end of a service. Here it is sung as a prelude to bar’khu—the “call to worship” that normally begins a service proper. In Sephardi custom this bar’khu is repeated at the end of morning and evening services, a practice that originated to accommodate latecomers.

 



Selections from the Kabbalat Shabbat (Welcoming the Sabbath) and Sabbath evening liturgy in the Western Sephardi tradition.

The 19th Century and the Music of Classical Reform

 

The 19th century witnessed increased immigration of Ashkenazi Jews, particularly from German-speaking regions of Central and Eastern Europe. Prior to the middle of the century, only two of the synagogues that subsequently became affiliated with the Reform movement were actually founded as such. Other congregations founded by German-speaking Jewish immigrants were initiated and led by lay people with what Neil Levin has deemed “minimal Judaic learning and for the most part no higher secular education . . . forming what would only later be seen as the seeds of a federated movement.” Further:

Those early, mostly German-Jewish congregations that embarked on reformist paths after circa 1840 undertook to do so initially without rabbinical authority (reform-minded or traditional), supervision, or even guidance. Their lay leaders were mostly unfamiliar personally with either the theological or historical underpinnings of the Reform movement in Germany or its synagogue aesthetics and procedures (including the musical dimensions) in urban centers such as Berlin or Hamburg, from which few of the immigrants had come.

Accompanying this new American version of Judaism was a need for new music that would reflect its American context and its move toward less formalized modes of worship. In Europe, prominent cantors like Solomon Sulzer and Louis Lewandowski were focused on continuity through innovation, preserving the heritage of cantorial traditions by adapting them to Western art music. In the emerging American environment, congregational singing was favored over cantors, English over Hebrew, and simplicity and familiarity over extravagance and exoticism. In the words of one advocate, the music was to be “so simple that after it has been sung once or twice, [the congregants] can all join in it.”

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Confronted with this repertoire divorced from its historical and sociological contexts, the contemporary listener will be justified in finding most of the settings hopelessly dated.”

 

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Touro Synagogue of New Orleans, one of the first American Reform congregations and the first temple built outside the thirteen colonies. (Photo credit. The Times-Picayune).

If simplicity was a desired objective, so too was an audible break from the Jewish liturgical practice of Europe. The budding movement was short on specifics as to what their music should sound like. However, as Levin observes, they had no trouble expressing what they did not want:

. . . anything too directly linked to traditional European Jewish experience as they perceived or imagined it; anything that was ethnically tinged, especially with eastern European flavors; anything that sounded too foreign to Western ears attuned to Western sensibilities; anything lacking in Western notions of sanctity, religious dignity, or optimistic solemnity; anything that might seem dolorous or mournful (especially by virtue of excessive focus on minor or minor-related modes); anything that masked universal perspectives and sensibilities; anything that might, by its tone, contradict the desired mood of exaltation; and, most especially, anything that might be heard or interpreted as imploring God with unrestrained emotion for relief from suffering (which some considered a now unwarranted obsession in the new American environment, best left to Europe) or for the traditionally accepted but now viewed as antiquated route to redemption.

An 1859 resolution by the trustees of Kehillat Anshe Maariv (KAM) in Chicago was typical of such admonitions against traditional or virtuoso emotional cantorial fervor: “From public worship there shall be removed wailing over oppression and persecution…. Bombastic words, exaggerations, and bad taste shall have no place in public worship.”

To create this music, composers—both Jewish and gentile—drew from two sources: European concert music and Christian hymns.

As with the Sephardic music of the Colonial era discussed earlier, listeners familiar with the range of contemporary Jewish liturgical music, even in its many guises, might find this repertoire a bit curious. Neil W. Levin’s observations concerning context are apt:

“Confronted with this repertoire divorced from its historical and sociological contexts, the contemporary listener will be justified in finding most of the settings, along with the English and German texts, hopelessly dated, musically wanting, Judaically unanchored, and in many cases downright humorous—particularly the adaptations from well-known classical concert, operatic, or Christian sacred works.” 

Thus, it is important to note:

“. . . these pieces were once taken quite seriously by educated worshippers and by many of their leaders, who perceived them to be spiritually uplifting and heard and sang them as marks of refinement and cultured religious experience. Listening to them can bring to life—perhaps in a way that no written accounts can do on their own—the aura of those services and the quest for modernity and a patently ‘American’ stamp that infused them.”

Two of the earliest composers affiliated with the nascent American Reform movement (or what would later become a movement) were German-born individuals who took root in the American South in the middle of the 19th century. Both were versatile musicians who survived by participating in a range of musical activities. As composers of Jewish liturgical music, they helped establish a musical identity that distinguished these new congregations from their contemporaries.

