Prayer Book (Sephardi Rite)

ONLY COPY EXTANT. ONLY HEBREW PRAYER BOOK PRINTED IN THE IBERIAN PENINSULA. Extraordinarily, this is the only known prayer book printed in the Iberian Peninsula. (Technically speaking, Maimonides includes in his Mishneh Torah, a rudimentary Seder Tefiloth Kol ha-Shanah two editions of which were printed in Spain (Thesaurus B32, B36; Offenberg, 89, 90) - yet one can hardly imagine the common man praying from a Ramba”m! It strikes one as odd that the siddur should place so low on the list of priorities of these early Jewish printers. This question must be asked not only of the Iberian Jewish printers but of their Italian co-religionists as well. Offenberg observes that only 9.5% of the Hebrew incunabula fall into the category of Liturgy. He qualifies his remarks by saying, “in categories such as liturgy and almanacs there is a very real risk that editions may have disappeared without trace precisely because they were so heavily used, so here again, caution is called for” (A.K. Offenberg, Hebrew Incunabula in Public Collections, Introduction, p. xxix). The “shelf life” of a prayer book is clearly much shorter than that of a scholarly work, yet why there should be such a paucity of prayer books from this era which produced in rapid succession no less than three editions of Rabbi David Kimchi’s biblical lexicon, Sepher ha-Shorashim? In the latter case, one might argue that the Sepher ha-Shorashim was immensely popular with Christian Hebraists, whereas the Siddur was restricted to a Jewish market. As regards Iberia per se, one must not minimize that after the Expulsion from Spain in 1492 and from Portugal in 1497, the Inquisition would systematically liquidate Jewish prayer books, whereas Hebrew books of a scholarly nature would still be of some use to Churchmen. Finally, it is possible the needs of the Spanish-Portuguese Jewish community were supplied by the Italian printing establishments (cf. Offenberg 109). There exist most interesting aspects within this prayer-book itself: The “nineteenth benediction” of the Amidah, the prayer against sectarians (birkath ha-minim), begins here with the word ”La-Meshumadim” (apostates), which is was the original wording of this prayer. This has been replaced with the censored version, “La-Malshinim” (informers). The original version beginning with the word “La-Meshumadim” has been preserved in Ms. Huntington 80 of Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Seder Tefiloth (at end of Sepher Ahavah), which was penned during the author’s lifetime, and to whose fidelity he attested with his signature. (The manuscript is in the possession of the Bodleian Library, Oxford.) Going back in time, the original “La-Meshumadim” version was unearthed in a Genizah fragment of the Palestinian “seder” (or siddur). See Solomon Schechter, “Genizah Specimens,” Jewish Quarterly Review, Old Series, Vol. X (1898), pp. 657, 659; Jacob Mann, “Genizah Fragments of the Palestinian Order of Service, Hebrew Union College Annual, Vol. II (1925), p. 306; Lawrence H. Schiffman, “At the Crossroads: Tannaitic Perspectives on the Jewish-Christian Schism” in Sanders, Baumgarten and Mendelson eds., Jewish and Christian Self-Definition (1981), pp. 150-151. The shift in wording was discussed by I. Baer, Avodath Israel (Roedelheim, 1868), pp. 93-94. At the conclusion of the Amidah printed here, there is a remarkable mystical practice. Under the rubric of “Seventy-Two Verses,” there appears what is to the uninitiated a random collection of verses from Psalms. There follows a “Yehi Ratzon” supplication that the recitation of Psalms be accepted “on this day.” At this point, the reader is to insert the day of the week: Sunday, whose sign is Leo, whose angel is Raphael, and whose heavenly body is the Sun; Tuesday, whose sign is Cancer, whose angel is Gabriel, and whose heavenly body is the Moon; Tuesday, whose sign is Ares and Scorpio, whose angel is Samaël, and whose heavenly body is Mars; Wednesday, whose sign is Gemini and Virgo, whose angel is Michael, and whose heavenly body is Mercury; Thursday, whose sign is Sagittarius and Pisces, whose angel is Tzadkiel, and whose heavenly body is Jupiter; Friday, whose sign is Taurus and Libra, whose angel is Anaël, and whose heavenly body is Venus; Saturday, whose sign is Capricorn and Aquarius, whose angel is Kaptziel, and whose heavenly body is Saturn.” The seventy-two verses quite obviously correspond to the seventy-two letters of the Divine Name. Twentieth-century researchers of the crypto-Jews of Belmonte, the last Marrano community in Portugal, discovered that these isolated remnants of Portuguese Jewry had preserved the tradition of a seventy-two letter nameof God, which they would invoke in their much garbled prayers. A UNIQUE AND ALTOGETHER EXTRAORDINARY LITURGICAL TEXT