Medieval Hebrew Literature, Genizah Research, Piyyut

The article is devoted to an examination of the relations between the payytanic epithet (Heb. Kinnuy) and  figurative language in Pre-Classical Piyyut (ca. fourth-fifth centuries CE). The poets used epithets when they did not wish to call a familiar concepts or  figures by their proper name. Some scholars even suggested that the relatively limited use of  figurative language in Piyyut relates to the extensive use of epithets. In the present article only those epithets which use  figurative language are discussed. The article examines  first instances in which the poet introduced original epithets. Then the more common epithets that are based on biblical  figurative language are discussed. In addition the article investigates rare cases in which  figurative poetic epithets are included in the broader development of  figurative language in a single line or over a number of lines, and cases where an epithet interrupts a  figurative sequence. The article is based on an analysis of numerous lines of poetry from the rich corpus of Pre-Classical Piyyut.

Critical edition of R. Saadya Gaon's bencher (diplomatic, based on MS Oxford, Bodl., Hunt. 448), with an introduction suggesting how to reconstruct Saadya's Urtext.

Published in a bibliophilic edition of 35 numbered copies in honour of the author's wedding.

The article focuses on El'azar berabbi Qillir, the iconic pay￿an of all ages, and explores several aspects of his work, heritage and cultural significance. The var- ious parts of the article do not present a cohesive image of the life and work of the Qilliri. Rather, they present a mosaic of different outlooks on his image as well as scholarly reflections on some of his major contributions to Jewish literary culture.

The present article discusses two rare Rabbinic Hebrew words denoting types of dried fruit: דמדמון in Yosef berabbi Nisan’s Seder for Qedushta הנני ממטיר, and קיטנים in Midrash Shir ha-Shirim Zutạ (according to MS St. Petersburg, Russian National Library, Ms. Antonin Ebr. III B 928). The etymology, morphology, and semantics of דמדמון and קיטנים are examined on the basis of the most probable lexical descendants of these words in Palestinian colloquial Arabic, viz. damdamūn and quṭṭēn respectively. The Palestinian Arabic word damdamūn ‘over-ripe grapes that are shriveled and dry by the time of the vintage season’ matches the Hebrew דמדמון both morphologically and semantically. The Palestinian Arabic word quṭṭēn ‘dried figs’ corresponds to the semantics of the unvocalised Hebrew קיטנים and suggests that it might be read as *qiṭṭēn (pl. qiṭṭǝnīm or qiṭṭēnīm), deriving from the Hebrew root קטן qtṇ.

Jewish sources commonly refer to Muslims as “Ishmaelites” and to Islamdom as “the Kingdom of Ishmael” due to an alleged biblical genealogy that both Jews and Muslims accept. Other classic Jewish sources, however, associate pre-Islamic Arabs as well as Muslims with two other biblical nations, Ammon and Moab, even when, and even though, the “standard” appellations are at hand. The Ammon and Moab nexus is mentioned in academic literature but without much elaboration. This article investigates several Jewish mentions of the nexus – most of Hispano-Jewish provenance – and proposes five explanations for its use.

Résumé
Les sources juives qualifient généralement les musulmans d’Ismaélites et le domaine de l’Islam en tant que “royaume d’Ismaël”, et ce au nom de généalogies bibliques reconnues autant par les juifs que les musulmans. D’autres sources juives classiques, cependant, rattachent les Arabes préislamiques ainsi que les musulmans à deux autres nations mentionnées dans la Bible, Ammon et Moab, et ce indépendamment de leur traditionnelle appellation d’Ismaélites. Jusqu’à présent, le lien avec Ammon et Moab n’a été que sommairement évoqué dans la littérature scientifique. La présente étude examine plusieurs sources juives, pour la plupart d’origine hispanique, évoquant un pareil lien.

This prosopographic study lists and discusses the personal names found in Cairo Genizah manuscripts pertaining to the fields of magic, divination and astrology. The names derive primarily from amulets, but also from divinatory spells, curses, exorcisms and magic manuals or recipes prepared for named owners or against named opponents. The study corpus included all the Genizah texts that have been published
thus far, all the unpublished magical texts from the Cambridge Genizah collection, and numerous unpublished texts from other Genizah collections, yielding a total of 156 named individuals. The article attempts to identify some of the listed names with individuals known from non-magical texts. Its conclusions address several questions related to the place of magic in the Jewish society of medieval Cairo.

Vol. 1 (A–C): “Aaron ben ʿAmram”; “Aaron Ḥakīmān”; “Aghmātī, Zechariah ben Judah”; “Alī ben Sulaymān”; “Bar Satya, Joseph ben Jacob”; “Baradānī, Joseph al-”; “Baradānī, Naḥum al-”; “Ben Berechiah Family”; “Ben Yijū, Abraham.”