 



A mid-19th century setting of Adon Olam by Gustave Cohen, the first cantor of Temple Emanu-El in New York (one of the first flagship synagogues of the American Reform movement).

Sweet Home Alabama: Sigmund Schlesinger

Sigmund Schlesinger was born in 1835 in the Germanic state of Württemberg and studied in Munich. Little is known about his early life, including the nature and extent of his Jewish education and exposure to the liturgical music of his region. He arrived in the United States in 1860, and by 1870 had settled in Mobile, Alabama. In the same year that he arrived he became the organist of Congregation Shaarei Shomayim (founded in 1844), and remained there for thirty-six years, until his death. Like many synagogue musicians, Schlesinger composed music to fulfill the needs of his congregation.

In addition to his work with Shaarei Shomayim, Schlesinger was a highly respected member of Mobile’s musical community and composed a great deal of secular music, including an opera on The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. His music for the synagogue spread beyond Alabama even before it was published, but received widespread circulation when he began gearing his compositions toward the Union Prayerbook of 1894, the first official prayerbook of the American Reform movement.

Several of Schlesinger’s settings are based on pre-existing music. The two examples featured here are Day of God, an adaptation of the traditional kol nidrei melody to an unrelated English replacement text, and his setting of a Yom Kippur prayer text (Ki vayom haze) to one of the most famous Donizetti arias, “Una Furtiva Lagrima” from L’Elisir D’Amore (The Elixer of Love).

 



Two liturgical settings by Sigmund Schlesinger, cantor and organist of Congregation Shaarei Shomayim of Mobile, Alabama in the late 19th century.

 

Louisiana Man: Frederick Kitziger

In that both were born in Germany in the mid-19th century and became influential musical figures in the Jewish communities of the American South, the lives of Frederick Kitziger and Sigmund Schlesinger have many parallels. Kitziger was born in 1844 and studied music at the Leipzig conservatory before immigrating to Louisiana in 1865. His situation was one to which many contemporary musicians can relate. He was in love in needed to prove to his fiancé’s father that he could sufficiently support her. He set off for New Orleans and began playing music. After a year, he had saved up some money and purchased a farm in the town of Crowley, Louisiana. He journeyed back to Germany to show his future father-in-law he had viable means to support a wife and family, and then returned to Louisiana to begin his new life. Only his farm failed. As John Baron, a musicologist who has meticulously researched Kitziger’s life and work, stated in a Milken Archive interview (video follows below), “After one year, he lost everything. Not a single seed came above the ground.”

So, he went back to New Orleans and pieced together a living with a variety of music jobs, including playing in churches and, eventually, at the city’s Touro Synagogue—the first Jewish temple outside of the thirteen colonies and the sixth oldest in the United States. Kitziger’s first association with the synagogue occurred in 1881. But by 1888, as Neil W. Levin has noted, “he had accumulated a sufficient number of original liturgical pieces to begin publishing them as the four-volume Shire Yehudah—Songs of Judah: A Collection of Sacred Songs for Soli and Chorus with Organ Accompaniment.” The first of the four volumes, Sabbath Morning and Evening Services, was issued that same year.

 

Shire
Cover of the second volume of Shire Yehudah by Frederick Kitziger. Kitziger was the most prolific composer of synagogue music in America at the time. (Photo credit: http://www.danwymanbooks.com/music1.php).

 

According to Baron, Kitziger wrote more synagogue music than any other synagogue composer in America at that time. Shire Yehudah alone contains 347 settings for Sabbath and High Holy Day services. Levin has further commented on the stylistic orientation of Kitziger’s synagogue music:

Like most of his contemporaries who composed and arranged music for the American Reform format, Kitziger’s harmonic language and melodic shapes unapologetically mimicks Western hymnody, other Protestant church forms, and classical art music. This reflected the prevailing tastes and expectations of American Reform worshippers as well as rabbis of that period. 

Featured here are one liturgical setting from the second volume of Shire Yehuda, “Mizmor shir l'yom hashabbat,” and one of the more curious relics of the era: Kitziger’s setting of the Psalm “O What Is Man” to Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.

In terms of parallels, it is interesting that Schlesinger and Kitziger both 1) came from Germany, 2) utilized well-known melodies from Western classical music for their synagogue music, 3) became relatively well-known and influential from fairly remote posts in the American South, and 4) were active in the non-Jewish and secular musical worlds of the communities in which they lived. Indeed, from what we know, perhaps the most significant ways in which the lives of Schlesinger and Kitziger diverged is that the former was never a farmer and the latter never a Jew.

