Jewish music and liturgies

The Musical Service of the Temple of Jerusalem

The history of Jewish religious music extends across the evolution of cantorial, synagogal, and Temple of Jerusalem melodies from biblical times. The Mishna provides several accounts of Temple music. According to its tractates, the regular Temple orchestra consisted of twelve instruments and a choir of twelve male singers. The instruments included the kinnor (lyre), the nevel (harp), the shofar (ram's horn) and the ḥatzotzrot (trumpet).

The shofar deserves particular attention: the sole instrument of the tradition to have survived uninterrupted from Antiquity to our own day, it still resounds each morning in the month of Eloul and throughout Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Its hoarse and fractured voice — the tekia, the shevarim, the terua — transcends the very notion of music to become an existential call, a summons addressed to the soul rather than to the ear. The Levites sang the psalms accompanied by the orchestra in the Temple courtyard; their voices were trained from childhood, and the musical service obeyed a rigorous organization codified in the Mishna tractates.

The destruction of the Second Temple in 70 of the Common Era caused an irreparable rupture. Jewish law decided, as a sign of mourning, to forbid instrumental music in synagogal liturgy — a prescription that, with variations depending on communities, shaped the sonic space of the synagogue for two millennia. The human voice thus became the supreme instrument of Jewish worship.

Cantillation — trop and teamim

The public reading of the Torah is not mere recitation: it obeys a precise system of melodic signs, the teamim (accents), also known as trop in Yiddish, whose codification tradition attributes to Ezra the Scribe upon the return from Babylonian exile. These signs fulfill a double function: syntactic, by indicating the structure of the Hebrew sentence, and musical, by prescribing a melody. There exist several systems of teamim — for the Torah, for the Prophets, for the poetic Writings (Psalms, Proverbs, Job) — and each major community developed its own melodic realization of these signs, such that the same text is sung to entirely different airs in Baghdad, Amsterdam or Salonika. These melodies constitute one of the oldest and most persistent layers of Jewish musical memory; certain cantillative formulas are probably earlier than the destruction of the Temple, transmitted orally from generation to generation before being fixed in writing.

Birth and Development of Piyyut

Sacred poetry, or piyyut, has been an integral part of Jewish culture since the beginning of the Christian era — unlike secular poetry, a novelty introduced by the Sephardim under the influence of Arabic poetry. Piyyut was born in Palestine and Babylonia. The Sephardim took it up, with exile and redemption as dominant themes, bringing liturgical, structural, stylistic and thematic innovations to it.

Piyyut (plural: piyutim) is a genre of Hebrew liturgical poetry composed to be sung during synagogue services. The term derives from the Greek poietes, poet. The earliest known paytanim (liturgical poets) operated in Byzantine Palestine in the 5th and 6th centuries; among them, Yossé ben Yossé, Yannaï and Eleazar Hakalir, whose complex compositions, playing on acrostics and the polysemy of Hebrew, are still recited in some communities during major festivals. Piyyut enriched the service when fixed prayer — tefilla — began to standardize, introducing a poetic and musical dimension capable of varying according to festivals and circumstances.

In Sephardic lands, piyyut experienced its golden age in the 10th–12th centuries, in the wake of the Hispano-Arabic poetic renaissance. The work of Juda Halevi can be viewed in three major blocks: liturgical poems, which to this day accompany synagogue services; the Book of the Kuzari, his great theoretical work; and the Songs of Zion (Shireï Tzion), elegies of breathtaking beauty on the distance separating the poet from the Holy Land. These songs were quickly adopted into the liturgy of the Three Weeks preceding the mourning of Tich'a BeAv, and Halevi also composed piyutim for Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur and the pilgrimage festivals, still sung in Sephardic rites.

