An Italian Tune in the Synagogue: an Unexplored Contrafactum by Leon Modena∗

Kedem G OLDEN

AN ITALIAN TUNE IN THE SYNAGOGUE: AN UNEXPLORED CONTRAFACTUM BY LEON MODENA∗

ABSTRACT

Leon Modena, one of the celebrated personalities of Italian Jewry in the early modern period, is known for his extensive, life-long involvement with music in its various theoretical and practical aspects. The article presents additional evidence that has gone unnoticed in previous studies of Modena’s musical endeavors: his adaption of a polyphonic, secular Italian melody, for the singing of a liturgical hymn. After identifying the melody and suggesting a possible date for the composition of the Hebrew text, the article proceeds to discuss it in a broader context of the Jewish musical culture at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in particular contemporary Jewish views to the use of “foreign” melodies in the synagogue. The article concludes with an attempt to situate it as part of Modena’s thought of art music.

RÉSUMÉ

Léon Modène, une des personnalités célèbres du judaïsme italien du début de la période moderne, est connu pour s’être impliqué de près dans le monde de la musique et ses divers aspects, aussi bien théoriques que pratiques. Le présent article présente un exemple supplémentaire de cette implication, passé inaperçu dans les études antérieures: l’adaptation par Modène d’une mélodie polyphonique profane italienne en un hymne liturgique. Après avoir identifié la mélodie et suggéré la date éventuelle de la composition du texte hébreu, l’article analyse cet hymne dans le contexte plus large de la culture musicale juive au tournant des xvie et xviie siècles, notamment en tenant compte des opinions juives contemporaines sur l’usage de chants «étrangers «dans la synagogue. L’article tente enfin de le situer dans le cadre de la pensée de Léon Modène sur la musique savante.

∗ In writing this article, I have benefited from the kind advice and encouragement of several people, including, among others, Peter Sh. Lehnardt, Sara Offenberg, Elam Rotem and Ron Lasri. Gabriel Wasserman had helped with the English translation of Modena’s work, and Yehonatan Vardi with its interpretation. To all these my sincere gratitude. Any faults, however, are of course my own.

Revue des études juives, 177 (3-4), juillet-décembre 2018, pp. 391-420. doi: 10.2143/REJ.177.3.3285578 392 AN ITALIAN TUNE IN THE SYNAGOGUE

Leon Modena, Venetian Rabbi and Musician

In the summer of 1608, the English traveler Thomas Coryate visited the “Most glorious, Peerlesse and Mayden Citie”, Venice. Among the many sights of Venice he would go on to record in his travelogue Coryat’s Crudi- ties (1611), was also the city’s famous ghetto, the Jewish quarter then walled for almost a century. During his visit, Coryate had the chance to observe a religious service in one of the synagogues in the ghetto — a rare opportunity for a man coming from a country with no native Jewish population, as they had been expelled from England in 1290. What he saw there — and, more precisely what he heard — unsettled him to his core:1 The Levite that readeth the law to them […] pronounce before the congregation not by a sober, distinct, and orderly reading, but by an exceeding loud yaling, undecent roaring, and as it were a beastly bellowing of it forth. And that after such a confused and hudling manner, that I thinke the hearers can very hardly understand him: sometimes he cries out alone, and sometimes againe some others […] do roare with him, but so that his voyce (which he straineth so high as if he sung for a wager) drowneth all the rest.

As a devout Protestant, Coryate was not without prejudice in writing of the Jews; but his depictions also show how, after coming in direct contact with them, he was sometimes capable of perceiving some Jewish customs favorably.2 Yet the cacophony of the Jewish prayer depicted above, which so unsettled the Englishman, cannot be mistaken. This impression does not derive merely from the objective depiction of the reading in the synagogue, but rather partially from an implicit comparison of the ceremony to Christian rites, familiar to both the author and his readers. Those rites where certain physical and verbal gestures signify order, harmony, and solemnity, as well as a sonic aspect which serves as one of the major focal points of Christian ceremonies — the uplifting music played to the congregation.3

1. T. Coryate, Coryat’s Crudities, Glasgow, 1905, p. 371 (I retained the original spelling). 2. On Coryate’s impressions of the Jews he met in the course of his continental travels, see M. Yardeni, “Descriptions of Voyages and Changed Attitudes towards the Jews: The Case of Thomas Coryate”, in id., Anti-Jewish Mentalities in Early Modern Europe, Lanham, 1991, p. 71-91. 3. Such a comparison could be drawn from the ecstatic depiction Coryate gives, later on in his travelogue of Venice, of the performances in the Feast of St. Roch: “This feast consisted principally of Musicke, which was both vocall and instrumental, so good, so delectable, so rare, so admirable, so superexcellent, that it did even ravish and stupifie all those strangers that never heard the like. But how others were affected with it I know not; for mine owne part I can say this, that I was for the time even rapt up with Saint Paul into the third heaven” (Coryat’s Crudities, p. 391). AN ITALIAN TUNE IN THE SYNAGOGUE 393

Coryate’s depiction is not unusual in this regard. In fact, it faithfully represents a typical categorization in Christian discourse, recently studied by Ruth HaCohen, which constructed the Christian universe as harmonious, and the Jew in it, contrastingly, as a discordant maker of noise.4 Rooted in early Christianity, as we shall see this perception also reverberated in late Renaissance Italy.5 As Coryate’s lexical choices suggest, against the rich Christian musical backdrop, even the refined and acculturated Venetian Jews, their women bejeweled and dressed in fineries,6 are still markedly makers of noise. To Coryate, precisely during their most hallowed occasion — reading from the holy Torah — the Jews’ uncouth sounds remove them from the recognizable cultural sphere of civilized people. This, however, is a distorting Christian perspective. While Coryate does not mentioned which of the synagogues in the ghetto he visited (he notes there were “at least seven”), wandering the streets of the Jewish quarter he could have easily encountered a man who was bent on bringing musical harmony to the synagogue, and sing different tunes there — Leon (Judah Aryeh) Modena (1571-1648).7 Modena, one of the most central and prolific characters of early modern Italian Jewry, was preoccupied with music in its various theoretical and practical aspects all throughout his life, as was meticulously and thoroughly shown by the late Don Harrán.8 Thanks to the wealth of writings he left us,

4. R. HaCohen, The Music Libel against the Jews, New Haven, 2011. 5. Ibid., p. 58-70. A similar critical depiction of the prayer service in an Italian synagogue was made a century before Coryate, by the French humanist François Tissard; see the quote in D. B. Ruderman, The World of a Renaissance Jew: The Life and Thought of Abraham ben Mordecai Farissol, Cincinnati, 1981, p. 101. 6. “I saw many Jewish women, whereof some were as beautiful as ever I saw, and so gorgeous in their apparel, jewels, chains of gold, and rings adorned with precious stones, that some of our English Countesses do scarce exceed them…” (Coryat’s Crudities, p. 372). 7. The literature on the life and work of Leon Modena is exhaustive. The main studies on his poetry and thought on music will be listed below. For a thorough survey of his life, see H. E. Adelman, Success and Failure in the Seventeenth Century Ghetto of Venice: The Life and Thought of Leon Modena, 1571-1648, Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 1985 (I thank the author for producing his work at my request). For articles treating various aspects of this unique figure, see D. Malkiel (ed.), The Lion Shall Roar: Leon Modena and His World, Jerusalem, 2003. 8. Harrán’s many articles to be mentioned below were invaluable in introducing me to the fascinating subject of Jewish music in the early modern period. For his main works on Mod- ena, see D. Harrán, “ʻDum Recordaremur Sionʼ: Music in the Life and Thought of the Venetian Rabbi Leon Modena (1571-1648)”, AJS Review, 23 (1998), p. 17-61; id., “Was Rabbi Leon Modena a Composer?”, in The Lion Shall Roar: Leon Modena and His World, p. 195-248; id., “Nomina Numina: Final Thoughts of Rabbi Leon Modena on the Essence of Sacred Music”, Italia, 17 (2006), p. 7-63. Also relevant to the following is Adler’s concise discussion; I. Adler, “La pénétration de la musique savante dans les synagogues italiennes 394 AN ITALIAN TUNE IN THE SYNAGOGUE we know more of Modena’s musical biography than perhaps any other Jew of his time. A man known to have possessed “a fine tenor voice” as an adult,9 Modena records in his autobiography, The Life of Judah, that he received his first musical education at the age of ten.10 Modena’s close rela- tives — uncle, brother-in-law, and later on his son-in-law, and his son Zebu- lun — all had musical training, and some even worked for a living as professional musicians.11 As part of his rabbinical duties in the Jewish ghetto, he served in the traditional post of cantor in the Italian Synagogue, from 1610 until his death in 1648.12 Additionally, beginning from around 1628 he also served as the maestro de cappella, the director of a musical academy founded in the ghetto and comprised of professional musicians — a clear sign of his extensive musical proficiency.13 Modena stands out among his Jewish peers not just as a performer of music, but also in his capacity as rabbi and ruler on religious law (halakha). He was the first to address the issue of performing art music in the synagogue in an elaborate responsum he produced in 1605 aimed at defending its legitimacy.14 He addressed the issue once more in his old age, in a second responsum written in 1645.15 The culmination of Modena’s musical enterprise, fusing together his musical talent as well as his rabbinical authority, was his part in the publication of thirty-three polyphonic Hebrew compositions for the synagogue, in the collection Ha-Širim ašer li-Šelomo (“Songs of Solomon”) by the Mantuan composer Salamone Rossi (1623).16 Modena was heavily involved in the production of this ground-breaking book: he au xviie siècle: le cas particulier de Venise”, in G. Cozzi (ed.), Gli Ebrei e Venezia: Secoli XIV-XVIII, Milano, 1987, p. 527-535. 9. According to a later testimony of his grandson, Isaac Levi; see “Music in the Life and Thought of Leon Modena”, p. 27. 10. D. Carpi (ed.), Chayye’ Yehudah: The Autobiography of a Venetian Rabbi (Hebrew), Tel Aviv, 1985, p. 41; M. Cohen (transl. and ed.), The Autobiography of a Seventeenth-Century Venetian Rabbi: Leon Modenaʼs Life of Judah, Princeton, 1988, p. 86. 11. “Music in the Life and Thought of Leon Modena”, p. 23-25. 12. Ibid., p. 19; on his cantorial duties, see also “Was Rabbi Leon Modena a Composer”, p. 198-202. 13. “Music in the Life and Thought of Leon Modena”, p. 53-60; and “Was Rabbi Leon Modena a Composer”, p. 209-211. 14. The responsum has been studied and translated in D. Harrán, Three Early Modern Hebrew Scholars on the Mysteries of Song, Leiden, 2015, ch. 3-4, p. 131-174. 15. This responsum survived only in partial form; it has been translated, annotated and discussed in “Final Thoughts of Leon Modena”. 16. On this collection, see D. Harrán, Salamone Rossi, Jewish Musician in Late Renais- sance Mantua, Oxford, 1999, chap. 7; and recently, J. Jacobson, “Art Music and Jewish Culture before the Jewish Enlightenment”, in J. Walden (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Jewish Music, Cambridge, 2015, p. 143-155. For a hypothetical reconstruction of the immediate circumstances surrounding the printing of the volume, see D. Harrán, “A Tale as Yet AN ITALIAN TUNE IN THE SYNAGOGUE 395 encouraged the composer to pursue this endeavor in the years before the publication, and at his request he took the challenging task of proofreading and preparing it for print. Anticipating a possible critical reaction from religious conservatives, Modena also added as preface to the collection his responsum from 1605 in defense of the legitimacy of performing art music, as well as a Hebrew introduction and (at least) one introductory poem.17 Considering his numerous musical activities, scholars have wondered whether like Rossi, Modena himself not only performed music but also composed Hebrew works for the synagogue; this so far has proven to be unfounded.18 This article aims to present additional evidence, small but significant, that has gone unnoticed in previous studies of Modena’s musical endeavors: his adaption of a polyphonic, secular Italian melody, for the singing of a liturgical hymn. After identifying the melody and suggesting a possible date for the composition of his Hebrew text, I proceed to discuss it in a broader context of the Jewish musical culture at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in particular contemporary Jewish views on the use of “foreign” melodies in the synagogue. I then end with an attempt to situate it as part of Modena’s thought of art music.

