By the Rivers of Babylon: Echoes of the

Babylonian Past in the Musical

Heritage of the Iraqi Jewish Diaspora
Regina Randhofer
This article is dedicated to the musical heritage of the Babylonian (Iraqi) Jews. It centres
on the question of possible musical vestiges of the Babylonian past and their uncovering.
The history of the Jewish settlement in Babylonia and the particular scientific interest in
it are discussed as well as questions of age and origin of Babylonian Jewish music,
musical sources and the problem of ancient Temple music. The core of the article focuses
on the older strata of Babylonian Jewish music / psalmody, Bible cantillation and the
tradition of lamentation, examining the phenomenon of collective memory and
deploying strategies beyond those employed in traditional musicology.
Keywords: Mesopotamian Legacy; Babylonian Jewish; Syrian Christian; Temple and
Synagogue; Orality and Literacy; Liturgical Music; Lamentation; Collective Memory
This article addresses a central question: does the musical heritage of the Iraqi Jewish
diaspora display echoes of its Babylonian past? The question guides the following
discussion of older strata in the musical tradition of the Babylonian (Iraqi) Jews. The
singular musical tradition of the Iraqi Jewish community, as one of the most ancient
Jewish communities with an unbroken continuity of 2600 years, has long been a
subject of research interest for musicologists. As a result, various genres of the Jewish
music of Iraqi origin have been investigated in different ways. This article can
only touch on aspects of this rich and multi-faceted tradition. However, in so
doing it introduces some new elements to the discussion, showing that the
Regina Randhofer is an assistant lecturer in the Musicology Department at the Martin Luther University of
Halle-Wittenberg, Halle, Germany. She received her doctoral degree (published 1995) from the Musicology
Department of the University of Cologne, Germany. Her main research interest is the liturgical music of the
Mediterranean and Middle East/Ancient Near East. Postal address: Martin Luther University of Halle-
Wittenberg, Musicology Department, Kleine Marktstrasse 7, D-06108 Halle, Saale, Germany. Email:
regina.randhofer@gmx.de
Ethnomusicology Forum
Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2004, pp. 21/45
ISSN 1741-1912 (print)/ISSN 1741-1920 (online) # 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/17411910410001692283
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topic of Babylonian Jewish music can also be explored using strategies beyond the
well-established paths of research. The article begins with a historical survey of Jewish
settlement in Babylonia, its prosperity and its decline, as well as its late rediscovery
and the growing scientific interest in the Babylonian diaspora. It considers the
problem of age and origin in general as well as the available sources of music. After a
short presentation of a concrete biblical source, an often-discussed problem of a
hypothetical nature is addressed, namely, the nature of the ancient Temple music.
Three categories provide the focus for the examination of the older music history
of the Babylonian Jews: psalmody, Bible cantillation and the tradition of lamentation.
The discussion of psalmody and Bible cantillation is genre oriented. The approach to
the Iraqi Jewish psalm considers the relationship between the textual and melodic
levels, a comparison with other Jewish psalmodic traditions as well as a comparison
with a Christian psalm tradition from the same cultural and geographic area; the
analysis of the Bible cantillation includes the comparison of different accentuation
systems and oral traditions. The discussion of the phenomenon of lamentation is
context oriented, focusing on the cultural and geographic background and taking
into consideration context-bound lamentation songs of different Mesopotamian
cultures and periods. Of particular concern here is the phenomenon and function of
collective memory. Formalized in ritual and a main component of forming identity,
collective memory links past, present and future and is a key not only for explaining
distant traits of the Iraqi Jewish tradition but also for understanding the three great
monotheistic religions as the legacy of ancient Mesopotamia.
Mesopotamia: Cradle of Civilization
Great cultures and world religions were born in the ancient societies of Mesopotamia,
the land between the two great rivers, the Euphrates and the Tigris in the Near East. It
was here that civilization arose under the Sumerians in the 4th millennium BCE, as
protection against the unpredictability of nature, with artificial landscapes and
sophisticated irrigation systems, the formation of urban societies, a legal order, early
calendars and the first written alphabet.
The patriarch Abraham was born in this land, which flourished from the 18th
century BCE under the name of Babylonia, and from which emanated the three
monotheistic world religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Even though the
progeny of Abraham, the people of Israel,
1
found a homeland further to the west in
the coastal strip of Canaan, their close ties to Babylonia were never broken off. At the
end of the 6th century BCE Babylonian invaders destroyed the Temple of Jerusalem
and deported a part of the Judaean population to Babylonia;
2
some 50 years after the
deportation, when the Jews were allowed to return to their country, the majority
remained in the land where they had become integrated and developed into a stable
and prosperous community. Important biblical scribes and prophets, such as Ezra,
Daniel or Ezekiel, lived and preached along the twin rivers; here they died and here
they are buried. Finally, in a period of decline in Canaan, Jewish civilization
22 R. Randhofer
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flourished in the land between the Euphrates and Tigris, and Babylon became the
spiritual and religious centre of the Jewish world for over a millennium, until, in the
course of Ottoman rule, it sank to the status of a backwater in history.
The Period of Cultural Ascendancy and Decline
By the 11th century Babylonian Jewish culture had established itself in a position of
undisputed authority, far surpassing that of the old centre in Palestine. The focus of
the Babylonian diaspora was Baghdad, where a small Jewish community had existed
since the 3rd century CE. After the Islamized Arabs conquered Babylonia in 634 CE
and Baghdad became the new Arab metropolis under Khalif Mansur, Jewish life
flourished there too. The Jewish community in Baghdad became the largest in Iraq,
while further Jewish communities sprang up elsewhere outside the city (Ben-Yaacob
et al. 1972, 1445ff.).
The rabbinic academies in Babylonia, which had been founded in the 3rd century,
flourished when Iraq came under the rule of the Persian Sassanid dynasty (224/651
CE) and developed into important centres of Jewish learning. It was here that the
Babylonian Talmud took its form, being codified in the 6th century; to this day it
remains the binding work of authority for the study of the Holy Scriptures. With this
work Babylonia reached its position as the cultural, spiritual and religious centre of
the Jewish World. Writing in the 12th century, Petahia of Regensburg expressed
wonderment at the learnedness of the Babylonian Jews: There is not an ignoramus
throughout the lands of Babylon and Assyria...who does not know all the 24 books in
their punctuation and accuracy [grammar], their defective and plene spelling,
because the h