Rabbi Yisrael Najara and the Melodization of Piyutim

Piyyut did not exist as text alone: it was inseparable from a melody, often borrowed from ambient music — Arabic, Persian, Andalusian or Ottoman — and sacralized by liturgical use. This melodization (lahn) constituted the essence of the paytan-singer's art, and none embodied its creative freedom better than Rabbi Yisrael Najara (c. 1555–1625). A prolific poet and rabbi in Gaza, Najara deliberately borrowed Turkish, Greek and Arabic melodies for his sacred Hebrew texts, sometimes at the cost of controversy, but always with immense popular success. His Yoducha Ra'ayonai ("May my thoughts give thanks to You") exemplifies this art: an antiphonal piyyut between soloists and assembly, it is documented and preserved at the Jewish Music Research Centre of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, notably in the SMR Bresler collection of Hebrew songs in Sephardic style [Jewish Music Research Centre, https://jewish-music.huji.ac.il/en/node/24708]. The work continues to be performed and recorded today, notably by hazan Yaakov Yitzchak Rosenfeld in a piano arrangement by Menachem Bristovsky, on the album Shabbas Ha'Malkah 2. Several of Najara's poems — including Yah Ribon Alam — are still sung at the Sabbath table in many Sephardic and Ashkenazi communities.

Oral Transmission and the Cairo Geniza

The Cairo Geniza, discovered in the late 19th century, revealed thousands of piyutim fragments, some of which bear musical notations; their decipherment enabled musicologists to partially reconstruct the musical practices of Jewish communities in Egypt and the Near East during the Middle Ages.

In Ashkenazi communities, the great piyutim of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur — Ounetaneh Tokef, Kol Nidré, Adon Olam — generated distinct melodic traditions in each region, sometimes jealously guarded. The melody of Kol Nidré, which opens the Yom Kippur vigil, is particularly famous. And the piyyut Yigdal Elohim Haï, composed by Daniel ben Judah Dayan in Rome in the mid-14th century, was sung to a melody that circulated throughout central Europe, achieving in some Ashkenazi communities of Polish Silesia one of the finest demonstrations of how Jewish communities, geographically dispersed, nonetheless maintained continuous musical exchanges, the hazanim traveling from one community to another and spreading new melodies.

The figure of the hazzan

The hazzan (or chazzan, plural: hazzanim) is the cantor of the synagogue, the master of liturgical chant. His role far exceeds that of a mere musician: he is the sheliach tzibbour, the "delegate of the community," the one who carries the collective prayer. As such, he must combine technical mastery of the voice with authentic inner fervor, deep knowledge of the liturgical text, and the ability to lead the congregation in prayer.

The Ashkenazi cantorial tradition — the hazzanut — developed over the centuries a vocal repertoire of exceptional complexity, founded on modes (nushaot) specific to each liturgical moment and each festival. These modes — Ahavah Rabbah, Magen Avot, Adonaï Malakh — are not mere scales: they carry a precise emotional color, immediately recognizable to the worshiper familiar with the rite. The hazzan improvises around these modes, weaving melismatic ornaments — krachs (sighs), dreydlekh (swirling ornaments), kvitchn (cries) — which constitute the sonic signature of Ashkenazi cantoria.

Salomone Rossi and polyphony in the Renaissance

The sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries witnessed a remarkable attempt to introduce Italian Renaissance polyphony into synagogal worship. Salomone Rossi, an Italian Jew who was celebrated in his time as a secular musician at the ducal court of Mantua, was encouraged to compose for the synagogue and left a number of compositions based on texts from Hebrew liturgy and the Psalms. His collection Hashirim asher lish'lomo ("The Songs of Salomone"), published in Venice between 1622 and 1623, constitutes the first corpus of polyphonic choral music specifically designed for the synagogue. Rossi's music did not prevail in his lifetime, but European-style choral music entered the synagogue in the nineteenth century through composers such as Salomon Sulzer in Austria and Louis Lewandowski in Germany.

Salomon Sulzer and the Viennese reform of synagogal chant

Salomon Sulzer (30 March 1804 – 17 January 1890) was an Austrian hazzan and composer. Called to Vienna in 1826 as the chief cantor of the new synagogue of the Stadttempel, he reorganized the synagogue's sung service, preserving traditional chants and melodies, but harmonizing them in accordance with modern musical conceptions. His collection Schir Zion ("Song of Zion"), whose two volumes appeared in 1840 and 1865, established models for the different sections of the musical service — the cantor's recitative, the choir's chorale, the congregation's responses — and it contained music for Shabbatot and festivals. Sulzer made the cantorate a profession in its own right; above all, he adapted the traditional nusach to Western musical modes and arranged pieces for choir.

