The principal aim of this article is to attach and study $p$-adic $L$-functions to cohomological cuspidal automorphic representations $\Pi$ of $\operatorname {GL}_{2n}$ over a totally real field $F$ admitting a Shalika model. We use a modular symbol approach, along the global lines of the work of Ash and Ginzburg, but our results are more definitive because we draw heavily upon the methods used in the recent and separate works of all three authors. By construction, our $p$-adic $L$-functions are distributions on the Galois group of the maximal abelian extension of $F$ unramified outside $p\infty$. Moreover, we work under a weaker Panchishkine-type condition on $\Pi _p$ rather than the full ordinariness condition. Finally, we prove the so-called Manin relations between the $p$-adic $L$-functions at all critical points. This has the striking consequence that, given a unitary $\Pi$ whose standard $L$-function admits at least two critical points, and given a prime $p$ such that $\Pi _p$ is ordinary, the central critical value $L(\frac {1}{2}, \Pi \otimes \chi )$ is non-zero for all except finitely many Dirichlet characters $\chi$ of $p$-power conductor.

The main result of this article states that the Galois representation attached to a Hilbert modular eigenform defined over $\overline{\mathbb{F}}_{p}$ of parallel weight 1 and level prime to $p$ is unramified above $p$. This includes the important case of eigenforms that do not lift to Hilbert modular forms in characteristic 0 of parallel weight 1. The proof is based on the observation that parallel weight 1 forms in characteristic $p$ embed into the ordinary part of parallel weight $p$ forms in two different ways per prime dividing $p$, namely via ‘partial’ Frobenius operators.

Let ρ be a two-dimensional modulo p representation of the absolute Galois group of a totally real number field. Under the assumptions that ρ has a large image and admits a low-weight crystalline modular deformation we show that any low-weight crystalline deformation of ρ unramified outside a finite set of primes will be modular. We follow the approach of Wiles as generalized by Fujiwara. The main new ingredient is an Ihara-type lemma for the local component at ρ of the middle degree cohomology of a Hilbert modular variety. As an application we relate the algebraic p-part of the value at one of the adjoint L-function associated with a Hilbert modular newform to the cardinality of the corresponding Selmer group.