azzan does not read in the Torah, but the one who is called to the Torah
reads himself (Ben-Yaacob et al. 1972, 1446).
With the shift of the Jewish population to Spain in the 11th century, the
Babylonian centre lost its intellectual and religious primacy. A time of intellectual and
cultural decline began for the Babylonian community. Continuing into the 20th
century, the land was subjected to the vicissitudes of history. Jewish life suffered
under intermittent conquests, destruction and foreign rule, while the number of
conversions to Islam grew. Under Ottoman rule (1534/1623; 1638/1917) the whim
of the current Turkish Governor determined whether there was a phase of relative
freedom and good economic conditions for the Jewish population or a period of
repression and emigration (Ben-Yaacob et al. 1972, 1446ff.). Increasingly, old Jewish
communities wilted away; only in Baghdad did a still lively Jewish community
continue to flourish until the First World War (Idelsohn 1922a, 1). When the
anthropologist Erich Brauer visited Baghdad in 1931/2, he could report only the
decay of the religious culture of the Jews of Baghdad and came to the conclusion that
nothing had survived from the golden age of the Babylonian diaspora (Shiloah 1983,
16).
Ethnomusicology Forum 23
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Rediscovery of Mesopotamia and Rise of Scientific Interest
Babylonia and its surviving Jewish communities re-entered the awareness of the West
only with travels to the East in the 18th and 19th centuries. For centuries before that
the region had not been visited by other than a few outsiders. Sporadic information
about the Babylonian Jews was included in reports of travellers to the Orient,
particularly in the 12th century; contemporaneous depictions by Ovadiah the
Proselyte, Rabbi Yehuda al-Harizi, Rabbi Benyamin of Tudela and Rabbi Petahia of
Regensburg even offered some insight into their musical practice. Thereafter, for a
long time, nothing was heard about the Babylonian Jews. Only the archives of the
Ottoman Empire bear witness to its Jewish population as the new rulers sought to
gain precise documentation about their new subjects in order to register them for
taxation.
The darkness over Mesopotamia finally began to clear at the end of the 18th
century, when an extensive travel and missionary literature began to deal with east
and south-east Turkey, as well as Mesopotamia. The missionary interests of the
churches acted together with the economic and political interests of the great powers
to initiate journeys for the purpose of research. In the 19th century, the Presbyterian
Church and the Church of England turned their attention towards the Babylonian
Jews and the numerous reports of missionaries sent out to Mesopotamia furnished
information on their world. Science also discovered Mesopotamia as a fertile ground
for archaeological investigation and the exploration of art history, geography,
philology and theology. The travellers, however, hardly came into contact with
Jews of the region, or at least most of them omitted to mention them in their reports.
In the 20th century, scholarly investigation begins to replace the rather general view
of the Babylonian Jews. Studies on special topics devoted to Babylonian Jews, such as
ethnological and linguistic studies, emerge. Their music also comes into the purview
of researchers. The establishment of comparative musicology in Berlin at the start of
the 20th century lent added impetus to research on Jewish music. Its most important
tool, the modern phonograph, enabled the first recordings and transcriptions of the
music of the Babylonian Jews to be made and turned it into a subject of scientific
interest, the more so as the great age and unbroken continuity of the Babylonian
community from the 6th century BCE up to the 20th century suggested that it might
have preserved the spiritual heritage of the people of Israel and promised to lead back
to the inceptions of the Jewish cult,
3
against the backdrop of which Western man
sought to understand himself.
The Music: Problems of Age and Origin
The particular interest to scholars of the Babylonian diaspora lies in its great antiquity
and enduring continuity over a period of some 2600 years. It is indeed a fascinating
thought that this musical tradition may have preserved some of the earliest strata of
Jewish musical history. It is nonetheless no small problem to identify these strata, as a
24 R. Randhofer
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whole series of factors needs to be borne in mind. First, Jewish music was handed
down from antiquity through an oral tradition, so that no specific melodies bearing
witness to the early epochs are written down or otherwise preserved: our only source
is the actual living practice of modern times, with melodies first written down and
recorded in such a way as to be accessible to us only from the beginning of the 20th
century. Thus two and half millennia of Babylonian musical tradition remain
undocumented as such.
Second, the picture of present-day musical practice among the Babylonian Jews
presents itself to us in a multi-faceted way. The great stretch of time is not only a
question of the antiquity of the tradition. It also means that many tree rings, as it
were, have accumulated over the years, signifying both continuity and change, with
extraneous influences incorporated in varying ways through acculturation and
transformation. Above all, the long Islamic period saw a fruitful exchange between
Jewish and Islamic cultures in Babylonia, both in general and with regard to music in
particular. It is not only contacts with neighbouring cultures, however, but also those
with other Jewish communities of the Diaspora that may well have left their traces in
Babylonian music practice.
Further, Babylonian Jewry scattered in the course of time into far-flung regions of
the world, especially to India and the Far East. Early on, commercial relations had
already brought Jews from the Near East to the Orient, where they settled along the
trade routes. A fresh wave of migration followed in the 19th and 20th centuries, as
Babylonian Jews left their homeland to settle further east in the already existing
communities in Central Asia, India and China. Most of these communities have since
disappeared, their populations having dispersed to other countries such as modern
Israel, Britain, North America and Australia (Manasseh 1991, 231).
Those who wish, despite this geographical and historical differentiation, to build
bridges, as it were, from the present back into the past, thereby gaining an insight into
Babylonian musical practice not only in terms of its present usage but also in respect
of its origins and development through time, find principally the following sources to
hand:
1. Written sources : The Babylonian Jewish area is evidenced by a series of literary and
other written documents, which help to illuminate the musical practice of bygone
epochs.
4
They need, however, to be interpreted with care as it is not always
apparent whether one is dealing with sources that reflect historical realities. The
written sources inform us about musicians, specific pieces of music, performance
practice, forms and usage and so forth, but not about actual melodies.
2. Notation: In Babylonia, as in other Jewish communities, a kind of written
notation in the form of accents was developed for the purposes of recitation from
the Holy Scriptures.
5
Nonetheless no actual melodies were delineated, even in this
case; all the same, comparison of this system with other accentuational notations
as well as with the oral tradition may increase its value as evidence.
Ethnomusicology Forum 25
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3. Oral transmission: The range of sources available here is the richest we have to
hand. The melodic element, however, is an unstable one, the more so in the case of
oral transmission. This is best proven by the Jewish traditions themselves: there
are a large number of such traditions existing today, not just a single one; in the
far dispersed diaspora, the melodies transmitted have strongly diverged and if
there ever was a primal tradition it is now beyond recognition. It is nonetheless
possible with a degree of care to use structural analyses and comparative studies to
lay bare the older transmission strata.
These three types of source provide the framework for the following profile, cut
through the history and music of the Babylonian Jews, though the profusion of forms
in which the music is manifested permits only a representative sample to be
presented.
Early Evidence Relating to Music
Jewish settlement in Babylonia begins with the conquest of the kingdom of Judah
through war by Nebuchadnezzar II. In 597 and 586 BCE, the Babylonian kings troops
marched on Judah, destroying the Temple in Jerusalem and carrying off a part of the
population of Judah into the Babylonian Captivity. Babylonia thus became the site of
the first Jewish diaspora.
Owing to the scarcity of sources, information on the Babylonian community in the
first centuries is not abundant. Only in Talmudic times, the period of the earliest
extant Bible commentaries (from the 2nd century CE), does documentary evidence of
a literary nature begin to accumulate. Not much more has been handed down to us
for the early period than the mere fact of the continued existence of a Babylonian
community of Judaeans, while scarcely any direct evidence of their musical practice
has survived.
The lament psalm 137,
c
Al naharot Bavel
6
(By the rivers of Babylon), evokes
memories of the Exile. It appears to have originated during the Captivity in Babylon
and is still sung annually throughout the Jewish world, as part of the service for the
tis
c
ah b
e
-av (the ninth [day] of [the month of] Av), the Day of Fasting and
Mourning in commemoration of the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple.
7
The
psalm begins:
1. By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion.
2. There on the poplars we hung our harps
3. for there our captors asked us for songs, our tormentors demanded songs of joy; they said,
Sing us one of the songs of Zion!
It describes how the Jews bewail their distant homeland. An instrument is also
mentioned, in English translation the harp, in Hebrew kinnor, an old cultural term of
unknown origin that occurs throughout the Ancient Near East from Egypt to
Mesopotamia (Gorg 1988).
8
The word probably signifies the lyre, an ancient Near-
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Eastern string instrument plucked either with the fingers or by means of a plectrum.
In any case the psalm furnishes us with an indication that the Jews brought musical
instruments with them from Palestine to Babylonia.
Music in the Temple
It is clear that the deportation of the Jews from Judah to Babylon led them to take
with them not only instruments but also musical practices and melodies, and the
question arises as to what these may have been like and whether anything has
survived of them to this day.
So far as the musical scene in Ancient Israel
9
is concerned, we need to think of it as
part and parcel of the practice of music making in the Ancient Near East as a whole,
including the neighbouring cultures, among them a series of minor cultures within
Ancient Israel as well as outside, which left their traces in secular musical practice as
well as in that of the religious cult. Music for the religious cult in Ancient Israel
includes that for the Temple in Jerusalem, built c. 1000 BCE by King Solomon and
serving as the focus for the worship of God for the people of Israel until its final
destruction at the hands of the Romans in around 70 CE. In addition to the Temple
there were a large number of cult centres outside Jerusalem with their own rites and
cult music.
The music of the Temple has fascinated scholars ever since and challenged them to
carry out research for the purpose of its reconstruction / mostly, however, on the
basis of lively speculation, since very little is actually known about the Temple cult.
We know that worship in the first Temple involved a short liturgy recited by the
priests, which included among its oldest strata the Jewish Creed S

