Mayer Levi

Mayer Levi's gravestone with the dates of his life from May 14, 1814 to December 7, 1874

Mayer Levi (born May 14, 1814 in Rottweil ; † December 7, 1874 ) was a German Chasan from the first generation of cantors who also trained at the teachers' college in southern Germany. He left extensive records on the sacred Jewish music of his time and a documentation of the old Jewish cemetery in Esslingen am Neckar .

Life

Mayer Levi lost his father as a toddler and moved to Esslingen with his mother in 1816. There he was first taught in the cheder . From 1824 he attended the state supervised Jewish school in Esslingen. In 1828 he received his admission to the local teacher training college, where he graduated in 1831.

Leopold Liebmann was his Chasanut teacher at the teachers' college. Since only a few hours were scheduled for the cantor studies at the seminar, Levi and other prospective cantors completed their training outside the seminar with cantors of the old school, including Samuel and Nathan Ederheimer. The influence of these two chasanim can be demonstrated in his later records. Both came from Ederheim near Nördlingen , which was not far from Oberdorf, the birthplace of Löw Sänger . Singer was the first cantor of the newly founded Jewish community in Munich ; his melodies were recorded by Samuel Naumbourg and published in 1932 by Abraham Idelsohn . Their traces can be found in Mayer Levi. His stepfather, Alexander Mai, who appeared as a lay cantor on public holidays, may also have influenced Levi.

Im Heppächer 3, Esslingen (synagogue)

After completing his studies, Mayer Levi first became a chasan and teacher in Eschenau in 1832 . In 1836 he moved to Mergentheim and in the same year he began to work in Aldingen , where he worked until 1843. After a short period of work in his hometown, he became cantor in Esslingen on August 29, 1844, because after the Jewish orphanage in Entengrabenstrasse had opened in 1842, a second teacher and cantor had become necessary. He moved into an apartment in the Heppächer in Esslingen in the same house as the synagogue . Although he planned to emigrate to the United States in the 1840s, he decided not to implement this plan in 1849 and stayed in Esslingen until his death. He was the first to be buried in the Israelite part of the Ebershaldenfriedhof ; his tomb has been preserved there.

Levi not only worked as a chasan and thus as a prayer leader in the synagogue and a religion teacher, but he also received a special permit to practice the activity of a butcher , which at that time no longer corresponded to the official dignity of a chasan and was accordingly banned. He founded a synagogue choir, which was dissolved before 1860, and from 1845 was a teacher of Chasanut and liturgical texts at the Esslingen teachers' college.

Geoffrey Goldberg , who has dealt with Mayer Levi and his estate in several works, states that neither this résumé nor Levi's musical ingenuity was spectacular, but on the other hand emphasizes: “And yet Mayer Levi was no ordinary small-town chasan. Because for a whole generation of Württemberg cantors he was also the teacher of the Chasanut - the sacred chants of the synagogue. In this function he saw the need to [...] create a collection into which he transferred the liturgical chants and melodies in accordance with the traditional forms of the South German Jews [...] So today we can rightly call Mayer Levi's collection as one of the most important documents of the Ashkenazi Chasanut from the time of the European emancipation of Judaism [...] "

Tradition and change in the training of cantors in Levi's time

The office of a chasan was made necessary by the decoration of the liturgy , which is typical for Ashkenazi synagogues and had a tradition especially in southern Germany. Here, unlike in Eastern European synagogues, which specifically employed a Torah reader, the Chasan was entrusted with the task of reading publicly from the Torah or of singing out of the Hebrew text of the Old Testament . The more weight the musical arrangement of the church services - parallel to the exclusion of Jews from the cultural and musical life of Christian circles - gained, the more important the office of Chasan became. So it gradually developed into a full-fledged profession.

