FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN: IDENTIFYING ANGLICANISM IN AN ANGLO-JEWISH HYMNAL

In 1899, Francis L. Cohen and David M. Davis published Kol Rinnah U’Tefillah: The Voice of Prayer and Praise . This pioneering ‘Handbook of Synagogue Music for Congregational Singing’ standardized the body of liturgical music used in Anglo-Jewish worship to this day. Early references to the volume as a ‘hymnal’ highlight parallels with Anglican music publications of the period, notably Hymns, Ancient and Modern (1861), the unofficial hymn-book of the Church of England

power were hugely influenced by the practices of the Established Church. In his examination of the Victorian Anglo-Jewish elite, Todd M. Endelman analogizes the Jewish social hierarchy in relation to the 'ins and outs' within British Christian society: Well-to-do Jews, as members of a minority group eager to secure social acceptance, took their cues from respectable society, especially Anglican upper-middle-class society … Religious observance being a necessary part of respectability, they adhered to the established conventions of the faith in which they had been raised… . The United Synagogue and the Chief Rabbinate enjoyed the support of Jewish City men because they could lay claim to being the Jewish equivalents of the Church of England and the archbishop of Canterbury. 5 The Voice of Prayer and Praise was a product of the United Synagogue, an umbrella body established in 1870 to provide unity among the principal Ashkenazi Orthodox synagogues in London, whose membership predominantly comprised Jews whose families had settled in England multiple generations previously, largely from Central Europe. Culturally, they were assimilated to English ways, and their worship had developed over the previous half-century to reflect their dual national and religious identity. The arrival of The Voice of Prayer and Praise at the end of the century also coincided with the peak of mass immigration of poverty-stricken Jews from Eastern Europe, which took the Jewish population of England from approximately 35,000 in 1850 to about 140,000, changing the cultural, financial, and religious face of Anglo-Jewry. At this point, antialien and overtly anti-Judaic sentiments inspired further desires within established Jewish communities to reinforce their identity as 'British Jews'. 6 Indeed, in existing scholarship, The Voice of Prayer and Praise has been explored as part of a Jewish musical canon through which to evidence the assimilation and anglicization for which Victorian Anglo-Jewry is best known, as well as-predominantly-to identify melodies and repertory shared across geographically and ideologically disparate branches of Judaism. 7 To date, such work has been firmly focused around a small body of Anglo-Jewish music publications; this article expands upon former studies by placing Anglo-Jewish collections within the wider context of contemporary Anglican music publications, an obvious next step in evaluating the role of music for the process of Anglo-Jewish assimilation.
Given the comparison between the United Synagogue as an authoritative body within Judaism and the Church of England within Anglicanism, both representative of tradition, conformity, and decorum, it would be perhaps more surprising to find no similarities between music collections compiled for their respective communities. However, direct studies to support notions of musical or ideological similarity between such collections are rare. Perhaps remarkably, Anglo-Jewish liturgical music has not generally been explored within the context of Victorian religious music more broadly, nor is it often discussed beyond the realms of Jewish studies or Jewish music scholarship. The primary aim of this article is therefore simple: to introduce to British musicology The Voice of Prayer and Praise-and one or two related collections of Jewish musical repertory-as important sources of Victorian liturgical music. From a starting point of exploring the role of the hymnal in both public and domestic worship during this period, I then trace the journeys of Hymns Ancient and Modern and The Voice of Prayer and Praise in relation to two other prominent volumes published in the mid-nineteenth century: John Mason Neale and Thomas Helmore's Hymnal Noted (1851) and Emanuel Aguilar and David Aaron De Sola's The Ancient Melodies of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews (1857), publications that sought to revive so-called 'ancient' material within a nineteenth-century context.
While only the tip of the religious iceberg-addressing one each of collections from the Anglo-Catholic, Anglican, Sephardi (Spanish and Portuguese), and Ashkenazi (Central and Eastern European) canon-the relative significance of these works, both to their own communities and to broader Christian and Jewish communities in England in their own time and since, can inform a more detailed understanding of the similarities between these forms of musical liturgy, as well as the differences behind these similarities. As such, the secondary aim of this article is to use these sources to take discussions of nineteenth-century Anglo-Jewish culture beyond themes of anglicization, assessing how they might also support existing scholarship into which the study of hymnody can be placed: Victorian musico-religious ideology, evolution, and historiography.

HYMNALS IN 'ORDINARY LIFE'
In opening his study of Victorian hymnody, J. R. Watson writes: 'The historian who would consider the impact of literature on the culture of the Victorian period would do well to consider Hymns Ancient and Modern, and the neglected field of hymnody in general … the publication figures tell a story of a literary form that penetrated further into ordinary life than any other.' 8 While Watson's focus here is literary, it nonetheless articulates the hymnal's place at the heart of public and private life in a Victorian England revolving around religion. They were not just intended for use in church worship; we are encouraged to 'imagine these books in the homes of Victorian middle-class families, resting on the piano during the week and taken to church or chapel on Sundays'. 9 They brought a sense of morality and religious purpose to domestic music-making, with the choice of hymnal (or hymnals) available within each home revealing much about the religious and political leanings of its residents. For the lower classes especially, they also represented a means of instruction-in theology, history, literature, and music: 'the nearest thing, apart from the Bible, to a repository of knowledge and an awareness of something beautiful'. 10 This vision of the hymnal as a stalwart of home and public life developed slowly across the first half of the nineteenth century. At first treated with suspicion for its Non-Conformist beginnings in the Methodist movement, by mid-century, hymn book sales and advertising had 'reached phenomenal heights', with increasing numbers of clergy insisting on their ownership by every household within their parish. 11 With Methodist, Evangelical, High Church, and Lutheran publications, to name a few, saturating the British religious music market between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, the status of hymnody shifted to a place of acceptance within the Church of England. The notion of precedent-as identified in the prominence of metrical psalmody in Protestant worship from the mid-sixteenth century, and reinforced by the discovery and reintroduction of 'ancient' hymns and chants by those associated with the Tractarian and other High Church movements-was key to asserting the theological and musical place of hymnody within the Anglican Church. 12 While many of these movements promoted plainchant as a means of encouraging congregational participation in services, it was noted by several sacred music apologetics in sermons and religious or music periodicals that the singing of praises to God in any form that inspired 'reverence and solemnity' was of benefit to worship. 13 Simultaneously, the effects of the Choral Revival-begun in earnest in 1839, according to Bernarr Rainbow-encouraged not just the revival of lost musical liturgy, but the creation of new texts, tunes, and settings that showed '[a] willingness to engage with material that reflected the cultural practices of the day'. 14 Discussions of music in church services encompassed a wide range of opinion on topics concerning congregational versus choral services, sung versus spoken liturgy, psalmody and hymnody, chant, and the use of 'unauthorized' music. 15 As the century progressed, this process evolved to incorporate increasing discussions of music scholarship and the purity of ancient sources. 16 Without the rich variety of earlier collections of liturgical music, and their writers, arrangers, and composers who were responding to the changing religious and musical environment of the early to mid-nineteenth century, Hymns Ancient and Modern would not have found its purpose. Out of the 'huge, inchoate mass of material' was the potential for a volume that, as Watson expresses it, paralleled Darwin's theory of Natural Selection, recently brought to prominence in 1859 with his On the Origin of Species, effectively through a musical 'survival of the fittest'. 17 The success of Hymns Ancient and Modern was its modus operandi, as set by John Keble: to be a 'comprehensive' volume that 'includ[ed] the most popular hymns of all shades of opinion'. Thus, through Hymns Ancient and Modern, the Church of England was shown to represent 'a central Anglicanism' that 'face [d] both ways, or at least in many directions', appealing to both high-and low-Church Anglican communities. 