Yossele
Rosenblatt

Yossele Rosenblatt was born in 1882 in Bila Tserkva, then in the Russian Empire and now in Ukraine, into a line of cantors. He sang in Vienna at 17, served congregations in Munkács, Pressburg and Hamburg, and in 1912 came to Ohab Zedek in Harlem, New York.

Audiences called him “the Jewish Caruso”. He sang in concert halls across America and appeared as himself, singing, in The Jazz Singer (1927), yet turned down the opera house on principle, keeping his voice for prayer. He died in Jerusalem in 1933, aged 51. His falsetto and the speed and precision of his ornaments are still the standard cantors measure themselves against.

Above and below the Hebrew letters of every verse sit small signs, the taʿamei ha-mikra (“the meanings of the reading”), known in Yiddish and English as trope. They do three jobs at once: they mark the stressed syllable, they show how the verse divides, like punctuation, and they carry a short melodic motif.

The same marks are sung to different melodies depending on what is read: one for the Torah, another for the Haftarah from the Prophets, others for the Five Scrolls (Esther at Purim, Lamentations on the Ninth of Av) and special melodies for the High Holy Days. Each community keeps its own melodies, handed down by ear: Ashkenazi, Sephardi and Yemenite.

In the synagogue the baʿal koreh, “master of the reading”, chants from a hand-written scroll that has no vowels and no trope marks, so the reader has learned them by heart. A pointer, the yad, keeps the place. The ḥazzan, the cantor, leads the sung prayers. Their art reached a golden age in the early twentieth century, just as the gramophone arrived to record it.