Colonial Harmonies

Luis Moises Gomez (c. 1660–1740) — first Parnas of Shearith Israel, America’s oldest Jewish congregation — left documentary traces but few audible ones. Colonial Harmonies reconstructs the auditory world he knew: the liturgical music of early colonial Shearith Israel, an amalgam of pre-Inquisition Spanish tonalities, late Stuart and early Georgian melodic structures, and the colonial sacred-harmony idiom of Gomez’s rough contemporary William Billings (1746–1800).

The project — made possible by the generous support of Dr. Arnold Goran — was undertaken under the auspices of the Gomez Mill House, in partnership with the combined choirs of Bevis Marks Synagogue and Lauderdale Road Synagogue in London, under Hazan Adam Musikant and Choirmaster Jason Silver, and with the Vassar College Jewish Studies Program.

Drawing on archival research at the Mill House, the American Sephardi Federation, and five living centers of the Western Sephardi world — Bevis Marks and Lauderdale Road in London, the Esnoga in Amsterdam, Shearith Israel in New York, and Mikveh Israel in Philadelphia — the project produced new arrangements of Hebrew liturgical texts set to tunes by William Billings.

The arrangements were intended for premiere in a London liturgical setting and for introduction in New York at a concert co-sponsored by the Gomez Mill House and Vassar College. COVID intervened before those performances could take place. The project, however, remains fully viable: its research, musical materials, and institutional collaborations are documented here, and the planned performances remain part of its future life.

The Gomez Mill House, built around 1714 in Marlborough, New York, is the earliest known surviving Jewish dwelling in North America. Luis Moises Gomez, whose Spanish ancestors had fled the Inquisition through France and England before settling in New York, purchased the surrounding land in 1714, and he and his sons amassed roughly four thousand acres along the Hudson over the following decade. The single-story fieldstone block house — its walls three feet thick, set into the side of a hill alongside what came to be called Jews Creek — served for thirty years as the Gomez family’s trading post in furs, timber, and limestone, supplying building material for the growing City of New York sixty miles downriver.

At the same time, Gomez was a proud Jew who sought and received an Act of Denization from the British Crown — its decree, signed by Queen Anne, still hangs on the Mill House wall — allowing him to conduct business, own property, and live freely in the colonies without an oath of allegiance to the Church of England. As Parnas of Shearith Israel, he was one of the principals behind the construction of the Mill Street Synagogue in lower Manhattan. The Mill House survived him, passing through Patriot trader Wolfert Ecker, the Armstrong farming family, and Arts and Crafts paper-maker Dard Hunter, before being rescued in the postwar years and listed in 1973 on the National Register of Historic Places. Today it is operated as a museum by the Gomez Foundation for Mill House.

The Mill House Foundation’s interest in this project lies in the possibility of reconstructing, however carefully and conjecturally, part of Gomez’s colonial soundscape. The claim is not that Luis Moises Gomez sang William Billings, nor that Hebrew prayers were historically set to these tunes in his household. The connection is more speculative and more suggestive: Gomez lived at the intersection of Sephardi Jewish memory, Atlantic commerce, British colonial culture, and the emerging musical idioms of early America. Billings’s psalmody belongs to that same colonial world, though from a Protestant and somewhat later register. To set Western Sephardi liturgical texts to Billings tunes is therefore not an act of recovery in the strict archival sense, but an historically informed act of imaginative reconstruction. It asks what Jewish prayer might sound like when voiced through the musical language of the American colonies in which Gomez and his descendants made their lives.

For the Gomez Mill House, this makes the project a way of hearing the site as well as seeing it: not only as stone, timber, creek, trade route, and family history, but as an acoustic meeting place where Sephardi liturgy, colonial Protestant song, Hudson Valley commerce, and the first generations of Jewish life in North America can be brought into meaningful relation.

Isaac Treuherz

Isaac Treuherz, a London-based musician, editor, designer, and specialist in Western Sephardi liturgical practice, is best known as co-editor, with Rabbi Adam Zagoria-Moffet, of Siddur Masorti, the first egalitarian Sephardi siddur. He is an expert teacher of Western Sephardi Torah cantillation as preserved in the London Spanish & Portuguese community. For this project, he rendered the Billings materials into usable musical form, allowing colonial American psalmody to be placed in disciplined conversation with Hebrew liturgical texts and Western Sephardi performance practice.

The project’s Hudson Valley home is Kehillah Kedoshah Zikhron Zvi, a Western Sephardi kehillah in Poughkeepsie that follows the rite of Amsterdam, London, and New York — the same liturgical tradition that Luis Moises Gomez carried up the Hudson three centuries ago. The proposed inaugural performance in London and the concerts at Gomez Mill House and Vassar would give the project public form, but its deeper life is liturgical: this music is meant to enter regular use, sounded not as reconstruction alone but as prayer.

The Ark, with its gilded Gothic medallions and William Morris Pimpernel textile, holds the Sefarim (Torah Scrolls) in a setting at once Iberian, English Arts and Crafts, and unmistakably Hudson Valley. The choice of the phrase Hashivenu above the Ark — “Restore us back to You, Adonay, and we will return; renew our days as of old,” recited at the close of the Torah service as the scrolls are restored to their place — speaks for the project as a whole: a tradition carried across an ocean, partly muted, and now returned to voice.

Liturgical accoutrements of the Congregation.