18 In fact, Nicholas Temperley has written that the popularity of Hymns Ancient and Modern caused the Church of England to halt preparations for its own, authorized hymnal, becoming the go-to hymn book for nearly 70 per cent of London's churches by the early 1880s. 19 Watson also ascribes significant weight to the 'ancient and modern' of the 1861 hymn book title, 'three words [that] carry a huge subtext, signalling nothing less than a struggle for the soul of the English Church, and even for the English nation itself '. 20 By this period, significant performative and academic consideration had been given to the balance between older and newly composed material, with societies such as the Concert of Ancient Music and the Academy of Ancient Music promoting the performance of a musical 'canon' of repertory composed at least thirty years earlier. In an important series of lectures presented in 1818, the performer and music scholar William Crotch aimed to demonstrate the potential for musical sublimity in modern works, the factor that apparently distinguished more recent compositions from the ancient canon. 21 This balance developed more slowly in the sacred realm of choral works and hymnody grounded in the 'cathedral tradition', due to suspicions surrounding the capacity of modern composers for spirituality, and out of an apprehension that the melodic and harmonic intricacies of new works prioritized music over liturgical text. As demonstrated through the writings of religious and musical leaders around the middle of the century, however, including some closely associated with the Oxford Movement and the Cambridge ecclesiologists, this attitude was slowly overshadowed by the notion that modern works could just as equally inspire 'devotion' as 'diversion'. 22 Chronological range as well as geographical variety (through repertory imported from the Lutheran and Unitarian movements of Germany and the United States of America) therefore contributed to the melting-pot of hymnody that ultimately came to represent a typically Victorian form of worship music, yet which emphasized the often under-represented diversity of nineteenth-century England. 23 A small yet well-established minority at mid-century, the Victorian Anglo-Jewish community was also seeking its own religious and musical identity. The Anglo-Jewish experience was unlike that of Jewish communities across the rest of Europe. While narratives regarding political emancipation and religious reform do share threads with similar experiences for other Jewish communities in, for instance, nineteenth-century Germany, Austria, and France, desires for change were led by the upper and middle classes, resident almost exclusively in London, keen for their daily lives to reflect their status as Englishmen, rather than evolving from fear of enforced assimilation or the removal of civil liberties, as seen in other European cities with a Jewish presence. 24 The breakaway in 1840 of several members from the two principal synagogues in London to form the West London Synagogue of British Jews, the country's first 'Reform' synagogue, is well documented in Anglo-Jewish histories for the animosity it inspired amongst Orthodox congregations, which deemed some of its largely aesthetic reforms to contravene rabbinic law, as well as for its seeming connections with other Reform communities across Europe (although this connection is frequently debated and challenged). 25 However, within British history as outlined briefly above, its presence acknowledges another aspect of nineteenth-century Anglo-Jewish life that is commonly overlooked: namely, that the Anglo-Jewish community was almost as diverse and hybrid in its religious and social make-up and its worship practices as Christian society. While small, it-like the Victorian society in which it resided-had its hierarchies and denominational adversities.
The two main Orthodox synagogues, which were situated within a few minutes' walk from one another near Aldgate in East London, catered for two separate branches of Judaism. The Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, on Bevis Marks, was so named for the origins of its Sephardi congregation, who had arrived in Britain in the mid-seventeenth century. which had arrived at the turn of the eighteenth century from Central and Eastern Europe. The liturgical structures, musical repertory, and Hebrew pronunciation of the two varied from one another; in fact, until the foundation of the United Synagogue, there were few attempts at standardizing prayer books across multiple synagogues, even those within the same geographical or denominational strand of Judaism. On the establishment of the West London Synagogue in 1840 these variations increased, with practices tailored to suit the needs of the 'British Jews' the Synagogue aimed to serve, as indicated in its full title. As will become apparent throughout this article, opinion regarding the authority, superiority, or significance of each of these branches and their practices was strong, and mixed. Furthermore, by placing the Anglo-Jewish community within the framework of a British nation seeking to identify its 'soul', the faith barriers that had divided 'Christian' from 'Jewish' history in Britain started to crumble.
Like its Christian counterparts, the Anglo-Jewish community overall was concerned with preserving and reviving its religious heritage; equally, it was keen to update its worship through practices that reflected the structure and decorum deemed appropriate within the developing Victorian standards of worship. It is perhaps no coincidence that the first synagogue choirs were formed between the late 1830s and early 1840s, around the time of the Choral Revival in the Church of England. On a certain level, it is easy to assume that these musical developments sprung directly from contemporary attempts at reform. Bernarr Rainbow's direct relation of the Choral Revival with the Tractarian, or Oxford Movement, as well as his approach to religious indifference in the Anglican Church, generalizes and underplays a more complex set of circumstances; he depicts the tone of the Anglican Church from the late eighteenth century to the 1830s as 'one of apathy, neglect, and irreverence', including descriptions of churches where the pulpit 'was made a convenient receptacle for the hats, coats, and sticks of the male members of the congregation' or where 'a covered font was used to house scrubbing brushes, mop, and floor-cloths'. 26 Bennett Zon and Dale Adelmann, while also citing sources that credit the lack of spirituality in the Church (particularly in its relation to music) to a general anti-ritualism, suggest that certain aspects of the Choral Revival-notably the adoption of plainchant-were 'probably conceived in the ethos of the Oxford Movement and realised by the Cambridge ecclesiologists'. 27 W. M. Jacob has provided greater context for the religiousness of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, acknowledging a more diverse range of behaviours towards faith, church buildings, and the clergy across the country. 28 Notable too are the intellectual aspects of the Oxford and Cambridge movements, developed by members of the universities in order to reintroduce more Catholic aspects to the Anglican Church. 29 Adelmann suggests that the Cambridge Ecclesiological Society's apologia for choral worship was 'arguably their greatest contribution to the revival of choral service' due to their popularity with the Anglican clergy. 30 By contrast, theological or doctrinal considerations were of less import to the overall aesthetic demands for reform made within the Anglo-Jewish community, owing in 26 Rainbow, The Choral Revival, 7-8. 27  part to the lack of rigorous rabbinical training within England (and the fact that Jewish students were either actively prohibited from, or made to feel unwelcome in, Oxford and Cambridge, whence stemmed the two foremost intellectual religious movements). 31 Furthermore, the mainstream Jewish press was not fully formed until after the earliest days of the West London Synagogue, when the Voice of Jacob and the Jewish Chronicle (which later merged) were established in 1841. Thus, reports of synagogue practice from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are largely found in (patchy) archives from individual institutions, or in personal correspondence. Rainbow's images of religious apathy do, however, mirror similar accounts of the principal synagogues from the same period and into the 1840s, which describe how discussions of 'the fluctuation of the markets and the advancement or fall of stocks' were prioritized by the congregation over worship, and how the Sanctuary was converted into a 'sales room' for the auctioning of blessings (mitzvot) during the service. 32 Significantly, a majority of British-born Jews lacked sufficient knowledge of Hebrew to follow lengthy services, often chanted elaborately by the cantor; as such, extant worship practices alienated both many synagogue seat-holders as well as non-Jewish visitors. Worship descended into chaos as those able to join in did so in 'heterophony' with the service leaders, while those less engaged with the liturgy chatted to their neighbours. 