Persian Liturgy and the Beauty of Forgotten Differences

The courtyard of the Ezra Yaghoub Synagogue in Tehran. Credit: 7dorim.com

In a tiny rented room above a car wash in San Luis Obispo, as visiting Conservative Ashkenazi rabbis led services for our community month after month, my dad would slip a Sephardic siddur into my hands. I’d try to follow along, but before long I’d throw my hands up, exasperated. “Why does this have so many extra words?” I’d ask.

“This is how we did it in Iran.”

“So we’re Sephardic?”

“Yes. Sort of. Well…no. It’s complicated.”

Growing up in the United States, especially in a small town outside Los Angeles, it was almost a radical act to mention that there are two types of Jews: those who developed in Eastern Europe—the Ashkenazi Jews—and those who developed in Spain—the Sephardic Jews. My dad led services with Ashkenazi liturgy and Sephardic tunes, while congregants praised our superior food and joked about converting to Sephardic Judaism to take advantage of the shorter Haftarot– selections from the books of the Prophets that are typically shorter in the Sephardic rite.

It’s strange then, that we aren’t actually Sephardic. 

There’s the story: After the Expulsion from Spain and Portugal, Sephardic Jews moved to North Africa and the Ottoman Empire, mixed with Jewish communities already living there, and turned the entire Jewish world into an easy-to-remember dichotomy. Sephardic tunes are much more “Middle-Eastern sounding” than Ashkenazi ones, as are their customs and pronunciations. And their liturgies, truncated Haftarot included, are slightly different. In each paragraph of the siddur, the Sephardic Jews might have a few extra words here or there, or on sporadic occasions, a handful of omissions. But mostly, they’re the same.

Growing up with a Sephardic siddur in my hands at Ashkenazi services, I learned to love those little differences. In the Qaddish they’d recite:

be’alma di’vra khiruteh, veyamlikh malkhuteh 

בְּעָלְמָא דִּי בְרָא כִרְעוּתֵהּ וְיַמְלִיךְ מַלְכוּתֵהּ

In the world He created according to His will, may He establish His kingdom

and I’d hurriedly whisper-add:

veyatzmakh purqanei viqarev meshikheyh

וְיַצְמַח פֻּרְקָנֵה, וִיקָרֵב מְשִׁיחֵהּ

and may His salvation blossom and His anointed be near

Then we’d continue out loud together. It was a secret little club for my dad, my brother, and me, inserting those forgotten phrases that the stream of visiting student rabbis didn’t even know about.

In the dining hall of a sleep-away Jewish summer camp when I was almost eleven, I remember turning to my counselor, puzzled, and asking why they were skipping half of Birkat HaMazon, the blessing after meals. He had no idea what I was talking about. I spent the rest of the summer (and the following years) trying to explain why I used Sephardic liturgy, even though my ancestors weren’t from Spain. One summer I was jokingly deemed the “Sephardic Chief Rabbi” of the camp, which was only fitting because Sephardic has come to mean “anything that isn’t Ashkenazi.”

Of course, Jews have lived all over the world for thousands of years. American culture sees Ashkenazi Jews as the norm, and incredibly, the most faraway-exotic-outsider-Jews are still thought of as being from the Southwestern corner of Europe. But before Spanish and Portuguese Jews spread out across the Mediterranean, there were already Jews with rich cultures living throughout Africa and Asia, some of which never saw significant Spanish influence. Before Spain existed as a political entity, Jews in the Persian Empire had written the Talmud, diverse sects had broken off and reformed and mixed philosophies with other cultures and religions, and travelers had brought Persian Jewish customs to Central Asia, South Asia, and China (as evidenced by an eighth century Judeo-Persian letter found in Xinjiang, various Judeo-Persian manuscripts of the Kaifeng Jews, and more recent findings from the Afghan Geniza). Independent Jewish enclaves rose and fell in Kurdistan, Babylonia, Yemen, Ethiopia, and the Caucasus Mountains before European Jewish immigration to the Middle-East. And over a thousand years ago, rabbis in Babylonia compiled the first siddurim, whose individual nuances took shape in each community until the printing press standardized the major liturgies we commonly see today.