A Hebrew Contrafactum for an Italian Tune: Modena’s Piyuṭ Yošebh marom ḥazaq

Leon Modena’s Hebrew poems, which constitute the bulk of his bellet- ristic writing, were collected and published in a modern edition by Simon

Untold: Salamone Rossi in Venice, 1622”, Sixteenth Century Journal, 40 (2009), p. 1091- 1107. 17. Harrán speculated that Modena had in fact written all the prefatory Hebrew matter, including the other two introductory poems, and even Rossi’s dedication of the work to his Mantuan patron Moshe Sullam; “Music in the Life and Thought of Leon Modena”, p. 50-51. 18. It has been extensively investigated in “Was Rabbi Leon Modena a Composer”. This issue has been associated with a manuscript (Cincinnati, Ms. Birnbaum 101), containing a single part of twenty-one Hebrew works, originally written for eight parts in two choirs. While earlier scholarship attributed the manuscript to Modena (as composer, though not as scribe), Harrán convincingly refuted this notion. For a recent short description of the manuscript, see P. Mancuso, “Musical Practice in the Venice Ghetto: Reading and Analysis of a Manuscript Witness”, in D. Calabi, L. Galeazzo, M. Massaro (eds), Venice, the Jews, and Europe 1516-2016, Venice, 2016, p. 250-255 (I thank the author for producing the article at my request). Following the submission of this article, an additional article by Harrán relevant to the discussion has been published posthumously; see D. Harrán, “Jewish Art Music in Late Sixteenth- and Early Seventeenth-Century Italy”, in K. Schlitz (ed.), A Companion to Music in Sixteenth-Century Venice, Leiden-Boston, 2017, p. 469-492 (esp. p. 485-492). 396 AN ITALIAN TUNE IN THE SYNAGOGUE

Bernstein in 1932.19 Bernstein based the edition primarily on a single manuscript, only partially extant, now in the possession of the Bodleian Library in Oxford.20 This manuscript originally consisted of more than 400 poems, and has been widely regarded as the poet’s autograph.21 Although the collected edition was published over eight decades ago, until recently Modena’s poems received little scholarly attention, and they were rarely studied for their literary aspects.22 As Ariel Rathaus remarked, the poems were referenced in past scholarship for the most part merely as

19. S. Bernstein (ed.), The Divan of Leo de Modena: Collection of His Hebrew Poetical Works (Hebrew), Philadelphia, 1932 (henceforth: Collected Poems of Leon Modena). The title given to the collection by Bernstein, dīwān, is highly anachronistic and improper for a seventeenth-century Italian author: originating in Persian, the term came to signify a poet’s collected work in medieval Arabic literature. It is therefore appropriate to apply it in Hebrew literature only to those poets active in Arabic-speaking ambience — first in Al-Andalus (the Umayyad Caliphate in the Iberian Peninsula and the Taifa kingdoms that followed it), and later in the eastern Mediterranean. See “Diwan” in the glossary in H. Schirmann, The History of Hebrew Poetry in Christian Spain and Southern France (Hebrew), E. Fleischer (ed.), Jerusalem, 1997, p. 675-676. In his autobiography, Modena himself mentions his collection of poems under the name “Songs [Poems] of Judah” (šire Yehuda); see Leon Modenaʼs Life of Judah, p. 127. 20. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ms. Mich. 528 (Neubauer 2157/4); I have consulted the microfilmed copy in the Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts at the National Library in Jerusalem (F 19971). 21. Already Heimann Michael, the collector who previously owned the manuscript before it came to the Bodleian Library, described it — in the earliest known modern reference — as a partially extant autograph, written “by the Rabbi himself. Containing 465 marks [of poems]… and missing the first folio” (H. Michael, Or ha-Chajim: Umfassendes bibliogra- phisches und literarhistorisches Wörterbuch des rabbinischen Schriftthums, Frankfurt a.M., 1891 [reprint: Jerusalem, 1965], no. 963, p. 443). Bernstein touched upon this subject briefly, in the English introduction of his edition; Collected Poems of Leon Modena, p. v-vii. The problematic issue of identifying Modena’s autographs has been treated in recent scholarship, with regard to manuscripts of several of his major writings; see in Carpi’s introduction to Chayye’ Yehudah, p. 20-22, and in contrast Cohen’s view in Leon Modenaʼs Life of Judah, p. 284-293; Y. Boksenboim (ed.), Letters of Rabbi Leon Modena (Hebrew), Tel Aviv, 1984, p. 3-5; B. Richler, “Unknown Writings of R. Judah Aryeh Modena” (Hebrew), Asufot, 7 (1993), p. 157-172; and now Y. Dweck, The Scandal of Kabbalah: Leon Modena, Jewish Mysticism, Early Modern Venice, Princeton, 2011, p. 37-55. 22. Previous studies include: A. Cohen, “Širato šel rabbi Yehuda Aryeh mi-Modena” [The Poetry of R. Judah Aryeh Modena] (Hebrew), in E. Artom, L. Caro, S. Sierra (eds), Miscel- lanea di Studi in Memoria di Dario Disegni, Torino-Jerusalem, 1969, p. 45-47; Harrán surveyed parts of the author’s poetic corpus thematically, in “Music in the Life and Thought of Leon Modena”, p. 30-38 (regarding poems mentioning music in various celebratory occasions); and in “Marriage and Music as Metaphor: The Wedding Odes of Leon Modena and Salamone Rossi”, Musica Judaica, 17 (2003-2004), p. 1-31, esp. p. 7-15 (regarding Modena’s epithalamia); A. Rathaus, “Leon Modena’s Autobiography and His Realistic Poetics” (Hebrew), in The Lion Shall Roar: Leon Modena and His World, p. 131-141; and more recently: M. Andreatta, “Tra la pagina e la pietra: Di due auto-epitaffi ebraici del rabbino veneziano Leon Modena (1571- 1648)”, in S. di Nepi (ed.), Storie intrecciate: Cristiani, ebrei e musulmani tra scritture, oggetti e narrazioni (Mediterraneo, secc. XVI-XIX), Rome, 2015, p. 3-15; id., “The Taste of Conviviality: A Poem on Food by Leon Modena”, Jewish Quarterly Review, 105 (2015), p. 456-481. AN ITALIAN TUNE IN THE SYNAGOGUE 397 historical documents, or used as points of comparison to the author’s other works.23 That Modena’s poetry remains a rather neglected part of his oeuvre is partially due to the notable shortcomings of Bernstein’s edition, which make it considerably difficult for readers today to appreciate it: the Hebrew poems are printed unvocalized, and the critical apparatus is lacking. Bern- stein’s English introduction and his evaluation of the poems, written at a time when most Hebrew poetry from Italy was still in manuscripts and rare prints, have aged significantly. At times, one even suspects the reliability of attribution of certain poems in the edition to the poet’s hand.24 Bernstein arranged Modena’s poems thematically, dividing them into different sections in his edition as he saw fit.25 The section titled “Moral and Religious Poetry” includes mainly piyuṭim, liturgical poems written for the embellishment of different prayers recited during the service at the synagogue. Among them is one beginning with the words Yošebh marom ḥazaq (“Dweller on High, Strong in Power”).26 Following an age-old custom in Hebrew liturgical poetry, the author signed the piyuṭ in acrostics with his first name, Yehuda. As Bernstein’s reading of this poem is faulty, I have produced a new fully vocalized and annotated edition (Appendix I). Preceding the piyuṭ is the following heading: “To the Tune (laḥan) of Trà verdi campi a la stagion novella, for Singing and Chanting”.27 The term laḥan suggests musical performance,28 a suggestion further reinforced by the