Vol. 2 (D–I): “Daniel ben Eleazar b. Hibat Allāh”; “Daniel ben Ḥasday”; “Daniel ben Samuel ibn Abī ʾl-Rabīʿ ha-Kohen”; “David ben Boaz”; “Dunash (Abū Sahl) ben Tamīm”; “Eleazar ben Ḥalfon ha-Kohen”; “Ḥananel ben Ḥushiel”; “Ḥananel ben Samuel”; “Ḥushiel ben Elḥanan”; “Ibn al-Barqūlī Family”; “Ibn al-Majjānī Family”; “Ibn al-Shūwaykh, Isaac ben Israel”; “Ibn Bundar, Ḥasan, Abū ʿAlī (Japheth)”; “Ibn Jāmiʿ, Samuel ben Jacob”; “Ibn Sughmār Family.”

Vol. 3 (J–O): “Japheth (Abū ʿAlī Ḥasan) ben Eli"; “Jeshua ben Elijah ha-Levi”; “Josiah ben Jesse”; “Judah ben Eli (ʿAllān)”; “Judah ben Joseph of Qayrawān”; “Kohen Ṣedeq ben Joseph Gaon”; “Levi (Abū Saʿīd) ben Japheth”; “Nathan ben Ḥananiah.”

Vol. 4 (P–Z): “Salmon ben Jeroham (Sulaym ibn Ruḥaym)”; “Shabīb ben Jacob”; “Tanḥum ben Joseph ha-Yerushalmi”; “Wahb ibn Yaʿīsh al-Raqqī.”

The Catalan Nusach: Main contours of the statutory prayers and of the system of liturgical poems.


במאמר זה אני מציג את התשתית המחקרית שבבסיס הסידור (סידור קטלוניא) ומסכם את המאפיינים העיקריים של תפילות הקבע ושל מערכת הפיוטים במנהג קטלוניא

בנוסף למאמר הכנתי רשימה מפורטת של כל הפיוטים המופיעים בל"ב כתבי-יד, שהם הלב והליבה של נוסח קטלוניא

This article explores the elements of Masorah in Yefet's work as well as the ideology behind his masoretic preferences.  It links his preferences with Karaite Zionistic doctrine of return to the Land of Israel, and the Karaite ideological supremacy given to the Tiberian oral recitation tradition of scripture. Yefet's discussions of lexical and grammatical problems are also explored in this article.  They are studied in the context of the early Karaite grammatical tradition.  His approach to solving these problems include old strategies as well as new, and is embedded in an innovative linguistic approach to cases of peculiarities.

This essay examines several liturgical poems in which a correspondence exists between the texts and the space in which they were performed. A key term in my investigation is ekphrasis, a rhetorical technique common in classical Greco-Roman world that influenced late antique liturgical poets. I begin with a discussion of the impact of ekphrasis on Christian and Jewish poetic texts and continue with an examination of several poems that appropriate the ekphrastic technique and use it as part of their own liturgical and ritual practices. Finally, I situate these poems alongside the architecture and the artwork of the synagogues and churches of late antiquity in which they were performed.

The Genizah fragments of the Jerusalem Talmud are an important source for the text and the interpretation of this Talmud. This article presents ten readings found in the Genizah fragments that re-illuminate some obscure issues in the Talmud and reevaluate questions in the history of its text. The studies also reveal some innovations in the study of the methods of transmission of the Jerusalem Talmud

This article examines two literary works of the maqama genre: The Book of Tahkemoni by Judah Alharizi (13th century) and Sefer Hamusar by Zachariah Aldahiri (16th century). Both texts share genre, language and literary tradition, and they both integrate travel narratives that combine fact and fiction in interesting ways. By way of comparison, the article explores the dynamics between the real and the imaginative in the texts, and elaborates on the similarities and differences between them. Several conclusions concerning the literary and historical characteristics of both texts are singled out, and finally the article makes a distinction between Alha- rizi’s linear-transformative travel narrative and Aldahiri’s circular-confirmatory one.

The article presents a contemporary view of the study of piyyut, demonstrating that Jewish po- etry of late antiquity (in Hebrew and Aramaic) was closely related to Christian liturgical poetry (both Syriac and Greek) and Samaritan liturgy. These relations were expressed primarily by common poetic and prosodic characteristics, derived on the one hand from ancient Semitic poetry (mainly biblical poetry), and on the other from innovations of the period. The significant connections of content between the different genres of poetry reveal the importance of com- parative study. Thus the poetry composed in late antiquity provides additional evidence for the lively cultural dialogue that took place at that time.

This volume offers the first comprehensive study on the history of
Middle Western Karaim dialects. The author provides a systematic
description of sound changes dating from the 17th–19th-centuries and
reconstructs their absolute- and relative chronologies. In addition, the
main morphological peculiarities are presented in juxtaposition to
Modern Western Karaim data.