ma
c
Yisrael (Hear,
Israel), the Decalogue and a series of benedictions and prayers (Goldschmidt and
Jacobs 1972, 392ff.). We know nothing of the manner of their recitation, whether
sung or spoken. According to biblical testimony, there was an organized Temple
music, performed by professional instrumentalists and singers from the tribe of Levi.
However, even though many studies referring to the numerous biblical sources may
suggest that we are well and precisely informed about the Temple music, we should
keep clearly in mind that historical reality and myth are intertwined in the Bible.
There are grounds for believing that the role of music in Solomons Temple was less
significant than is depicted in the biblical sources (Braun 1999, 23/4).
We may assume that the Temple worship, its liturgy and music, was not unknown
in Babylonia, for contact between Babylonia and the old Homeland was never entirely
broken off and, during the period of the second Temple, many pilgrimages from
Babylonia to Jerusalem are attested (Oxtoby and Neusner 1972, 38). It is nonetheless
improbable that the Babylonian diaspora maintained and cultivated the music of the
Temple, since such a Temple / with its fixed rules and professional choirs and
orchestras / was non-existent in Babylonia. Such temple music requires three basic
conditions. . .the place / Jerusalem; the function / the Temple service; the specific
group controlling and supervising the music / the Levites (Shiloah 1983, 9). With
Ethnomusicology Forum 27
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the destruction of the Temple, however, these three conditions ceased to be met. The
previously mentioned Psalm 137, furthermore, gives an indication of the impossi-
bility of reproducing the sacred music of Jerusalem in Babylonia; to quote: how shall
we sing the Lords song in a strange land? (Shiloah 1983, 9, with reference to Rabbi
Saadya Alfayoumi). A report such as that of Rabbi Benyamin of Tudela, a well-known
Spanish traveller who visited Baghdad in 1170, is therefore to be read only with the
greatest caution. Tudela made a report about the heads of the Talmud schools, among
other things, to the effect that one of them, as well as his brethren, knows how to
chant the melodies as did the singers at the time when the Temple was standing
(Shiloah 1983, 13). However, quite apart from the absence of a Temple in Babylonia,
the time that had elapsed between Tudela and the existence of the Temple in
Jerusalem was far too long for anyone possibly to have had any memories of the
music performed there.
The Older Strata in the Musical Tradition
As the Babylonian tradition, like most other cases of musical transmission within the
Near Eastern cultural region, was never written down, we have no documentation of
the oldest melodies. Our only source is present-day musical usage; but here the
question arises as to the age, origin and authenticity of those melodies currently in
use. The answer to this question depends on factors that can scarcely be established
with any degree of certainty. We know from oral traditions that they are subject to
change with time. Within limits, improvisation and variation are in any case typical
of all Near Eastern traditions. Still, based on present usage and by means of
comparison with other Jewish traditions or with neighbouring cultures, it is possible
to show that certain parts of the repertoire are of very considerable antiquity. I shall
now consider three such constituent parts of the early transmission history:
psalmody, biblical cantillation and the tradition of lamentation.
Psalmody and Biblical Cantillation
Regular use of music in the synagogue is not yet to be found in connection with the
early Babylonian diaspora. As is now known, the synagogue service with a fixed order
arose not from the Babylonian Exile but from the centuries following the final
destruction of the Temple under the Roman Emperor Titus (70 CE).
10
It cannot,
however, be doubted that the early Babylonian Jews nonetheless used religious music,
since this had long since played an integral role in the religious life of the people of
Israel that not only extended to places of public worship but also included home-
based rituals and life-cycle celebrations, from birth to death. In the course of the
historical development of the religion ever more occasions for the use of music
presented themselves, for, to an increasing extent, the day, week, year and indeed the
whole life of each individual came to be structured in terms of service of the Lord.
28 R. Randhofer
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Thus, in the course of time a wide range of liturgical and paraliturgical music practice
arose, ranging from private gatherings to the major festivals.
With the genesis and development of a regulated liturgical order for the synagogue,
a whole new field for the use of religious music opened up, which took the
Babylonian diaspora captive. Unlike the Temple, the synagogue, at least in the period
of its inception, was a purely lay institution. Its music was purely vocal, without use
of instruments, and concentrated entirely on the text. The musical repertoire
included the recitation of books from the Bible as well as the singing of prayers,
benedictions and hymns. A central place in the synagogue liturgy was occupied from
early on by the psalms and readings from the Bible.
Psalmody
The singing of psalms may be taken as an old practice which was also cultivated in the
Babylonian diaspora. It was an integral part of the service in the Temple, but psalms
were also performed at home.
11
One hundred and fifty psalms found their way into the biblical canon and count
among the lyrical texts within it. Their predominating stylistic device is the
parallelismus membrorum, or thought rhyme, which consists of two half-verses (at
times also thirds of a verse) / a poetic technique cultivated by nearly all ancient Near
Eastern cultures. The thought rhyme is a poetic form in which two semantically
related thoughts / thoughts which resemble, complement or contrast with one
another / are paired as, for example, in Psalm 1, verse 6: For the Lord watches over
the way of the righteous, // but the way of the wicked will perish.
Metre in a strict sense, i.e. patterns of long and short syllables, is not used in
psalms, but a line often has three to four stresses. This poetic form of text suggests a
sung recitation; indeed, many psalm texts call directly for musical presentation
(Bayer, Avenary and Boehm 1972, 565), for example Psalm 33, verses 1/3:
1. Sing joyfully to the LORD, you righteous; it is fitting for the upright to praise him.
2. Praise the LORD with the harp; make music to him on the ten-stringed lyre.
3. Sing to him a new song; play skilfully, and shout for joy.
Nearly all Hebrew psalms have a title. Often the titles give information about the
type of composition and also contain or imply a musical direction. Even if we have no
objective evidence relating to the oldest melodies, nonetheless a whole series of psalm
headings make it plain that the texts were originally sung to fixed melody types. It
would appear that model melodies of a nature similar to folk song are to be indicated
by titles like According to the Hind of the Dawn (Psalm 22), According to Lilies
(Psalms 45, 69), According to the Dove on Far-off Terebinths (Psalm 56) or
According to Do Not Destroy (Psalms 57/9, 75)
12
/ that is, melodies which would
in general have been well-known to the people (Bayer, Avenary and Boehm 1972, 565;
Bayer 1982). This way of indicating the melody would seem to have been quite
normal in the Ancient Near East since musical information was already given by
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means of headings and colophons in Old Babylonian hymns (Kilmer 1997, 137ff.).
The custom was also common in the Syrian Church, an ancient Christian tradition
rooted in the same cultural milieu as that of the Babylonian Jews. In the oldest
manuscripts, the melodies of the hymns of Ephrem the Syrian (303/373 CE) are
indicated by a stich similar to the Hebrew psalm titles, e.g. According to the Flock of
Bardaisan (Beck 1983, 349).
The poetic parallelism of the psalm verses suggests a melodic parallelism as well.
This form of psalm recital is widespread in present-day practice and is also to be
found among the Babylonian Jews. In the Babylonian tradition the dichotomy of the
verses can further be underlined by the fact that in two-part psalm-tone models each
half is provided with a different recitation axis and different cadences, each with its
own final tones (Figure 1).
13
The parallelistic construction of the psalm verses also suggests a special manner of
performance, whereby the chant alternates between different bodies of singers. This is
attested from early on: written statements from the 1st century CE bear witness to the
responsorial performance of psalms of various kinds, namely the alternation between
a solo voice (the cantor) and choir. This old practice of alternating singing was,
however, abandoned by nearly all Jewish traditions with the exception of
the Babylonian Jewish one, where it survived for the recitation of the Hallel psalms
(113/18) at Pesach (Idelsohn 1944, 20ff.), as well as in Northern Mesopotamia
among the Kurdish Jews for Psalm 92 on the Shabbat morning (Flender 1988, 57).
14
The parallelismus membrorum, the basic poetic framework of the psalms, is not
always reflected on the melodic level since the formula involving two-part psalm
tones is not the only one to be encountered in Jewish musical practice. It seems that
an older stage of psalmody is represented by a single psalm-tone or single-part
formula applied to the psalm text in harmony with the syntax of the verse. The
parallelismus membrorum, the basic pattern of psalmodic poetry, is in this case not