23. “Leon Modena’s Autobiography and His Realistic Poetics”, p. 132. 24. I refer here to those poems included in the edition which are not found in Ms. Mich. 528; see for example Collected Poems of Leon Modena, no. 202, p. 203-204 (a liturgical poem without an author’s signature, whose exact origin is not disclosed by the editor, but for a vague statement in the notes that it was taken “from a manuscript of various poems found in the library of the Jewish Theological Seminary in Budapest”). Following the publication of the collected poems, Bernstein discovered additional prefatory poems by Modena in rare books; he published them in S. Bernstein, “Šeloša piyuṭim ḥadašim le-Rabbi Yehuda Aryeh mi- Modena” [Three New Poems by R. Judah Aryeh Modena] (Hebrew), Alim: Blätter für Bib- liographie und Geschichte des Judentums, 1 (1938), p. 106-109. 25. For example, under the section titled “Juvenilia” (Collected Poems of Leon Modena, no. 1-20, p. 33-64) he also included poems whose exact dates of composition is not explicitly stated by the poet. Collected Poems of Leon Modena, no. 192, p. 200-201. In the original ;יושב מרום חזק .26 Oxford manuscript, the poem is copied on fol. 43r (according to the Hebrew pagination, 31a), and marked as no. 232. .לחן טר"ה וירד"י קמפ"י אל"ה סטאגיו"ן נוויל"ה לשיר ולזמר .27 28. On the musical term laḥan see E. Seroussi, Incipitario sefardí: El cancionero judeoes- pañol en fuentes hebreas (siglos XV-XIX), Madrid, 2009, p. 38-43, esp. 42-43. As Seroussi concludes in the section devoted to the term in the Sephardic Diaspora after the Expulsion, “the term laḥan is closely associated with the adaptation of a melody from an existing text to another text and, consequently, the interpretation of several literary texts with the same musical ‘text’” (ibid., p. 43; translation mine). 398 AN ITALIAN TUNE IN THE SYNAGOGUE two concluding words of the heading,29 thus rendering it a musical incipit. In the original Hebrew, all words but the first and last two are punctuated with apostrophes, a well-known sign indicating transliteration from a foreign language. Bernstein correctly identified the language of the incipit as Italian, and transliterated it back to Latin script in his notes to the poem, adding a Hebrew translation: “In the fresh green pastures of springtime”. In an effort to identify the Italian tune, he sought the aid of his friend, the noted scholar Umberto Cassuto, then a professor at the University of Florence. The latter in turn asked his colleagues from the Department of Italian Literature and Romance Languages, but claimed they were unsuccessful in tracking down the song in question. Bernstein was left to speculate this was “most probably an Italian folk-tune with which the congregants were familiar”.30 It was “an Italian tune” for sure, but no “folk-tune” at all. With comprehensive indexes of Italian printed musical sources such as the Nuovo Vogel now at our disposal, not to mention the mighty, all-encompassing Google-algorithm, we may easily identify the musical incipit. It is identical to the opening words of a four-voice canzonetta written by a well-known composer of the late Renaissance, Orazio Vecchi (1550-1605).31 Vecchi was an older contemporary of the Jewish poet, holding ecclesiastical positions in various cities in northern Italy, before returning to his native city of Modena.32 Taking holy orders in his youth, Vecchi wrote both secular and sacred works; his canzonettas books were printed in Venice and received tremendous popularity in their day, circulating widely in Italy and across the Alps in northern Europe.33 Trà verdi campi is the last composition printed in Vecchi’s First Book of four-voice canzonettas.34 The identification of the canzonetta as the model for the Hebrew piyuṭ can be verified definitely by comparing their structures. Bernstein arranged the Hebrew text in his edition in accordance with most of the poet’s other poems

can be read as denoting לשיר ולזמר Unvocalized in the original manuscript, the two words .29 two nouns, “for singing and chanting” (le-šir u-le-zemer), or as two verbs, “to sing and to chant” (la-šir u-le-zamer). The two verbs recur many times in parallelisms in the book of Psalms: compare 21:14, 27:6, 57:8, 67:33, and many more. That they were interchangeable can be inferred from Modena’s responsum from 1605, where they appear at times as synonyms in the very same sentence; see Three Early Modern Hebrew Scholars, p. 152-174. 30. Collected Poems of Leon Modena, p. 200. 31. For the text of the canzonetta in the original and an English translation, see R. DeFord (ed.), Orazio Vecchi: The Four-Voice Canzonettas, 2 vols., Madison, 1993, vol. 1, p. 41-42; for the music, see ibid., vol. 2, p. 50-51, and below, Ex. I. 32. On this composer and his work, see the encyclopedia article by W. Martin, “Vecchi, Orazio”, Grave Music Online, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, on-line, accessed February 5, 2017 . 33. The Four-Voice Canzonettas, vol. 1, p. 6-8. 34. Ibid., p. 2. For the printing of this book, see in next section below. AN ITALIAN TUNE IN THE SYNAGOGUE 399

— seemingly a monorhymed poem made of ten lines, each divided by a caesura into two equal hemistichs. However, a reexamination of the original manuscript reveals that every other “line” of the poem is noticeably indented, and distinctly divided into three separate stichs; all the tripartite stichs rhyme with a single, identical rhyme. Thus, each pair of “lines” in the manuscript in fact comprises a strophe of five verses, prosodically identical to that of the canzonetta: two verses of eleven syllables, with stress on the penultimate syllable (endecasillabo piano), followed by three shorter rhymed verses, the first of seven syllables (settenario piano) and the remaining two of five, also stressed on the penultimate syllable. By constructing his poem thus, Modena had meticulously recreated the form of the Italian original, as can observed in a proper arrangement of the parallel texts of the first strophes — the Hebrew also transliterated in Latin script — in the following: Trà verdi campi a la stagion novella Vince ogni fior una vermiglia rosa. Veggiola di lontano, Ma stendo in vano L’ardita mano. יֹוׁשֵ ב מָ רֹום חָ ָ ז ק וְ אַ ּמִ י ץ ּכֹוחַ , ,Yošebh marom ḥazaq we-amiṣ kòaḥ רַ חּום וְחֹונֵ ן ּדַ ל, ְ ו רָ ב מֹוׁשִיעַ – – Raḥum we-ḥonen dal, we-rabh mošì῾a` עַ ד אָ ן רָ ׁשָ ע ַ י ְ צ ִ ל י חַ Ad an raša῾ yaṣlìaḥ῾ וְל ֹא ָ ת ִ פ י חַ we-lo taphìaḥ צֹורֵ ר ק מ ַ ְ ִ ׁש י חַ ? ?ṣorer maqšìaḥ

Thematically, Modena’s Hebrew text bears no relation to the Italian lyrics used by Vecchi.35 The latter paints an Arcadian scene of unrequited love amid the green fields and rivers of springtime, where nymphs and Umbrian shepherds serve as props in the idealized pastoral setting.36 Modena’s poem

35. Unlike most texts of Vecchi’s canzonettas, probably written by the composer himself (The Four-Voice Canzonettas, vol. 1, p. 3), our canzonetta re-uses a text from an earlier source. Trà verdi campi first appeared in print in the now rare book Delle mascherate musi- cali… a tre, a quattro, & a cinque voci, published in 1571 in Venice by Serafino Candido. There it is three-voice villanela, aptly sung by the figure of a nymph named Naria (“la ninfa Naria”). For the content of this collection, see J. Bernstein, Music Printing in Renaissance Venice: The Scotto Press, 1539-1572, New York, 1998, no. 364, p. 841-843; on Candido and his work, see F. Zimei, “Dalle ‘Mascherate’ alla ‘Divota rappresentatione’: Nuove acquisizioni sulla vita e le opere di Serafino Candido”, in A. Lattanzi, P. Maione (eds), Commedia dell’Arte e Spettacolo in musica tra Sei e Settecento: Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi (Napoli, 28-29 settembre 2001), Napoli, 2003, p. 253-286. As Candido’s book was published only once, on the very year Modena was born, it seems almost certain the poet referred to the much more popular, later composition by Vecchi; see below. 36. On Vecchi’s canzonettas, see P. Schleuse, Singing Games in Early Modern Italy: The Music Books of Orazio Vecchi, Bloomington, 2015, ch. 1, p. 10-42. Schleuse treats the posi- tioning of Trà verdi campi at the end of the First Book as heralding “a transition in Vecchi’s 400 AN ITALIAN TUNE IN THE SYNAGOGUE on the other hand deals with conventional themes of Jewish hymnology, depicting the plight of Exile, where Israel is persecuted by “adversary” (v. 5), “evil inciter” (v. 9) and a “lion” (v. 19), seemingly referring to the Christian nations, and implores God for mercy.37 The piyuṭ is replete with references to the language of various customary prayers, and its final strophe pleads with God to take vengeance on the Gentiles, ending with the Mes- sianic hope of the future redemption. However, the author’s conscious choice of this particular musical composition is apparent in one highly original aspect — in the way he utilizes the structure of the strophe, divided asymmetrically into two distinct sections. Each pair of longer couplets opens with God and mentions one of His virtues: His might (v. 1, 11), His mercy (v. 2), His splendor (v. 6), His forgivingness (v. 7), His attentiveness (v. 12), and His just judgement (v. 16-17). In contrast, each ending triplet shifts the focus to Israel’s woes in Exile, and calls on God not to stand idly by as the nations of the world abuse and oppress His people.38 Such arrangement of the content, with longer verses opposite the shorter ones, creates a kind of visual equivalent of the depicted scene — where the Mightiest of all is juxtaposed with the meager, “poor” (v. 12) people of Israel pleading for His mercy.39 The first two sen- tences of each strophe also correspond syntactically to the two verses, giving them a sense of solidity. In contrast, the very short refrain verses make conspicuous use of enjambment, creating a dynamic effect of movement.40 This precise and consistent distribution of the text is surely not accidental. In fact, Vecchi’s melody enhances its effect: whereas the first two verses of the strophe are sung by the four voices in a homophonic manner (the first of the two repeated twice), the three shorter verses are sung in a faster rhythm and in polyphony (Ex. I). This thus proves beyond doubt Modena’s intention for the musical performance of the text he had written, to be sung according to Vecchi’s canzonetta.41 later canzonettas away from the comic elements […] toward eroticism couched in the pastoral style” (ibid., p. 27-28). 37. For a general survey of the context and major trends in the Hebrew liturgical poetry at the time, see D. Pagis, “Liturgical Poetry in Seventeenth-Century Italy: A Hebrew Manu- script” (Hebrew), Qiryat Sepher, 50 (1975), p. 288-312 (reprinted in id., Poetry Aptly Explained: Studies and Essays on Medieval Hebrew Poetry, E. Fleischer [ed.], Jerusalem, 1993, p. 336-60). 38. In the original text of the Italian canzonetta (above, n. 31), the three final verses serve as an actual refrain, repeated unchanged for the first three strophes until the last, fourth, strophe. 39. This was suggested to me by my colleague Ron Lasri. 40. See especially in the third strophe (v. 13-15). 41. It is interesting to note that in his famous madrigal comedy L’amfiparnasso (1597), Vecchi included a comic scene set in Venice, which involves Jewish characters. The Christian AN ITALIAN TUNE IN THE SYNAGOGUE 401

Ex. I: Orazio Vecchi, Trà verdi campi (Canzonette di Oratio Vecchi da Modona, libro primo a quattro voci, 1580), reproduced with the Hebrew text of the first strophe of Leon Modena’s piyuṭ, Yošebh marom ḥazaq (arranged by Elam Rotem). 402 AN ITALIAN TUNE IN THE SYNAGOGUE

