THE SYNAGOGAL HYMNS constitute the richest vein of Hebrew poetry, in terms of quantity and quality. Tens of thousands of them are extant, and while some are short and simple others are very long and complex. Some are content to follow well-worn furrows of convention verging in some cases on the banal, but others display breathtaking originality and inventive daring, and the best of them rank among the most brilliant creations of any language or culture.

The beginnings of Jewish hymnography are lost in time. The Temple had its psalms, and the recent discoveries in the Judaean desert have brought to light sectarian hymns of groups that replaced the worship of the Jerusalem Temple with their own associations. The Graeco-Roman Diaspora had its proseuchai, or prayer-houses, whose hymns are mainly lost, though snatches of them have been preserved by the Christian Church. Some early rabbinic compositions survive within the folios of the Talmud. But it was the cantor- poets of Byzantine Palestine who inaugurated the tradition of synagogal hymnography in the Hebrew language that, through successive upheavals and transformations, was destined to remain a standard feature of Jewish religious life for fifty generations and more.

The word piyyuṭ, like the word ‘hymn’, is of Greek origin, and it is no accident that the piyyuṭ first saw the light in a region where Greek and semitic cultures met and mingled. The same is true of classical Christian hymno - graphy, whose formative figures Ephrem (in the fourth century) and Romanos (in the sixth) were both born and bred in Syria. The poetry of the Byzantine synagogue, like its architecture, its decorative art, and no doubt its music, is of mixed Greek and semitic parentage; it is an expression of that near-eastern Hellenism that is so well captured by Glen Bowersock in his book Hellenism in Late Antiquity. Hellenism in this sense is not in conflict with semitic tradition but enhances it and enables it to express itself with lucidity and beauty.

The precise relationship between Jewish and Christian hymnography has not yet been established. Downplayed by some scholars, it is variously considered by others as an outstanding example of the influence of Christian upon Jewish culture, or the reverse.