Two thousand and sixty pages in Israel Davidson’ s monumental Thesaurus of Mediaeval Hebrew Poetry are almost exclusively devoted to a mere bibliographical listing of the piyyutim; and that listing is not even complete. Further poetic creations have come to light, particularly through published genizah fragments, since Davidson first published his magnum opus in the first third of this century. Of this vast body of literature, the eleven poems which we have reproduced in this volume do not presume to offer even a foretaste. But it is important for the reader to know how allpervasive a phenomenon the piyyut, at one time, constituted in Jewish religious life.

Of course, no single community ever included all of the available piyyutim in its services. Indeed, it is clearly one of the dividing lines between one liturgical rite and another that some piyyutim are recited and that others are excluded. Some curious results emerge from a comparative study of the various rites. It is, for example, generally conceded that, from a purely aesthetic point of view, the poetic creations of the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue are far superior to those of Ashkenazi Jewry. Yet comparatively few piyyutim have actually been incorporated into the Sepharadi service, whereas piyyutim tend to proliferate in the Ashkenazi rite. Thus, in a standard edition of the latter, one hundred pages are devoted to the Morning and Additional Services of the first day of Passover. Of those one hundred pages, fully twenty-four, or almost a quarter of the entire service, are taken up by piyyutim! The comparable ritual of the Sepharadi tradition has no more than three pages of piyyutim.

Nascent Reform Judaism in the nineteenth century won its spurs by waging a battle against the piyyutim. In its effort to reduce the duration of the services to a span of time which would match the span of attention and devotion of the worshipper, Reform Judaism saw in the piyyutim that element of the traditional liturgy which could most easily be shed. Particularly so, because, as we have seen in chapter I, there was ample precedent for opposition to the piyyutim in the legal literature of traditional Judaism.