reflected on the melody level: the single-part formula is laid upon the text in
stereotypical fashion / a half verse, a third of a verse or even a whole verse,
irrespective of the manner of its subdivision, may be subsumed under such a
formula.
15
This one-part type of psalm tone is also to be found alongside its parallelistic
counterpart in the tradition of the Babylonian Jews (Figure 2). But the single psalm-
tone is not to be met with only here. Significantly, it is the predominant type also in
the conservative sequestered regions of the Yemen on the very edge of the old Jewish
diaspora
16
(Figure 3), in the inaccessible North Mesopotamian region among the
Jews of the Kurdish mountain country (Figure 4) and in the Syrian Church
17
(Figure 5).
18
Figure 1 Psalm 1, Iraq, Baghdad.
30 R. Randhofer
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Figure 2 Psalm 107, 1/8, Iraq, Baghdad.
Figure 3 Psalm 1, 1/4, Yemen.
Figure 4 Psalm 24, 1/5, Kurdish, Iran.
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Of all the Christian psalm tones, it is only the Syrian that follows this concept of
textual presentation, according to which the melodic formula and verse text are only
loosely related to one another.
19
The Syrian psalm evinces an especially close relation
to the Kurdish Jewish psalm in particular in that both are characterized by an arch-
shaped melodic idiom. This closeness need not necessarily be the result of a
borrowing; it may be that it is to be explained in terms of a shared cultural milieu.
Kurdish Jews and Syrian Christians live in the same cultural area of Northern
Mesopotamia. What is more, they speak the same language, traceable back to an
Aramaic dialect. Otherwise, they have no contact with each other. The arch-like
formula may therefore be the vestige of an older Mesopotamian melody model.
The textual and melodic levels of the psalm are thus not necessarily coincident, and
the single-part melodic formula appears, in the light of a whole series of arguments,
to be older than the two-part one. This finding points to the conclusion that at one
time an epic rather than a psalmodic style underlay the recitation of the psalms
and in the Mesopotamian region this epic perception has successfully maintained
itself down to the present day.
Biblical cantillation
Together with the psalms the reading of the Bible was also of importance in the
synagogue. The earliest public reading of the Holy Scriptures dates back to the time
before the Babylonian Exile, to Ancient Israel in the 7th century BCE (622 BCE) where
it took place in the context of the Josian Reform, when a forgotten Book of the Law
(Deuteronomy) was found during restoration work on the Temple. At this stage,
however, it would be out of place to speak of regular, institutionalized Bible reading.
Subsequently, sporadic Bible readings occurred repeatedly and were probably
performed in a reciting style. The literary evidence for a melodic recitation of the
Bible increases in the 2nd century CE, with the elaboration of a fixed synagogue
service and the development of a regular rotation of readings of extracts from the
Torah and the Prophets (McKinnon 1986, 166ff.). The reading from the Torah (the
Figure 5 Psalm 104, 14/20, Syrian Christian.
32 R. Randhofer
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five books of the Pentateuch) thus came to lie at the heart of every synagogue service,
while the reading of other biblical books was reserved for special feast days.
At first the melodic cantillation of the Bible text was carried out with the help of
cheironomic memorization. Cheironomy is a bodily and gestural encoding of musical
information: hand signs and the positioning of the arms serve as mnemonic aids for
particular pitches and rhythms and provide a first form of archival memory for music
in traditions devoid of written notation. One of the most prominent examples of
cheironomy is to be found in iconographic representations of Ancient Egypt. In
modern Egypt, cheironomy is still practised by the descendants of Pharaonic Egypt,
the Coptic Christians (Hickmann 1949). Also, in some ancient Jewish communities
in North Africa, Italy and the Yemen, cheironomy has survived until the present day
(Chernett 1997, 9). In Babylonia itself it has been abandoned, but its existence there
in the 12th century is attested to by Petahia of Regensburg (Shiloah 1983, 14).
The first written notation for cantillation of the Bible arose both in Babylonia and
in Palestine from the 5th century CE. The early systems, in the form of accents,
present a form of inter-punctuation and subdivide the sentences into meaningful
parts by means of a limited stock of signs.
20
In its early stage, the Babylonian system
contents itself with ten signs, mainly consisting of Hebrew letters (Figure 6).
21
All
these signs were disjunctive and served to mark off the syntactic subdivisions; besides,
there were favoured accent combinations. Between 700 and 1000 CE, the Palestinian
school of the Tiberian Masoretes finally developed an elaborated accent system with a
strongly reinforced number of signs, further distinguished hierarchically into accents
that separate or bind together (Figure 7). Furthermore, the Tiberian Masoretes came
Figure 6 Babylonian Accentuation (2 Chronicles 1, 8/11).
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to divide the accentuation into a poetic system for the Book of Psalms, Job and
Proverbs, on the one hand, and a prose system for the remaining 21 books, on the
other.
The new accentuation was accepted as binding by the spiritual authorities in
Babylonia and superseded the other two protosystems. Babylonia took over the new
refined system of accents, which involved a more differentiated technique of singing.
This is especially easy to observe in the case of the Torah cantillation, which became
exceedingly complex there under the influence of the Tiberian system and was
provided with a wealth of melodic formulas (Figure 8a).
22
In principle, each sentence
of the Torah is successively subdivided into smaller melodic units, beginning at its
end and running back to the beginning. In this way an irreversible chain of melodic
motifs is created (Flender 1988, 77).
In most Jewish communities, the Torah cantillation is structurally bound to the
written codification, even though it is free with regard to the morphology of the
accent motifs and rests on the foundation of oral transmission (Flender 1988, 79).
There is, however, a tradition that follows a different pattern. In the Torah cantillation
of the Yemenites, contrary to the suggestions furnished by the Tiberian accents, like
Figure 7 Tiberian Accentuation (2 Chronicles 1, 8/11).
34 R. Randhofer
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melodic phrases are strung together in additive fashion accompanying the syntactic
units of the sentence and thus correspond more to the Babylonian style of
accentuation (Flender 1988, 77). As already observed, the Yemenite community lies
in a backwater at the edge of the Jewish world, far from the main cultural centres.
Hence, it seems that an older stratum of the tradition transmitted from pre-Masoretic
times has been able to maintain itself in the Yemenite Torah cantillation (Figure 8b).
23
The style of Yemenite Torah cantillation may represent the style which was
predominant in Babylonia before the introduction of the Tiberian Masora. There are
further indications to support this claim: the Torah manuscripts of the Chinese Jews
of Kaifeng contain accents which differ from the Tiberian system and enable us to
conclude that there was, rather, an additive principle underlying the Torah recitation.
These Chinese Jews were originally a Babylonian group who emigrated early on to
China and as a result missed the adoption of the Tiberian accentuation. The Kaifeng
accentuation probably corresponds to an older, pre-Masoretic conception of the text,
as is also reflected in both the protosystems and the contemporary practice of the
Yemenites.
24
Figure 8 Torah Cantillation (Exodus 12, 21).
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Tradition of Lamentation
The lamentations used for the Day of Fasting and Mourning tis
c
ah b
e
-av occupy an
outstanding place in the liturgical repertoire of the Babylonian Jews. The two lament
psalms, 137 and 79,
25
are sung at services in the synagogue on this day, together with
other laments and parts of the Book of Jeremiah. In addition, services include
particular songs of lament of a poetic nature, the qinot .
The special status of the forms connected with the tis
c
ah b
e
-av in all the various
Jewish traditions has often been noted, for they are quite distinct from the otherwise
usual song types. Flender first outlined these peculiarities so far as the lament psalms
are concerned (1981, 320ff.), while Herzog and Hajdu (1968) broadened the range of
consideration to other traditions as well as bringing further parts of the repertory
into view. For Shiloah, the great number of musically interesting Lamentations
associated with the Ninth of Av can be considered a distinguishing sign of the
Babylonian heritage, because of their difficulty in performance (1983, 22).
Among the Babylonian Jews / and this applies equally to the Kurdish Jews of
Mesopotamia / the singing of the tis
c
ah b
e
-av is in a special idiom. Idelsohn was
already able to affirm: Die babylonische Klageweise hat kein Analogon im judischen
Gesange, obwohl einige Motive an die sonst allgemeine Klageliedweise erinnern (1922a,
12) (translated in the English reprint as The Babylonian Lamentations mode has no
analogies in Jewish song, although some motifs are reminiscent of the general
Lamentations mode). Instead, he found parallels in the singing of the Syrian and
Coptic Churches: Dagegen findet sich eine ahnliche Weise, wenigstens hinsichtlich der
Tonalitat, im Kirchengesange der Jakobiter
26
in der Gebetsart Bo
c
ut

