JUDAIZATION 265that the social history of thepiyyutis still largely unexplored .Thepiyyutim
are a relatively recent discovery, and the scholarship on them has been largely
concerned with such basic issues as textual criticism, attribution, prosody, and
generic history.^62 What follows should be considered tentative.
Thepiyyutis an artifact of the professionalization of liturgy in some Pales-
tinian synagogues, for it is a type of poetry produced by a newly emerged
professional class, thepayyetanim(piyyutis a hebraized back formation of the
Greek loan wordpayyetan=poietes, or poet) .In brief, it seems that starting
in the sixth, or possibly the fifth, century, some Palestinian synagogues began
employing poets whose job it was to compose a new cycle of liturgical poetry
for each Sabbath and holiday.^63 This development may be seen as the institu-
tionalization, perhaps under the impact of a similar development among
Christians, of the practice of liturgical improvisation that had prevailed in at
least some Palestinian synagogues—a practice that had favored employing the
eloquent and learned as prayer leaders.^64 In the eighth century and following,
thepiyyutwas taken up in communities under Palestinian influence, for ex-
ample, in Egypt and Asia Minor .By then, though, a certain conservatism
(^62) Even J .Yahalom,Poetry and Society in Jewish Galilee of Late Antiquity(Tel Aviv: Ha-kibbutz
Ha-me’uhad, 1999), has mainly these traditional concerns, despite its title.
(^63) See Schirmann, “Yannai Ha-payyetan”; Yahalom, “Piyyut as Poetry”; Levine,Synagogue,p.
119 .In fact, the “Bach-at-Leipzig” model, as Schirmann and Yahalom characterized it, can be
demonstrated only for Yannai and Rabbi Shimon bar Megas (see Yahalom,Liturgical Poems of
R. Simon bar Megas[Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1984], p .13).
As to the date of the development of thepiyyut, the reviser of I .Elbogen,Jewish Liturgy, pp .220–
21 (apparently H .Schirmann), argues that “we can no longer distinguish between a period of
statutory prayers and a period ofpiyyutthat followed”—a statement true, if at all, only if we
imaginepiyyutpurely as a literary form rather than as a literary form embedded in a social
practice, and furthermore adopt a kind of genetic fallacy according to which the classicpiyyut
was already present in its sources .For what Elbogen’s reviser means is that Hebrew poetry was
written before the sixth century that featured some elements characteristic of thepiyyut, e.g., use
of archaizing periphrasis .There is no evidence that thepiyyutas social practice, or even as full-
blown literary form, existed before the fifth or sixth century.Au contraire, the silence of Y .Berak-
hot and Y .Megillah seems decisive.
The earliestpayyetanimare thought to have been Yosi ben Yosi and Yannai; for their dates, see
A .Mirsky,Yosse ben Yosse: Poems(Jerusalem: Mossad Bialik, 1977), pp .8–14; and Rabinowitz,
Liturgical Poems of Rabbi Yannai, 1: 45–54.
(^64) At least this is how Palestinian rabbinic texts describe it, and they are followed by most
modern scholars; see, e.g., Yahalom, “Piyyut as Poetry,” pp. 111–12; R. Scheindlin,The Gazelle:
Medieval Hebrew Poems on God, Israel, and the Soul(New York: JPS, 1991), pp .13–18 .E.
Fleischer,Shirat Hakodesh Ha’ivrit Biyemei Habeynayim(Jerusalem: Keter, 1975), pp .47–54,
suggests a different trajectory of development; prayer, in his view, had not been improvised but
fixed in an infinity of local variants; thus, much as in modern synagogues, the congregation
recited the prayers and the leader then repeated them .After several centuries, boredom set in (!),
so some prayer leaders, especially those in the synagogues connected to the rabbinicyeshivot,
began to compose new liturgies, which they performed while the congregation continued to
recite the traditional liturgy .Fleischer was apparently disturbed by the congregational passivity
implied by an improvisational liturgy.