 

 



Two liturgical settings by Frederick Kitziger, including "Oh What Is Man," based on the first movement of Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 14 "Moonlight" (Op. 27, No. 2).

Songs of Zion

Though it continues today in various guises, the fashion of adapting well-known secular melodies to synagogue liturgy became a contentious one. Throughout this period there were many who questioned whether some of the less Jewishly grounded aspects of Reform worship were altogether appropriate. In 1887, The American Hebrew printed the comments of one observer:

“It is sometimes absolutely grotesque to hear the tunes associated with amorous or dramatic passages in operas sung to words of religious import. The most ridiculous lack of aesthetic taste is displayed. Seldom is there any true solemnity or other natural emotional force expressed by the choirs. Nothing but declamatory phrasing and sensational yelling utterly at variance with the character of the service.”

At the same time, cantors familiar with the European cantorial tradition, or minhag Ashkenaz, began to arrive in America to fulfill important cantorial posts. Like Schlesinger and Kitziger, these cantors began composing music for their congregations, and compiling and editing collections of music for use in Reform synagogues throughout the country.

Among the most famous documents of this era is Songs of Zion: A Collection of the Principal Melodies of the Synagogue from the Earliest Time to the Present, a  souvenir anthology for the Jewish Women’s Congress created for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition (World’s Fair) in Chicago compiled by cantors Alois Kaiser and William Sparger.

Preceded by an introductory essay on the history of synagogue music, the principal section comprised fifty authentic melodies in four-part arrangements. In an attempt to appear more “American,” the settings were presented with piano or organ accompaniment and all Hebrew texts were replaced with English lyrics. It also included several settings by well-known 19th-century European synagogue composers and several original compositions by Kaiser and Sparger. The volume came to be widely used throughout American Reform congregations.

“

The most ridiculous lack of aesthetic taste is displayed.”

Alois Kaiser (1840–1908) was one of the first cantors to bring to America a thorough grounding in the western and Central European Ashkenazi liturgical music traditions. He was born in Szobotist, Hungary and received his musical training in Vienna at the Teachers’ Seminary and Conservatory of Music. But prior to that he cut his teeth singing in Salomon Sulzer’s choir at the Seitenstettengasse Tempel in Vienna, an experience that familiarized him with the rich body of misinai tunes (seasonal leitmotifs, dating to medieval Rhineland Jewry) and other age-old melodies of minhag Ashkenaz. After working as a cantor for several years in Europe, he immigrated to America and assumed the cantorial post at Congregation Oheb Shalom in Baltimore.

Prior to working with Sparger on the volume presented at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, Kaiser joined forces with two fellow immigrant cantors, Moritz Goldstein (1840–1906) and Samuel Welsch (1835–1901), to compile and publish a four-volume anthology of music, Zimrath Yah—Liturgic Songs Consisting of Hebrew, English, and German Psalms and Hymns, Systematically arranged for the Jewish Rite with Organ accompaniment.

For years Kaiser lobbied for rabbinical support for a hymnbook that could be used in all American congregations. He was openly critical of American synagogue repertoire of the time and especially concerned for the preservation of the minhag Ashkenaz he had learned in Europe. He cautioned that any new hymnal must be “an eminently Jewish hymnbook . . . in which every number will be a literary production of the highest order” and in which hymns would be “adapted to exclusively Jewish melodies.” Kaiser’s opportunity to influence the direction of American synagogue music came when a committee of Jewish women from prominent Chicago families invited him and Sparger to compile and edit a souvenir book of Jewish music for the Jewish Women’s Congress of the World’s Parliament of Religions at the 1893 Columbian Exposition (World’s Fair) in Chicago. But, as can be heard in the examples included here, the desire to project an American sound was still strong.



“As the Hart Panteth” and “Thou Art Enthroned Above” from the Songs of Zion volume prepared for the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, sponsored by the Jewish Women’s Congress.

William Sparger (1860–1904) was a rabbi’s son born in Hungary. He sang in the synagogue choir in his youth, and in 1879 he began studies at the University of Vienna, where he may also have studied at the conservatory. He immigrated to America in 1883 and served as both rabbi and cantor of Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn. He was elected cantor and music director of Temple Emanu-El in 1891 and continued until 1903, the year before his death.

