248 A History of Judaism
a mystical element into the most solemn portions of this communal
prayer: ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts! The whole earth is full of
his glory.’^11
In course of time this liturgy became greatly embellished. Around the
fifth century Jews in Palestine began to compose hymns for insertion
into the regular prayers. These piyyutim (poems) were often works of
considerable complexity and beauty, and many were attributed to spe-
cific authors – in Byzantine Palestine from the fifth to seventh centuries,
notably Yosi b. Yosi, Yannai and Eleazar Kallir. Schools of paytanim
(poets) were found in Byzantine southern Italy in the ninth century and
further north in Italy in the tenth century. A series of great paytanim
were to be found in Germany and Spain from around the same period.
Liturgical music seems to have developed less extensively in this period,
with no use of musical instruments in synagogue worship. But the dis-
persion of Jewish communities led to the gradual development of
distinctive regional melodies for chanting both the reading of the Torah
and the communal prayers. Worship involved the whole body, and pos-
ture remained an important element in prayer, with developing customs
about standing and bowing at particular times, although dance had less
of a role in worship than in other religious traditions – the Tanzhaus in
medieval Jewish communities in Germany was primarily for communal
celebrations of weddings.^12
At the centre of Sabbath and festival liturgy was the regular reading
of the Torah which had been established long before the Temple was
destroyed (see Chapter 3), and an immense amount of effort was
invested in safeguarding the integrity of the biblical text and in encour-
aging its study. The multiplicity of readings in many biblical books
which seems to have been standard at the end of the Second Temple
period, as in the biblical manuscripts found at Qumran, had given way
a thousand years later to a consolidated text in which divisions into
words, sentences and paragraphs, and (crucially) the vocalization of the
consonantal text, standardized its meaning. The scholars responsible for
the production of what became the masorah, or ‘traditional text’,
worked mostly in the second half of the first millennium ce and mostly
in the land of Israel, culminating in the biblical text determined in the
school of Tiberias in the tenth century. Their critical notes included
marking each place where what is read in the text (keri ) is to be differ-
ent from what is written (ketiv ). This process could completely change
the apparent meaning of a passage, reading (for instance) lo (with a
vav ) to mean ‘for him’ instead of lo (with an aleph ) to mean ‘not’ in Isa