(FRENCH JUDAICA).

By the middle of the 18th-century, the town of Aix had become the last cultural center in which the traditions of the Comtat Venaissin communities were preserved. It was mostly through the efforts of the Crémieux and Milhaud families that this sacred patrimony was kept alive. This prayer-book was based on Elijah Crémieux’s Seder HaTamid of a century earlier, with a wide selection of Piyutim for all the communities of the Comtat Venaissin. The publication was “more a labor of patriotism than piety, for within a generation it is doubtful whether there was any synagogue at which services according to that time-honored tradition were still regularly held” (C. Roth, “The Liturgy of Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin,” Journal of Jewish Bibliography VII [1939], p. 104). See also EJ, Vol. II, cols. 475-6. Of special interest are prayers for the local Carpentras “Purim” commemorating miraculous events that occurred in that community on the 9th of Nissan in the year 1681. See EJ Vol. I, pp. 139-144.