Monteil, Abraham. (Ed.) Seder LeShalosh Regalim [Festival prayers]

According to Cecil Roth, this volume of the Carpentras liturgy is "the most important, most bulky, most remarkable and from the bibliographical point of view, most involved of the whole series." The town of Carpentras in the Vaucluse Department, fourteen miles North-East of Avignon had a Jewish presence almost without interruption since the 12th-century. Abraham Monteil, editor of this prayer book, was a native of L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue, smallest of “the four holy communities” of Comtat Venaissin, the papal territory in Southern France that historically provided a safe haven for Jews fleeing the provinces of Languedoc and Provence, from whence they were expelled by the French monarchs. (The other three communities in this tetrapolis were: Avignon, Carpentras, and Cavaillon.) The Jews of the Comtat had their own synagogue rite, which by the close of the 18th-century was rapidly falling into disuse. See C.Roth, “The Liturgy of Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin,” Journal of Jewish Bibliography I (1939) p. 99-105; reprinted in Cecil Roth, Studies in Books and Booklore (1972), pp. 81-87; EJ, Vol. V, cols. 208, 859; Vol. IX, col.105; Vol. XI, col. 402