Search Results

This chapter focuses on Ereṣ Yisra’el, the birthplace of the piyyuṭ and the home of the anonymous poets (4th–6th c.) who generally followed biblical models — most notably the book of Psalms — in their liturgical writings. Some of their structural and stylistic innovations prompted the more imaginative creativity of their successors. Yose b. Yose (4th–5th c.), the first hymnist to be identified by name, expanded the musical devices of the hymn with strophic rhyming patterns, alliteration and assonance, and enhanced the hymn with legends from the rabbis. He employed figurative language in the form of metonymy — the emblematical use of words — and recontextualized biblical phrasing for assignment in the synagogue hymn. Yose was followed by the hymnography of Yannai, the stylistic master of the pattern poem and an innovator in synthetic parallelism, and Eleazar Qillir (or Qallir), the most prolific of the Ereṣ Yisra’el poets. The chapter then looks at the new era in Jewish hymnography which began with the decline of the Ereṣ Yisra’el centres of learning beginning with the Arab conquest in 634 and the corresponding emergence of academies in Babylonia.

This chapter examines the Karaite synagogue poets. The Karaites, a Jewish sect originating in the first half of the eighth century, are distinctive mainly because of their refusal to accept the authority of the talmudic-rabbinic tradition. Although the Karaites were at odds with their Rabbanite brethren in matters relating to Jewish law, they readily adopted the latters’ models in hymnography. The Karaite liturgy, which in the early years of the sect consisted of recitation from the Psalms and other scriptural readings, soon developed into rich and varied genres for fasts and feasts. The new hymnography was preserved in the thirteenth-century Karaite prayer-book edited by the scholar-poet Aaron b. Joseph the Elder from Crimea and Constantinople. Like their Rabbanite counterparts, Karaite hymnists served a didactic function, instructing the laity in their religious obligations. Karaite poets also used the liturgy as a means of instructing their congregations in current philosophical issues, particularly those relating to Jewish Neoplatonism and the nature of the soul. In their aesthetic function, Karaite hymnists resembled the Rabbanite Hispanics, favouring Arabic quantitative metres and verse forms. Caleb Afendopolo (d. 1525) of Kramariya (near Constantinople) was the master of this poetic art, as seen in his liturgical (and secular) writings.