33 The foundation of the West London Synagogue followed certain demands for improvements to decorum that were routinely overlooked, as well as desires for a synagogue closer to where those seeking a more orderly service-some of the middle-and upper-class congregants of Bevis Marks and the Great Synagogue now resided in the West End. It has been associated with a major upheaval in synagogue practice, particularly in the light of the reaction it received from more Orthodox congregations, although in reality a shift towards a more anglicized service had been (slowly) under way since the late eighteenth century and certainly by the 1820s. A number of its aesthetic amendments were ultimately taken up by many Orthodox synagogues, where they were deemed acceptable within Jewish law by Chief Rabbi Nathan Marcus Adler (1803-90), who was elected to the role in 1845. 34 Unlike the Archbishop of Canterbury's status within the Church of England, the position of the Chief Rabbi as the authority figure within Orthodox Anglo-Jewry had far more cultural than religious implications. In effect, Chief Rabbi Adler single-handedly staved off any intellectual developments in Anglo-Judaism, preventing ministers trained outside the country from taking the title 'Rabbi' and refusing to establish an English Beth Din (rabbinical court) of religious leaders with whom to exchange theological ideas or religious concerns. His leadership can be summarized as a period of increasing anglicization in British Orthodox synagogues, in part to avoid further defections to Reform. Under his autonomy ministers, readers, and choristers regularly began to wear canonicals, sermons were encouraged to be in English (rather than Hebrew, Yiddish, or Ladino), and organized choirs became an obligatory feature of worship. Jewish immigrants viewed Adler and his successor, his son Hermann Adler (1839-1911), as lax religious leaders 'who explicitly cultivated the appearance of a Christian cleric'. To a degree, then, the foundation of the West London Synagogue has parallels with the Oxford Movement, despite obvious theological and spiritual differences. Both small communities that experienced adversity from more mainstream branches of their respective faiths, a number of their measures ultimately acted as catalysts for more widespread changes to worship, notably within music practices. Incidentally, for over twenty years the West London Synagogue and the principal Tractarian Church in London, All Saints', were situated a few doors away from one another in Margaret Street. Alongside criticisms of its (largely aesthetic) amendments to synagogue worship, the musical activities of the West London Synagogue inspired some particularly vituperative responses to the use of the organ or of female voices-elements considered inappropriate in regular worship under Talmudic law (although, in many cases, this came down to taste and existing bitterness between the Reform and Orthodox communities). In fact, from its inception in 1841, some of the most frequently expressed opinions in the Jewish Chronicle concerned music in all its forms; by the 1870s and 1880s, it was replete with editorials, opinion pieces, and correspondence expressing multiple points of view on the subject: repertory, performance standards, the role of choir versus congregation, the teaching (or lack) of decent music education in Jewish schools affecting the capabilities and interest of young choristers, and so on. 36 The use of the female voice was particularly contentious, owing not only to its grounding in the Talmudic law of kol isha (which stipulated that a woman's voice should not be heard by men outside her immediate family, especially in worship), but also in the light of general Victorian concerns for female modesty and ongoing discussions of the role of women in congregational worship. 37 One Jewish Chronicle editorial made the remarkable comment that the Ladies' Gallery, a women-only space situated apart from the main body of the sanctuary, did not itself 'form part of what is understood to be a "congregation".' 38 As such, the West London Synagogue's mixed choir was unpopular with a significant portion of the Anglo-Jewish community on both musical and religious grounds, despite arguments that it vastly improved the quality of choral singing during services.
Notwithstanding attempts to unify practices across certain synagogues, particularly following the establishment of the United Synagogue in 1870, musical and financial capabilities varied widely from one synagogue community to another. The adoption of a choir, which Adler aimed to introduce within all Orthodox synagogues, was therefore inconsistent across the country, dependent on the forces available, the abilities of the singers and choirmasters, and the musical tastes and customs of each congregation. While some preferred the high-quality, professionalized choral sound of, for instance, the West London Synagogue, whose singers were often notable Jewish recitalists or opera singers, others criticized the same on account that the performative atmosphere precluded the congregation from participating fully in the service. Others found the frequent changes of repertory at 'the passing fancy and caprice of the conductor' made it impossible for congregations to join in with singing. 39 In seeking to identify a mode of best practice, regular comparisons were drawn between musical customs in Anglo-Jewish worship and those of the Church of England. There were even significant plans to develop a choir school to train Jewish boy choristers in the performance of synagogue repertory, mirroring those established in cathedrals across the country, although this 36  never came to fruition. 40 It is unsurprising, therefore, that a common request across this period was the publication of an authorized volume of synagogue repertory mirroring similar collections available for church communities, particularly for use in the United Synagogue.
'ANCIENT' MELODIES While the Jewish community in Britain could not claim the number of musical collections produced by the various Christian denominations during the nineteenth century, several synagogue composers, choirmasters, and organists did publish volumes of liturgical music, mostly repertory that they had often introduced (and, in many cases, composed themselves) within their own synagogue choirs and congregations. Some of these will be addressed in what follows; however, one of the best remembered-and studied-of these collections was the first of its kind, and paralleled some of the earliest Anglican hymnals in its scope and purpose.
If Hymns Ancient and Modern can now be considered the 'climax' of nineteenth-century Anglican hymnody, The Ancient Melodies of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews, published just four years earlier, indicated the start of something new for the Anglo-Jewish community. 41 It was compiled by the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue's minister, David Aaron De Sola, with melodies notated and harmonized by the semi-renowned pianist Emanuel Aguilar. A single volume, it divided the music for almost all religious occasions into six categories: Morning Hymns (six melodies); Sabbath Melodies and Hymns (fourteen); Melodies for New Year and Day of Atonement (eleven); Festival Hymns (nine); Elegies for the Ninth Day of Ab (thirteen); and Occasional Hymns (seven). 42 An essay by De Sola on the history of the melodies and their texts preceded the collection, and an appendix containing his composed setting of the Adon Olam text was also included. The melodies themselves were transcribed as De Sola had 'heard them in Amsterdam and in this country'. 43 The originality of The Ancient Melodies within the sphere of Jewish liturgical music was twofold. According to De Sola, it was the first work 'ever published on the subject of the Sephardic Liturgy'; he acknowledged a prior collection published in Paris in 1854, Recueil des chants hebraïques ancien et modern du rit Portugais réunis et composés par Emile Jonas, but claimed that 'a cursory view thereof suffices to satisfy any reader acquainted with the subject, that this work contains much of M. Emile Jonas, but little or nothing "du rit Portugais ancien"'. 44 Another innovation of the volume for the Jewish community was its musical arrangement, with each melody harmonized in three-or four-part accompaniment across treble and bass staves. While a tradition of harmonization had developed in Anglo-Jewish (and wider European) worship practice, this was principally undertaken by meshorrerim, singers apprenticed to a synagogue cantor, and often improvisatory in nature. With this volume, however, the harmonizations aimed to serve a more apposite purpose for an anglicized Jewish community, as will be evaluated in due course. 40  In his essay preceding Aguilar's arrangements, De Sola laid out the three 'principal motives' for producing the volume: (1) to unearth 'interesting specimens' from previous generations unknown to the current community; (2) to avoid further loss of the Sephardi musical heritage 'in the present age of religious indifference'; and (3) to 'assist … public and private devotion among the widely-spread Israelitish nation'. 45 The implication is that despite being the first synagogue in the country to introduce a choir, in 1838, the musical traditions of the Sephardi community were becoming lost within an indecorous and apathetic environment. 46 Aguilar and De Sola were not merely notating melodies regularly performed in the Synagogue for the sake of posterity; they saw their volume as fundamental in avoiding the demise of the Sephardi canon, both in Britain (where, in addition to 'religious indifference', Ashkenazi communities were now outnumbering their own) and abroad.
