The first siddur and the Haggadah

After Bar Kochba's defeat and Julian's failure there was no prospect of rebuilding the Temple, but it remained the rabbis' model of worship: they tied the timing of the three daily prayers to the sacrifices, adopted the Temple's 'Amen', deferred to priests and Levites and required prayer facing the Temple. There is no evidence, however, that they tried to rebuild it: their religious life presupposed its absence.3

It is hard to reconstruct how Jewish worship became rabbinized. The Dead Sea Scrolls contain prayers that illuminate its prehistory, but there is a large gap before the rabbinic evidence from 200 CE on. The duty to say the Shema twice daily is taken as given in the Mishnah; some evidence suggests the rabbis did not invent it, yet when it began remains unknown.4

After the Temple's destruction, praying became a collective, organized activity. The texts of that prayer were worked out by the sages of the Mishnah and both Talmuds, and the Geonim fixed them in a prayer book used to this day. Since the Mishnah, communities pray three times a day, though the Mishnah debated whether the evening prayer was obligatory. The order rests on two pillars: the Shema with its blessings and the Amidah, or Tefilah, a sequence of blessings mixing praise and requests. For communal prayer the rabbis required ten adult men, the minyan; only in the twentieth century did some communities begin to count women.5

In canonizing the Mishnah and Talmud, the Geonic period also canonized the practices they had developed. Drawing on earlier rabbinic tradition, the Geonim produced and spread the first prayer book, which fixed the text and sequence of the service: the first siddur grew out of the order of prayers that Amram Gaon set out in the ninth century in a written reply, probably addressed to the Jews of Spain. The Haggadah, the text that orders the Passover seder, was also canonized then; though it uses Mishnaic material, it is a Geonic work, codified by Amram in his siddur, and its earliest versions date from that era.1

The Geonim deserve the credit for turning rabbinic teachings into religious practice beyond the academies: they standardized the content, put it in writing and used their authority, prestige and international contacts to spread it through the Islamic world.2

Later practices should not be projected onto late antiquity: the kippah, the bar mitzvah and the Kaddish for the dead arose only in the medieval or early modern period. But Jewish worship remains thoroughly rabbinized, as shown by the Haggadah, the most widely circulated Jewish text after the Bible.7