Literary text: Halper 222

Description

Recto: Fragment of a prayer for Jewish burials that was recorded on the back of a letter in Arabic c. 1708 CE (See separate record: PGPID 32488). In the introduction to her edition, Jane Hathaway notes: "On the recto of this document is the Tsiddūḳ ha-Dīn (literally, ‘affirmation of the [divine] decree’), a traditional Jewish burial prayer compiled from various verses in the Hebrew Tana"kh along with brief passages from the rabbinical oral tradition.... This Tsiddūḳ ha-Dīn is the Sephardic version, which differs considerably from its Ashkenazi counterpart in the biblical verses it includes. Both versions contain Deut. 32.4, beginning ‘The Rock, his work is perfect’, but whereas this verse opens the Ashkenazi prayer, it does not appear in the Sephardic prayer until the fifth stanza and is followed by a brief midrashic passage and one from the Mishnah. In this document, however, the stanza beginning with Deut. 32.4 follows two interpolated lines, Ps. 89.49 and Ps. 144.4, that do not form part of the conventional Sephardic Tsiddūḳ ha-Dīn." (Hathaway, Ottoman-Era Documents from the Cairo Genizah, 106)