News of the upcoming publication of The Ancient Melodies was received positively, with expressions of enthusiasm that a volume of Jewish liturgy would 'elevate the choral services of the synagogue'. 47 Elizabeth Polack from Malton, Yorkshire, saw another, more widespread, benefit of the volume. She wrote to the Jewish Chronicle: From the admiration and interest shown by my Christian friends here when I play and sing our ancient Jewish melodies (to which I adapt English words), I am sure such a work would sell well amongst Christians everywhere; and for ourselves, what so right and consistent as that we should humbly imitate the 'sweet Psalmist of Israel', and sing the praises of God, not on the Sabbath only, but in the evening gatherings of every domestic circle? 48 Having previously presented lectures on the 'Ancient Music of the Hebrews' in a community with-one can assume-a relatively small Jewish population, Polack was presumably knowledgeable about the broader interest in 'ancient' melodies as a form of religious, musical, and academic instruction. 49 It is possible that she was also known to the wider Jewish and non-Jewish community as England's first female Jewish playwright, thus potentially having a heightened awareness of the cultural and educational interests of the Victorian public. 50 A growing fascination with 'sources from the past' pervaded musical writing, collecting, and scholarship. In fact, the Jewish Chronicle reported that, in her first lecture, Polack performed examples from 'Lord Byron's "Hebrew Melodies," set to ancient airs', referring to Isaac Nathan's volume of the same title. 51 Nathan's Hebrew Melodies, first published in 1815 and subsequently reprinted and added to until the late 1820s, set Byron's English texts to vocal melodies considered by Nathan to be of ancient Ashkenazi origin, 'all of them upwards of 1000 years old and some of them performed 45 Ibid. 1. 46 It is hard to determine exactly how many synagogues were active during this period, as a number of smaller congregations appeared, disappeared, and merged with one another, often serving the relatively under-represented Jewish working class. In London, only five or six principal institutions served the majority of upper-and middle-class Jews, most of which were Ashkenazi Orthodox. 47 London, c.1827-9). by the Antient [sic] Hebrews before the destruction of the Temple' (a fact he later corrected). 52 Designed as drawing room and concert hall repertory, Nathan never intended his melodies to be performed as part of worship, nor was his collection tailored to the Jewish community. Nathan's procurement of Byron to supply the poetry, and of 'the most famous tenor in England', Jewish (but converted) cantor-turned-opera singer John Braham, to perform the collection, reinforced Hebrew Melodies's position not as a volume of sacred works, but as a collection of 'national melodies', a style that populated early nineteenth-century musical culture. 53 Ruth HaCohen has referred to Nathan's 'pseudohistorical categorization' of his melodies to pre-date Christianity as 'a clear attempt to make the music agreeable and accessible to Christian ears, to redeem it from its "perfidious" sound and the discordant noises long associated with Jewish existence'. 54 Despite mixed reviews, which demonstrated a predictably anti-Jewish bias, the first edition of Hebrew Melodies sold 10,000 copies.
To a certain extent, material related to Jewish liturgy and history had a monopoly on the term 'ancient', a word that-as indicated-had strong resonances within Victorian Britain, associated with authority and purity; it was also a term associated with the Latin language, which, aside from its links with Roman Catholicism, represented tradition and, as 'the language of the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge', intellectualism. 55 The ancientness of Jewish, or specifically Hebrew, musical practices was frequently addressed in music scholarship of the period, although this was often with the ultimate aim of demonstrating the superiority of subsequent Christian customs that built on their Jewish predecessors. Henry Chorley's inclusion of Hebrew music in his National Music of the World (written and presented in 1862) under the subsection 'Music from the East' helped to ensure that Jewish music remained understood as 'Other', as based in biblical fact. 56 This was also in line with the more strongly expressed views of the poet Matthew Arnold, who created a distinction between an accepted Jewish-Christian 'continuity' and a rejected 'racial commonality'. 57 German-born Carl Engel's treatment of the 'evolutionary stasis' of Hebrew music in his 1864 The Music of the Most Ancient Nations focused on musical details from the Bible and ignored 'synagogal (and heathen)' aspects of Jewish musical history in order to defend Christian-and, more broadly, Westernmusical superiority and integrity. 58 Bennett Zon refers to the 'scientific' approach of Engel's work, 'a book designed to explore descent'. 59 Inspired by the growing popularity of Darwin's theories, Engel reinforced the opinions of other contemporary musicians-Zon mentions John Stainer among others-who displayed 'a soft, passive musical anti-Semit[ism]' that enabled them to view ancient Hebrew music as separate from nineteenth-century Jews and Jewish music. 60 (London, 1870). 59 Zon, 'Anti-Semitism and Hebrew Music', 2. 60 Ibid. 14.
of ingrained anti-Semitism that pervaded Victorian Britain meant that, as Nathan identified and attempted to correct, Jewish music under any guise would retain its vulgarity and noise, even when immersed within a cultural style familiar to and popular with Victorian society as a whole. While The Ancient Melodies was thus unlikely to prove immediately popular outside Jewish circles, and predominantly Sephardi circles at that, De Sola and Aguilar took measures to assist with its success; as such, it is reminiscent of some of the cathedral psalters and High Church hymnals published around the same period in terms of content and purpose. Alongside the importance of the Anglican apologia to defend the use of hymns in worship, Martin V. Clarke also observes the role of the preface in early Anglican hymnals for the same reason, often evidenced through historical and theological foundations. 61 Composed in the same vein, De Sola's essay outlining the 'ancient' melodies and texts incorporated in the volume, claiming that some of the poetic texts used in contemporary worship dated back as far as the tenth century, acted as encouragement to the reader that they were right to be preserved, explored, and performed in worship. 62 While he acknowledged that melodies from the same period were largely lost, De Sola did identify a couple in the collection that he reasoned could have been composed during this time, with one other believed to be from 'a period anterior to the regular settlement of the Jews in Spain', such as that set to the text 'Az Yashir Moshe', the Song of Moses found in Exodus 15:1-18 (see Pl. 1). 63 His aim that the volume would 'prove generally interesting to the historian, the amateur, and archaeologist of the Musical Art' in collaboration with Aguilar's harmonized arrangements of so-called 'ancient' texts and musical material, had similarities with the harmonized psalters of, for instance, Samuel Sebastian Wesley, or the plainchant and Gregorian hymns compiled by Thomas Helmore, albeit using Hebrew rather than Latin. 64 As such, it is possible to identify the transition from such volumes towards a more comprehensive collection such as Hymns Ancient and Modern or The Voice of Prayer and Praise, albeit over a widely different time-frame.