The textual basis for this historical-linguistic investigation is a critical
edition of pre-1800 Western Karaim interpretations of Hebrew religious
songs called piyyutim (149 texts altogether). The reason behind this
choice is that some of these texts are among the oldest known Western
Karaim texts in general, and that until now no study has brought the
Karaim translation tradition in this genre closer to the reader.

This article offers a reading of two Hebrew liturgical poems by Yannai, a sixth century C.E. poet, from the perspective of contemporary gender and literary studies. The poems vividly and elaborately retell the story of Sarah's (and Abraham's) barrenness and their wish to have a child. The unique nature of these compositions lies in their delicate treatment of gender roles as well as in their surprising portrayal of Sarah as an active and self-conscious agent. Yannai draws on rich exegetical tradition (biblical, patristic and rabbinic) regarding Sarah's infertility but offers his own insights and contributions. The article also comments on the relevance of Christian hymnography to the study of Jewish poetry in Late Antiquity and on feminist readings of poetic texts from this formative period.

Eli ben Ezekiel (c. 1000 – c. 1075) is well known figure whose works are abundantly represented in the documents of the Cairo Geniza. He held a senior clerical position in the Jerusalem 'court' under two of the major leaders of his time: Salomon ben Yehuda Gaon and Daniel ben Azarya Gaon. Ben Ezekiel's love of Hebrew piyyut and his contribution to their study is attested in the hundreds of poems he copied in his typical and easily recognizable handwriting, poems composed by numerous authors from different eras. 
This paper surveys Eli ha-Kohen's works in this field by covering the various literary works he copied along with a list of his original poems. Three of his poems from Cairo Geniza manuscripts are presented

The Apocalypse of St. John and the Sefer Zerubbabel [a.k.a Apocalypse of Zerubbabel] are among the most popular apocalypses of the Common Era. While the Johannine Apocalypse was written by a first-century Jewish-Christian author and would later be refracted through a decidedly Christian lens, and the Sefer Zerubbabel was probably composed by a seventh-century Jewish author for a predominantly Jewish audience, the two share much in the way of plot, narrative motifs, and archetypal characters. An examination of these commonalities and, in particular, how they intersect with gender and sexuality, suggests that these texts also may have functioned similarly as a call to reform within the generations that originally received them and, perhaps, among later medieval generations in which the texts remained important.

Review on:
1. S. Glick with D. Arad and Z. Stampfer et al., Seride Teshuvot, A Descriptive Catalogue of Responsa Fragments from the Jacques Mosseri Collection, Cambridge University Library, Leiden 2012
2. ש' גליק, בשיתוף ד' ארד וי' שוורץ, שרידי תשובות מחכמי האימפריה העות'מאנית, א-ג, ירושלים תשע"ג-תשע"ד

רב יהודה ב"ר יוסף ראש כלה היה אישיות נכבדה בקירואן היהודית בסוף המאה ה-10 ותחילת המאה ה-11. הוא היה מקורב למלכות, סוחר עשיר ומפורסם וגם תלמיד חכם ידוע. במסגרת פעילותיו הלימודיות, רב יהודה ביקש, וקיבל, פירוש למסכת ברכות מאת רב האיי גאון וכן שכנע את רב חושיאל בן אלחנן להשתכן בקירואן. במאמר זה נציע שעסקן-סוחר חולל שינויים מהותיים בסדרי הלימוד בין בני עירו עד ליצירת חיבורים תורניים חדשים שטרם הכירו במזרח.

R. Judah b. Joseph Resh Kallah was a unique figure in 10th century Kairouan; a politically connected international trader and an erudite Torah scholar. He is the impetus behind Rav Hayya Gaon's unique commentary to the tractate Berakhot and in persuading the Apulian scholar R. Hushiel to take up residence in Kairouan. Here we suggest his influence brought about a series of far-reaching changes in Torah study in the Mediterranean.

Our knowledge of Hebrew poetry written in the East in the Middle Ages is limited. In contrast to the Andalusian school of Hebrew poetry, which has received predominant attention by modern scholarship, we still lack even a preliminary inventory of Hebrew poets in centers outside of Al-Andalus. This lacuna hinders our understating of an important process that took place after the so-called ‘Golden Age’, wherein poets in the East embraced and absorbed the poetic innovations heralded by the Andalusian school.
This article seeks to fill this lacuna in part by shedding light for the first time on the figure of ꜤOvadiah, an obscure poet apparently active in Damascus in the thirteenth century. This prolific poet wrote hundreds of secular and liturgical poems, which were compiled in a Dīwān. Fragments of two distinct copies of the Dīwān survived in the Second Firkovich Collection, now at the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg. Examining ꜤOvadiah’s extant poems, this article addresses the major trends and character of his poetry. The poet’s familiarity with the Andalusian school is evident not merely in his poetic craft and use of conventional genres and literary motifs, but also in the variations and explicit quotes he employs, building on well-known poems by Andalusian poets. Conversely, we find poetic innovations in ꜤOvadiah’s oeuvre, unknown in his predecessors, such as strophic poems celebrating wine-drinking before ending – surprisingly – with the hope for future redemption. This article concludes with an appendix of a selection of poems by the author.