Sulzer's influence was considerable and extended beyond Jewish circles: Franz Schubert heard him sing and was moved by it; Franz Liszt visited him in Vienna. In Berlin, Louis Lewandowski (1821–1894) pursued a parallel but distinct enterprise: his Kol Rinah uTefillah (1871) and Todah weSimrah (1876–1882), syntheses of the Ashkenazi tradition and European classical harmony, remain references for Ashkenazi liturgy to this day. Sulzer and Lewandowski were undoubtedly the two most popular composers of synagogal music of the nineteenth century, in both Western and Eastern Europe.

Emil Breslaur: pedagogue and choral director of the Reformed Synagogue of Berlin

Alongside Sulzer and Lewandowski stands a lesser-known figure who nonetheless embodies the diversity of ways in which Jewish musicians of the nineteenth century inhabited the space between synagogue and civil society: Emil Breslaur (29 May 1836 – 26 July 1899). Born in Cottbus, he initially trained as a preacher and religious teacher within the Jewish community of his native city, having followed the training provided by the teacher seminary of Neuzelle. This double anchor — pedagogical and religious — marked his entire trajectory.

In 1863, Breslaur settled in Berlin and entered the Stern Conservatory, where he specialized for four years in piano pedagogy. From 1868 to 1879, he taught at the Neue Akademie der Tonkunst founded by Theodor Kullak. In 1874, he published Die Technische Grundlage des Klavierspiels, a work that earned him the title of professor. In 1878, he founded the journal Der Klavier-Lehrer, which he directed until his death and which established itself as the principal organ of German piano pedagogy in the nineteenth century. He was also the initiator of the circle of music teachers which, in 1886, gave birth to the Deutscher Musiklehrerverband, the national association of music teachers in Germany.

It was in 1883 that Breslaur became cantor of the Reformed synagogue in Berlin [« Emil Breslaur », Jewish Encyclopedia, 1902]. This role placed him at the heart of the German liturgical Reform project: to modernize synagogal chant by applying the aesthetic and choral standards of European learned music, following the path traced by Sulzer in Vienna and by Lewandowski in Berlin. His career illustrates a phenomenon characteristic of nineteenth-century German Judaism: musicians trained in civil institutions, deeply integrated into German culture through their pedagogical practice and publications, who subsequently placed their expertise at the service of the Jewish community — not through a break with their professional milieu, but as a natural extension of an assumed dual belonging. Breslaur did not leave a corpus of synagogal compositions comparable to that of Lewandowski, but his presence at the head of the choir of Berlin's principal Reformed synagogue during the last two decades of the century makes him a discreet yet real link in the chain of transmission of Ashkenazi synagogal choral music.

Israel Baal Shem Tov and Music as a Mystical Path

Hasidism, a spiritual movement born in Podolia — a province of Poland — in the first half of the eighteenth century, profoundly transformed the relationship of Jews to liturgical music. Its founder, Israel ben Eliezer, known by the name Baal Shem Tov ("Master of the Good Name," circa 1698–1760), taught that prayer was worthwhile only through inner fervor — kavanah — and that music was the royal path to this state of mind. Hasidism advocates access to the divine through collective and ecstatic experiences; kavanah, "intention or meaning invested in the practice of a ritual act," became the primary criterion of all valid prayer.

The niggoun — Melody Without Words

The most original musical contribution of Hasidism is the niggoun (plural: nigunim). To compose this distinctive repertoire, Hasidic masters drew from several distinct sources: preexisting Jewish popular melodies, secular dance tunes — Ukrainian, Polish, Moldavian — which they reinterpreted in a spiritual sense, and forms of synagogal chant already in use, which they invested with a new intensity. To this heterogeneous material, they added a unifying principle: the melody without words, empty syllables — dai dai dai, yai yai yai, bam bam — allowing the soul to express itself where articulate language is powerless. According to Hasidic theology, melody is the direct expression of the soul (neshama), a direct bridge between man and his Creator, inaccessible to discursive reason.

