Courts, Repertories and the Reach Beyond Hasidism

Hasidism is not one body but a family of courts, and each keeps its own melodies. Chabad is the outlier in how it has handled them. Where most courts carry their repertory by ear and leave it uncatalogued, Chabad began publishing its niggunim in the twentieth century, in the collection assembled under Shmuel Zalmanov from 1948, and treats particular melodies as teaching material with named origins and stated purposes. The result is that Chabad niggunim are the ones most often heard outside Hasidism, and the ones most often assumed to be typical when they are in fact unusually well documented.

Breslov holds the form on a different footing. Its founder taught that joy is an obligation and that melody is one of its instruments, and its repertory is smaller, more concentrated and more closely tied to a handful of texts and phrases than Chabad's. The most widely recognised Breslov chant outside the movement is a short phrase built on its founder's name, which spread through Israeli public life in the late twentieth century in a way none of its adherents planned.

The form has travelled a long way from the courts. Niggunim are sung in non-Orthodox congregations that hold none of the theology behind them, in Israeli popular music, and by professional performers with no Hasidic connection at all. Hasidic communities are not uniformly comfortable with that, but the movement outward has been going on for a century and shows no sign of reversing.