Siddur

The earliest parts of Jewish prayer books are the Shema Yisrael ("Hear O Israel") (Deuteronomy 6:4 et seq) and the Priestly Blessing (Numbers 6:24-26), which are in the Torah. A set of eighteen (currently nineteen) blessings called the Shemoneh Esreh or the Amidah (Hebrew, "standing [prayer]"), is traditionally ascribed to the Great Assembly in the time of Ezra, at the end of the biblical period. The name Shemoneh Esreh, literally "eighteen", is a historical anachronism, since it now contains nineteen blessings. It was only near the end of the Second Temple period that the eighteen prayers of the weekday Amidah became standardized. Even at that time their precise wording and order was not yet fixed, and varied from locale to locale. Many modern scholars believe that parts of the Amidah came from the Hebrew apocryphal work Ben Sira. According to the Talmud, soon after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem a formal version of the Amidah was adopted at a rabbinical council in Yavne, under the leadership of Gamaliel II and his colleagues. However, the precise wording was still left open. The order, general ideas, opening and closing lines were fixed. Most of the wording was left to the individual reader. It was not until several centuries later that the prayers began to be formally fixed. By the Middle Ages the texts of the prayers were nearly fixed, and in the form in which they are still used today, albeït with significant variations across communities. Scholars generally trace the formation of fixed Jewish prayer to the Geonic period (7th–11th centuries), when rabbinic leaders in Babylonia created more standardized forms of liturgy to meet the needs of their communities. During this time, the first complete siddurim appeared, including the important 10th-century prayer book compiled by Saadia Gaon. In the centuries that followed, different Jewish communities developed their own rites (nuschaot), shaped by local customs and halakhic interpretations. The Siddur was printed by Soncino in Italy as early as 1486, though a Siddur was first mass-distributed only in 1865. The Siddur began appearing in the vernacular as early as 1538. Many siddurim containing some form of the Sephardic rite together with the usages of the Ari were published, both by actual Sephardic communities and for the use of Hasidim and other Ashkenazim interested in Kabbalah. In 1803, Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi compiled an authoritative siddur from the sixty siddurim that he checked for compliance with Hebrew grammar, Jewish law, and Kabbalah: some call this siddur "Nusach Ari", and is used by Lubavitch Hasidim. Those that use Nusach HaAri claim that it is an all-encompassing nusach that is valid for any Jew, no matter what his ancestral tribe or identity, a view attributed to the Maggid of Mezeritch. The Mahzor of each rite is distinguished by hymns (piyyutim). The most important writers are Jose ben Jose, probably in the 4th-5th century CE, chiefly known for his compositions for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur; Yannai; Eleazar Kalir, the founder of the payyetanic style, perhaps in the 7th century; Saadia Gaon; the Spanish school, consisting of Joseph ibn Abitur (died in 970), ibn Gabirol, Isaac Gayyath, Moses ibn Ezra, Abraham ibn Ezra and Judah ha-Levi, Moses ben Nahman (Nahmanides) and Isaac Luria; and the Ashkenazic and French schools including Shimon bar Yitzchak, Meir bar Yitzchak and many others. The Ari recited only early piyyutim, such as those by Eleazar Kalir, but did not like the Sephardic piyyutim. Therefore, on holidays he would daven (recite the prescribed liturgical prayers) with Ashkenazim—as opposed to his practice the rest of the year to daven with Sephardim—in order to recite their piyyutim, which include many more earlier piyyutim. For this reason, many Hasidim (such Belz and Viznitz) recite many piyyutim on Yom Tov and the sabbaths of the four special portions preceding Passover in accordance with the practice of the Ari. However, in Sephardic communities which accepted most of the practices of the Ari, they never accepted the Ashkenazic piyyutim. ==Complete and weekday siddurim==