o, qolo sbi
c
ojo,
ebenso im Gesange der Kopten in A

gypten (1922a, 12) (translated in the English

reprint as On the other hand there is a similar mode, at any rate so far as the tonality
is concerned in the chants of the Jacobites in the supplicatory form Bo
c
ut

o, qolo
sbi
c
ojo, also in the chants of the Copts in Egypt). This latter he identifies in another
article, making the same comparison, as a song of lament of the Copts (1922b, 368).
The parameter that Idelsohn takes as the basis for his comparison is a scale, which
he shows to underlie all three traditions (1922a, 12).
The question as to what conclusions might be drawn from this circumstance may
reasonably be raised at this juncture, for, on closer inspection, at least two of the three
pieces compared prove to be either untypical or unsuited to the comparison. The
Syrian Christian example is a bo
c
ut

o dMor Ya
c
qub (request poem by St Jacob) in the
seventh tone (qolo sbi
c
oyo), which, in Idelsohns version, can be identified only from
the text.
27
The melody seems to be a singular / not to say even corrupted / melody,
which strongly diverges from the Western Syrian standard version of the bo
c
ut

o dMor
Ya
c
qub in the seventh tone.
28
Idelsohn does not refer to the source of the Coptic
example nor does he supply any text. Consisting as it does of a single line (1922a, 13;
36 R. Randhofer
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1922b, 368), it appears to be taken from a lament. Those, however, who have heard a
Coptic lament, such as the lah

n idr b (melody idr b ) know that, given the

monumental architecture, highly stratified tonal dimensions and overall complexity
of the whole song, a single line taken from it is without any sense and, in any case,
meaningless in the context of a comparative study such as that which Idelsohn
undertakes.
29
It is at any rate not possible to distil from this comparison an idiom
common to all three traditions.
That it is by no means misguided to look for parallels to Babylonian Jewish song in
the Syrian Christian context has already been shown in the case of psalmody. As far as
lament is concerned, an analogy with the Babylonian manner is indeed to be found in
the Syrian repertoire, namely in the tak

sfot

o (supplications). They occupy a

prominent position in the burial rite, i.e. they are sung in a context relating to
death and resurrection.
30
In both cases the songs of lament have a special place in the
repertoire: they are technically highly demanding and display an idiom which is quite
distinct from all other forms in the same group and evidently has roots entirely of its
own. The two chants are, moreover, alike with respect to their idiom: a characteristic
is the alternation of recitative passages and melismatic chant, both as a rule set off
against each other by a jump into a higher register. In the case of the recitative
passages, the melodic material is to a large extent non-specific, with a narrow
ambitus; the melismata, on the other hand, are striking in their broader tonal range,
their characteristically falling style and terraced drops in intertwined thirds or
seconds alternating with thirds (Figures 9 and 10).
31
There is, to be sure, more than one way in which this common idiom, as shared by
the Babylonian Jews and Syrian Christians, may be explained. However, the fact that
these two groups were not in contact with each other, albeit sharing the same natural
and cultural environment, suggests that one should first of all concern oneself with
precisely this area, that is to say with Mesopotamia, and the conclusion will soon be
reached that lamentation played a central role in Mesopotamia from the earliest
settlement of the region.
Figure 9 From Psalm 79, Babylonian Jewish.
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Lamentation is an anthropological universal, to be found in practically all cultures
in the world, appearing as an expression of situations of travail in connection with
events causing existential privation (Welten 1980, 736), such as death, sin,
destruction, loss, military defeat, a threatening criminal process and so forth. What
differentiates Mesopotamia from other cultures is the fact that lamentation in this
case was the expression of historical experience touching the very being of the people:
lamentation developed in Mesopotamia into a central ceremonial act.
The deeply pessimistic worldview of the Mesopotamian population is rooted in the
natural environment. As a result of the abundance of water from its twin rivers, the
Euphrates and Tigris, Mesopotamia was a favourable place to settle; at the same time,
it was plagued by the alternation between heavy flooding and catastrophic droughts.
The people had from earliest times managed to make use of this environment and
improve it, but they remained nonetheless dependent on incalculable nature. The
other danger with which the early civilization of the Land of the Twin Rivers had to
contend was warfare. Urban life and growing wealth rendered the fruitful, densely
settled Mesopotamian plain a natural target for attacks from outside.
Against this background of natural vicissitudes and wars, a Mesopotamian
tradition of lament developed. The great mass of such hymns from Mesopotamia,
of which large numbers have come down to us, are related to these two factors
(Krecher 1980/3): the destruction of cities and the cycle of nature. Both genres of
lament were transformed into ritual and, through the medium of ritual performance,
were able to gain access to the collective memory.
The concept of collective memory was developed in the first half of the 20th
century. Major contributions are the works of Maurice Halbwachs (1950), Ernst
Cassirer (1923/9, 1942), Paul Connerton (1989), Francis Yates (1966) and Aleida and
Jan Assmann (see Assmann, Assmann and Hardmeier 1983), the latter introducing
the concept to the archaeological disciplines (1988, 1992). According to Jan Assmann,
collective memory comprises two modes of remembering the past: communicative
memory and cultural memory. Communicative memory refers to the recent
past and means the concrete history present to a given generation. Cultural
Figure 10 From tak

seft

o man lo nebke, Syrian Christian.

