page_title: Syrian Jews
section_title: Liturgy
hierarchical_section_title: Syrian Jews / Traditions and customs / Liturgy
caption_attribution_description: Rabbi Jacob Saul Dwek and officials of the great synagogue of Aleppo. This photo is taken from a book. It shows the influencial Rabbi and officials of aleppo's great synagogue. Aleppo was one of the main centers of Judaism.
context_page_description: Syrian Jews are Jews who lived in the region of the modern state of Syria, and their descendants born outside Syria. Syrian Jews derive their origin from two groups: from the Jews who inhabited the region of today's Syria from ancient times; and from the Sephardi Jews who fled to Syria after the Alhambra Decree forced the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492.
  There were large communities in Aleppo and Damascus for centuries, and a smaller community in Qamishli on the Turkish border near Nusaybin. In the first half of the 20th century a large percentage of Syrian Jews immigrated to the U.S., Latin America and Israel. Most of the remaining Jews left in the 28 years following 1973, due in part to the efforts of Judy Feld Carr, who claims to have helped some 3,228 Jews emigrate; emigration was officially allowed in 1992. The largest Syrian Jewish community is located in Brooklyn, New York and is estimated at 75,000 strong. There are smaller communities elsewhere in the United States and in Latin America.
  In 2011, there had been about 250 Jews still living within Syria, mostly in Damascus.
context_section_description: There exists a fragment of the old Aleppo prayer book for the High Holy Days, published in Venice in 1527, and a second edition, starting with the High Holy Days but covering the whole year, in 1560. This represents the liturgy of the Musta'arabim (native Arabic-speaking Jews) as distinct from that of the Sephardim proper (immigrants from Spain and Portugal): it recognizably belongs to the "Sephardic" family of rites in the widest sense, but is different from any liturgy used today. For more detail, see Old Aleppo ritual.
  Following the immigration of Jews from Spain following the expulsion, a compromise liturgy evolved containing elements from the customs of both communities, but with the Sephardic element taking an ever-larger share. In Syria, as in North African countries, there was no attempt to print a Siddur containing the actual usages of the community, as this would not generally be commercially viable. Major publishing centres, principally Livorno, and later Vienna, would produce standard "Sephardic" prayer books suitable for use in all communities, and particular communities such as the Syrians would order these in bulk, preserving any special usages by oral tradition. (For example, Ḥacham Abraham Ḥamwi of Aleppo commissioned a series of prayer-books from Livorno, which were printed in 1878, but even these were "pan-Sephardic" in character, though they contained some notes about the specific "minhag Aram Tsoba".) As details of the oral tradition faded from memory, the liturgy in use came ever nearer to the "Livorno" standard. In the early years of the 20th century, this "Sephardic" rite was almost universal in Syria. The only exception (in Aleppo) was a "Musta'arabi" minyan at the Central Synagogue of Aleppo, but the liturgy of this group only differed from the "Sephardic" by a few textual variants and the order of some of the hymns.
  The liturgy of Damascus differed from that of Aleppo in some details, mostly because of its greater proximity to the Holy Land. Some of the laws specific to Eretz Yisrael are regarded as extending to Damascus, and the city had ties both to the Safed Kabbalists and to the Jerusalem Sephardic community.
  The liturgy now used in Syrian communities round the world is textually speaking Oriental-Sephardic. That is to say, it is based on the Spanish rite as varied by the customs of Isaac Luria, and resembles those in use in Greek, Turkish and North African Jewish communities. In earlier decades some communities and individuals used "Edot ha-Mizraḥ" prayer-books which contained a slightly different text, based on the Baghdadi rite, as these were more commonly available, leaving any specifically Syrian usages to be perpetuated by oral tradition. The nearest approach to a current official prayer book is entitled Kol Ya'akob, but many other editions exist and there is still disagreement on some textual variants.
  The musical customs of Syrian communities are very distinctive, as many of the prayers are chanted to the melodies of the pizmonim, according to a complicated annual rota designed to ensure that the maqam (musical mode) used suits the mood of the festival or of the Torah reading for the week.  See Syrian Cantors and the Weekly Maqam.
caption: Rabbi Jacob Saul Dwek, Rabbi Reuven Ancona and officials of the great synagogue of Aleppo.
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