Helmore and John Mason Neale's 1851 Hymnal Noted, claimed by Susan Drain to be 'the most important volume in the revival of plainsong in Anglican churches', is a prominent example of the type of publication that appears to have influenced the style and structure of The Ancient Melodies. 65 It is perhaps telling that, through the observations in his essay, De Sola reflected several aspects of historical and theological justification found also in the preface of the Hymnal Noted, compiled by two of the earliest members of the Cambridge Ecclesiological Society and thus at the forefront of the intellectual as well as aesthetic argument for the revival of ancient material in contemporary worship. His biographical list of early Jewish poets, to whom (he claimed) could be attributed a number of the collection's texts, mirrors John Mason Neale's commentary on the rich and diverse nature of the hymn texts that have formed the Christian liturgy: 'These hymns were not written by any one man, nor at any one time. They are offerings, cast into the treasury of the Church, slowly, and at different periods, during the space of a thousand years.' 66 61  Likewise, Helmore's justifications for the melodies used in the Hymnal Noted, which he claimed '[reach] back, in many cases, certainly as far as any written records are left us, probably to the age of King David', are also visible in De Sola's more detailed historical rendering. Described by Helmore as 'a work designed to supply the acknowledged want of an English Hymnal', the purpose of the Hymnal Noted pre-empted similar desires within the Jewish community. 67 Helmore attributed the absence of such a work to 'the too general apathy, both of the clergy and of the laity, with regard to ritual matters', despite 'the wishes of the Rulers of the Reformed English Church at two distinct periods of her history, that she should have an authorised Hymnody'. 68 As such, the Hymnal Noted served a similar purpose to The Ancient Melodies: the preservation and dispersion of lost or forgotten 'Hymns of the ancient Church'. 69 The resemblance between the two collections is particularly apparent in Helmore's Accompanying Harmonies to the Hymnal Noted, which was the third and final format in which one could purchase the Hymnal, available as follows: 1. The English Words by themselves, in a cheap edition, for general use. 2. The English Words Noted, for the use of all who sing,-printed to correspond with the Directory, Psalter, and Canticles Noted, in the Manual of Plain Song, 18mo. edition. 3. The present volume of Accompanying Harmonies, for the use of organists and others who play, and also for any who may find it expedient to add vocal harmonies to the Canto-fermo of the Hymnal. 70 The description of each format contained in this volume, with its focus on cost and all-encompassing language, affirms that it was a collection intended for both church and domestic use, mirroring De Sola's third objective: the use of The Ancient Melodies to support 'public and private devotion'. In the light of the context and musical style of Nathan's collection-the only one of its kind in Britain at the time-Polack's correspondence had identified that The Ancient Melodies could have equal success by satisfying an absence within Jewish everyday life for which the production of hymnals had provided a ready solution within the Christian community: an aid for domestic worship. Of his arrangements, Aguilar wrote that 'although these melodies are, for the most part, harmonized so as to be sung in parts, they are written in the manner I have thought most convenient for playing'. 71 With this comment, Aguilar set in motion the idea that Jewish musical worship had a valid place beyond the synagogue. Given that, in 1857, no British synagogues had adopted instrumental music within their regular Sabbath and High Holyday services, it is clear that one of Aguilar's intentions was for his volume to, in Watson's words, '[rest] on the piano' and play a role in home worship. 72 As the minister of the Sephardi synagogue, De Sola potentially had a practical as well as cultural and spiritual aim for the volume: namely, to prevent further defection by the Synagogue's congregants to the West London Synagogue by providing a resource that would allow those who now resided west of the City, and thus closer to the Reform synagogue than to Bevis Marks in Aldgate, to participate in Orthodox, Sephardi worship. Aguilar's harmonizations had, in theory, the added advantage of moulding traditional melodies into a format familiar to an anglicized and culturally integrated community, whose Saturdays more frequently incorporated attendance at concerts and drawing room recitals than at synagogue. 73 68 Ibid. p. i. 69 Ibid. p. ii. 70 Ibid. 71 Aguilar and De Sola, The Ancient Melodies, n.p. 72 Talmudic law prohibited the use of instruments on the Sabbath due to the risk of them requiring fixing or tuning, acts that would break the laws of keeping the Sabbath free from all activities that constituted 'work'. There is also an understanding that, since the destruction of the second Temple in 70 ad, the Jewish people have been in a state of mourning; as such, the use of instrumental music to celebrate in worship is unlawful. The two 'reform' synagogues-the Manchester Congregation and the West London Synagogue-introduced organs to regular services in 1858 and 1859 respectively; no Orthodox communities incorporated instrumental music other than during exceptional occasions, such as weddings or state celebrations that fell outside the Sabbath and High Holy Days. 73 Endelman, The Jews of Britain, 114.
In reality, however, Aguilar's arrangements were of limited musical quality and hindered more than helped the sense of the melodies. While the collection was picked up with enthusiasm in the cultural press, with reviews appearing in two of the most popular and influential weekly magazines, the Literary Gazette and the Athenaeum, neither commented positively on the harmonizations. 74 With some homophonic movement, moments of static harmony under a melismatic melody, and internal lines that frequently cross from the treble to the bass staff and back again, there is a challenge in attempting to perform Aguilar's arrangements vocally (see Pl. 2). In some pieces, arrangements written for '4 voci' end on a five-or six-note chord, and many examples assigned to 'solo and chorus' give little indication of which sections were to be performed by which forces. The latter issue is just one example of a problem found with many of the pieces; one required a detailed knowledge of the liturgy and common practice in order to understand not only which sections were performed by whom, but also which section of melody to sing to particular verses of text. Compare this with Helmore's arrangements of the Hymnal Noted, which, as in The Ancient Melodies, prioritized instrumentalists, as indicated by the description of Accompanying Harmonies above. Here, the harmonizations were printed, according to Helmore, 'in the usual notation of Gregorian organ music (first used by V. Novello and S. Wesley)'. 75 In this format, established several decades earlier, the four parts clearly outlined in short score (melody and three harmony lines, almost entirely set note for note) work equally well for voice. It was not until 1889 that Anglo-Jewish collections took the same view regarding the benefit of short-score arrangements that equally suited vocal and instrumental performance, and even then-as will be addressed shortly-this was an exceptional case.
Despite a more instinctive layout than The Ancient Melodies, Accompanying Harmonies-the most complete of the three formats of the Hymnal Noted-nonetheless had issues regarding ease of use; namely, that one could only see a single verse of each hymn in its harmonized form. In a pattern that continues in hymnals to this day (including in Hymns Ancient and Modern), subsequent verses were presented on a facing page. The Ancient Melodies did not include additional verses, instead suggesting that one refer to a copy of De Sola's 'Prayers of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews' for the complete text. 76 An additional obstacle for The Ancient Melodies was the inconsistent use of Hebrew and English transliteration. De Sola's prayer book was written in Hebrew and English translation, while The Ancient Melodies used Hebrew transliterated into English. Given that, as innumerable pieces in the Jewish Chronicle attest, priority was given to the widespread encouragement and improvement of congregational singing, a collection that required significant prior knowledge and experience (including familiarity with another language) was perhaps not the most obvious starting point.
