Review: Piyyuṭ and Midrash: Form, Genre, and History, by Tzvi Novick

Abstract

Tzvi Novick, Piyyuṭ and Midrash: Form, Genre, and History . Journal of Ancient Judaism Supplements 30. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Verlage, 2019. 235 pp. ISBN 9783525570807. €90.00. In 1938, Menahem Zulay published what is often considered to be the first critical edition of classical piyyutim , Hebrew liturgical poems from late antique Palestine. At the time, scholars had only just begun to publish these long-forgotten works from manuscript fragments rediscovered in the Cairo Genizah. While the edition was nothing less than groundbreaking, Zulay chose to hold off on providing a commentary, such that, in the words of Saul Lieberman, “the book remains closed and sealed in terms of its content.”1 For Lieberman, and for those scholars who came after him, the key to understanding piyyuṭ lies in midrash , rabbinic exegesis, and thus, for the past eight decades, scholars have read piyyuṭ as hierarchically indebted to rabbinic texts. When combined with its baroque aesthetic and the simple fact that much piyyuṭ still remains unpublished, the perception of hierarchy has allowed scholars of late antique Judaism to largely avoid this corpus. Piyyuṭ , it is believed, is hard to penetrate, and anyway, it is largely derivative and unoriginal. Tzvi Novick's learned and subtle new book, Piyyuṭ and Midrash: Form, Genre, and History , seeks to rectify this situation. Over the course of seven chapters, Novick attempts “to build bridges across the disciplinary divide that separates the study of rabbinic literature in late antique Roman Palestine from the study of early (pre-classical and especially classical) piyyuṭ ” (215). In Chapter 1, Novick outlines the terms of his study, the program of the book, and also the ways in which the explicit performative element of piyyuṭ differs from what is usually found in midrash . Much of the chapter takes up the issue of voicing in the two corpora. Novick looks at the way midrash and piyyuṭ each represent the voicing of biblical characters, of God and Israel, and …