Each Hasidic court — the Ger, the Lubavitch, the Breslav, the Modzitz — developed its own repertoire of nigunim, a veritable musical identity card of the group. The Modzitz nigunim are particularly renowned for their melodic beauty and musical sophistication. The Habad school (Lubavitch), founded by Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi (1745–1812), theorized the role of music in spiritual life and developed a repertoire of ten fundamental nigunim that every Hasid is supposed to know.

Hasidism and Liturgy — Tensions and Syntheses

The rise of Hasidism did not occur without tensions with the rabbinic establishment, which viewed with disfavor the liberties taken with the order and timing of prayers, the place accorded to melody at the expense of the text, and the influence of non-Jewish music in the nigunim. Hasidism reactivated an embodied prayer that Talmudic scholars sometimes regarded with a certain detachment. Rabbi Shneur Zalman insisted on absolute obedience to divine will through the observance of commandments, and music was to serve this objective by cultivating kavanah. Gradually, Hasidic liturgy incorporated borrowings from Ukrainian, Polish, Moldavian and even Turkish melodies, "elevating" them through sacred use to a new spiritual dignity.

Sephardic Music after 1492

The expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 constituted a founding event for Sephardic Jewish music. The exiles carried with them their liturgical melodies, their Andalusian piyoutim, and their songs in Judeo-Spanish (the judezmo or ladino). After the Reconquista and the prohibition of Judaism on Spanish soil in 1492, many Sephardim were forced into exile — and then those from Portugal in 1497 — toward the Levant and neighboring Mediterranean countries, even into the Ottoman Empire, where they carried with them their language and music. The great Ottoman cities — Constantinople, Salonika, Izmir, Safed — became the centers of a new flourishing of Sephardic musical culture, which integrated the maqam modes of Turkish and Arabic music while preserving the melancholy memory of Iberian melodies.

The permanence of certain medieval melodies through the centuries is attested by a remarkable example. In the Spanish-Portuguese synagogues of Amsterdam, Paris, Bayonne, Bordeaux and London, one sings the prayer for rain, the Geshem, according to the same melody, clearly carried and piously preserved by the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492. This melodic conservatism is one of the most striking characteristics of Sephardic liturgy: the ear of the faithful recognizes melodic contours that reach back to medieval Spain.

The mizmor and the bakashot

The tradition of bakashot (sung supplications), practiced particularly by Sephardic communities of the Maghreb and the Near East, constitutes one of the least known gems of Jewish music. These are nocturnal vigils — generally organized on winter Shabbat, in the depths of night — during which choirs of singers perform dozens of piyoutim and supplications in Hebrew and Aramaic, to melodies borrowed from the great maqamat of classical Arabic music. The tradition of bakashot in Morocco, in the communities of Fès, Meknès, Marrakech and Tétouan, was particularly vibrant and was partly preserved by Moroccan immigrants in Israel, where it has experienced a vigorous revival since the 1970s.

Yemenite Jews form a distinct community in the history of Jewish music. Isolated for long centuries, they preserved a tradition of cantillation and archaic liturgical chant, probably very close to the practices of the first millennium, which astonished musicologists when it was discovered in the twentieth century. Their diwan — the collection of sung poetry compiled by Rabbi Shalom Shabazi (circa 1619–1720) — is one of the richest corpora of liturgical poetry in all of Judaism.

The pizmon and the secular Sephardic song

At the boundary between sacred and secular, the pizmon is a Sephardic song in Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic or Judeo-Spanish, whose lyrics are liturgical or semi-liturgical but whose melody is often borrowed from the surrounding popular song. Masters such as Rabbi Yisrael Najara, already mentioned in the chapter on piyyout, composed hundreds of pizmonim to Turkish, Greek and Arabic melodies, several of which were adopted into the formal liturgy of various Sephardic communities. The SMR Bresler Collection of the Jewish Music Research Centre of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem today constitutes one of the most important documentary resources for the study of this repertoire, gathering recordings and transcriptions of Hebrew chants in Sephardic style that make it possible to measure the extent of exchanges between the Jewish tradition and the learned and popular musics of the Mediterranean world.

