A lecture “The False ‘Chestnut Cantor’ and the Real One: The Yiddish play Der falshe Kashtan, and the rabbis who cursed and blessed the popular cantor Salomon Weintraub, known as Kashtan“ by Daniel Katz

On Tuesday evening, 10 June, at 6 pm, our library invites you to a lecture titled “The False ‘Chestnut Cantor’ and the Real One: The Yiddish play Der falshe Kashtan, and the rabbis who cursed and blessed the popular cantor Salomon Weintraub, known as Kashtan“ by Daniel Katz.

The lecture will be held in English (with translation into Lithuanian) in Vilnius Jewish Public Library

An early Yiddish play, Der falshe Kashtan, was written around 1820 in Budapest. It involves a deceitful character who pretends to be the famous synagogue cantor Salomon Weintraub, known as Kashtan. The author, Moses Gottlieb Saphir, was known as a satirical writer in German. Yet some sources suggest that he wrote another Yiddish play, Die falshe Catalani. Our speaker will explore this tantalizing idea and reveal all of its mysteries. We will also see how rabbis reacted to the real cantor Kashtan, whose name the play borrowed for its title. The real Kashtan, who toured all of Eastern Europe from Budapest to Vilnius and Riga, was the most famous Jewish singer of his time (1781–1829). Dr. Katz is a musicologist and Jewish cultural historian. He specializes in the synagogue music of this period.

Bio

Daniel Katz wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on a fourteenth-century Latin treatise about music notation. He now researches the history of Ashkenazi synagogue chant, especially in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Dr. Katz has had Fulbright grants to Italy and Germany. He received a fellowship from the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard and a grant from the German Research Foundation for his work at the Martin Buber Institute for Jewish Studies at the University of Cologne. He is a founding member of the German General Rabbinical Association and since 2024 has been the rabbi of the Jewish Liberal Community of Cologne.

The organizers may be taking photographs and videotaping the event as part of the Vilnius Jewish Public Library’s historical record of its programs over the years.

Registration to event: https://forms.gle/2GfvzbLYqWR8x9Pq5