This was traditionally learned through oral tradition, that is, the apprentice heard and repeated the repertoire of his teacher, an experienced cantor. Up until the late 18th century, almost none of this was put down in writing, and only in Germany around the middle of the 19th century did the custom develop to guarantee tradition in writing through musical notation. Mayer Levi's writings are evidence of this development. This was supported in Württemberg by the transition from protective Jewry to recognition of the general Jewish religious community, which took place in 1828. In the course of this development, the old system of singing teachers, who often immigrated from Eastern Europe and who still lead a wandering life, was pushed back. In Levi's early written documents there are still traces of this old Meshorer style: The Chasan was usually accompanied by two apprentices (“Meshorerim”), a boy soprano (“Singerl”) and a bass, who assisted him. In Württemberg the Meshorerim were gradually excluded until 1838, with which the apprentice system came to an end here; At the same time, the training of the Chasanim was officially regulated for the first time: from 1828 a multi-part examination had to be taken at the teachers' seminar in order to obtain the qualification of a teacher-cantor. More than a third of the old style cantors did not feel up to these demands and had to look for other sources of income.

Entrance decoration of the former teachers' college in Esslingen

In 1831 a law was passed in which the personal union of cantor and religion teacher in Württemberg was finally officially confirmed; in Baden this union had already taken place in 1824, in Bavaria in 1828, and other states soon followed. The cantor was also obliged to preach and carry out other pastoral activities when there was no rabbi in a parish . In Württemberg, the duties of the Chasanim were laid down in detail by the Royal Israelite Higher Church Authority from 1831 onwards: In 1838, a divine service order was issued, and in 1841 the official instructions for the cantors were published. Mayer Levi belonged to the first generation of young cantors who were familiar with these regulations and probably adhered to them in every detail. It was also they who put together written compendia to support the students and the inexperienced Khazanim and thus contributed to the documentation of a tradition that has now disappeared.

Mayer Levi's musical compendium

The fourteen extant and well-known volumes of the Levic Compendium have the following titles:

1. Additional prayer ("musaf") on Rosh Hashanah (Series A)
2. Afternoon prayer ("minchah"): Sabbath, public holidays, high feast days (Series A)
3. Evening prayer ("ma'ariv") on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur (Series A)
4. Book Esther ("megillat Ester") (Series A)
5. Fasting to Av ("tisha B'Av") (Series A)
6. Morning prayer ("shacharit") on Rosh Hashanah (Series B)
7. Morning prayer ("shacharit") on Yom Kippur (Series B)
8. Additional prayer ("musaf") on Rosh Hashanah (Series B)
9. The evening of Yom Kippur ("kol nidrei") (Series B)
10. Morning prayer ("shacharit") on Rosh Hashanah (Series C)
11. Final prayer ("ne'ilah") on Yom Kippur (Series C)
12. Morning prayer ("shacharit") on Yom Kippur (Series D)
13. Additional prayer ("musaf") on Yom Kippur (Series D)
14. Pilgrimage Festival ("shalosh regalim") (Series D)

Mayer Levi's preserved work comprises at least the 14 volumes mentioned, twelve of which are in the USA today: Eight are stored without a signature in Gratz College in Philadelphia (Series A and D), four in the Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati ( Series B). These are under Birnbaum Collection, Mus. Add. 26, Vol. 1-4. The two volumes available in Germany are in the City and University Library of Frankfurt am Main (Series C). They bear the signature Mus. hs. 2780 and Ms. hebr. Oct. 272 and are both also available digitally. These volumes in Germany were previously ascribed to Abraham Baer ; But Goldberg was able to prove that they come from Mayer Levi.

How and when the various parts of the Levian work came to these locations is not entirely clear. Abraham Zevi Idelsohn, who taught at the Hebrew Union College and compiled a thesaurus of the traditional chants of the southern German Jews, obviously did not know the manuscripts that are there today. He died in 1938, which can perhaps be taken as the terminus post quem for the arrival of the volumes in Cincinnati. The volumes in Philadelphia today come from the private collection of Professor Eric Mandell , who was Erich Mendel Cantor in Bochum . Mandell bought at least one of the volumes in 1947 from a bookseller in New York . According to the seller, this volume, probably the first in the collection, had been in use in Heilbronn a century earlier . Mandell, who lived until 1988, suspected a connection between the writings in his collection and those in Cincinnati.