At some point in my early twenties, I wandered into a Yemenite synagogue and found myself trying to follow along in a siddur that didn’t match up with the Sephardic or Ashkenazi liturgies whose little differences I had mastered. Suddenly, I felt how my Ashkenazi camp friends must have felt when I took them to Sephardic synagogues. I wondered why Yemenites had so many extra words all over the place, and whether this meant that the Sephardic liturgy I’d been so proud of was somehow defective, somehow adulterated from this more ancient, more original set of words. Sure, I had my secret little club, whispering “veyatzmakh purqanei viqarev meshikheyh” in the Qaddish, but the Yemenites also added:

weyifroq ameyh

וְיִפְרוֹק עַמֵּיהּ

and may He save His people

And most importantly, seeing Yemenite liturgy firsthand made me wonder: if these Middle-Eastern Jews from Southern Arabia with little to no Sephardic lineage or influence had kept their original customs alive with such care and devotion, why had Iranian Jews, also largely outside the post-Expulsion sphere of Spanish exile, become “Sephardic?”

Some research led me to the work of Elkan Nathan Adler, an English Jewish traveler and collector who traveled to Tehran and Bukhara in the late nineteenth century and bought manuscripts from local Jews in 1897. Among his collection are fragments of the original Persian Jewish liturgy, one which deviates from any other liturgy in use today. Based on the siddur of Saadia Gaon (d. 942 CE), this liturgy developed over hundreds of years into a distinctly Persian rite entirely separate from those of Ashkenazi, Sephardic, and Yemenite Jews. In 1650, a Jewish printing press in Livorno, Italy began mass-printing Ashkenazi and Sephardic siddurim, thus establishing the standard prayer wording for those communities, and it was only in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that Sephardic emissaries started to bring siddurim with the Spanish rite into Persia. Before that, our Iranian Jewish ancestors were likely conducting synagogue services unrecognizable to us, with those pesky little differences pushing far past even those of the Yemenite liturgy.

The Persian manuscripts, published by the Ben-Zvi Institute, present an almost-complete siddur, hand-written and damaged in some places, with directions written in Judeo-Persian—certainly enough to speculate about what Persian synagogue worship was like, and even enough to feasibly recreate the original Persian Jewish style of prayer. Adler and other sources reveal that Iranian Jews generally sat on the floor, removed their shoes in synagogues, and likely regularly engaged in full prostration. But the manuscripts reveal fascinating variations in language and Persian Jewish tradition that suggest our forgotten heritage is a unique one among modern Jewish communities.

Immediately apparent is the poetic character of the Persian liturgy, wherein phrases that are only two or three words in Ashkenazi and Sephardic siddurim turn into long strings of elaborate praise. The simple Sephardic “veyatzmakh purqanei viqarev meshikheyh” reads:

veyassmahh parqaneyh viqareb malekhut meshihheyh veyifroq yat ‘ameyh vikanes galevata deyisrael berahhamteyh

וְיַצְמַח פָּרְקָנֵיה וִיקָרֵב מַלְכוּת מְשִׁיחֵיה וְיִפְרוֹק יָת עַמֵיה וִיכַנֵשׂ גָלְוָתָא דְיִשְׂרָאֵל בְרַחְמְתֵיה

and may His salvation blossom and the kingdom of His anointed be near, and may He save His people, and may He enter the exiles of Israel in his mercy.

 – a potential nightmare for most Hebrew school kids, but a beautiful collection of words I can whisper to myself at those Ashkenazi services that omit the entire section. Phrases in the Amidah like:

kevodo maleh olam 

כְּבוֹדוֹ מָלֵא עוֹלָם

may His honor fill the world 

become:

kevodo vehodo vegadlo ve’uzo vetifareto uqedushato male olam

כְבוֹדוֹ וְהוֹדוֹ וְגָדְלוֹ וְעֻזוֹ וְתִפְאַרְתוֹ וּקְדוּשָׁתוֹ מָלֵא עוֹלָם

may His honor, splendor, greatness, strength, beauty, and holiness fill the world