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memory refers to the distant past and incorporates two different concepts: memory
culture (Erinnerungskultur) and reference to the past (Vergangenheitsbezug).
Memory culture is the way a society ensures cultural continuity by preserving its
traditions from generation to generation with the help of cultural mnemonics, i.e.
objectifications of past activities. References to the past not only enable later
generations to reconstruct their cultural identity, they also bestow collective identity
on the members of a group or society, supplying them with an awareness of their
unity and singularity in time and space by creating a shared past (Assmann 1992).
The primary organizing form of cultural memory is ritual (Assmann 1992). Rituals
and ceremonies associated with special occasions and places / such as commemora-
tion days, ancient sites or sacred places / become time marks and sites of memory.
Cultural memory does not intend to reproduce exactly the events of the past but
makes statements about the past in terms of a given cultural context of the present.
In Mesopotamia, most of the extant laments appear to have originated in
connection with ritual ceremonies, and it was through ritual performance that the
lament became a figure of memory. The rites themselves have not survived to our day
but we know the cult context from ritual descriptions dating primarily from the 1st
millennium. Of course, no melodies have been handed down on account of the lack
of musical notation; only the texts have survived. All we know is that the singer who
recited the songs of lament for the cult was a priest, and that the manner of recitation
was taught in the temple schools, which is an indication of their professional
character (Rashid 1984, 14, 20). The texts of the hymns in question clearly show what
differentiates the Mesopotamian lament from those of other early high cultures such
as Egypt or China: the gloom which underlies the basic attitude, the pessimistic view
of history and human fate and the perpetual bewailing of the fragility of civilization.
The two most important types of event causing existential privation with which
ritual lament in Mesopotamia is bound up are the mourning for a destroyed city and
that for a god who has disappeared, symbolizing the cycle of nature with its coming
into fullness and passing away. The destruction of a city and its cult places in war was
interpreted as a turning away by the gods as a punishment. This model of the origin
of times of emergency in an intervention of angry gods is met with for the first time
in history in Mesopotamia. It is based on the Mesopotamian legal order whereby
communal life was regulated by contracts and oaths; if these were broken, the gods
would intervene to punish the wrongdoer (Assmann 1999 [1992], 229/58). The
rituals that were carried out in connection with destructive catastrophes served to re-
establish the preceding order. The function of the sung laments was to assuage the
relevant tutelary god of the city, or those gods who had turned away from their
people, and to move them to return. The bridge between this and the Jewish Day of
Fasting and Mourning, the tis
c
ah b
e
-av, on which the destruction of Jerusalem and
the Temple is bewailed, is apparent. Evidence for fasts with their own particular
liturgy and ceremony held on the occasion of catastrophes befalling the people of
Israel is already to be found in biblical times and continues into the Middle Ages
(Elbogen 1962, 126ff.). Tis
c
ah b
e
-av is the most important such fast day and at the
Ethnomusicology Forum 39
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same time also a day of mourning. From early times, mourning practices are
prescribed for this day, as, for example, on the death of a next of kin, and in part they
have survived to the present day (Elbogen 1962, 128).
32
The representation of dying and resurrected gods made manifest the rhythm of life
as seen by a people who were dependent on the annual renewal of nature. Every year,
as the waters dried up and nature declined, the departure of all manner of gods for
the underworld was mourned in Mesopotamia; every year, with the return of the
rains, the filling of the rivers and the fresh blossoming of nature, the gods arose again.
This cycle of death and resurrection of the gods was celebrated in the cults, the most
prominent of which was that of Tammuz (or Dumuzi) in Mesopotamia, otherwise
known as Adonis in Phoenicia, whose influence extended far and wide in the
Mediterranean world. Tammuz laments among the Israelites are also attested in the
Old Testament (Ezekiel 8, 14).
33
The lament formed an essential part of the cult of these gods. The period during
which the texts were transmitted stretches over almost 3000 years and reaches back
into the Seleucid period in the 2nd century BCE (Krecher 1980/3, 4), their ritual
enactment being still more persistent. In Christian Syria, for example, Babylonian
cults and feasts at which ritual lament played an essential role are still in evidence at
the end of the 5th century (Drijvers 1984).
Above all, this tradition of mourning over cyclical waxing and waning found a
reception in Christian systems of belief, in which it was transformed into the concept
of death and resurrection (Leipoldt 1923). In ritual terms we meet it in double form:
in the week leading up to Easter, with its remembrance of the death and resurrection
of Christ, and in the funeral rites. Pagan laments for the dead persisted in this context
until at least the end of the 6th century. The Church Fathers continually battled
against them because they thought them no longer appropriate to the burial of the
dead in a Christian sense, but ecclesiastical authorities were never wholly successful in
the attempt to eradicate the laments entirely from Christian burial rites (Kaczynski
1983, 798/804).
Nature and war were thus the foundations on which a Mesopotamian lament
tradition grew up. The destruction of urban life as a consequence of human action
and the peoples dependence on the cycle of nature led to two specific forms of
lament, which were articulated in countless hymns, transformed into rites, fixed in
the calendar and, by dint of constant repetition over the millennia, hardened into
timeless figures of commemoration. Nature and war were, after all, what eventually
brought about the collapse of the ancient Mesopotamian kingdom. The legacy of its
civilization has, however, lived on to the present day in the religions, literatures,
cosmogonies, rituals and laws of neighbouring cultures, among them those of the
Jewish and Christian populations. Against this background, the idea that the
traditional manner of lamentations also need not automatically have disappeared
along with the fall of ancient Mesopotamia would seem to be in no way groundless.
The assumption of an old Mesopotamian legacy would explain the special
importance of the hymns of mourning in the Babylonian repertoire,
34
and an older
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stratum of a Mesopotamian tradition of lament could well have survived in the
Babylonian Jewish as well as the Syrian Christian laments.
Conclusion
To end, I return to the starting point of my considerations: does the musical heritage
of the Iraqi Jewish diaspora display echoes of its Babylonian past? The present study
has examined some of the musical strata that have preserved older material, and has
suggested ways and means of bringing it to light. Furthermore, it has pointed to the
concept of collective, or cultural, memory as being a central point of a new paradigm
of culture studies, one that may be employed to fathom the cultural past of the Iraqi