While both had issues with accessibility, the fact that neither the Hymnal Noted nor The Ancient Melodies has retained the reputation of later collections considered 'authorized' musical companions to worship comes down to their focus on a musical heritage that, at the time, did not speak to their respective religious communities at large. 'H.', whose comments on the upcoming The Ancient Melodies featured in the same issue of the Jewish Chronicle as Elizabeth Polack's, obliquely identified one of the principal drawbacks of The Ancient Melodies: as a volume of entirely Sephardi tunes, many of which were in danger 74  the one promised by Mr. Aguilar … have already appeared in Paris, of the services of the Portuguese and German congregations, but neither, I believe, contains music that is known here, and consequently cannot be accepted (however great their intrinsic merits) as our own national sacred music …'. While possibly intimating that these collections predominantly contained new compositions and arrangements unfamiliar in Britain-perhaps being as equally critical of Emile Jonas's 1854 volume as De Sola-'H.' also identified that, by mid-century, there was a definable Anglo-Jewish musical style. Perhaps most significantly, he pre-empts the future of music in British-particularly London-synagogues for the rest of the nineteenth century: It were much to be desired that the London synagogues at least should possess some authorised standard music of their own, and not, as at present, each differing from the other, according to the taste of the reader or choir master. To compile the scattered national melodies which may still be found in the various synagogues, mingled with the numerous modern compositions introduced from time to time, might indeed be a work of some difficulty; but I have not the least doubt competent persons could be found to undertake the task in a community such as ours, pre-eminently endowed with musical talents.
Despite a certain pride in the existence of traditional melodies from various 'nationalities', 'H.' appeared to assert that musical priority should be given to the development of a coherent body of work that allowed the capital's synagogues to all sing with one voice. This, in fact, is the first example in the Jewish Chronicle of a request for a form of Anglo-Jewish hymnal; 'H.' accurately predicted that The Ancient Melodies, given its content and 'national' style, would not fit this purpose. However, as he also predetermined, there was another nationality to consider beyond those once of great significance to the Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews of Britain-one that was unique to them as members of British society. It is unclear why such a volume took over forty years to appear, particularly in the light of the rapidity with which the Anglican hymnal market developed and published its output. One reason is almost certainly related to personnel; there were simply fewer musicians of significant academic or theoretical ability to compile a well-researched, high-quality compendium of Jewish liturgical music. When works were published in the interim years (some of which will be discussed shortly), they, like The Ancient Melodies, addressed the particular needs of a certain synagogue or community, often focusing on gathering repertory already in use within that synagogue (usually composed or arranged by the chazan or choirmaster), such that the volumes served principally as choir books in service order. Even this was largely left to those whose musical skills were greater than those of the majority of musicians working in synagogues during the period; as an indication of the general level of musical ability, many choirmasters taught their choristers by ear, much to the disdain of a number of writers to the Jewish Chronicle. In 1899, Francis L. Cohen and David M. Davis finally provided a long-awaited solution to the problem of a hymnal that spoke directly to the hybrid Anglo-Jewish community.

AN ANGLO-JEWISH 'HYMNAL'
While The Voice of Prayer and Praise cannot claim anywhere near the thirty-five million copies of Hymns Ancient and Modern that were sold by the end of the nineteenth century, its place within Anglo-Jewish 'ordinary life' should not be underestimated. 78 It has an international reputation so great among Jewish musicians that it has been referred to for many generations by its nickname, 'the Blue Book' (as it will be referred to hereafter), in accordance with the colour of its cover. Published on the cusp of the twentieth century, the Blue Book represented a community and musical style firmly established in the mid-to late nineteenth century, yet some of its melodic content preceded this period by many centuries. It contained 310 musical settings of liturgical texts-a combination of harmonized 'traditional' melodies and more recent compositions-in transliterated Hebrew (using Ashkenazi pronunciation), including repertory for morning and evening Sabbath, Festival and High Holyday services, as well as occasions such as weddings and memorials. Arranged in SATB short score, it also contained tonic sol-fa notations of the soprano and alto lines, reflecting the popularity of this mode of music education in schools, and the editors' interest in ensuring that boy choristers could engage fully with Jewish liturgical repertory. 79 According to the Jewish Chronicle, 1,050 copies of the first edition were printed initially, with 'about 430' sold in the three months following its publication. 80 A second edition of the volume was published in 1914, and a supplementary section was added to the third edition in 1933; this edition itself has been reprinted three times, in 1948, 1958, and 1967. It is still used by synagogue choirs today, and the arrangements contained within it (often adapted from their original sources melodically, harmonically, or linguistically by the editors) are more regularly used in current British performance practice than earlier published versions.
An equivalent to the place of Hymns Ancient and Modern within the Anglican Church, the Blue Book would come to be treated as the epitome of Anglo-Jewish worship music across several branches of Judaism, despite its firm grounding in Ashkenazi Orthodoxy. In fact, for its own collection of Anglo-Jewish liturgy, the United Synagogue had a perfect example of musical best practice in Hymns Ancient and Modern, as well as a political interest in demonstrating commonalities with standardized forms of Anglican worship, particularly as increasing numbers of Russian and Polish Jews coming into the country set up large congregations with seemingly alien practices in the East End of London. The lead up to the Blue Book, a volume representative of the United Synagogue, thus saw an adoption of expressions and phrases-as well as musical styles-that had linguistic associations with the Church of England and its representative works.
The surface commonalities between the Blue Book and Hymns Ancient and Modern reach well beyond a shared use of Psalm 148: a preface outlining the purpose of the volume and its authority within Anglo-Jewish institutions (as indicated by its compilation by a 'Choir Committee of the Council of the United Synagogue of London'); a wide-ranging mix of historic and modern liturgical settings, some presented in a form not dissimilar to Anglican chant; an accessible layout, which ensured that only one volume was required in order to see the complete text and music simultaneously (a novel feature commended in Hymns Ancient and Modern, and one distinctly lacking in De Sola and Aguilar's The Ancient Melodies); a thorough Index of first lines at the front of the volume containing the name of the composer or arranger (see Pl. 3); and a short score, which was not only suitable for choral performance (again, more so than the arrangements in The Ancient Melodies), but which could 'facilitate accompaniment on the organ or pianoforte in the choir-room or domestic circle'. 81 The Blue Book incorporated works common in the Ashkenazi synagogues, featuring compositions and arrangements by well-known synagogue musicians 79  Wasserzug. More than that, however, it also mirrored Hymns Ancient and Modern in its 'comprehensive' musical content. Alongside Ashkenazi material it included a number of Sephardi traditional melodies, as well as arrangements and compositions by musicians associated with synagogue music reform in both Britain and Europe (principally Charles Kensington Salaman, an elite member of the West London Synagogue and trained composer and pianist, and Solomon Sulzer, Austria's leading synagogue cantor and a prolific writer of Jewish liturgical repertory appropriate for nineteenth-century congregations). 82 It also featured settings by the contemporary French synagogue composer Samuel Naumbourg, the seventeenth-century Italian-Jewish court composer Salomone Rossi, and a number of texts set to popular 'classics' by Beethoven, Halévy, Handel, and Mendelssohn. Such settings-arranged in some cases to the music of composers with little or no Jewish association-were common, although these names still stand out as unexpected within an Index populated in the main by British synagogue musicians.
