Such was the trance of transcendence in which Dovidl passed his month with the Medzhiners, absorbing their archaic rhythms. He likened it to discovering a medieval manuscript, its music a daze of hieroglyphics and its instruments rough to the unattuned ear – ‘like swapping my Guadagnini for a sackbut’. It required him to suspend his perception of what is beautiful and what is music. Only when such preconceptions were set aside could he appreciate the marvels of a different value system.

Hassidim who had visited him in mourning now came by daily to teach him Torah with Rashi’s exegesis and, in the afternoon, The Well-laid Table of the sixteenth-century Safed sage Josef Caro, the catalogue of the laws and customs for observant Jews. It reminded him, in its clarity of purpose and timeless certainty, of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Well-tempered Clavier , which contains preludes and fugues for each of the major and minor keys – a mode for every circumstance. He did not articulate this allusion since none of the Hassidim would have recognised Bach’s name, but the affinities between religious and musical practice seemed to him more than incidental. Both demanded daily hours of application and a comparable single-mindedness. He wondered briefly if he were not exchanging one servitude for another.

By way of relief, the Hassidim told him fabulous legends of former rebbes, recited in a sing-song that evolved, at times, into actual song: their melodic legacy. Had the Baal shem tov (1696–1760), it suddenly occurred to him, ever come across J. S. Bach (1685–1750)? They were almost exact contemporaries, ten years either way. Both had travelled widely: imagine an encounter at a wayside inn, Bach and the Besht. And why was the Well-tempered Clavier known to pianists as the ‘Old Testament of the Keyboard’? Bach was not the tiniest bit Jewish, but had it not taken a Jew, Felix Mendelssohn, to revive the performance of his music after a century of neglect? Dovidl kept these speculations to himself, swallowing his cross-cultural confusion. Over time, the distinctions dissolved in his mind and he came to the conclusion that one form of devotion was not that different from any other, and none had a monopoly on divine revelation.