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Siddur

A siddur (Hebrew word, plural siddurim) is a Jewish prayer book over the world, containing a set order of daily prayers.

The earliest parts of Jewish prayer are the 'Shema Yisrael' ("Hear O Israel", Deuteronomy 6:4), and the Priestly Blessings (Numbers 6:24-26), which are in the Torah. A set of eighteen (currently nineteen) blessings called the 'Shemoneh Esreh' or the 'Amidah' ("standing [prayer]"), is traditionally ascribed to the Great Assembly in the time of Ezra, at the end of the Biblical period.

The name 'Shemoneh Esreh', literally "eighteen", is an historical anachronism, since it now contains nineteen blessings. It was only near the end of the Second Temple period that the eighteen prayers of the weekday 'Amidah' became standardized. Even at that time their precise wording and order was not yet fixed, and varied from locale to locale. Many modern scholars believe that parts of the Amidah came from the Hebrew apocryphal work Ben Sira.

According to the Talmud, soon after the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem a formal version of the 'Amidah' was adopted at a rabbinical council in Yavne, under the leadership of Rabban Gamaliel II and his colleagues. However, the precise wording was still left open. The order, general ideas, opening and closing lines were fixed. Most of the wording was left to the individual reader. It was not until several centuries later that the prayers began to be formally fixed. By the Middle Ages the texts of the prayers were nearly fixed, and in the form in which they are still used today.

Readings from the Torah (five books of Moses) and the "Prophets" (Nevi'im) form part of the prayer services. To this framework various Jewish sages added, from time to time, various prayers, and, for festivals especially, numerous hymns.

The earliest existing codification of the prayerbook was drawn up by Rav Amram Gaon of Sura, Babylon, about 850 CE. Half a century later Rav Saadia Gaon, also of Sura, composed a siddur, in which the rubrical matter is in Arabic. These were the basis of Simcha ben Samuel's Machzor Vitry (11th century France), which was based on the ideas of his teacher, Rashi. From this point forward all Jewish prayerbooks had the same basic order and contents.

The siddur was printed by Soncino in Italy as early as 1486, though a siddur was first mass-distributed only in 1865. The siddur began appearing in the vernacular as early as 1538.