Dating Modena’s Hebrew Contrafactum

When did Modena write his Hebrew text for Vecchi’s melody? In answer- ing this question, I may only offer a speculative date. Curiously, as far as we can tell Modena made no other reference to this composition beyond the text itself. This exclusion most probably also contributed to it being unde- tected by past scholarship. The only source of the text, the Oxford manuscript, discloses no specific date in the heading. Unfortunately, the date of composition cannot be deduced from the arrangement of the poems in the manuscript, as it is not organized in any kind of chronological order.42 In ascertaining a tentative date, we must therefore consider different factors for a possible context, relating both to Modena’s biography and to the musical print-culture of his time. Let us begin by presenting the known years of publication of Vecchi’s First Book of four-voice canzonettas, the source of the melody used by Modena. While no copy of the book’s first edition survived,43 the earliest extant edition — which, for the sake of our discussion, we shall consider as the second edition — was printed in 1580. The First Book of the four-voice canzonettas was subsequently reprinted in Ven- ice again in 1581, 1585 and 1591.44 It was reprinted there one last time over two decades later, in 1613, after the Gardano Press took on the new name

protagonist in need of cash hurries to the Jews’ pawnshop, and finding it locked due to the Sabbath knocks upon the door repeatedly, interrupting the prayer of Jews inside. Following other scenes portraying Jews in Renaissance Italian music, Harrán defined this scene as an ebraica; see his discussion in D. Harrán, “Between Exclusion and Inclusion: Jews as Portrayed in Italian Music from the Late Fifteenth to the Early Seventeenth-Centuries”, in D. Myers et al. (eds), Acculturation and Its Discontents: The Italian Jewish Experience between Exclusion and Inclusion, Toronto, 2008, p. 72-98; and in id., “ʻBarucabaʼ as an Emblem for Jewishness in Early Italian Art Music”, Jewish Quarterly Review, 98 (2008), p. 328-354, esp. p. 340-341, 344-345. Vecchi’s work was one of the first instances Christian audience had the chance to listen to a musical “representation” of the Jewish prayer outside the walls of the synagogue. The farcical scene was undoubtedly meant to arouse in the specta- tors the same baffled and ridiculing response we found in Thomas Coryate: the Jews the protagonist encounters recite their prayer in a clattering strange language, partially corrupted Hebrew, and partially complete gibberish (ibid., p. 341-343); they do so in a “disturbed polyphony of changing rhythms on syllabic melodies”, and produce the semblance of “vocif- erous prattle” (The Music Libel against the Jew, p. 65-66) — once more, in the image of the noise-making Jew. Whether or not Modena knew Vecchi’s comedy, from our perspective his choice of one of the composer’s popular secular works to beautify the worship of God, and his clever employment of it for this end, cannot be seen as anything but sheer historical irony. 42. See Bernstein’s English introduction, Collected Poems of Leon Modena, p. vi, and below, n. 60. 43. The Four-Voice Canzonettas, vol. 1, p. 1. DeFord conjectured it was published either in 1578 or in 1579. 44. Ibid., p. 12-13; Singing Games in Early Modern Italy, p. 16. AN ITALIAN TUNE IN THE SYNAGOGUE 403 of Magni. Vecchi’s First Book was also printed in a pirated edition in Milan in 1586; and a sacred contrafactum of Trà verdi campi, written in honor of “the Madonna of the Fields of Fossano” for the feast of the Holy Annuncia- tion, was included in a book of religious laude published in Rome in 1600.45 The printing dates thus reveal that Vecchi’s four-voice canzonettas were particularly in vogue in the late sixteenth century. I would therefore suggest it is plausible that Modena wrote the text to Vecchi’s melody near the height of the canzonettas’ popularity — namely, in the late 1580’s or the early 1590’s, when the rabbi was in his late teens or early twenties. While there are two main periods when Modena is known to have been actively occupied in the making of music, for reasons I shall argue below, they were probably not the occasion Modena wrote his piyuṭ. The first date was during his stay in Ferrara in 1604-1607, where he served as preacher in the synagogue.46 As he recounted in a letter to Rabbi Judah da Fano Saltaro, he and some members of the congregation hired a music teacher and practiced every day,47 with their practice intended to exalting God. Indeed, Mod- ena and others eventually performed Hebrew hymns in the synagogue on Sabbaths and holidays. He claimed that while most of the congregation took great delight in the performance, one member of the community, a certain Moses Coimbran, rose up in opposition and questioned its appropriateness. Coimbran’s reaction forced Modena to defend the legitimacy of art music in the synagogue, in a responsum that received the approbations of five Venetian rabbis, including Saltaro, in the summer of 1605.48 Comparing the canzonetta-piyuṭ with the information the author provides of the performance in Ferrara, we encounter some disparities. The question posed by Modena in the opening of the responsum,49 tells of “six or eight intelligent persons”, members of the congregation, who “sing… on holidays

45. Giovanni Arascione, Nuove Laudi Ariose della Beatissima Vergine, Rome, 1600. The text of the contrafactum is reprinted in The Four-Voice Canzonettas, vol. 1, p. 122-123. It shares an identical first strophe of the secular piece, but deviates from the latter by having seven strophes rather than four. Apart from the identical structure, the laude also adopts the pastoral mood of the original. An additional religious contrafactum, in German (beginning: “Im grünen Wald”), was produced by Valentin Haussmann; see ibid., p. 75. 46. On Modena’s years in Ferrara, see Success and Failure, p. 374-391. 47. Adelman (ibid., p. 379) speculates that the music teacher mentioned was in fact Mod- ena himself. 48. Letters of Rabbi Leon Modena, no. 64, p. 110-111. The five rabbinical approbations have been reprinted with an annotated translation in: Salamone Rossi, Complete Works, D. Harrán (ed.), 13 vols, Neuhausen-Stuttgart-Madison, 1995-2003, vol. 13a, p. 212-219. 49. That Modena himself probably wrote the anonymous question was noted by I. Adler, “The Rise of Art Music in the Italian Ghetto”, in A. Altmann (ed.), Jewish Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Cambridge, 1967, p. 321-364 (337). 404 AN ITALIAN TUNE IN THE SYNAGOGUE and festivals, songs, praises, hymns, and melodies — En k᾿elohenu, ῾Alenu le-šabeaḥ, Yigdal, Adon ῾olam and others”.50 If we take the number of people stated in the question to literally mean the singing parts, they are obviously more than those of the canzonetta. While it is reasonable Modena is referring to the number of singers in the performance, who together sang songs with a varying number of parts — some only for four voices, like the canzonetta — the four compositions alluded to are all noticeably from the traditional repertoire of Hebrew prayers and old, standard piyuṭim.51 The second period in Modena’s life is more than two decades later. As mentioned above, beginning from 1628 he served as the maestro de cappella of the new musical academy in the Venetian ghetto. We know relatively little on the activity of this institution, based on a short Italian letter written by Modena and a later testimony of his former pupil, the apostate Giulio Moros- ini (formerly: Šemuel Naḥmias).52 However, since the academy was founded some fifteen years after the last known edition of Vecchi’s First Book, it seems unlikely that Modena’s piyuṭ was written for it. Had he contributed Hebrew texts to the academy, we may assume Modena would have chosen more contemporary compositions, palatable to the taste of the professional musicians who comprised the academy.53 To these arguments, another may be added: the piyuṭ is notably absent from Modena’s various other later writings on music, dated from his early thirties until the end of his life. That Modena wrote the piyuṭ in his late teens or early adult years might also be supported circumstantially, if we consider the poem in relation to the rest of Modena’s extant poetic corpus. Whether he wrote poems for his own use or was commissioned to do so by others,54 almost all of Modena’s

50. Salamone Rossi, Ha-Širim ašer li-Šelomo [The Songs of Solomon] (Hebrew), Venice, 1623, fol. 4b; translation by Harrán, Three Early Modern Hebrew Scholars, p. 152-153. 51. Compare “Music in the Life and Thought of Leon Modena”, p. 22, n. 16; and below, n. 82. We may conjecture that being aware of the novelty in bringing art music to the synagogue, Modena opted to perform well-known works, thereby assuaging the impression of an element foreign to the synagogue (see more below, in the final section). 52. On the musical academy in the Venetian ghetto see above, n. 13. The academy was founded after many Jewish musicians fled to the city from Mantua, in the wake of the War of Succession that ensued upon the death of Vincenzo II Gonzaga. Modena’s letter is produced in C. Roth, “‘When We Remembered Zion’: The Musical Academy of the Venetian Ghetto”, in id., Personalities and Events in Jewish History, Philadelphia, 1953, p. 283-295. 53. On Modena’s possible duties as the maestro de cappella, see “Was Rabbi Leon Mod- ena a Composer”, p. 209-224. We do not know if Modena was indeed required to supply any Hebrew texts for the performances of the academy. 54. In his autobiography Modena mentions “poems for wedding and gravestones” (i.e., commissioned epithalamia and epitaphs) as one of his twenty-six professional occupations; Leon Modenaʼs Life of Judah, p. 160. Another occupation mentioned is “music” (ibid., p. 162). AN ITALIAN TUNE IN THE SYNAGOGUE 405 poems are written in the quantitative metric system. This metric system was adopted and adapted from Arabic poetry in the tenth century by Dunaš ben Labraṭ, the founding father of the Andalusian school of Hebrew poetry.55 First introduced in Italy in the middle of the twelfth century by the poet and polymath Abraham Ibn Ezra (d. ca. 1164), the quantitative meters became the norm in Italian Hebrew poetry for most of its span up until the beginning of the twentieth century.56 Carefully examining Modena’s canzonetta-piyuṭ, however, we can immediately discern that it does not fall into any of the regular Andalusian quantitative meters. First, the poem is strophic rather than monorhymed, with a considerable difference in the length of its verses. Second, and more impor- tantly, it is written in a different metric system altogether, one which Dan Pagis called “the overt syllabic meter”.57 This rival metric system had con- solidated in Italy in parallel to the first metric system during the early fifteenth century, in the epic poem Miqdaš Me῾aṭ by Moshe da Rieti (1388- 1466).58 After Rieti, it became common during the fifteenth century. But at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the overt syllabic meter had fallen out of favor, replaced again by the old, traditional quantitative meters. In sum, the piyuṭ stands out as an exception in Modena’s poetic corpus. In particular, it is disparate from other poems by Modena, penned later and explicitly stated as having been written to be sung to music, all in quantitative meters.59 One other notable example of a poem by Modena in the overt syllabic meter can be found — and fortunately, it is one which is dated. This poem in turn bears an even greater affinity to an Italian literary source: a Hebrew translation of some fifty octaves from Ludovico Ariosto’s

