Qaddish: Untersuchungen zur Entstehung und Rezeption eines rabbinischen Gebetes (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Qaddish: Untersuchungen zur Entstehung und Rezeption eines rabbinischen Gebetes Ra‘anan S. Boustan Andreas Lehnardt. Qaddish: Untersuchungen zur Entstehung und Rezeption eines rabbinischen Gebetes. Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism 87. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002. Pp. xiv + 386. The ubiquity and elasticity of the Kaddish (alt. Qaddish) within Jewish liturgical practice has made this brief, but enigmatic prayer a perennial object of both scholarly and popular interest. It is our great fortune that we now have a study that has done justice to the complexity and specificity of the historical development of the Kaddish. In a monograph that is focused and sweeping in equal measure, Andreas Lehnardt sets out to explain both how and why the Kaddish emerged as a major structuring element within the Jewish liturgy at the same time that it attracted a diverse range of liturgical applications. Lehnardt's study is grounded in the methodological insight that the histories of (Jewish) prayers such as the Kaddish, with their fluctuating textual identities and heterogeneous liturgical functions, must integrate text-historical, literary-historical, and reception-historical considerations. Studies of early Jewish worship in particular are constrained by the decentralized nature of Jewish religious practice as well as the complex process of Jewish textual transmission. By employing such tools, Lehnardt turns obstacles into opportunities for illuminating key moments in the dynamic history of the Kaddish, while acknowledging the epistemological limits imposed by the evidence. It is thus no coincidence that his account begins in the Middle Ages with the oldest extant textual witnesses for the Kaddish, then backs up into Late Antiquity to explore earlier, indirect testimonies about its language and function, and finally moves forward in time again to describe the various medieval appropriations of this late antique prayer. Lehnardt argues in chapter one (pp. 15–77) that the Kaddish, in both its earliest and its fully crystallized forms, is characterized by generic and linguistic hybridity. Despite this high degree of textual variation, all versions of the Kaddish are characterized by a distinctive admixture of Hebrew and Aramaic juxtaposed within single sentences and even clauses. Numerous earlier scholars suggested that this peculiar linguistic feature reflects the process of translation from a Hebrew original to an [End Page e65] artificial Aramaic "school language." Through careful linguistic comparison of the Kaddish with contemporaneous Hebrew and Aramaic sources, especially Targumic Aramaic, Lehnardt concludes that the prayer cannot be assigned to a specific linguistic-institutional context, but exhibits the general (Hebrew and Aramaic) linguistic features of rabbinic literature. Moreover, the Hebrew units of the Kaddish, which are interwoven with its Aramaic building-blocks, cannot be accounted for as mere back-borrowings. The inseparability of Hebrew and Aramaic within the Kaddish indicates that it was a linguistic hybrid ("ein Mischprodukt") from its earliest stages of development and never existed in a "pure" linguistic form in either Hebrew or Aramaic. According to Lehnardt, the bilingual character of the Kaddish has its counterpart in the prayer's hybrid generic form. The Kaddish resists generic definition, although it employs doxological formulae (i.e. yehe sheme raba mevarakh) and formally resembles certain features of prayers linked to public Scriptural reading (e.g., the 'al ha-kol prayer and the Yekum purkan). Lehnardt rejects the findings of Joseph Heinemann's form-critical method, which placed the Kaddish squarely within the rabbinic study-house (bet ha-midrash). Instead, he argues that, from a formal perspective, the Kaddish cannot be assigned to a single Sitz-im-Leben, and proposes that its generic and linguistic hybridity result from its shifting application in various institutional settings—synagogue as well as study-house. In chapter two (pp. 79–142), Lehnardt analyzes rabbinic sources that provide evidence for the liturgical function of the Kaddish or illuminate the ways in which its meaning and power were conceived in Late Antiquity. The linguistic and formal flexibility of the Kaddish corresponds to its varied reception within classical rabbinic literature. The Kaddish did not develop along a single, linear trajectory from pre-rabbinic prayers such as the Lord's Prayer found in the New Testament, but emerged through an unsystematic process of expansion, reinterpretation, and redeployment. Indeed, the Kaddish is nowhere attested as a fully crystallized...