Origins and Characteristics of Klezmer

Just as Ashkenazi Jews have two languages — Hebrew and Yiddish — so too do they have two musics: the sacred music reserved for synagogue worship, and the secular music of popular celebrations, called klezmer. The word klezmer comes from the association of the words klei and zemer, instrument of song. Originally, the word klezmer (plural: klezmorim) designated the instruments themselves. The meaning shifted, and the performers too came to be called klezmorim; because of the precarious living conditions of these itinerant musicians, the word could carry a pejorative connotation.

Klezmer music was born in Jewish communities of Central and Eastern Europe, probably from the fifteenth century onward. It drew nourishment from the musics of the Middle East and Turkey, the original heritage of the Ashkenazim, as well as from the musical traditions of Central and Eastern Europe — Slavic and Romani. Klezmer music as we know it is an instrumental dance music that traditionally sounded at the celebrations and weddings of Jewish communities; it is permeated with Romanian, Moldovan, Ukrainian, Greek, and Romani influences, which make it immediately recognizable by its character at once festive and elegiac, by that mixture of laughter and tears which constitutes its deepest hallmark. The klezmorim were professional musicians who played at weddings, celebrations, and communal festivities, often in groups (the kapelyes) composed of violins, cimbaloms, clarinet, double bass, and other instruments that varied according to region.

Klezmer and the Synagogue — a Permanent Osmosis

Like klezmer art, the Ashkenazi cantorial style (hazzanut) encompasses many ornaments, and it employs the same modes, indeed even the same motifs. This influence of hazzanut on Jewish instrumental music is evident, if only in the names of certain ornaments — such as the krachs (sigh) — which come directly from the cantorial tradition. The boundary between the sacred and the secular is porous in Ashkenazi music: melodies circulate from one register to the other, a tune heard in the synagogue on a Saturday reappearing the next day on the wedding musician's violin.

Klezmer in the Twentieth Century — Emigration, Renaissance, Métissage

The great waves of Jewish immigration to the United States between 1880 and 1924 transported klezmer music to New York, where it developed in a new context. Nascent recording studios made it possible to fix and distribute these melodies; artists such as Naftule Brandwein (c. 1884–1963) and Dave Tarras (1897–1989) became legendary figures of American klezmer. After an eclipse of several decades — during which the children of immigrants preferred jazz or American pop to their parents' music — klezmer experienced from the 1970s–1980s onward a spectacular renaissance, carried by musicians such as Giora Feidman, Andy Statman, and the Klezmatics, who fused traditional elements with jazz, rock, and world music.

Balatonfüred, July 2026 — a First Klezmer Festival Announced in Hungary

The renaissance of klezmer is not merely American or Israeli: it has also touched, since the 2010s, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe where klezmer music was born and from which it nearly disappeared with the communities that carried it. Hungary provides a particularly eloquent example. According to an announcement by Mazsihisz published before the event, a first festival dedicated exclusively to klezmer music is to be held in Balatonfüred, on the open-air Kisfaludy stage, Tagore promenade on the shores of Lake Balaton, at the initiative of the Klezmerész ensemble: the "I. Magyarországi Nemzetközi Klezmer Fesztivál" [source: Mazsihisz, pre-event announcement, July 2026]. The project will bring together Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, and Israeli groups, in a setting combining musical program, Jewish and Hungarian gastronomy, kosher wines, and craft market. The stated ambition is to create an annual tradition; if the festival takes place as announced, it will be the first of its kind in Hungary.

This project is part of a complex history. Hungary was one of the great centers of klezmer music in the modern era: Budapest was, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a city where Jewish communities were both numerous and integrated into cultural life, and where Jewish musicians actively participated in the country's musical life. The Shoah destroyed the greater part of this musical community. The organizing of a first klezmer festival in Balatonfüred, in a context as symbolically charged as the shores of Lake Balaton — a place of retreat for the Hungarian bourgeoisie, once cosmopolitan — is a gesture of remembrance as much as a living musical celebration. The announced presence of Czech, Slovak, and Israeli ensembles underscores the transnational dimension of the klezmer renaissance in Central Europe: musicians from neighboring countries that once shared the same shtetlekh intend to meet on a stage by the lake to reaffirm a continuity that history had interrupted.