55. For a concise explanation on the quantitative metric system, see B. Hrushovski, “Prosody, Hebrew”, in F. Skolnik (ed.), Encyclopedia Judaica, Detroit, 2007, vol. 16, p. 605- 609. In short, it differentiates between long vowels and short vowels. The poem’s verses (called, following the Arabic term, bayit) are monorhymed and written in schemes of inter- changing lengths of vowels, according to a rigid set of regular meters. 56. D. Pagis, “Hebrew Metrics in Italy and the Invention of Hebrew Accentual Iambs” (Hebrew), reprinted in: Poetry Aptly Explained, p. 166-255 (172-173). 57. Ibid., 182-189. Unlike quantitative meters, the overt syllabic metric system made no differentiation between long vowels and shorter ones. Rather, it was based on a fixed number of syllables per verse, following the pronunciation of the Hebrew language common among Italian Jews, where short and long vowels were pronounced as equal-length syllables (ibid., p. 174). 58. D. Bregman, “A Note on the Style and Prosody of Miqdash me῾at”, Prooftexts, 23 (2003), p. 18-24 (21-22). 59. See for example Collected Poems of Leon Modena, no. 53, p. 72-73, 86, p. 100, 118- 119, 131, respectively. 406 AN ITALIAN TUNE IN THE SYNAGOGUE celebrated chivalric romance Orlando furioso.60 Astonishingly, in the heading Modena notes that he penned this translation, no small feat by itself at any age, when he was only twelve years old.61 This testimony should not be regarded fictitious or exaggerated, as Modena was indeed known as a child prodigy. According to his autobiography, by the age of two and a half he could read, and so recited the hafṭara at the synagogue, and by the age of three he could translate the weekly portion of the Torah to Italian.62 By the age of thirteen, he had already penned a moralistic dialogue on the harm of gambling, later to be printed in 1596.63 Reading of the translation and comparing its literary aspects to that of the piyuṭ shows the latter is more eloquent and fluent than the former, which sometimes sacrifices articulation in Hebrew for the sake of textual fidelity to its source material (“word for word”). It is therefore possible the piyuṭ was written some years later during the course of the author’s youth, at the date suggested above.64 If this is correct, Modena’s piyuṭ would thus also predate the publication of Rossi’s Songs of Solomon by over three decades, making it the earliest known example of “Hebrew” polyphony written to be performed at the synagogue.

Modena’s Contrafactum and Contemporary Jewish Musical Culture

Leon Modena’s novelty lies in his choice of basing his piyuṭ on a polyphonic composition. As far as we know, in Modena’s days the singing of traditional piyuṭim in the synagogue was always monophonic — that is, sung

60. Ibid., no. 1-2, p. 33-45. Modena translated six octaves from the first Canto, and additional 42 octaves from the twenty-eighth Canto. On this translation, see Success and Failure, p. 222-224. It should be noted that in the original manuscript, these poems are marked no. 338-339, quite near the end of the extant sequence of poems. 61. That is, around the year 1583 (Modena having been born in 1571); Collected Poems of Leon Modena, p. 33: “The First Canto of the Ariosto [sic], I’ve translated to Hebrew, word קאנט״ו ראשון מן האריאוסטו העתקתי בעברי מלה במלה) ”for word, when I was twelve years old .(בהיותי בן י״ב שנה 62. Leon Modenaʼs Life of Judah, p. 82-83. 63. On the dialogue, Sur me-Ra῾ (“Turn Aside from Evil”), see Success and Failure, p. 224-233. The same year he penned the dialogue (1584), Modena composed another example in the overt syllabic meter — his remarkable ottava rima lamenting the death of his master, R. Mosè della Rocca, which could be read simultaneously both in Hebrew and Italian (Qina šemor / Chi nasce, mour); Collected Poems of Leon Modena, no. 3, p. 51-52. 64. For what we know of the beginning of the author’s music education at the age of ten — that is, in 1581 (above, n. 10) — would it be too great a speculation to imagine Modena knew Vecchi’s collection from the curriculum of his early musical study? AN ITALIAN TUNE IN THE SYNAGOGUE 407 to music with a single line.65 However, the use of Gentile melodies for the singing of piyuṭim, by way of contrafactum, is a centuries-old practice. Known from various localities of the medieval Jewish world, it was most notably cultivated in the Iberian Peninsula. The earliest extant Hispanic musical incipits from there date from the first half of the fifteenth century, attesting to the Jews’ familiarity with the repertoire of songs of different genres in the Romance languages.66 Following the great Expulsion of 1492, as Sephardic Jews resettled across the Mediterranean in the Ottoman Empire, they added many tunes from their Turkish environment to their musical repertoire.67 At the same time, the foreign melodies gained greater visibility and wider dissemination in the sixteenth century, with the advent of the new technology of the printing press. One major landmark in this process occurred during Modena’s youth, and, as we shall see, would also have a later effect on him: the publication of the first edition of the book of liturgical hymns Zemirot Yiśra’el (“The Songs of Israel”), printed in Safed in 1587 by the most prolific Hebrew poet of the sixteenth century — Israel Najara.68 Himself a talented musician, Najara’s piyuṭim were especially characterized by the extensive and consistent use of foreign melodies from various sources, both the older Hispanic ones, and the local Arabic and Turkish.69 They proved immensely popular among the congregants, quickly disseminating across the eastern Mediterranean and beyond, and leaving their mark on the Jewish communities for many generations to come.70 Writ- ten to be sung on para-liturgical occasions, many of these piyuṭim show clear connections to their models — adopting not only their poetic structures, but

65. “Music in the Life and Thought of Leon Modena”, p. 19-21. 66. E. Seroussi, “Catorce canciones en romance como modelos de poemas hebreos del siglo XV”, Sefarad, 65 (2005), p. 385-411; id., “Un cancionero hebreo-español del siglo XVI (Ms. Guenzburg 1224)”, in E. Romero (ed.), Estudios sefardíes dedicados a la memoria de Iacob M. Hassán (z”l), Madrid, 2011, p. 579-619; id., “Which Romance Songs did Iberian Jews Sing in 1492?”, Hispania Judaica Bulletin, 10 (2014), p. 225-238; Incipitario sefardí, p. 44-49. 67. On these, see J. Yahalom, “Hebrew Mystical Poetry and Its Turkish Background”, in J. Yahalom, A. Tietze, Ottoman Melodies, Hebrew Hymns: A 16th-Century Cross-Cultural Adventure, Budapest, 1995, p. 9-43. 68. J. Yahalom, “Rabbi Israel Najarah and the Revival of Hebrew Poetry in the East after the Expulsion from Spain” (Hebrew), tag">Pe῾amim, 13 (1982), p. 96-124. 69. Incipitario sefardí, p. 49-55. 70. E. Seroussi, “Rabbi Israel Najara, Moulder of Hebrew Sacred Singing after the Expul- sion from Spain” (Hebrew), Asuphot, 4 (1990), p. 285-310; id., “Judeo-Islamic Sacred Sound- scapes: The ‘Maqamization’ of Eastern Sephardic Jewish Liturgy”, in B. Cooperman, Z. Zohar (eds), Jews and Muslims in the Islamic World, Bethesda, 2013, p. 279-302. 408 AN ITALIAN TUNE IN THE SYNAGOGUE also borrowing themes, and even imitating the sound of their opening lines phonetically.71 In stark contrast to this stand the Jewish communities of Italy, the so- called Italiani. Until now, only a single — or rather: double — Hebrew contrafactum of an Italian tune has been studied: the popular song Galan- tina Morosina was used, around 1450, by two Florentine Jews — Raphael da Faenza and Lazaro da Volterra. Each of them composed a Hebrew poem based on its tune — a love lyric and a piyuṭ, respectively.72 To this singular example, we may dubiously add another sixteenth-century lyric in ottava rima, written by the poet and physician to the Pope, Joseph Zarfati (d. 1527).73 As indicated by the heading in the manuscript, Zarfati’s octave Yešena at, ani ne῾or we-noded (“You sleep, while I, wakeful, wander”) is actually a fairly accurate rendition of the Italian Tu dormi, io veglio, a stram- botto by Serafino Aquilano (1466-1500) which was set to music in a book published by Ottaviano Petrucci in 1505.74 It is very unlikely Modena knew these two earlier precedents, as each poem survived solely in a single manuscript. Evidently, they had a limited distribution, and scholars discovered and identified them for the first time only in the past century. The few additional examples of Italian contrafacta I have found, some of which are mentioned below, ostensibly testify that the use of local melodies for piyuṭim was quite rare in Italy. They amount to

71. H. Avenary, “Gentile Songs as a Source of Inspiration for Israel Najara”, in id., Encounters of East and West in Music: Selected Writings, Tel Aviv, 1979, p. 186-190; T. Be’eri, “Music and Poetic Structure in XVI-XVII c. Oriental Piyyut”, in U. Haxen, H. Trautner-Kromann, K. Goldschmidt Salamon (eds), Jewish Studies in a New Europe: Proceedings of the Fifth Congress of Jewish Studies in Copenhagen 1994, Copenhagen, 1998, p. 75-81; “Hebrew Mystic Poetry and Its Turkish Background”, p. 16-18 (“From Sound to Text”). 72. D. Almagor, “Poesia profana e poesia sacra nel Rinascimento italiano: un esempio ebraico”, Rassegna Mensile di Israel, 60 (1994), p. 87-107. For an English translation of the lovely secular Herew lyric, see T. Carmi (transl. and ed.), The Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse, Harmondsworth-New York, 1981, p. 441-443. The original Italian text for Galantina Moros- ina seemingly did not survive. 73. For studies on this poet, see D. Almagor, “Yoseph ben Shemuel Zarfati: An Anno- tated Bibliography” (Hebrew), Italia, 12 (1996), p. 53-113. Zarfati was the first to introduce the poetic form of ottava rima in Hebrew, influenced by the literary fashion of lyric octaves prevalent in Florence, where he resided for several years; A. Rathaus, “Per una classificazi- one delle ottave di Josef Zarfatti” (Hebrew), Italia, 8 (1989), p. 75-86. 74. Rathaus identified the original Italian (ibid., p. 80, n. 18). For an English translation of Zarfati’s octave, see Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse, p. 454. The poem has recently been discussed with regard to its possible musical performance in A. Gosfield, “‘I Sing it to an Italian Tune…’: Thoughts on Performing Sixteenth-Century Italian-Jewish Sung Poetry Today”, European Journal of Jewish Studies, 8 (2014), p. 9-52, esp. p. 40-42. AN ITALIAN TUNE IN THE SYNAGOGUE 409 insular, non-sequential instances, with no established and lasting tradition to speak of, comparable to that of the contemporary Sephardic counterpart.75 To these finds we must also add two contemporary references, from Mod- ena’s own close circle, treating the practice of contrafacta in the liturgical sphere in an unfavorable manner. Though relatively short, they are significant to us, as they clearly represent a view opposite to Modena’s, which was current among the Italian Jewish intellectual elite — an elite that otherwise was no stranger to the art music of its surroundings.76 Ben-Zion Zarfati was one of the five Venetian rabbis approached by Modena in the summer of 1605, following the polarizing performance at the synagogue in Ferrara, to add his approbation to the author’s responsum on the performing of art music in the synagogue.77 While he commended Mod- ena for the ruling, most of his approbation relates to a recollection from his youth. He describes an incident where the seemingly clear-cut partition, separating Christian “exterior” from a supposedly uninfluenced Jewish “interior”, was broken — giving way to sounds unfamiliar in the synagogue:78 I remember, in the days of my youth, when I diligently entered the doors of Tora in the Holy Congregation of Padua — a city full of scholars at that time, headed, as their king, by the great sage, my lord, teacher and master, his honored eminence the rabbi Rabbi Meir79 […] we used to sing in the synagogue the whole order of the Qeduša, many times at his request. Certainly, it was not inferior, but rather preferable to those who inflict their voices upon us in common songs sounded outdoors and on the streets.

