"Kol mekadesh shevi'i": A Liturgical Melody Sung at Home

This article draws upon the unusual characteristics, origins and prevalence of the melody to the poem "Kol mekadesh shevii" [He who sanctifies the Seventh day] and discusses how it came to be recognized in the past seventy years as a signifier of Ashkenazi pre-Holocaust musical and religious culture and in particular as a sonic marker of liturgical sound, although it was sung at home. The Kol mekadesh melody came over time to represent two vastly different symbolic positions. As a melody adopted from non-Jewish sources bringing new, sometimes controversial sounds into the synagogue, and as a typical synagogal sound. Twentieth-century norms of aesthetic and social preference shunned Kol mekadesh once extremely popular, which was now deemed untuneful and unsuitable for new contexts and styles of performance practice. Its perceived antiquity as compared to other Zemiroth melodies ensured it remained in continuous use while at the same time relegated it as different and unique. Kol mekadesh remains a story of musical adoption and rejection and at its core reveals the complex and at times contradictory sonic economies of liturgical sounds in Ashkenazic Jewish domestic traditions of the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries.