ABSTRACT
A vast corpus of creative literary work characterizes the Jewish hymnographic heritage. The repertoire of Babylonian Jewish shba¥oth may be seen as part of, and as an extension of, the substantial body of synagogal hymns (Heb.: piyyû¿îm; s. piyyû¿). In the Foreword to Weinberger’s literary history of Jewish hymnography, Nicholas de Lange writes:
The synagogal hymns constitute the richest vein of Hebrew poetry, in terms of quantity and quality … The beginnings of Jewish hymnography are lost in time. The Temple had its psalms, and the recent discoveries in the Judaean desert have brought to light sectarian hymns of groups that replaced the worship of the Jerusalem Temple … The Graeco-Roman Diaspora had its proseuchai, or prayer-houses, whose hymns are mainly lost, though snatches of them have been preserved by the Christian Church. Some early rabbinic compositions survive within the folios of the Talmud. But it was the cantor-poets of Byzantine Palestine who inaugurated the
1 Rabbi Moshéh Ibn cEzra, Iyyunim, p. 27, quoted in Joseph Dana, ‘Meaningful Rhyme in the Hebrew Poetry of Spain (Selected Examples from the Sacred Poetry of Rabbi Moses Ibn Ezra)’, Jewish Quarterly Review, 76/3 (1986): p. 189 fn. 41.