This comment has been studied by Israel Adler, who dated the incident to around 1555-1565.80 Although Adler was wary of characterizing the

75. For the adaptation of German tunes in the singing of Yiddish songs across the Alps, in contemporary Ashkenazi culture, see D. Matut, Dichtung und Musik im frühneuzeitlichen Aschkenas, Leiden-Boston, 2011, vol. 2, p. 39-61. 76. Apart from the studies by Harrán already mentioned, in particular his posthumous “Jewish Art Music…”, see the references also in “Rise of Art Music in the Italian Ghetto”; and recently D. Jütte, “The Place of Music in Early Modern Italian Jewish Culture”, in R. Davies (ed.), Musical Exodus: Al-Andalus and Its Jewish Diasporas, London, 2015, p. 45-61. 77. Two letter by Modena to Zarfati on this matter have survived; see Letters of Rabbi Leon Modena, no. 65, p. 111-112 (appealing for the approbation); no. 66, p. 112 (following it; dated August 21, 1605). 78. Songs of Solomon, fol. 6a; translation follows (with minor changes) Complete Works, זוכרני בימי חרפי, בהיותי שוקד על דלתי התורה בק"ק פאדוואה, עיר ש כֻ ל ה :vol. 13a, p. 212-213 סופרים בעת ההיא, ומלכם בראשם הגאון אמ"ו כמהרר"ם, שוררנו בבית הכנסת כל סדר הקדושה ופעמים לבקשתו, דודאי לא גרע ועדיף מהני, שנתנו עלינו בקולם משירי הדיוטות המרננים בחוצות וברחובות. 79. Rabbi Meir Katzenellenbogen (d. 1565) — a prominent Ashkenazi rabbi of German descent who was the head of the yešibha of Padua. 80. “Rise of Art Music in the Italian Ghetto”, p. 335-336. 410 AN ITALIAN TUNE IN THE SYNAGOGUE

performance unequivocally as polyphonic, it seems quite clear that the singing of the Qeduša prayer involved some sort of adaption of tunes from the Italian sphere in general, and secular songs in particular.81 Be that as it may, the fact that Zarfati had to delve deep in his memory to cull an anecdote from several decades earlier, hints that this performance was an unusual — perhaps unfavorable — occurrence. As far we can tell, it found no further continuance.82 The second critical comment on the subject is more extensive; it was included in the treatise ῾Arugat ha-Bośem (“The Bed of Spices”), published three years earlier by the Paduan rabbi Samuel ben Elḥanan Archevolti (ca. 1530-1611).83 Apart from his rabbinical post, Archevolti was also a gram- marian, tutor, and poet, and he was perhaps the most influential intellectual presence in the life of the young Modena. The ten-year-old precocious boy was sent in the spring of 1581 to Padua, where he spent the following year studying with the tutor at his house. As he would later record warmly, Archevolti initiated his literary education: “from him I learned the art of poetry and the language of letter writing. He loved me dearly from then until the day of his death, for he used to say that I was one of the students to whom he had given birth in his own image and likeness in wisdom”.84 Establishing himself as a young man, Modena kept corresponding with his

81. The phrase “common songs” translates literally as “songs of the laymen” (hedyoṭot). Harrán treats this remark similarly: “Though the tunes were probably ‘measured’, they seem to have been monophonic, no to speak of their use as sacred contrafacta” (Salamone Rossi, Jewish Musician in Late Renaissance Mantua, p. 206). It is tempting to link Zarfati’s stipula- tion of the streets with the documented presence of street singers crowding the piazzas of the Italian cities during the sixteenth century. On this, see for example R. Salzberg and M. Rospocher, “Street Singers in Italian Renaissance Urban Culture and Communication”, Cultural and Social History, 9 (2012), p. 9-26. 82. Zarfati’s text thus provides a further possible proof that Modena wrote the piyuṭ on an occasion other than his stay in Ferrara. Had he known of Modena’s adaption of Vecchi’s melody — a Gentile “common song” — Zarfati most probably would not have given his approbation in support of the responsum. 83. Samuel Archevolti, ῾Arugat ha-Bośem [The Bed of Spices] (Hebrew), Venice, 1602. Harránʼs recent articles, on two of his poems with musical links, provide a good introduction for this author: D. Harrán, “Keḥi Kinnor by Samuel Archivolti [sic] (d. 1611): A Wedding Ode with Hidden Messages”, AJS Review, 35 (2011), p. 253-291; id., “An Early Modern Hebrew Poem on Music in Its Beginnings and at the End of Time”, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 64 (2011), p. 3-50. 84. Leon Modenaʼs Life of Judah, p. 86. See the many parallels in the intellectual and rabbinic activities of the two men, listed by Adelman in Success and Failure, p. 213-215. Considering Modena’s telling comment, a comparative literary study of the two poets might prove fruitful for our understanding of the role poetry played in Jewish intellectual circles of early modern Italy. However, this will first require establishing a reliable and comprehensive edition of Archevolti’s corpus, whose poems are scattered in various manuscript and rare prints. AN ITALIAN TUNE IN THE SYNAGOGUE 411 aged mentor on various matters. All of his extant letters to Archevolti are written with the utmost respect and self-deprecation.85 When Archevolti died in 1611, Modena eulogized him in an elegy praising his various virtues which were now lost to the world.86 Archevolti’s ῾Arugat ha-Bośem is primarily a grammatical treatise. Typi- cal of Hebrew works of its kind, it also includes a short segment at the end, dedicated to the writing of verse; its thirty-first chapter is so titled: “Wherein the desired poem shall be explained”.87 Contrary to the heading, however, the chapter is almost entirely devoted to the undesirable effects of a contemporary popular trend plaguing the synagogues, much to the dismay of the author. As Archevolti borrows heavily from Yehuda ha-Levi’s philosophical polemic the Kuzari all through the chapter, he bewails the misfortune of his age:88 We have sinned, committed iniquity and transgressed,89 for bringing the rival90 of the Hebrew tongue into Her abode, and setting Her according to the meters of profane songs of the populace — that is: making use of their popular tunes. For it may be that during his time [i.e., the days of Yehuda ha-Levi] these signs of uncleanness91 [first] appeared, to introduce into the prayer books hymns founded on those melodies. And this great error had ultimately become so prevalent, that the printers — their sin the sin of Sodom!92 — said: on a piyuṭ beginning with Šir toda l-Elohim tena [“Give unto God a Song of Thanksgi- ving”] — Sing to the tune of En toda la tramontaña; and of another piyuṭ they wrote: To the tune of El vaquero de Moraña, and others in the same manner,

85. Letters of Rabbi Leon Modena, no. 5, 14, 17, 37, 81, 92, p. 47-49, 57, 59, 81-82, 127- 128, 139, respectively. Since one of the letters explicitly mentions ῾Arugat ha-Bośem (no. 81), it is safe to assume Modena was well aware of his mentor’s view to be quoted below. 86. Collected Poems of Leon Modena, no. 205, p. 209-210. 87. ῾Arugat ha-Bośem, fol. 109b-110b (reprinted in I. Adler, Hebrew Writings concerning Music: In Manuscripts and Printed Books from Geonic Times up to 1800, RISM B, 9, Munich, 1975, p. 96-102). Regrettably, this chapter has not yet been fully translated to English; for a partial translation, see A. Berlin, Biblical Poetry through Medieval Jewish Eyes, Blooming- ton, 1991, p. 154-158. Archevolti’s views in this chapter deserve further exploration. חטאנו, עוינו, פשענו, להכניס צרתה:(Arugat ha-Bośem, fol. 110a-b (translation mine῾ .88 לביתה אל לשון העברית, להכינה על משקלי שירי חול מההמון, שאין זה אלא להשתמש מניגוניהם ההמ�ו ניים; כי אולי בימיו ]של ר׳ יהודה הלוי[ נגלו סימני טומאה להשים בסידורי התפילות שירים נבנים על הניגונים ההם, ויהי השיבוש הזה הולך ומתפשט, עד שהמדפיסים, חטאתם כסדום, הגידו: ועל פיוט אשר תחילתו ׳שיר תודה לאלקים ּתְ ָ נ ה׳, הזכירו ׳לחן אין טודה לה טראמונטאנייה׳, ועל פיוט אחר כתבו ׳לחן איל באקירו די מוראיינה׳, וכדומה לאלה, ובזה הכניסו פסול בקודש ]...[ וְנַ חנּו, מה נדבר ומה נצטדק על קצת חזני דורינו, שמנגנים התפילות הקדושות בניגוני שירי חול מההמון, ומתוך הדיבור המקודש ייפול בדעתם ניבול פה ודבר ערווה! 89. Following the words uttered by High Priest on the Day of Atonement according to TB, -This phrase was later standardized by Maimo .אנא ה׳, חטאתי עויתי ופשעתי לפניך :Yoma, 41b nides as the appropriate opening for a confession (see his Mišne Tora, Hilkhot Tešubha I). 90. Ṣarata, the term after I Sam. 1:6. 91. Simanei ha-tum᾿a, following Mišna, Nega῾im 7:3, and more. 92. Isa. 3:9. 412 AN ITALIAN TUNE IN THE SYNAGOGUE

thereby putting blemish on what is holy […] and as for us — what can we say, how can we justify93 some cantors in our time, who sing the holy prayers according to the profane and popular tunes, and [by doing so] from the hallowed speech obscenity and profanity enter their mind!

