Spagnolo Inventing Jewish Music, Again (WCJS 2017) 1 Inventing Jewish Music, Again. Reuben Rinder in San Francisco Francesco Spagnolo, UC Berkeley Following his hiring at San Francisco’s Congregation Emanu-El in 1913, Cantor Reuben R. Rinder (1887-1966) became an influential figure in the shaping of 20th- century Jewish musical culture. Through insights gained from the Reuben R. Rinder papers brought to the University of California, Berkeley with the addition of The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, i my paper aims at reconsidering Rinder’s innovative approach to synagogue music as a paradigm of Jewish musical professional activity. In researching this topic, I encounter the figure of Cantor Reuben R. Rinder for a second time. I first “met” Rinder—not in person, of course—when, thirty years ago, I was making my first steps in the study of Jewish music under the guidance of the late Israel Adler. ii My early encounter is representative of the traditional way in which Reuben Rinder has appeared in Jewish music scholarship: as a visionary who commissioned the “Sacred Services” for the synagogue composed by Ernest Bloch (in 1933) and Darius Milhaud (in 1947), and discovered not one, but two young Jewish violin prodigies, Yehudi Menuhin (the child of the anti-Zionist intellectual, Moshe Mnuchin, a Jewish educator in the San Francisco Bay Area) iii and Isaac Stern (the child of Russian immigrants to San Francisco, and a student of Rinder’s at Congregation Emanu-El’s religious school). iv Rinder’s commissions of Bloch’s Avodath Hakodesh and, in part, of Milhaud’s Service Sacrée, have attracted the attention of many scholars, who read the correspondence between the cantor and the composers (in the Bloch collection at UC Berkeley’s Music Library), v and attempted to decipher the cultural agenda that inspired these fundamental (albeit rarely performed or used in synagogue life) 20 th -century