MUSIC – Artist Enrico Fink on the trail of “Le-El Olam”

An expert in Jewish musical tradition and a composer and artist as well, the president of the Jewish Community of Florence Enrico Fink has embarked on a quest to find a 16th-century piece written by a distinguished rabbi and scholar who, in 1560, resided among the kabbalists in Safed, a center of Jewish mysticism in the land of Israel. Its author, Mordecai ben Yehudah Dato, was born in San Felice sul Panaro, in the province of Modna likely around 1525, and was a reclusive yet highly regarded figure.
He composed numerous poems, as Fink recounts in an article published on the website of the Jewish Music Research Center – JMRC, one of the oldest research centers of the Faculty of Humanities at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and an international reference point for ethnomusicological studies related to Jewish traditions.
Mordecai ben Yehudah Dato dedicated himself to the creation and dissemination of his “Le-El ‘Olam,” and Fink explores the piece’s history through a presentation featuring images, links, and listening excerpts. Written for Shabbat, the poem has traveled throughout Jewish Italy. The oldest manuscript version dates to 1581, when Dato was still alive (he died between 1593 and 1601) and includes some notes apparently signed by the author himself. Among them is the indication that the piece should be performed “to the tune of a song whose first words are ‘Anshei Emunah,'” Fink writes. It is most likely referring to the ancient selikhah (supplicatory prayer) “Anshei Emunah ‘Avadu Ba’im Be-koaḥ Ma’aseihem.”
One of the most interesting sources where “Le-El ‘Olam” appears, Fink continues, is the Sefer ha-maftir shel Urbino, a manuscript donated in 1956 to the newly inaugurated Italian synagogue in Jerusalem and later published in a bilingual Italian and Hebrew edition. “Compiled in 1710, the manuscript is an ornate little book written in the central Italian town of Urbino, in honor of a young man’s first reading of a haftarah, even before his formal initiation as a bar mitzvah,” the Jewish religious adulthood, which boys attain on their 13th birthday. Two centuries later, this piece had nearly vanished from the musical memory of Italian Jewry, except for “some traces of persistence in small communities in central Italy.”
Among those who studied it, the author notes Rabbi Elio Toaff, born in Livorno and known for his tenure as Chief Rabbi of Rome, but also for his earlier role in Ancona during WWII (1941-1943). Also notable is musicologist Leo Levi, who confirmed the presence of “Le-El ‘Olam” in the ritual of the Marche community. This is corroborated by Riccardo Di Segni, the current Chief Rabbi of Rome: “I learned about it in the early 1960s from Rabbi Giuseppe Laras, who was then Chief Rabbi of Ancona.”

Picture: “Le-El ‘Olam” in the Sefer ha-maftir shel Urbino.