Cantor

The hazzan, or cantor, leads the congregation in prayer, and the exact description of the office is easily missed: he is the emissary of the congregation, praying on its behalf.

Emissary of the community

The technical term names the hazzan the shaliach tzibbur, the messenger or emissary of the congregation, one who stands before the ark and leads the prayers as the representative of all present, carrying their worship rather than performing for them, so that the office is one of representation. In practice the hazzan chanting of the liturgy, in the traditional modes and melodies, gives the service its musical form, and in the great tradition of cantorial music the office became one of high vocal art.

Voice and learning

Any competent adult may lead the prayers, so the hazzan is not a priest and the office is not an order, but the leading of the more elaborate services came to require skill in the traditional chant and knowledge of the liturgy, and the professional cantor, trained and appointed by a congregation, became a fixture beside the rabbi, the one teaching and deciding, the other leading the sung worship. In the modern movements the office is held by women as well as men. The hazzan stands within a wide family of those who lead sung worship, but the particular sense of the office, the emissary who prays in the name of the assembled congregation, is distinctively its own.

Cantorial music developed its own elaborate art over the medieval and early modern period, particularly among Ashkenazi communities in Eastern Europe, where improvised prayer modes and coloratura vocal display around a fixed liturgical text produced a repertoire and a virtuoso performance tradition distinct from the plainer styles other communities preferred. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are often called the golden age of the cantorate, when star hazzans toured and recorded, some achieving fame among Jewish audiences comparable to opera singers, before the Holocaust destroyed the communities and institutions, particularly across Eastern Europe, that had sustained the tradition at its height.

The office has since been formalised through dedicated cantorial schools and professional associations that train and certify hazzans for congregational service, and Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist Judaism now ordain women as cantors, a change Orthodox congregations, in keeping with their broader restriction on women's public liturgical leadership, have not adopted.

Formal cantorial ordination today runs through dedicated programmes, including the H. L. Miller Cantorial School at the Jewish Theological Seminary for the Conservative movement and the School of Sacred Music at Hebrew Union College for Reform, combining vocal and liturgical training with academic study over several years before conferring the title hazzan, a credentialing structure giving the modern cantorate an institutional shape closer to the rabbinate than the informally trained cantors of earlier centuries, who typically apprenticed under a working hazzan rather than attending a seminary.