P. 13 from Ms hebr oct 272 in Frankfurt

P. 26 from Mus. hs. 2780 in Frankfurt

In 2000, the Frankfurt library asked Professor Israel Adler to verify the allocation of one of the volumes there to Baer. Adler made the photocopied manuscript available to Geoffrey Goldberg, who was then able to prove that the script came from Mayer Levi. A decade later he also succeeded in assigning the second Frankfurt manuscript to Levi. The fact that other volumes that have now disappeared must have existed is evident from various references by Levi.

The dating of the surviving manuscripts is problematic because Levi only provided today's volume 2 and today's volume 9 with the dates (1849 and 1862). According to Goldberg, the earliest possible date for the first volume is the year 1845, in which Levi began teaching at the Esslingen teachers' college. External clues such as the typeface suggest the following dates of origin: Volumes 1–5 (in Gratz College, "Series A") probably date from the period from 1845 to 1857, Volumes 6–9 (in the Hebrew Union College, "Series B") ) from the period from 1857 to 1862, Volumes 10 and 11 (in Frankfurt, "Series C") should have been written shortly after 1864 and Volumes 12-14 (in the Gratz Collge, "Series D") come from roughly the second half 1860s.

In the first four volumes, which are remarkably calligraphic , the German annotations are artfully aligned with the flow of the Hebrew script, in the later they were inserted in Gothic script . There are also glued-in clippings from printed prayer books, so that a work was created in which the shares of the Chasan and the congregation in the service were brought together. Almost all of the music is taken from oral tradition, with an exception being six pieces of music that Levi took from the Stuttgart Choral Gesänge, which were published in 1837 and 1843. His main interest was apparently the traditional solo singing of the cantor, not the modern chorale arrangements.

The first volume is not always provided with written notation. Obviously, Levi soon discovered that the ability of the students and chasanim to improvise on their own according to given hints and patterns was no longer sufficient, so that he later completely put down all the songs and melodies that the chasan had to sing in the service. This gave his work a comprehensive character and clearly differed from later printed compendiums such as those of Selig Scheuermann or Fabian Ogutsch .

In order to be able to assign the Hebrew syllables to the notes precisely, Mayer Levi also wrote the notes from right to left. He also added some very detailed liturgical and musical notes, as they were later used by Baer. In 1854 Mayer Levi tried to have his notes published. Moritz Eichberg , the supreme Stuttgart Chasan, to whom Levi's work was presented for assessment, rejected his request. He confirmed that the melodies met the requirements of the tradition and that the collection was also complete - from which one can conclude that Levi had already completed the first version of his collection by this time, that more volumes must have existed than today and that at least Some of the surviving manuscripts must consist of copies of earlier versions - but criticized the notation from right to left and the fact that the work, unlike Western music, was not rhythmically consistent. Despite this rejection, Levi apparently continued to work on the collection in his own style. This work on the same subject, which has probably lasted for decades, is particularly interesting: one can see from Levi's notes how the traditional chants were slowly modified under changed conditions. This distinguishes the manuscripts from collections such as Salomon Sulzer's Schir Zion or Moritz Deutsch's Handbuch für die Chasanim , which only reflect the end result of a modernization of traditional chants. In the early versions the melodies are often ornate and expanded, while later notations of the same piece dispense with these difficulties. Phrygian passages e.g. B. were later changed to minor , melodies in "adonai malach", which roughly corresponds to Mixolydian , to major . Levi also often reduced and simplified the vocalises , around which a bitter argument arose in the middle of the 19th century, but not as radically as some of his contemporaries or descendants. Mayer Levi tried to write down the melodies in a low voice to avoid the difficulties of high notes and to reduce the range. In the course of time, he also devoted himself to strict rhythmization based on the pattern of western music of the 19th century.