An often-overlooked fact is that a precursor to the Blue Book, also subtitled a 'Handbook of Synagogue Music for Congregational Singing', had been published ten years earlier, under the authority of Chief Rabbi Adler. 83 Its editors-Francis Cohen, this time with B. L. Moseley-referred to it as 'the first complete Anglo-Jewish collection of devotional music'. 84 This Handbook was effectively the first edition of the Blue Book upon which the latter expanded, adopting a substantial number of pieces from across the Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Reform canon. The Handbook's preface restates both the condition of congregational singing in British synagogues during the 1880s and the great need for a 'singing book' to encourage 'an improved choral service'. 85 Furthermore, it lists the choirmasters, cantors, and musicians who helped to compile the selection of melodies to be included, and who contributed their music to the collection.
That Cohen was at the forefront of both the Handbook and the Blue Book is unsurprising; trained (and later a tutor) at Jews' College, a rabbinical school established in London by Chief Rabbi Adler, he became the minister of the Borough Synagogue in South London as well as a respected authority on historic and contemporary Jewish music. He presented many lectures on the subject, including at the 1887 Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhibition (with music examples performed by West London Synagogue organist, Charles Garland Verrinder, and his choir), and published articles in the Jewish and musical press. 86 Shortly after publishing the Blue Book Cohen emigrated to Australia, appointed to the role of Rabbi at Sydney's Great Synagogue, and between 1901 and 1906 was music editor of the Jewish Encyclopaedia. Amongst his contemporaries, he and Verrinder (an Anglican musician with Oxford and Lambeth degrees in Music) could be considered the most academically active speakers and promoters of Jewish music to both Jewish and non-Jewish audiences. 87 In the light of the intellectual backgrounds of, for instance, Helmore, Neale, and Keble (a leading figure in the Oxford Movement as well as a contributing force behind Hymns Ancient and Modern), the role of two well-informed and academically interested individuals to the development and dissemination of the Anglo-Jewish canon cannot be underestimated. Verrinder's status as an outsider within the Jewish community, particularly in the context of his Anglican musical training and continued work in the Church during his time at the West London Synagogue, also makes him a key link between the two religious and musical spheres. His own collection of Jewish liturgical music, The Music Used in the Services of the West London Synagogue of British Jews, is of particular significance to this discussion as one of the more prominent works to fill the forty-year void between The Ancient Melodies and the Blue Book. 88 Printed across thirty years between 1861 and 1892, first by Addison and Co. and later by Novello, his six-volume set (coedited in the main with Charles Salaman) effectively served as choir and organ books for the Synagogue's services, although it was reviewed and advertised for wider use in music periodicals; it can be supposed that Verrinder also used the volumes in his congregational singing classes, which he held at intervals across his forty-five-year career at the Synagogue. 89 It was the first of its kind to produce Anglo-Jewish worship music (both traditional melodies and more recent compositions) in a format suitable for accompanied or a cappella choral performance, presented clearly with all the music and liturgical text in one place. As such, and in terms of some of its content (as will be discussed in brief shortly), it can be argued that it provided early inspiration not only for the Blue Book itself, but for those who, in the interim years, observed the absence of such a volume that would represent the majority Anglo-Jewish community. There is perhaps an irony in the fact that, during the year in which the United Synagogue was formed, Verrinder published his second volume of music for the Reform Synagogue, yet no equivalent materialized to coincide with attempts to unify the Ashkenazi Orthodox congregations. The Music Used has been well studied by historians of the music of the Anglo-Jewish Reform movement, as well as by those keen to trace the movement of traditional melodies between different branches of Judaism. 90 However, while several of Verrinder's compositions and arrangements have been retained for use in individual synagogues, the collection itself has, like The Ancient Melodies and in contrast with the Blue Book, become preserved as an item of historical interest rather than part of current synagogal practice.
As was the case with those who contributed to Hymns Ancient and Modern, a number of the musicians whose repertory featured in the Blue Book had published their works previously or, in the case of Mombach, had had unpublished manuscripts compiled and rearranged posthumously. 91 Almost all of these publications, however, required some form of rearrangement by Cohen and Moseley (and, later, Davis), due to being printed predominantly 'in a popular form', meaning that-like The Ancient Melodies-they were rendered more suitable for performance by voice and piano for domestic purposes, rather than for specific use by either the choir or congregation within the synagogue. It was anticipated that the Handbook and Blue Book would be equally suited to contribute to home worship, congregational participation in services, and as choir books; all the arrangements contained therein were clearly in four parts (although in Orthodox synagogues these would have all been sung by male choristers), with no additional harmonizations or embellished accompaniments, yet also easily playable on the piano In keeping with specific synagogue practices or 'in order to render the book acceptable to other than Hebrew Congregations', certain collections were published in full score with keyboard accompaniment, or with English translations; Salaman and Verrinder's volumes accommodated the use of the organ in the West London Synagogue, while Abraham Saqui's Songs of Israel incorporated English poetic texts as well as Hebrew liturgy. 92 Where pieces from these volumes were featured in the Handbook or the Blue Book, therefore, they were subject to changes in melodic, rhythmic, and textual transcription, as well as some not insubstantial reharmonization in certain cases, by the editors. 93  Notwithstanding the excitement and positive response initially surrounding the Handbook's publication, it appeared to have little effect on improving the standards of congregational singing and was quickly forgotten; by the time that Cohen and Davis were considering an updated edition, the Handbook was already out of print. 95 In fact, in the ten years between the two, there was a shift within musical opinion printed in the Jewish Chronicle from cynical references to what the Handbook had been 'projected to do for the great majority of … British congregations', towards excitement concerning 'the absolutely unique features' of the upcoming Blue Book. 96 A number of these commentaries, as well as those from previous decades highlighting the need for a standardized volume of Jewish liturgical music, contain striking language that goes some way to indicating the type of volume expected by the Jewish community. 95 Cohen and Davis, The Voice of Prayer and Praise, p. v. Interestingly, one of the key criticisms of the Handbook, paralleling an issue in using the Ancient Melodies, was that the liturgical texts were transliterated when set to music, yet the titles were printed in Hebrew script. Even in the Blue Book, the Index of first lines remained in Hebrew, at odds with the same words printed in transliteration at the start of each piece. 96  It is telling that the preface to the Blue Book, while making a connection with Hymns Ancient and Modern through its use of the text from Psalm 148, made no attempt to create further linguistic links between the two collections. Stalwartly referring to it as a 'Handbook' (as they did its predecessor), Cohen and Davis attempted to identify a separate genre that they labelled 'modern Jewish Hymnody', claiming that the Blue Book's contents was 'thoroughly representative of … the great founders' of such works. By contrast, public and media responses to the announcement of the volume, and the 1889 collection, focused on the notion of a Jewish 'hymnal', to the extent that an advertisement in the Jewish Chronicle-a newspaper with both a Jewish and non-Jewish readership-was written thus: It is almost certain that this advertisement was written by Cohen, Davis, or another close colleague within the United Synagogue. As such, while the Handbook was careful to identify itself as a separate body of work unique to the Jewish community, the language used outside that context worked hard to garner interest by engaging with terms, phrases, and key features familiar to those with a knowledge of contemporary sacred music publications. This linguistic difference is crucial to our understanding not of the content of each collection leading up to the Blue Book, but to the subtly varying perceptions of their compilers, editors, and the general public regarding their identity and position in line with other collections of religious music.