Destruction and Memory

The twentieth century was for Ashkenazi Jewish music both an apocalypse and a rebirth. The Shoah annihilated the great communities of Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Hungary that were the living custodians of the traditions of hazzanut, klezmer, and Hasidic nigunim. Hazanim of international renown, klezmorim whose mastery had been forged by generations of oral transmission, singers of piyutim and bakashot — all were swept away by genocide. Musical memory nearly died with them. But in the camps, ghettos, and hiding places, men and women continued to sing — in Vilna, in Theresienstadt, in Warsaw — as if music were the ultimate human resistance to one's own destruction.

The Cantorial Golden Age and Its Twilight

The cantorial golden age came to an end in the 1960s with the disappearance of the last generation of the great cantorial stars of the old world. Yet, decades before that, many synagogues had begun to emphasize congregational singing. The mythic cantors of this golden age — Yossele Rosenblatt (1882–1933), Gershon Sirota (circa 1874–1943), Jan Peerce (1904–1984), Richard Tucker (1913–1975) — combined operatic voices with an intimate knowledge of nusach, and their recordings remain irreplaceable documents.

Shlomo Carlebach and the Neo-Hasidic Revival

In the 1970s and beyond, the music of Jewish folk singer Shlomo Carlebach and other easy-to-sing melodies began to replace cantorial solos in synagogues. Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach (1925–1994), born in Vienna into a rabbinical family, emigrated to the United States and became the most influential composer of Jewish liturgy in the second half of the twentieth century. His melodies — simple, catchy, grounded in Hasidic modes — were adopted in synagogues of all persuasions, from Orthodox to Liberal, in Israel as in the diaspora. It is rare for a Shabbat to pass today without at least one niggoun by Carlebach being sung somewhere in the world.

Liturgical Music in Israel — Between Traditions and Creation

The creation of the State of Israel in 1948 opened a new chapter for Jewish music. The gathering of aliyot — successive immigrations of Yemenite, Moroccan, Iraqi, Polish, Hungarian, Ethiopian, and Russian Jews — produced in the new state a musical laboratory of unprecedented richness. Kol Tsahal Radio, conservatories, the National Opera, and musical academies became the places where these traditions confronted and enriched one another. Composers like Paul Ben-Haim (1897–1984) and Marc Lavry (1903–1967) attempted to synthesize Ashkenazi and Oriental heritages in a distinctly Israeli style. The Hatikvah, the national anthem of the State of Israel, itself carries in embryo this complex musical history: its melody is of ancient origin, sung in certain Ashkenazi communities to the piyyout Yigdal Elohim Haï by Daniel ben Judah Dayan and taken up in other traditions with melodies preserved since medieval Spain.

Yossé ben Yossé (dates unknown, probably 5th–6th century, Byzantine Palestine) — One of the earliest known paytanim, active in Byzantine Palestine, Yossé ben Yossé is the author of several foundational piyoutim for the services of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, some of which are still recited in ancient communities. His poetry, devoid of rhyme but based on acrostic, bears witness to an era when the synagogue sought to enrich fixed prayer with poetic speech. He is considered the founding father of the Jewish liturgical poetic tradition.

Eleazar Hakalir (dates unknown, probably 6th–7th century, Palestine or Babylonia) — Undisputed master of piyyout in the early period, Hakalir is the author of a considerable number of liturgical compositions for the entire Jewish calendar, including the famous kerovaot for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. His style, of extreme density, plays on Hebrew neology, acronyms, and midrashic allusions. His works were so canonical that they sparked a millennial debate between those who wished to preserve them in the service and those — including Maimonides — who judged them too obscure to be sung by the congregation.

Judah Halevi (c. 1075–1141, born in Spain, died en route to Jerusalem) — Poet, philosopher, and physician, Judah Halevi is the greatest figure of medieval Hebrew liturgical poetry. His work unfolds in three major blocks: liturgical poems, still sung in Sephardic synagogues; the Book of the Kuzari, a major work of Jewish philosophy; and the Songs of Zion (Shireï Tzion), moving elegies on the Holy Land, adopted in the liturgy of the Three Weeks preceding Tisha Be'av. Each text was conceived to be sung, making his poetry inseparable from music.