Similarly, the phrase uttered during the Amidah’s third prostration in all modern siddurim simply reads:

modim anahnu lakh 

מוֹדִים אֲנַחְנוּ לָךְ

we thank you

But in the Persian manuscripts, it is written as a much longer and more detailed description of religious devotion:

modim anahnu lakh umesaperim et gadlakh, umebarekhim et shemakh kor’im umishtahavim umitepalelim umitehanenim lifnei kise kevodakh be’emet

 מוֹדִים אֲנַחְנוּ לָךְ וּמְסַפְרִים אֶת גָדְלָךְ וּמְבָרְכִים אֶת שְׁמָךְ כוֹרְעִים וּמִשְׁתַחֲוִים וּמִתְפַלְלִים וּמִתְחַנְנִים לִפְנֵי כִסֵא כְבוֹדָךְ בֵאֱמֶת

we thank you and enumerate your greatness, and bless your name, we kneel and prostrate and pray and appeal for mercy before your glorious throne, truly

Something about the flowing language of the prayer speaks to the dramatically poetic nature of Persian culture and literature—to the strings of blessings I hear from my grandmother on the phone and from strangers at the synagogue and on the streets of Pico-Robertson, to the Persian dads I’ve seen at Shabbat dinners blessing their children not only to be like Ephraim and Menashe or Sara, Rivka, Rahel and Leah, as is written in siddurim, but to a further string of Biblical and historical heroes from Moshe and David and Shelomo to Deborah and Hannah and Ruth and our very own Queen Esther. I’ve even heard one daughter remind her dad to reluctantly add Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the list of inspirational matriarchs as he blessed her.

This practice is not written down in any modern siddurim, but it seems that certain Persian Jewish oral traditions may be tied to distant memories of forgotten liturgies. In modern siddurim, the verse before Mi Khamokha reads:

malkhuto beratzon qiblu aleyhem, Moshe u-bene Yisrael lekha ‘anu shira besimha raba ve’amru kulam

מַלְכוּתוֹ בְּרָצוֹן קִבְּלוּ עֲלֵיהֶם מֹשֶׁה וּבְנֵי יִשׂרָאֵל לְךָ עָנוּ שִׁירָה בְשִׂמְחָה רַבָא וְאָמְרוּ כֻלָם

His Kingship they willingly accepted upon themselves. Moshe and the Children of Israel answered with song and great joy, and they all said          

The Persian liturgy reads:

malkhuto qiblu aleyhem, Moshe veAharon uMiryam vekol benei yisrael keshe’alu min hayam lekha ‘anu shira begila berina besimha vessahalah  raba anu ve’amru kulam

מַלְכוּתוֹ בְּרָצוֹן קִבְּלוּ עֲלֵיהֶם מֹשֶׁה וְאַהֲרֹן וּמִרְיָם וְכָל בְנֵי יִשׂרָאֵל כְשֵׁעָלוּ מִן הַיָם לְךָ עָנוּ שִׁירָה בְגִילָה בְרִנָה בְשִׂמְחָה וְצָהֲלָה רַבָא עָנוּ וְאָמְרוּ כֻלָם

His Kingship they willingly accepted upon themselves. Moshe and Aharon and Miryam and all of the Children of Israel who ascended from the sea, answered with song and [four synonyms for joy], and they all answered and said

In addition to the verse’s flowery language which boasts four synonyms for joy, it is also worth noting who the verse identifies as its singer. “Moshe ubenei yisrael” – “Moshe and the children of Israel” is rather “Moshe veAharon uMiryam vekol benei yisrael keshe’alu min hayam” – “Moshe and Aharon and Miryam and all of the Children of Israel who ascended from the sea”. Though it’s doubtful the name of Miriam is included for any even remotely egalitarian reasons, it’s still notable to find an ancient precedent to the contemporary Reform and sometimes Conservative practice of adding in the names of matriarchs to counter the patriarchal language that pervades most religious traditions. In other words, the constant poetic language of the Persian Jews brings in layers of meaning to virtually every prayer, and it enriches the liturgies with which present-day Jews are familiar. Kabbalists talk about the idea of hidden meanings contained within the literal meanings of a text, and this works similarly. When familiarized with varying liturgies, sentences begin to take on deeper meanings than the words that are simply there on the page.

