Judaism and Hebrew Prayer

Are the origins of the synagogue to be sought in a reaction to the centralisation of worship in Judaism, or in a wider context? When did prayer become central to Jews and how are the conflicts and tensions of the talmudic period reflected in the history of its liturgy? Did Christianity and Islam have something to do with the emergence of the first Jewish prayer codices? What was the fate of the early mediaeval Palestinian rite and how did its Babylonian equivalent come to dominate the text of the early siddur? How much cross-fertilisation was there between statutory prayer, mysticism and poetry in the prayer-books of Ashkenazi and Sefardi circles? Can one identify in today's Hebrew prayers the influence of the massive demographical changes in the distribution of the Jewish people and of the establishment of the State of Israel? In an attempt to answer these tantalising questions, Stefan C. Reif takes the reader on an intriguing journey through periods about three thousand years apart and into locations as distant from each other in every sense as Sura in Mesopotamia and Cincinnati, Ohio. In this first attempt for almost three-quarters of a century to provide a scientific overview of Jewish liturgical history, the latest scholarship and the most original sources are carefully identified and utilised. The result is a book that will prove attractive both to scholarly and to lay opinion, and will exchange the narrow and tendentious scholasticism of nineteenth-century Jewish liturgical research for a broader approach to the history of such religious phenomena which is appropriate for modern readers.