(Liturgy). Milhaud, Michaël, ed. Rituel des Prières en Hébreu a l’Usage des Israélites de l’Ancien Comtat [Prayers in Hebrew According to the Rite of the Former Comtat]. Vol I: Daily Prayers. Vol. II: Sabbath

(FRENCH JUDAICA)

Vitalis

Aix

1855

Two volumes bound in one. Hebrew with instructions in French

Vinograd, Aix 14

A Vestige of Comtadin Jewry. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the town of Aix had become the cultural center in which the former 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. (French composer Darius Milhaud was a descendant of the latter family.) This prayer-book was based on Elijah Crémieux’s Seder he-Tamid of a century earlier. “It 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” See C.Roth, “The Liturgy of Avignon and the Comtat Venaissin,” in 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 the community on the Fifteenth of Kislev in either the year 1512 or the year 1715 (there exists some question which), and other events that took place on the Ninth of Nissan 1681. See Vol. I, pp. 139-144