The term 'hymnal' was used repeatedly to refer to the Blue Book, the Handbook, and their equivalents within church practice, indicating its familiarity within Anglo-Jewish parlance. Both collections-notable also for their status as 'authorised' for use by the Chief Rabbi and the United Synagogue-were written up and reviewed in the Jewish Chronicle as 'The New Hymnal'. 98 These references to a Jewish 'hymnal' began considerably earlier than the late 1880s. As a term, it was sometimes assigned multiple interpretations. Some equated the chazanut-Jewish cantorial chants passed down over generations-to the 'hymnal melodies' of the Church; one such writer, A. Albu, wrote to the Jewish Chronicle in May 1872 addressing the likely reason why chazanut had not retained its popularity in the synagogue in the same way that hymnal melodies continued to be used in the Church: The music of the church is not only known to the organist, but to every child and other person who join [sic] the service in the Church. The simplicity of the notes facilitates its adoption for 97  the sacred text, and it aids it to become popular to every worshipper, whether gifted with musical talent or not.
Is this the case with our chazanut, our national melodies? No! I venture to state that, except the chazan and a few of the old members in a congregation, no one knows the melodies… . The chazanim, anxious to impress the sacred words, to [sic] use between every word, even between every syllable, a variety of fantastic and ornamental cadences, through which our national melodies have become disguised and disfigured. 99 Albu's comment does not suggest an awareness of the complicated trajectory that led to the development of a standardized hymnal repertory in the Church of England, yet he was clearly conscious of the positive impact of such collections as Hymns Ancient and Modern on congregational participation in services. Aside from claiming that he himself had 'composed, fifteen years ago, a book of national melodies' for use by the Great Synagogue, he asserted that a committee of chazanim should be formed to compile and publish melodies 'to be adopted in all synagogues, so that wherever we go to worship we should be able to join in the service'. 100 He also stipulated that '[t]hese melodies should be taught in every school of our community'. Another piece printed in the Jewish Chronicle later in 1872 also adopted the word 'hymnal' in its discussion, referring to the collective body of repertory already performed in the two principal Synagogues in London. The author asserted that congregational participation would be best achieved using 'melodies which any child might learn-such as those which form the staple of the simple and beautiful hymnal of the Church of England, the melancholy but more beautiful hymnal of the Portuguese Synagogue, and the florid and equally beautiful hymnal of the Great Synagogue'. 101 Interestingly, the references to the 'hymnals' of the Portuguese and Great Synagogues do not relate to physical volumes, although the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue had obvious associations with The Ancient Melodies published fifteen years previously. Two collections of music relating to the Great Synagogue-in the form of repertory composed by Mombach and Marcus Hast-appeared later in the century. 102 In fact, it is worth noting that Albu's correspondence dates his own mysterious collection for the Great Synagogue to 1857, conveniently providing competition to the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue's own volume. Most significantly, however, the allusion to the 'hymnal of the Church of England' was undoubtedly a reference to Hymns Ancient and Modern, albeit with an unsophisticated understanding of the hybrid nature of its content and its unauthorized status (and demonstrating an assumed superiority over Christianity common within the pages of the Jewish Chronicle). Given that, by this date, the only other synagogue to have produced anything close to a 'hymnal' was the West London Synagogue, notably absent from the Jewish Chronicle's 1872 correspondence, this makes an important point regarding perceptions within the Jewish community of acceptable modes of musical practice. In the light of Endelman's observations, equating the musical canons of the two oldest British Synagogues with that of the 'Established Church' simultaneously reinforced the less well-considered comparison between Jewish Reform and 'Nonconformity'. 103 It is striking, too, that when the Blue Book's editors chose which Sephardi melodies to include in their volume, they often selected Verrinder's arrangements for the West London Synagogue (removing the organ accompaniment) over Aguilar's earlier notated versions, using Verrinder's higher-quality harmonizations verbatim and without acknowledgement.
These sources demonstrate that as early as the 1870s, the terms 'hymn' and 'hymnal' were of great significance to the Jewish community. They represented a means of musical communication that was familiar, whole, and grounded in tradition. As the Jewish Chronicle correspondence suggests, the Anglo-Jewish community sought a hymnal for more than just an improvement in choral services. A vital element was the education of young children, not solely for the benefit of synagogue choirs that incorporated boy choristers, but for the preservation and rejuvenation of Jewish music for future generations. With an aim to provide 'more general instruction of choristers by note and not by ear', correcting the mode by which most synagogue choirs had learned their repertory, the Blue Book also sought to educate the wider United Synagogue congregation musically by encouraging the teaching of singing notated music through its use in Jewish schools, choir and congregational rehearsals, and in the home. 104 In its multifunctionality, the Blue Book was closer to the notion of a hymnal than any other Anglo-Jewish liturgical publication of the nineteenth century.
Another striking feature of the earliest advertisement for the 1889 Handbook, as quoted above, was its adoption of the phrase 'Ancient and Modern' to refer to its 313 musical numbers. A scan through other hymn and psalm collections leading up to 1861 indicates that Hymns Ancient and Modern did not introduce this expression within the Church, yet almost certainly was responsible for its subsequent popularity. 105 As early as the mid-eighteenth century it was adopted in titles, subtitles, and descriptions of liturgical volumes and compilations of melodies, both in Britain and abroad. In fact, Nathan's Hebrew Melodies is a striking example among a plethora of sacred and secular music based around Christian and folk tunes, its subtitle being 'a Selection of Hebrew Melodies Ancient and Modern, newly arranged, harmonized, corrected and revised with appropriate Symphonies and accompaniments'. 106 While not compiled for synagogue use, it does demonstrate associations between Jewish melodic material and this expression prior to its more widespread popularity.
Perhaps a more remarkable feature of the Blue Book-in comparison with both Christian and Jewish precedents-was its avoidance of the words 'ancient' or 'modern' within its contents. What other collections referred to as 'ancient melodies' the Blue do dwell' to the tune 'Old Hundredth' (alongside the Hebrew text for Psalm 100 to the same tune), several melodies from Aguilar and De Sola's volume, and even one from Isaac Nathan's-perhaps this is truly the most comprehensive, if concise, collection intended for use within Jewish worship. Cohen's Latin title, while perhaps seeming incongruous, was clear in its description of the 'national' style depicted in its contents. It was also almost certainly a deliberate attempt to add authority, weight, and a sense of intellectualism (and assimilation) to his volume, which he hoped would be used by 'English-speaking Jews' in a number of locations and environments. 109 This exploration will conclude here with some final remarks on the notion of familiarity. Anglo-Jewish histories are, as mentioned, often keen to emphasize the deliberate 'anglicization' undertaken by the period's British Jews. Indeed, many of the observations above acknowledge that the Jewish community sought inspiration in Anglican musical practices when devising their own. However, the narrative of Victorian hymnodyincluding its Jewish collections-also demonstrates the fluidity of religious and musical developments across all faith denominations. In this light, the adoption of certain linguistic and stylistic traits within Anglo-Jewish collections appears less as imitation and more as a natural absorption of familiar concepts, expressions, and ideologies. While it may have taken thirty-eight years for the Blue Book to find its inspiration in Hymns Ancient and Modern, building on the slower development of notated Anglo-Jewish repertory, the longevity of the 'hymnal of the Church of England' ensured that Cohen and Davis had a strong and familiar model on which to base their volume-and its success is indicative of its place as a leading resource of Victorian hymnody.