Jews from a different angle. Against this backdrop, further investigations on the
Babylonian musical repertoire are desirable. A critical point, however, for any kind of
research on the Iraqi Jews is the fact that the Iraqi diaspora no longer exists in its
ancient homeland. The decline of the Ottoman Empire, two World Wars and the
political cataclysms in Mesopotamia that resulted from them led to the disintegration
of the Babylonian diaspora in Iraq in the 20th century. With the establishment of the
state of Israel, the majority of the Jews migrated from Iraq to Israel, leaving only a
small number of Jews in modern-day Iraq. Others emigrated to Southern and Eastern
Asia / India, Burma, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Hong Kong and Shanghai.
In Israel, most of the Babylonian synagogues have meanwhile adopted the musical
tradition of the Sephardi Jews; here, the treasury of old Iraqi melodies is almost lost
(Flender 1981, 277). The question of the extent of preservation and transculturation
in the music of the Babylonian Jews in South and East Asia and some Western
countries is the theme to which the contributions by Manasseh and Kartomi in this
volume are dedicated. In Babylonia itself, however, the story of one of the main pillars
of the Jewish diaspora for 2600 years is finished.
Notes
[1] For the varying use of the name Israel, see Rabinowitz (1972).
[2] Twelve Israelite tribes settling in the Land of Canaan were united into one kingdom by King
David (c . 1004/965). After the death of Davids son, King Solomon (c . 926 BCE), the kingdom
was divided into a northern kingdom, Israel, and a southern kingdom, Judah (Hebrew
Jehudah, Greek Jud[a]ea), the latter being on the territory of the tribes of Benyamin and
Judah; its capital was Jerusalem.
[3] The term cult (Latin colere, colui, cultus /to cultivate; to care; to worship) was given
terminological incisiveness by Thomas Aquinas and designates in scholastic usage a whole
system of religious belief and ritual. The term is used in this sense in the present article.
[4] Detailed information on the written sources is to be found in Shiloah (1983, 10/18).
[5] For details of Babylonian accentuation, see Kahle (1913).
[6] The transcription of Hebrew words in this article is based on the academic conventions for
Biblical Hebrew. The transcription of Syriac (in Western pronunciation) and Arabic words
follows the internationally recognized transcription/transliteration system accepted by the
German Oriental Society (Deutsche Morgenlandische Gesellschaft).
Ethnomusicology Forum 41
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[7] A series of catastrophes is associated by Jewish tradition with tis
c
ah b
e
-av, among them the
twice-over destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. See also Tishah bav in Frankel and
Teutsch (1992, 177).
[8] A detailed discussion of the kinnor is to be found in Bayer (1968, 89/131.) For a more recent
discussion see Braun (1999, 39/41).
[9] With the term Ancient Israel I should like to designate / regardless of the historical, biblical
or religious differentiation of the term Israel / the whole people of the twelve tribes, the so-
called Israelites, and the territory in which they settled in biblical times.
[10] For the development of the synagogue service and its opposition to the Temple service, see
McKinnon (1986).
[11] The Babylonian Talmud, for example, testies to the performance of the Hallel psalms
(113/18) at home at the Passover seder (McKinnon 1986, 184ff.). In this function they are in
use to this day. Besides, in the past as in the present the private domain opens up further
opportunities for the rendition of psalms (Flender 1981, 138, 212ff., 238ff.).
[12] These titles of Hebrew psalms are quoted from The Bible, Revised Standard Version.
[13] Source of the recording: Tape Y 268, National Sound Archives, Jerusalem; performed by
Yehezkel Batat, Baghdad, Iraq; recording: Solomon Rosowsky, 1934(?). For a complete
transcription and analysis, see Randhofer (1995, 1: 69/74; 1995, 2: 1, 5, 8/11). A discussion
of the same recording of Psalm 1 within the frame of a comparison with other Jewish
traditions is to be found in Flender (1988, 51/9, 137/45); for discussion of Babylonian
psalmody and the double recitation axis, see also Flender (1981, 277/83).
[14] The Kurdish Jews have lived since the Babylonian Exile in the mountainous region North of
Babylonia, which is also inhabited by Kurdish tribes. As a result of its geographical isolation,
the Kurdish mountains region forms a cultural backwater in which a series of archaic
characteristics have maintained themselves, for example the Aramaic language once spoken in
Babylonia. On the music of the Kurdish Jews, see Gerson-Kiwi (1971).
[15] For details of the various forms and usage of psalms in the Jewish and Christian traditions, see
Randhofer (1995).
[16] The settlement of the Yemen by Jews is at present still unexplained. The Yemenite Jews
themselves trace their origins back to a group of Jews who had already emigrated to the Yemen
before the Babylonian Exile. The fact remains that the Jewish tradition in the Yemen presents a
series of archaic features.
[17] The Syriacs stem from the Aramaeans. Their ecclesiastical language, Syriac, derives from Old
Aramaic, the language spoken by the Jews from the 5th century BCE. During the Middle Ages,
the West Syrian branch of the Church retreated to the remote, inaccessible mountain country
of the Tur Abdin, on the border between Turkey and Iraq, where a small ancient Christian
community still lives to this day.
[18] Sources of the recordings are as follows: Figure 2/Tape Y 62, National Sound Archives,
Jerusalem; performed by Baruch Abdallah Ezra, Baghdad, Iraq; recording: Johanna Spector, 18
June 1951 in Israel. Figure 3/Tape Y 1592, National Sound Archives, Jerusalem; performed
by Efraim Yaqub, Yemen; recording: Reinhard Flender, 6 July 1980 in Israel. Figure 4/Tape Y
3253, National Sound Archives, Jerusalem; performed by Yusuf Asuri, Bokan, Iran; recording:
Reinhard Flender, 27 March 1979 in Israel. Figure 5/authors own recording; performer:
Shemun Can, Tur Abdin, Turkey; recorded 8 May 1992 in St Marks Monastery, Jerusalem.
For complete transcriptions, analyses and information on Figures 2/5, see Randhofer (1995,
1: 120, 130/1, 136/7, 154/7; 1995, 2: 5/7, 68/71, 86/7, 96/9, 111).
[19] For a comparison between Jewish and Christian psalms on a large scale, see Randhofer (1995).
[20] In the Geniza of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo a large number of manuscripts with both
protosystems, the Palestinian and the Babylonian, were found at the end of the 19th century. A
geniza is a room belonging to a synagogue in which disused religious writings are stored. The
42 R. Randhofer
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bulk of the Hebrew Bible text with Babylonian accentuation has come down to us from the
Cairo geniza. See Kahle (1913, 1927).
[21] Example after Kahle (1927, 90).
[22] Example after Idelsohn (1922a, 33), here erroneously labelled as Exod.18, 1/2 instead of
Exodus 12, 21/2. The same example as part of a comparative analysis of Exodus 12, 21/2 in
different Jewish traditions is discussed in Flender (1988, 75/9, 157/63).
[23] Example after Idelsohn (1914, 156).
[24] On the Jews of Kaifeng and their Torah manuscripts, see Shaked (1996, 1997).
[25] Psalm 137 is used on the tis
c
ah b
e
-av by all Jewish traditions, whereas the use of Psalm 79 is
restricted.
[26] The Western branch of the Syrian Church is also known as the Jacobite Church after Jacob
Burdono (Baradai), who reorganized it in the 6th century.
[27] The ba
c
wot