Levi's notes document the development of a branch of synagogue singing that is now almost dead. As Goldberg writes in modern Ashkenazi synagogues "the former duality of two musical traditions, those of Eastern Europe and those of Western Europe, the hegemony of the Eastern European traditions given way." On the occasion of the centenary of the inauguration of Theodore Rothschild house , as well as the 75th anniversary of his Desecration by the National Socialists , the 'Esslinger Judenmusik' by the Stuttgart composer Georg Wötzer was premiered on November 10, 2013, a collection of eight pieces with different casts, some of which use melodies from Levi's collection.

Documentation of the old Jewish cemetery in Esslingen

View into the old Jewish cemetery in Esslingen

A documentation of the old Jewish cemetery in Turmstrasse and the Middle Beutau in Esslingen can also be traced back to Mayer Levi. In 1862 he created an occupancy list and recorded an occupancy plan. He also copied the legible inscriptions on the tombstones and translated some of them. His cemetery register was confiscated by the Reichssippenamt in 1938 (inventory number RSA J 855) and filmed from 1943 to 1945. While Levi's originals have been lost, the films are in the possession of the Stuttgart State Archives (call number J 386, volume 186 with 153 pages). Joachim Hahn later benefited from Mayer Levi's work when he created documentation on the cemetery. This was published in 1994.

Web links

Commons : Mayer Levi  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Ms hebr oct 272
• Mus. hs. 2780

Individual evidence

1. ^ Nicole Bickhoff-Böttcher, Gertrud Bolay, Eduard Theiner: 200 years of Jewish life in Hochberg and Aldingen 1730-1930 . In: Heinz Pfizenmayer (Hrsg.): Local history series of publications of the municipality of Remseck am Neckar . tape 10 , 1990.
2. ↑ Geoffrey Goldberg, Mayer Levi (1814-1874): An Esslinger Chasan (cantor) and his compendium of synagogue chants for cantors , in: Esslinger Studien 47, 2009/10, pp. 111–148, here p. 115
3. ↑ Geoffrey Goldberg, Mayer Levi (1814-1874): An Esslinger Chasan (cantor) and his compendium of synagogue songs for cantors , in: Esslinger Studien 47, 2009/10, pp. 111–148, here pp. 117–120
4. ↑ Geoffrey Goldberg, Mayer Levi (1814-1874): An Esslinger Chasan (cantor) and his compendium of synagogue chants for cantors , in: Esslinger Studien 47, 2009/10, pp. 111–148, here p. 117
5. ↑ Geoffrey Goldberg, Mayer Levi (1814-1874): An Esslinger Chasan (cantor) and his compendium of synagogue songs for cantors , in: Esslinger Studien 47, 2009/10, pp. 111–148, here p. 116
6. ↑ Geoffrey Goldberg, Mayer Levi (1814-1874): An Esslinger Chasan (cantor) and his compendium of synagogue chants for cantors , in: Esslinger Studien 47, 2009/10, pp. 111–148, here p. 125
7. ↑ This is still the case on the library's website; Mus. hs. 2780 also bears the name Baers on the first sheet.
8. ↑ Geoffrey Goldberg, Mayer Levi (1814-1874): An Esslinger Chasan (cantor) and his compendium of synagogue songs for cantors , in: Esslinger Studien 47, 2009/10, pp. 111–148, here pp. 120–128
9. ↑ Geoffrey Goldberg, Mayer Levi (1814-1874): An Esslinger Chasan (cantor) and his compendium of synagogue songs for cantors , in: Esslinger Studien 47, 2009/10, pp. 111–148, here p. 147 f.
10. ↑ Festive Concert - 100 Years of the Jewish Orphanage Esslingen ( Memento of the original from November 10, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
11. ↑ cemetery project uni-heidelberg.de
12. ↑ List of Jewish cemeteries in Baden-Württemberg on uni-heidelberg.de ( memento of the original from April 11, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.