These forgotten differences permeate every page of the Persian manuscripts, and not just with the constantly divergent wording. As with the Yemenite Jews, whose pronunciations have preserved ancient Hebrew phonologies, the Persian manuscripts deviate from modern siddurim in spelling, reflecting the uniquely Persian way of pronouncing the Hebrew language. Words like “shekakha” are routinely written as “shikakha”, a pronunciation tradition still perpetuated by older generations of Persian Jews. The entire siddur lacks almost all dageshim (consonant-modifying diacritics), and anyone who has listened closely to our parents and grandparents reading Hebrew may have noticed the relative interchangeability of the letters pe and fe, kaf and khaf, bet and vet, and so on. To our Americanized ears it seems like our ancestors are reading a muddled version of Hebrew full of mistakes, but it may just be that their version recollects older traditions.

The Persian liturgy, fallen out of use in the last couple of centuries, lacks many of the more recent additions to Jewish prayer services. Large sections of the Yom Kippur service presented in the manuscripts are much shorter, and few services include the Aleinu prayer. Kol Nidre, now a staple of the High Holidays, was once controversial, and the Persian siddur, influenced by Saadia Gaon and his disputes with the Karaites (an originally Persian-Babylonian Jewish movement rejecting the rabbinic texts as supreme authorities on Jewish law), is notably missing Kol Nidre entirely. Directions for lighting candles on Hanukkah diverge from modern practice, Birkat HaMazon, the Pessah Haggadah, Havdallah, and the Counting of the Omer (the latter of which is conducted in Aramaic) vastly differ from newer traditions, and in the morning Shaharit service, congregants are instructed to only put on their sisit (“tzitzit”) once they reach the Barekhu prayer, and not at the beginning of the morning service. There are countless unique practices included in the Persian rite, and these manuscripts have saved them from oblivion.

So what is the point of all this? Even if these manuscripts are painstakingly transcribed into a format easily readable by the average observant Jew, and all the directions are transliterated and translated from the admittedly difficult-to-master Judeo-Persian – will anyone actually use an ancient liturgy that suggests that Persian Jews aren’t really as Sephardic as we like to think? Will those of us who can read Hebrew engage with a past that is rapidly disappearing, especially when it has more words and longer passages than the now-typical Ashkenazi siddurim all around us? Do we really want to introduce more religious variants to a world that is already bogged down with difference? And won’t it just highlight our own alienation and distance from modern mainstream Judaism?

As they say: “The truth is one, the paths are many.” Preserving and highlighting the maybe-no-longer-moribund Persian liturgy provides one more path toward the insights and poetry of the greater religious world, with crucial glimpses into our own seldom-studied history and customs. Amid increasing appeals for a singular legalistic way of practicing Judaism, this ancient liturgy introduces variety to the landscape of our traditions and to those of our ancestors. We are deeply lucky to have inherited so many different ways of expressing our religion, including one that would have disappeared if not for a few fragments of text picked up by an English collector on a trip to Asia during the lifetimes of our own great-grandparents.

So sometimes I whisper the extra words. Sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I picture Yemenite or Persian phrases in the pages of an Ashkenazi prayer book. Sometimes I clutch a Sephardic siddur and whirl my thoughts around without any words at all. These divergent styles of devotion and prayer and the hibernating richness of Persian liturgy demonstrate that the beauty of our religion rests in the little differences. A few words here, an extra phrase there—and whole histories lying in the cracks in between.

References

Adler, Elkan Nathan. Jews in Many Lands. Jewish Publication Society of America, 1905. 

Nusach HaTefila Shel Yehudei Paras. Shelomo Tal. Ben Zvi Institute, Jerusalem, 1981.

Wong, Fook-Kong; Yasharpour, Dalia (2011). The Haggadah of the Kaifeng Jews of China. Brill Reference Library of Judaism.

Xu, Xin; Gonen, Rivka. The Jews of Kaifeng, China: History, Culture, and Religion. KTAV Publishing House, Inc., 2003.