We present a web-based system called ViS-À-ViS aiming to assist literary scholars in detecting repetitive patterns in an annotated tex-tual corpus. Pattern detection is made possible using distant reading visualizations that highlight potentially interesting patterns. In addition , the system uses time-series alignment algorithms, and in particular, dynamic time warping (DTW), to detect patterns automatically. We present a case-study where an ancient Hebrew poetry corpus was manually annotated with figurative language devices such as metaphors and similes and then loaded into the system. Preliminary results confirm the effectiveness of the system in analyzing the annotated data and in detecting literary patterns and similarities.

מנהג בני ארץ ישראל להפטיר בשבתות שבין י"ז בתמוז לראש השנה בפרקי פורענות ונחמה. עם זאת, כמה מפייטני ארץ ישראל ששלחו ידם בכתיבת יוצרות, ובראשם ר' שלמה סולימן אלסנג'ארי, לא רמזו ביוצרותיהם, כפי ניתן היה לצפות, להפטרות הפורענות והנחמה. במאמר מוצע שסולימן כתב את מחזור היוצרות המקורי שלו לקהילות שנהגו במנהג הקריאה הבבלי ולא ייחדו הפטרות של פורענות ונחמה לימי בין המצרים ולשבתות שבין תשעה באב לראש השנה. רק בשלבים מאוחרים יותר של חייו הוא חזר ועיבד את מערכות היוצר שלו לקהילות שנהגו לייחד הפטרות מיוחדות לשבתות הנחמה והפורענות. להצעתי כמה השתמעויות חשובות לתולדות הפייטנות העברית בכלל ולהבנת השלבים השונים ביצירתו הפייטנית של שלמה סולימן, מהפוריים שבמשוררי הגניזה והפייטן הראשון שהותיר בידינו מחזור שלם של מערכות יוצר לפרשות השבוע.

Some Hebrew mystical texts use esoteric rhetoric, yet our ability to historically verify these claims is very scant.
This article tackles this problem from a new angle.  Literary analysis of Sefer Yeşira shows that it contains many poetical features typical of oral traditions: alliteration, assonance, anaphora, parallelism, semantic compression, the play of words, and beautiful visual images that serve as organizing principles.  Most important is the constant effort to use numerical systems as organizing principles.
Thus this article claims that the motivation for garbling mystical ideas in a beautiful rhythmic song-like text is mnemonic – the need to remember the group’s unique esoteric ideas without feeling free to put them into writing.  The fact that the text was edited and adapted time and again over many generations might explain the lack of consistency in using those literary means.

This article presents a critical edition of three Aramaic piyyutim for Purim. The piyyu-tim are unique in that they were not written in Hebrew, the overwhelmingly dominant language of classical piyyutim, but in a biblicizing register of Aramaic. This puts these piyyutim in conversation with other forms of Jewish Aramaic poetry, namely poems written in Jewish Palestinian Aramaic (JPA). The article includes a detailed analysis of the relation between the JPA poems for Purim and the piyyutim presented herein, and it argues that overt anti-Christian polemics are common to both. The Aramaic piyyutim presented here thus provide a unique nexus between JPA poetry and classical piyyut.

Review of Michael Rand's Introduction to the Grammar of Hebrew Poetry in Byzantine Palestine (Gorgias Dissertations 22, Language and Linguistics), Gorgias Press, Piscataway, New Jersey 2006.

Appeared in: Journal of Semitic Studies 54 (2009), pp. 595-597

The newsletter of the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit, Cambridge University Library.

A fragment of a prayer book from the Mosseri  Genizah collection, recently conserved and re-opened, reveals unique Palestinian prayer traditions, solves some scholarly conundrums and evokes new questions.

Ḥatanu poems – poems containing the refrain ‘we have sinned, our Maker; forgive us, our Creator’ – have long been considered a subgenre of seliḥot. However, a study of the Cairo Genizah fragments containing ḥatanu poems – over 400 in number – reveals an entirely different picture. Here the ḥatanu poems consistently fill a liturgical role distinct from that of seliḥot. For instance, on the weekday fast days, the seliḥot were recited in the sixth benediction of the ʿAmidah prayer, while the ḥatanu poems were recited as part of taḥanun. In this article I elucidate the specific liturgical role filled by the ḥatanu poems, consider the implications regarding their origin, and, overall, argue that ḥatanu poems should not be categorized as a subgenre of seliḥot poems, but rather as a distinct genre.