Daniel ben Judah Dayan (c. mid-14th century, Rome) — Roman liturgical poet, he is the author of the piyyout Yigdal Elohim Haï, a versification of Maimonides' thirteen principles of faith. Sung to a melody that circulated throughout Central Europe and even to Sephardic-Portuguese synagogues, this piyyout is one of the identified musical roots of the Hatikvah, the national anthem of Israel. His text remains sung in communities of very different traditions, attesting to the unifying power of liturgical poetry across centuries and geographies.

Salomone Rossi (c. 1570 – c. 1630, Mantua, Italy) — Jewish composer and violinist active at the court of the Gonzaga in Mantua, Rossi is the first major figure of polyphonic synagogal music. His collection Hashirim asher lish'lomo (Venice, 1622–1623) is the first corpus of choral music for multiple voices written specifically for the synagogue. Protected by Rabbi Leon of Modena, Rossi embodied the possibility of dialogue between the Italian Renaissance and Jewish tradition, opening a path that Sulzer and Lewandowski would follow two centuries later.

Israel ben Eliezer, called the Baal Shem Tov (c. 1698–1760, born in Podolia, Poland — died in Mezhybozh) — Founder of Hasidism, the Baal Shem Tov transformed the relationship of Eastern European Jewish communities to prayer and music. He taught that melody — even without words — was a royal path to God, and his disciples developed the repertoire of nigunim that would characterize the Hasidic movement. His musical thought, transmitted by his disciples in Hasidic tales, had a lasting influence on the whole of contemporary Jewish spirituality.

Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi (1745–1812, born in White Russia) — Founder of the Habad current of Hasidism and author of the Tanya, Shneur Zalman theorized the role of music in spiritual life in a systematic way, insisting on kavanah — inner intention — as a condition of all authentic prayer. He composed or gathered a corpus of fundamental nigunim for the Habad movement, including ten melodies considered the holiest in the Hasidic repertoire, and left a theory of music as an expression of the soul that Hasidism continues to teach.

Rabbi Yisrael Najara (c. 1555–1625, born in Safed, died in Gaza) — Liturgical poet and rabbi, Najara is the author of hundreds of pizmonim and piyoutim, collected in his volume Zemirot Yisrael. He practiced with assumed freedom the borrowing of Turkish, Greek, and Arabic melodies for sacred Hebrew texts. Among his best-known compositions is Yoducha Ra'ayonai ("May my thoughts give thee thanks"), an antiphonal piyyout documented and preserved at the Jewish Music Research Centre of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem [https://jewish-music.huji.ac.il/en/node/24708], still performed and recorded nowadays. His Yah Ribon Alam is still sung at the Shabbat table in many Sephardic and Ashkenazi communities.

Myer Lyon, called Leoni (c. 1748–1797, London) — Hazzan of the Great Ashkenazi Synagogue of London, Leoni was one of the first Jewish cantors to also perform on the English opera stage and to introduce synagogal music to the non-Jewish public. His version of the piyyout Yigdal — known as the "Leoni melody" — was adopted by Christian hymnologists and Zionist melodists, contributing to the spread of a Jewish melody across continents and confessions.

Salomon Sulzer (30 March 1804 – 17 January 1890, Hohenems, Austria – Vienna) — Chief cantor of the Stadttempel synagogue in Vienna for nearly sixty years, Sulzer was one of the most influential composers of synagogal music in the nineteenth century. He adapted the traditional nusach to Western musical modes, transformed the cantorate into a full profession, and published the Schir Zion whose two volumes established the standards of reformed Ashkenazi liturgy. His influence reached non-Jewish composers such as Schubert and Liszt, who attended his Viennese services.

Louis Lewandowski (1821–1894, Wreschen, Prussia – Berlin) — Composer and choir director in Berlin, Lewandowski was Sulzer's Prussian counterpart in the reform of synagogal music. His collections Kol Rinah uTefillah (1871) and Todah weSimrah (1876–1882) remain essential references for Ashkenazi liturgy, syntheses of cantorial tradition and European classical harmony. He remained in Berlin throughout his life, inscribing his work in the continuity of the great German liturgical Reform of the nineteenth century.

