The Jewish influence on music in Montréal is less historical than it is geographic. You can’t draw a straight line between famed Cantor Joseph Rosenzweig and, say, Arcade Fire, but both wandered the same neighborhoods. The Ukrainian Federation on Hutchison was once a synagogue; now the POP Montréal festival stages shows there. La Sala Rossa, a storied venue co-owned by Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s Mauro Pezzente, was once the Jewish Workman’s Circle, and it looks much the same as it did when it was built in 1932. In a familiar evolution, what were once garment industry sweatshops have become rehearsal spaces and venues for semi-legal loft shows. And in between those two eras, Jewish Montreal’s most famous musical export, Leonard Cohen, stalked the same boulevards.

The city’s enduring tradition of cantorial music is especially notable. It’s a style that today is rarely heard outside of synagogues, where cantors (or hazzanim) lead prayer services, but in the mid-20th century, between the wars, it was both a form of worship and popular entertainment, and the Plateau and Mile-End were absolutely thriving with temples where you could hear it.

“Cantorial music in some ways was emulating opera and classical music,” says Zev Moses, director of the upstart Museum of Jewish Montréal, an invaluable resource for mapping the area’s history. “It owes itself to 19th century European traditions that weren’t Jewish at all, which they then integrate and formalize. It really comes out of the 1800s in Germany when Reform Jews appear and they’re trying to fit in with the rest of the culture of Europe.”

As for the Montréal scene, Moses says, “It started in the ’20s. By mid-century, all these synagogues had money, and each one could afford a cantor full-time, and often a choir as well. It became the thing that all the congregants wanted; it was almost like a status symbol.”

One of the most prominent venues for cantorial music was the B’nai Jacob synagogue on Fairmount, which in its heyday was considered the “Carnegie Hall” of Jewish music, playing host to famous cantors from around the world. The building is now a strange architectural portmanteau: When the congregation moved west in the 1960s, the College Français took over the building and inserted an awkward modernist façade over what was once a stately Romanesque temple. Only by looking up can you see the Hebrew characters still inscribed on the brick arches barely visible from the street.

By the 1950s and ’60s, the cantorial music craze started to die down all over North America, as Jews’ lives revolved less and less around the synagogue. But something about Montréal, with its economically stunted, time-capsule quality – a quality that over the last 20 years has made it a consistently inexpensive haven for musicians and artists – kept it going far longer than practically anywhere else.

“It stays alive in Montréal because it’s such a traditional community, basically until 10-15 years ago,” Moses says. “That world where you could only hang out with cantors, you could have a ton of colleagues in this city – that was possible until 2000, I would say.”