The Remarkable Career of Franz Schubert’s Favorite Cantor

There is an old Yiddish expression zingen mayofes (or mayufes), literally “to sing Mah Yafit,” a once-popular Sabbath-table hymn. Its connotations, however, are strictly negative. To Poles it came to mean a song and dance performed by a Jew (or someone parodying a Jew) for the entertainment of Polish nobles. In the words of the historian Janusz Tazbir, the performer would take on the character of a “quasi-jester . . . who abuses the Polish language in the most amusing way.” The parallel in American culture would be the minstrel shows of the 19th and early 20th centuries, in which African-American musicians (or white ones in blackface) would perform in a way that conformed to and exaggerated the crudest racist stereotypes.