Amram Gaon

His order of prayers, in a responsum probably for the Jews of Spain, gave rise to the first siddur; he also codified the Passover Haggadah.

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 idea of prayer as a continuous obligation, repeated several times daily in a fixed sequence of blessings, seems to have taken shape over the Second Temple and rabbinic periods. The first prayer book, the siddur ('ordering'), appeared only in the Gaonic period: the earliest systematic ordering was compiled in the ninth century by Amram from the Talmud and earlier Gaonic sources, and Saadya produced another about a century later.2