Emil Breslaur (29 May 1836 – 26 July 1899, Cottbus – Berlin) — Preacher, pedagogue and choir director, Breslaur embodies the dual anchoring of Jewish musicians in nineteenth-century Germany. Trained as a religious instructor in Cottbus and as a pianist at the Stern Conservatory in Berlin, he founded the journal Der Klavier-Lehrer in 1878 and contributed to the creation of the Deutscher Musiklehrerverband (1886). In 1883, he became choir director of the reformed synagogue in Berlin, placing his learned musical training at the service of communal liturgy in the direct line of Lewandowski.

Yossele Rosenblatt (1882–1933, Belaya Tserkov, Ukraine – Jerusalem) — Nicknamed the "king of cantors," Yossele Rosenblatt was the most celebrated figure of the golden age of hazzanut. His tenor-alto voice of exceptional power and emotion brought him worldwide renown; yet he refused to sing at the Metropolitan Opera in New York out of fidelity to his religious vocation. His recordings, made from 1912 onwards, remain irreplaceable documents of Ashkenazi cantorial tradition at its apex.

Dave Tarras (1897–1989, Ukraine – New York) — Klezmer clarinetist and composer, Dave Tarras was the dominant figure of American klezmer music in the twentieth century. Immigrating to New York in 1921, he recorded hundreds of pieces and trained several generations of musicians. His mastery of Jewish modes and his constant dialogue with American jazz make him the embodiment of diaspora klezmer, halfway between fidelity to Ashkenazi sources and openness to the new world.

Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach (1925–1994, born in Vienna, died in New York) — Rabbi, singer and composer, Shlomo Carlebach is the most widely performed composer of Jewish liturgical music in the contemporary world. From the 1970s onward, his melodies founded on Hasidic modes began to replace cantorial solos in synagogues. They have become a common heritage of the entire Jewish world, transcending divisions between religious streams and generations, and constituting probably the most universally shared Jewish musical legacy of the twentieth century.

Jewish music and liturgy cannot be reduced to a subject of the past, however rich. They are a living tradition, in permanent creative tension between fidelity and renewal. From the song of the Levites in the Temple of Jerusalem to the melody of Carlebach sung in chorus in a synagogue in Tel-Aviv or Brooklyn, the thread has never been broken — even if it has sometimes come close to breaking, under the weight of exile, persecution, and modernity.

What strikes one at the end of this journey is the extraordinary capacity of the Jewish musical tradition to absorb without dissolving. The modes of the Arabic maqamat became the nushaot of Sephardic liturgy. Polish and Moldavian melodies became Hasidic nigunim. Viennese classical harmony became Sulzer's Schir Zion. American jazz irrigated the klezmer of the diaspora. In each case, the borrowing was a conquest, an act of creative resilience that affirmed, against all odds, the vitality of a people who had lost their territory but never their voice. And when Najara borrowed a Turkish melody to pour into it the words of Yoducha Ra'ayonai, he was doing nothing other than what generations before and after him accomplished: inscribing the universal in the particular, without losing either one or the other.

The figure of Emil Breslaur reminds us that between the great names celebrated by posterity, there were also musicians of the second rank, pedagogues, choir directors of local communities, who kept the musical institutions standing day by day — in Berlin as elsewhere. And the klezmer festival project at Balatonfüred shows that renaissance does not play out only in the capitals of the American diaspora or in Israeli concert halls: it can also be born on the shores of a Hungarian lake, where Jewish communities were decimated and where musicians today choose to reconnect, in the open air, with a heritage thought to be lost.

The question that arises today is that of transmission: how will generations born in a digital world, where music is accessible on demand but where communal singing is becoming rare, appropriate these traditions? The signs of vitality are real — the renaissance of klezmer in Central Europe, the renewal of bakashot, the proliferation of Judeo-Arabic music ensembles, the growing interest of scholars in musical manuscripts from the Genizot, digital preservation of Sephardic piyoutim at the Jewish Music Research Centre in Jerusalem. But living transmission, from master to student, from generation to generation, in the space of the synagogue and the community, remains the central issue. For Jewish music, it will be understood, is not a repertory: it is a relationship.