There is no doubt Archevolti’s strong words are a reaction to a wide- spread practice known to his intended readership. Since the specific musical incipit cited is from a popular Spanish coplas, we may safely assume he was addressing the flourishing singing of piyuṭim common at the time in the Sephardic communities of the eastern Mediterranean.94 The author’s lachry- mose remarks betray the prominent presence of Sephardic musical repertoire in early seventeenth-century Italian synagogues, also attested in other sources.95 Although he does not explicitly name him, or indeed quote a poem by him, in writing this strong moralistic criticism Archevolti may have had in mind one figure in particular, already mentioned above: Israel Najara. This is probable considering the immediate context for the publication of ῾Arugat ha-Bośem, namely that Najara’s popular book Zemirot Yiśra’el had been reprinted in a third, extended and definitive edition in Venice in 1599, only three years earlier.96 The notable reference to “obscenity and profanity”, to which the congregants stand at risk of being exposed during the service, is also appropriate to Najara’s poems. The poet was not hesitant about taking popular love tunes of the day as musical models for his composition. Moreo- ver, his own liturgical hymns were heavily charged with erotic undertones, influenced by the sensual language of the Song of Solomon.97 Najara was also similarly criticized by others.98

93. Gen. 44:16. 94. For the identified incipit mentioned by Archevolti, see Incipitario sefardí, no. 255, p. 241-242. 95. Ibid., p. 58-60. Apart from the printing of liturgical codices discussed immediately below, an important manuscript of piyuṭim arranged according to the Turkish musical modes was copied in Venice in 1650 by the cantor David de Silva. 96. Ibid., p. 51. Regarding the fault the author attributes on the part of the printers for the dissemination of the foreign tunes, it should be noted that Archevolti served as a proofreader of Hebrew books published by several printing houses in Venice; to many of these he also attached prefatory verses. 97. “Hebrew Mystical Poetry and Its Turkish Background”, p. 18-20 (“Locutions from the Song of Songs”). 98. See the critical remarks of his contemporary Menaḥem de Lonzano in Šete Yadot [The Two Tenons] (Hebrew), Venice, 1618, fol. 141b-142b, discussed by J. Yahalom, “From the Allegorical to the Mystical: Poetical Polemics as a Reflection of Shifting Aesthetic Sensibili- ties” (Hebrew), in Y. Ben-Arieh, E. Reiner (eds), Studies in the History of Eretz Israel: Presented to Yehudah Ben Porat, Jerusalem, 2003, p. 282-287. Lonzano claimed to have voiced his harsh reservations to Najara in person as well. AN ITALIAN TUNE IN THE SYNAGOGUE 413

Yet, surprisingly, on this very issue an implied difference of opinions emerges between the aged mentor and his former pupil. Not only did Mod- ena not look critically on Najara’s enterprise — we know in fact he fully endorsed it. When the extended third edition of Najara’s book was printed in Venice, a splendid prefatory sonetto caudato was inserted immediately following the title-page, signed in acrostics with the author’s name: Judah Aryeh Modena.99 In the sonnet the poet describes how his heart lay slumber- ing “in the bed of song”, until it was suddenly woken from its sleep by the sound of the dedicatee’s marvelous piyuṭim. Now all congregants may sing them, on any festive occasion or holiday, to exalt and praise their Maker. The sonnet ends with a hyperbolic pun: “Never has there been in Israel a man like Israel [Najara]!”.100 Tellingly, Modena also kept a copy of Naja- ra’s book in his possession until the very end of his life, as proven by the record of “Zimirod Israel” [sic] in the inventory of his estate made by an Italian notary after his death, half a century later.101 Given Modena’s approving attitude to the use of foreign melodies favored in the Sephardic Diaspora, as can be deduced from the evidence presented so far, a puzzling question naturally arises: how do we explain the existence of only a single polyphonic piyuṭ following this practice? Based on the suggested date of composition, I wish to cautiously propose an answer, comprised of two factors of unequal weight in the mind of the poet. First, it is not unlikely that the absence of a local Jewish Italian tradition of contrafacta, as well as the hostile views expressed by his contemporaries, were enough to deter the young Modena from further pursuing this path. This also seems to be true of the Italian Jews in general. Though at the time the Italiani were obviously familiar with contrafacta of tunes popular among their Sephardic coreligionists, and possibly even sang piyuṭim in this manner at the synagogue, they themselves opted predominantly not to make use of Italian melodies in their prayers. Even after Modena we find only fragmen- tary evidence of such practice, with just a handful of examples of Italian contrafacta known from Hebrew poetry in the seventeenth century.102 By

[Israel Najara, Zemirot Yiśra’el [The Songs of Israel ;ישן במזמור שיר :Beginning .99 (Hebrew), Venice, 1599, fol. 2a; reproduced and annotated in D. Bregman (ed.), A Bundle of Gold: Hebrew Sonnets from the Renaissance and the Baroque (Hebrew), Jerusalem-Beersheba, 1997, no. 127, p. 182-183. .The praise follows Deut. 34:10 .לא קם בישראל כישראל .100 101. C. E. Ancona, “L’inventario dei beni appartenenti a Leon da Modena (prima metà del secolo XVII)”, Bolletino dell’istituto di storia dello società e dello stato veneziano, 10 (1967), p. 258-267. 102. Almost all of the later known musical incipits originate in the poetry of Jacob Frances (1615-1667), a Hebrew poet of Portuguese descent active in Mantua and Florence, who in his 414 AN ITALIAN TUNE IN THE SYNAGOGUE comparison, in the Sephardic Diaspora and the Jewish communities of the Arab world this practice endured, enjoying popularity through the centuries up to the present.103 Second, it seems that in discussing Modena’s piyuṭ, we ought to distin- guish between two corresponding but not identical aspects — the melody composed by a Gentile composer on the one hand, and on the other the musical features employed by him, namely art music and in particular polyphony. While Modena did not oppose the use of the former, it is obvious he was far more preoccupied with the latter.104 His notions on the subject therefore require further elaboration. Following the myth prevalent in various forms from Late Antiquity, that all sciences have their origin in the ancient Hebrews, Renaissance Jewish scholars perceived contemporary “science of music” as the very image of the music used by the Levites in their divine office at the ancient Hebrew Temple. This wisdom, they believed, had passed on to the Gentiles, but had been forgotten by the people of Israel due to the harsh conditions of their Exile. One of the first to have elaborated on this seems to have been the biblical commentator and renowned poet, Immanuel of Rome (d. ca. 1328). In his commentary to Proverbs 26:13, he named the “science of music” (ḥokhmat ha-nigun) as one of the arts formerly in the possession of the Hebrews, used by great poets such as Assaph and Jeduthun mentioned in Psalms, which were now completely lost to them.105 Elsewhere, he also wittily summarized the idea in the short epigram: “What does the science final years made many enemies in his community for his fierce opposition of the Sabbatean movement; for the poems with Italian incipits, see P. Navè (ed.), The Complete Poems of Jacob Frances (Hebrew), Jerusalem, 1969, p. 181-184, 229, 500-505. I have succeeded in identifying one of these incipits, and hope to elaborate on it elsewhere. 103. For a later justification of the practice, with regard to a Sephardic synagogue in nineteenth-century Vienna, see E. Seroussi, “A Hasidic Exemplum in a Judeo-Spanish Hom- ily from the Early Nineteenth-Century: A New Source on ‘Secular’ Music in Synagogal Singing” (Hebrew), Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Folklore, 11-12 (1990), p. 121-138. The subject of singing liturgical hymns according to Arab melodies was addressed in the nineteen- seventies in an elaborate responsum by the greatest rabbinical authority of the past century, Rabbi ῾Obadia Yosef (1920-2013); see his collection of responsa, Sepher še᾿elot u-tešubhot yeḥawe da῾at (Hebrew), Jerusalem, 1978, vol. 2, no. 5, p. 24-28. M. Rosenfeld-Hadad, “‘There on the Poplars [Arabs] We Hung Up [Rely On] Our Lyres [Jewish Music]’: Rabbi ꜤOvadyah Yosef’s Halakhic Rulings on Arabic Music”, in J. Meri (ed.), Jewish-Muslim Rela- tions in Past and Present, Leiden-Boston, 2017, p. 172-205. 104. This feature, as should again be emphasized, was unlike traditional singing of piyuṭim, as well as those whose music was adapted from foreign sources, which were all monophonic. 105. Book of Proverbs with the Commentary of Immanuel of Rome (Hebrew), Naples, ca. 1487 (photoprint: Jerusalem, 1981), p. 167. A. Melamed, The Myth of the Jewish Origins of Science and Philosophy (Hebrew), Jerusalem, 2010, p. 226-229, characterized Immanuel’s notion as a “radical” expression of the myth of Jewish origins of sciences, typical of the Renaissance. AN ITALIAN TUNE IN THE SYNAGOGUE 415 of music say to others? / Indeed, I was stolen out of the land of the Hebrews”.106 Following Immanuel, this notion of the lost Hebrew science of music permeated discussions dealing with the music of the Temple.107 That Modena held this notion is evidently clear already in his first responsum on the performance of art music from 1605. Pleading the case for the legitimacy of its (re)introduction to the synagogue, he argued not only on aesthetic and religious grounds — that a prayer eloquently sung is preferable for praising the Almighty — but also with the panging sense of lost national pride: “Will we, who [in the Temple] were masters of music in our prayers and our praises, now become a laughingstock to the nations, for them to say that no longer is science in our midst?”.108 In his preface to Rossi’s Songs of Solomon, written almost two decades later in 1623, he reiterated the claim that the ancient Hebrews excelled in art music comparable to that of seventeenth-century Italy.109 Modena opens by quoting Immanuel’s epigram ver- batim, and follows in depicting the old king David composing his psalms and the Levites singing in the Temple, until the fall of Jerusalem and the Exile, whose travails made the Jews forget their art: “when they were in a land not their own, the wisdom of their sages disappeared”. Still, all hope is not yet lost, for “their ears picked up a trace of it afterwards from their neighbors, as the remnant of the city [Jerusalem] in these generations at the end of time”.110 The adult Modena therefore perceived art music, practiced by his Chris- tian contemporaries, as a distinctly Hebrew element — one which sadly was no longer in the possession of its original owners. Now, however, a change would come. As entailed from this basic premise, it seems the adaptation of foreign polyphonic compositions, to sing Italian contrafacta in the synagogue, would simply not suffice, if one were to truly return what was “stolen out of the land of the Hebrews” to Jewish audiences. Instead, the

-after Gen. 40:15. Imma ;מה תאמר חכמת הנגון אל האחרים? / גֻ ֹנ ב גֻ נבתי מארץ העברים .106 nuel’s phrasing follows his self-proclaimed source of inspiration, Yehuda Alḥarizi (1165- 1225), in his introduction to his volume of original maqāmāt, Sepher Taḥkemoni; see D. S. Segal (trans.), The Book of Tahkemoni, London-Portland, 2001, p. 14. 107. See Harrán’s discussion on this aspect in Abraham Portaleone’s scientific treatise, Šilṭe Giborim (1612); D. Harrán, “In Search of the ‘Song of Zion’: Abraham Portaleone on Music in the Ancient Temple”, European Journal of Jewish Studies, 4 (2010), p. 215-239. 108. Songs of Solomon, fol. 5a; translation by Harrán, Three Early Modern Hebrew ואנו אשר היינו בעלי המוסיק"א בתפלותינו והודאותינו עתה נהיה לבוז אל העמי׳]ם[ :Scholars, p. 170 Modena notably uses the Latin word musica and not its many .אשר יאמרו כי אין אתנו עוד חכמה partial Hebrew equivalents, suggesting he was referring specifically to art music. 109. Songs of Solomon, fol. 3a-b; translation in Complete Works, 13a, p. 175-186. בהיות׳]ם[ בארץ לא להם אבדם מחכמת חכמיו, ותקח אזנם שמץ ממנה אחרי כן:Ibid., p. 176 .110 .מזולתם, שריד מעיר בדורות אלה באחרית הימים 416 AN ITALIAN TUNE IN THE SYNAGOGUE obvious solution would be to take art music — and following the rationale of the Jewish Italian thinkers, actually: reclaim it and restore it to its right- ful owners — and use it to compose original Hebrew works for the singing at the synagogue. Not coincidently, this is precisely what we read Modena does later on — beginning as a young man in his thirties performing Hebrew hymns with fellow singers in Ferrara, and eventually in the instrumental part he played in the publication of Salamone Rossi’s works.

