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Liturgical texts from the Cairo Genizah document Palestinian and Egyptian Jewish practice in the medieval period and demonstrate the great variety of liturgical creativity that was possible in these communities. Various blessings which were never recognized in Babylonia circulated in Palestinian-informed liturgy, such as “one who circumcises” and “who made me free and note a slave.” The Genizah contains many examples of both the so-called Palestinian and Babylonian liturgies, as well as texts which are amalgamations of the two. Both the sequence and the exact content of the Menahot and Berakhot sets of blessings ultimately remained fluid until the era of the Shulhan Arukh in the sixteenth century.

This chapter examines the power and construction of Jewish memory as well as the image of the religious Other in Jewish liturgy, which has been so heavily conditioned by adversarial biblical narratives and the experience of historical persecution. In the memory shaped by Jewish liturgy — be it the daily Amidah, the High Holiday prayers, Passover and Purim texts, or the Ninth of Av piyutim (liturgical poems) memorializing the destruction of the Temple, the tragedies of the Middle Ages, and the Holocaust — the religious or political Other is portrayed as almost universally negative. The non-Jew — usually considered in the impersonal abstract, rather than the particular other — is a threat to Jewish uniqueness. It disrupts God's covenantal plan for Israel. The chapter then looks at the ongoing tension between making historical memory part of Jewish identity and an openness to allowing history to unfold into a future that may move beyond tragedy.

This chapter provides an overview of Jewish hymnography. Synagogue hymnography, compared to its Christian and Muslim counterparts, is distinctive in both its focus and its volume. There is nothing comparable in Christianity or Islam to the vast Jewish liturgical corpus. The disparity in output is due both to the difference in focus and to the rabbinic encouragement to be creative in prayer. Lay leaders in the synagogue responded enthusiastically to the rabbinic advice, and urged their cantor-poets to compose additions to the obligatory šemaʻ and ʻamidah, as well as celebrations and observances of life-cycle events. A constant feature of the Jewish experience emerged with the hymnic ritualization of the great events of human life. There is also a difference in the historical experience of the Jews exiled from their national home. Given a life in exile, the synagogue poet would often appeal to God for national restoration. This book studies Jewish hymnography in the eastern Mediterranean and in western and central Europe, demonstrating how its literary history was largely determined by contemporary culture.

This chapter focuses on the beginnings of the Zionist movement and Reform Judaism in France. It provides a close study of the activities and publications of the Fédération Sioniste de France, which was created at the turn of the century that reveals French and east European cultural and political sensibilities. It suggests how Zionism may have had a broader influence on the outlook of French Jews even before the First World War. The chapter discusses the 1905 separation of church and state that paved the way for the founding of the first Reform congregation in France in 1907. It describes the modernization of Jewish liturgy and Jewish religious practice along the lines of the German and English Reform movements.

If the actualization of biblical sovereignty in the Zionist present rendered eighteen centuries of exile a nocturnal existence, art music of the 1950s and 1960s interfered with such linearity using the linear properties of non-Western Jewish musical traditions and serial compositional devices. Such a convergence rendered the objectification of non-Western Jewish musical traditions obsolete and consequently severed the exotic and territorial functions they served. By utilizing the linear properties of Arab Jewish musical traditions to animate inner semiotic occurrences, composers suspended extrovert exotic signifiers and invalidated their objectification. With no visible exoteric earmarks to transmit peripherality and Otherness, the binaries by which non-European Jewish immigrants had been perceived (primitivism/modernism, religion/secularism) were deemed progressively inoperative. Through a study on the agency of non-European Jewish musical traditions, chapter 2 uncovers the network that connects the theological grammar of Zionism with the Zionist pecking order, whose lower rungs were allocated to North African and Near Eastern Jews.