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WITHIN the so-called Christian-Jewish polemics of late antiquity, the absence of direct Jewish responses to the numerous contra-Judaeos treatises renders the debate singularly one-sided.1 This apparent lack of Jewish participation in the reported and often acrimonious debates is all the more striking in view of the sharpening of Christian pens as control over the Holy Land shifted from Byzantine to Sasanian hands and back before the territory fell to the Moslems in 636-- 638 C.E.2 This silence also supports, indirectly, the assumption that such Christian anti-Jewish polemics were largely aimed at a Christian audience rather than a Jewish one.3 Yet Jewish awareness of both anti-Jewish attitudes on the part of government and church and of contemporary events was certainly present.4 The difficulty is that Jewish reactions to the critical events of the seventh century are encoded in literary compositions that require careful deciphering. These include apocalyptic visions in prose, exegetical works (midrashim), and synagogal poetry (piyyut).5 All three genres have remained largely outside the scope of the renewed scholarly interest in the seventh century in general and in Jewish-Christian-Moslem relations in particular.
I address here the least known of these, the piyyut, or liturgical poetry or verse compositions that accompany the divine service in the synagogue.6 Several will be seen to incorporate clues that can shed light on two historical enigmas linked with the capture of Jerusalem by the Sasanian Persians in 614: the alliance between the Jews and the Sasanians, and the plans to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem.7
1. The problematic of piyyut
The origins of the genre of piyyut remain controversial. Already in antiquity it was possible to discern two distinct traditions, one aspiring to date its birth to specific historical events, the other associating it with a literary-historical evolution. The first tradition ascribed the appearance of verse in the synagogue to external pressure in the form of persecution (either Byzantine or Sasanian); the second ascribed it to popular demand to enliven the service.8 Scholars espousing the latter view point to a long tradition of Hebrew poetry from biblical days to late antiquity. Others have discerned influences of Christian, and particularly Syriac, hymnology on the birth (or rebirth?) of synagogal poetry in late antiquity.9 To compound the problem of the birth of...