Although Modena’s piyuṭ to Vecchi’s melody apparently remained a neglected possibility, and received no resonance at the time, it provides us with a rare and tangible glance at the soundscape of the Jews of Italy in the age before Salamone Rossi. As this period is known almost entirely from written testimonies, which by necessity remain mute to us, this evidence is even rarer. Moreover, it marks an important milestone in our understanding of Modena’s evolving thought concerning art music, revealing his affinity for it at a young age, as well as his ardent desire to introduce it as legitimate where it has not been played before — the synagogue. This affinity would go on and mature in other and more substantial paths, culminating in the publication of Songs of Solomon, the first printed collection of polyphonic Hebrew compositions.

Kedem Golden [email protected] AN ITALIAN TUNE IN THE SYNAGOGUE 417

Appendix: Leon Modena’s piyuṭ Yošebh marom ḥazaq

Printed below is a vocalized edition of Modena’s piyuṭ set to Orazio Vec- chi’s four-voice canzonetta, both in the original Hebrew and in an English translation and annotation. In preparing it I have consulted the microfilmed copy of Modena’s manuscript, found in the Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts at the National Library in Jerusalem (F 19971). The few textual variants differing from Bernstein’s reading were also noted.

Source: Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ms. Mich. 528 (Neubauer 2157/4), fol. 43r, no. 232. Edition: S. Bernstein (ed.), The Divan of Leo de Modena: Collection of His [ב] Hebrew Poetical Works, Philadelphia, 1932, no. 192, p. 200-201 Structure: Five strophes, each comprised of two long verses of eleven syllables, (endecasillabo piano), followed by three shorter rhymed verses, one of seven syllables (settenario piano) and two of five syllables, all verses stressed on the penultimate syllable.

לחן טר"ה וירד"י די קמפ"י אל"ה סטאגיו"ן נוויל"ה לשיר ולזמר

ֹוׁשֵ בי מָ רֹום חָ זָ קוְאַּמִ יץ ּכו חַ רַ חּום וְחֹונֵ ן ּדַ לוְרַ במֹוׁשִ י עַ – דעַ ןאָ רָׁשָ ע יַצְלִ י חַ ְ ו ל ֹא תָ פִ י חַ 5 רצֹורֵ מַקְׁשִ י חַ ?

הַ ּמִתְּגָאֶהעַ ל לּכָ חַ ּיֹות הַ ּקֹדֶ ׁש טֹוב ּומֵטִ יב, לּומֹוחֵ וְסֹולֵ חַ רְ אֵ ה-נָ אוְהַׁשְ ּגִי חַ ּכִ י רַ ע מֵדִ י חַ 10 עַ ּמְ ָך ַ י ְ ב רִ י חַ .

וְ אַּתְּגִ ּבֹור ּפֹוקֵ ד ׁשְ אֹון קָמֶ יָך לְׁשַ וְעַ תאֶבְ יֹונִים אֹוזֶ ןׁשֹומֵ עַ הֵ ן עֵ ת אֲׁשֶ רּתַרְּתִ י חַ אַ ף, וְ ּתֹוכִ י חַ 15 ד מֹורֵ מָׁשִ י חַ . 418 AN ITALIAN TUNE IN THE SYNAGOGUE

ָןהִ יןּד יָׁשָ רמִׁשְּפָ טּבַ ּמֹאזְנַיִם מַּטֶ הּכְלַּפֵ י חֵןּגְדֹול הַחֶסֶ ד ּתָ רִ י עַ ְ ו תַ ְ צ רִ י חַ אֲ רִ י תַ ְ ב רִ י חַ 20 וְעַם יָנִי חַ .

הַ רּמְאַחֵ נֹוקֵ ם וְנֹוטֵ רסֹוף סֹוף נָא נֶאְמָ ןּבְדִ ּבּור אֲׁשֶ ר יַבְטִ י חַ יֹום היְׁשּועָ ּתַ פְרִ י חַ לּגֹואֵ ּתַ צְמִ י חַ 25 הָ א בֵ מָ ׁשִ י חַ .

2 וחונן[ ב: וחנון. 9 מדיח[ ב: מריח. 14 ותוכיח[ ב: תוכיח. 18 ותצריח[ בכתב היד: האות צ’ מטושטשת, ודומה ל-ב’.

To the Tune of Trà verdi campi a la stagion novella, for Singing and Chanting

Dweller on High, strong in power, O merciful one, who pities those in need, great in rescuing – How long will the wicked triumph and You not ensnare 5 the heart-hardened adversary?

O You exalted by all the celestial beings, the good and benevolent, who forgives and absolves – Look down and see: an evil inciter 10 frightens Your people.

And You, O Mighty One, who punishes the masses of your enemies whose ear listens to the cry of the poor – surely the time has come for You to show Your wrath, and admonish 15 those who rebel against the Messiah. AN ITALIAN TUNE IN THE SYNAGOGUE 419

Who judges in the balance according to a just measure, who inclines the scales to charity, and is full of grace, Cry out and shout chase away the Lion 20 to leave Your people in peace.

Though You are late, at last You will rage and take vengeance, I pray, be true to Your words of promise – cause the Day of Rescue to flourish make the Savior sprout 25 bring the Messiah.

1 Dweller on high: God Almighty; after Isa. 33:5, and many more. Strong in power: Job 9:4; Isa. 40:26. 2 Who pities those in need: Prov. 19:17. Great in rescuing: Isa. 19:20. 3 How long… wicked triumph: after Jer. 12:1, and Ps. 94:3. 4-5 You not ensnare… the… adversary: after Ps. 10:5; see Qimḥi’s commentary loc. cit., and on Isa. 42:22. 6 Exalted by… celestial beings: an epithet for God in his splendor, following the ancient piyuṭ, El adon ῾al kol ha-ma῾aśim: ha-mitga᾿e ῾al ḥayot ha-qodeš. 7 Good and benevolent: after Ps. 119:68. Who forgives and absolves: the phrase recurs many times in the prayers of the Day of Atonement. 9 Evil inciter: the enemy of Israel; the phrase follows II Sam. 15:14. 11 punishes: for their past transgressions against Israel; after Jer. 23:2. Masses of your enemies: Ps. 74:23. 12 Whose ear listens…: after Ps. 69:34, and Nišmat kol ḥai: “You hear the outcry of the poor”. 15 Those who rebel against the Messiah: in this phrase, mored mašiaḥ, Modena might be referring specifically to the Christian nations, who by embracing Christ as the savior deny the future salvation foretold by the prophets. Compare the following argument in author’s later treatise Magen wa-Ḥerebh (“Shield and Sword”), an antichristian polemic written in old age: “Since the days of yore and until this very day, the Christians thought the difference between them and the Jews being that the Jews await the Messiah, destined by the prophets to come, while they say he had already come. And they perceive it so, that should they but force the Jews to acknowledge he had already come, they will also acknowledge that Christ was in fact the Messiah […] their belief in the coming of the Messiah is the main principle on which their entire faith rests, and should it fall the very foun- dations of their doctrine would crumple — yea, it itself would fall”.111 16 Who judges…: Unvocalized in the original Hebrew, and seemingly made of only ten syllables, this verse presents several possible interpretations; I opted to read it as Dan hin yašar, mišpaṭ ba-mozenayim, treating the shewa in the final word as a

111. Sh. Simonsohn (ed.), Clipeus et Gladius: Leonis Mutinensis Tractatus Antichris- מאז מקדם ועד היום חשבו הנוצרים, :(tianus (Hebrew), Jerusalem, 1960, p. 64 (translation mine שההבדל וההפרש שבין היהודים ובינם הוא היות היהודים מצפים למשיח המיועד מהנביאים שעדיין ב ֹא י ב ֹא, והם אומרים שכבר בא. ובמדומה להם, שאם יכריחו היהודי להודות שכבר בא, יודו ג״כ שהנוצרי היה המשיח ]...[ אמונת ביאת המשיח להם הוא עיקר ראשיי ויתד שכל אמונתם תלויה בו, ואם יפול יתמוטטו .כל יסודי דתם, ותפול בכלל 420 AN ITALIAN TUNE IN THE SYNAGOGUE shewa mobile, which Italian Jews pronounced as a full syllable. Judges in the balance: after Prov. 16:11. Just measure: in the original Hebrew, hin, after Lev. 19:36. 17 Who inclines the scales to charity: after TB, Rosh ha-Shana, 17a: “He that abounds in grace (Ex. 34:6) inclines [the scales] to grace”. The poet uses ḥen (translated in this context, liberally, as “charity”) as a synonym for ḥesed; see their pairing together in Est. 2:18. 18 Cry out and shout: Isa. 42:13. 19 Chase away the Lion: the lion referred to here is obviously the enemy of Israel. The Hebrew wording is a pun on the discussion in TB, Babha Qamma, 58a: “One chases away a lion from his friend’s possessions” (mabhriaḥ ari mi-nikhsei ḥabhero). 21 Though You are late: in bringing Your vengeance upon the Gentiles; after Deut 7:10, and the discussion which follows it in TB, ‘Erubhin, 22a: “Rabbi Ila explained: ‘He [God] will not be late to those that hate Him’ (Deut 7:10) — but He will be late to those who are just in all respects”. You will rage and take vengeance: after Nah. 1:2. 22 Be true to Your words of promise: for the future salvation of Israel. The wording follows the first blessing recited after the haphṭara: “Faithful are You Lord our God, and faithful are Your words… blessed are You Lord, the God who is faithful in all His words”. 24 Make the Savior sprout: after the fifteenth benediction in the ῾Amida prayer: “Speedily cause the scion of David Your servant to flourish, and increase his power by Your salvation… Blessed are You Lord, who causes the power of salvation to flourish”.