o (plural) are prayers of request sung daily at certain specic times of prayer as
well as after the Eucharist in the Mass; the texts, attributed to Mor Ya
c
qub, i.e. Jacob of Serugh
(c . 451/521 BCE) are in dodecasyllabic metre. Other authors include Ephrem the Syrian
(306/373 CE) in heptasyllabic and Balai (died 432 CE) in pentasyllabic metre. The ba
c
wot

o are
bound to the Syrian Oktoechos, that is, there are eight melodies for each text.
[28] This, incidentally, also applies to most of the Syrian Songs in Idelsohns collection (1922b).
[29] For the Coptic lah

n idr b , see Randhofer (1995, 1: 186/94; 1995, 2: 146/59).

[30] The Syrian Church knows several hundred tak

sfot

o (supplication hymns) for various

occasions, the burial of the dead being one. The texts are attributed to Ephrem the Syrian
and Rabbula of Edessa and thus date from the 4th/5th century. Today only a few tak

sfot

o are
still in use, most having fallen into desuetude (see Randhofer 2002).
[31] Source for transcription in Figure 9: Tape Y 62, National Sound Archives, Jerusalem;
performed by Baruch Abdallah Ezra, Baghdad, Iraq; recording: Johanna Spector, 18 June 1951
in Israel. Source for transcription in Figure 10: authors own recording; performer: Shemun
Can, Tur Abdin, Turkey; recorded 8 November 1994 in St Marks Monastery, Jerusalem.
[32] For the regulation of mourning, see also Tishah bav in Frankel and Teutsch (1992, 177).
[33] The death and resurrection of gods could also enter into the personal conception of death and
resurrection: in the Edessan graves of early Christian times the Phoenix is often to be met with
in iconographic representation. The phoenix stems from the Tammuz/Adonis cult and
symbolizes resurrection (Drijvers 1980, 190/1).
[34] A lamentation tradition appears to have remained alive among the Babylonian Jews in later
centuries. On his visit to Baghdad in 1120, Rabbi Yehuda Al-Harizi remarked in particular on
the lament character of the works of the Baghdadi poets: And in all their songs they lament:
Woe unto us that we are cut off and we are like a ock lost and straying. By the rivers there we
sat down, we wept; and on the willows in the midst thereof we hanged our harps (Shiloah
1983, 13).
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