From Medina Raḥamim to Elul Seliḥot: Toward a Prehistory of Nocturnal Penitential Prayer
Shulamit Elizur, the undisputed doyenne of piyyut scholarship, published in 2016 a characteristically magisterial study on the origins of the seliḥot liturgy. This liturgical category – like the prayerbook as a whole – is not attested before the eighth and ninth centuries. The great payyetanim of late antique Eretz Israel – Yose ben Yose, Yannai, and R. Eleazar ha-Qalir – composed qinot, qerovot, and other poetic forms, yet, as Elizur has demonstrated elsewhere, seliḥot cannot be ascribed to this early…