In addition to his work on the souvenir anthology with Kaiser, he collaborated with Temple Emanu-El’s organist and choirmaster, Max Spicker, on a collection titled The Synagogal Service. Divided into two parts, Part I for Sabbath eve services and Part II for Sabbath morning, the collection came to be known informally as “Spicker-Sparger,” and was widely used throughout American Reform congregations. It contains original compositions by Sparger and Spicker as well as various others, and adaptations from such classical composers as Charles Gounod and Anton Rubinstein. The s’u sh’arim adaptation from a Roman Catholic Mass by Gounod, featured here, was especially popular. The three other selections are a v’sham’ru setting attributed to “Sparger-Dworzan,” C. Attenhofer’s “May the Words” (an English version of yih’yu l’ratzon, which in traditional services is said at the conclusion of the silently recited amida), and Will C. Macfarlane’s “Who Is Like Unto Thee?” (an English version of mi khamokha).

“

. . . the Jewish synagogue is indeed sadly in need of Jewish music.”

Max Spicker (1858–1912) was born in Königsberg, East Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia), and pursued his musical studies at the conservatory in Leipzig. He was an opera conductor and theatrical music director in Heidelberg, Köln (Cologne), Potsdam (at the Royal Theater), and Hamburg. After immigrating to America in the 1880s, he was appointed organist and choir director at Temple Emanu-El in New York in 1891, the same year as William Sparger. The two functioned as a team for the congregation’s overall music program and in composing, editing, and publishing synagogue music. Spicker also served as director of the Brooklyn Conservatory.

 



Selections from The Synagogal Service, the edited volume commonly known as "Spicker-Sparger."

 

The Union Hymnal: Toward a Uniform Repertoire

But concern over the nature and direction of American synagogue music continued to grow. In 1892, discussions about music at the Central Conference of American Rabbis centered on the need for a common repertoire and a musical companion to the forthcoming Union Prayerbook (published in 1894). One rabbi complained that “the Jewish synagogue is indeed sadly in need of Jewish music . . . our music is not the outgrowth of Jewish production. We sing Methodist music and Presbyterian and Catholic.”

In 1897 the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR) issued the Union Hymnal. Compiled and edited by Cantor Alois Kaiser, it was a collection of four-part metrical choral hymns on Western models, with English texts, which was intended as a pool from which choirmasters, music directors, or, in their absence, rabbis could draw, which would ideally become familiar to all Reform congregations and worshippers throughout the United States. It was not the first synagogue hymnal to be published for Reform use in America; earlier ones had been compiled and issued by individuals as well as by particular congregations who made them available to all synagogues and choirs that wished to use them.

Commenting on the idea of a common hymnal Isaac Mayer Wise, one the movement’s most significant figures, declared “I would be in favor… all that the Hebrew mind has produced in the way of song united in one volume.”

The volume includes one hymn composed by Kaiser: a setting of a rhymed paraphrase of Psalm 82 by John Milton, “How Lovely Are Thy Dwellings.” Kaiser intended it as a substitution for the Hebrew liturgical text drawn from that Psalm, ma tovu ohalekha—a common prelude to evening services.

Other selections are based on traditional melodies either of minhag Ashkenaz or of Western Sephardi custom, which Kaiser knew from his years singing in Solomon Sulzer’s choir in Vienna. “All People on Earth Do Dwell” is based on a misinai leitmotif for the Festival of Shavuot. The English text is a paraphrase of Psalm 100 by William Kethe.

The tune source of “There Is a Mystic Tie That Joins” is a Western Sephardi melody that is employed as a skeletal motif for hallel as well as for tal (dew) and geshem (rain) prayers on Pesah and Sukkot. The English text by Max Myerhardt contains dated but once common references to the Jewish people as “the children of the martyr race.”

 

The music of the Classical Reform era is now largely a relic of the past. As European Jewish composers arrived in America in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, they began composing music more in the vein of that which had developed in Europe under such influential figures as Sulzer and Lewandowski. Much of the music from that neo-Reform period can be explored in Volume 4.

 

 

 

 



Selections from the 1897 edition of the Union Hymnal, compiled and edited by Alois Kaiser.

 

 

Links & Credits

Featured Recordings:

Amsterdam/Western Sephardi Tradition
Chants and Elegies for Tisha B’av
Shabbat

Music of Classical Reform:

Day of God - Sigmund Schlesinger
Ki vayyom haze - Sigmund Schlesinger
Mizmor shir l’yom hashabbat - Frederich Kitziger
Oh, What Is Man - Frederick Kitziger
As the Hart Panteth | Thou Art Enthroned Above
Selections from the Spicker-Sparger Anthology
Union Hymnal Selections

Featured Composers:

Alois Kaiser
Frederick Kitziger
Sigmund Schlesinger
William Sparger
Max Spicker
Western Sephardi Tradition

Credits

Liner notes by Neil W. Levin
Exhibit curated by Jeff Janeczko

 

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The playlist below includes selected tracks from the works featured in this exhibit. Much more is available on our Spotify Channel.