Aleinu

Aleinu (it is upon us, from its opening words) is a prayer of praise that now closes nearly every Jewish service, though it began as the opening of the kingship section of the New Year (Rosh Hashanah) liturgy, where it proclaims God as king over all the earth. Its first part gives thanks that Israel has been given to know and serve the one God; its second looks forward to the day when idolatry will vanish and all humanity will acknowledge the one God and his kingdom, a universal hope for the perfecting of the world under God's sovereignty. Ascribed by tradition to great antiquity, it was adopted from the High Holy Day service into the daily liturgy in the medieval period, and it acquired a particular solemnity, being recited in some communities with bowing at its central declaration. In the Middle Ages one of its lines drew hostile Christian censorship, and it has a charged history; today it stands as the fixed conclusion of the service, joining thanksgiving for the particular covenant to a universal hope.

The line that drew hostile Christian censorship over the centuries, understood by some readers as disparaging other religions, was excised from many printed prayer books under pressure and only partially restored in some modern editions, a history that scholars of Jewish liturgy treat as a documented instance of censorship shaping the transmitted text rather than an open question. Legend attributes the prayer's authorship to the biblical Joshua or to the sages of the Great Assembly, attributions that cannot be verified and that liturgical historians generally regard as pious tradition rather than established fact.

One line within the traditional text, describing those who bow to vanity and emptiness, became the object of sustained controversy in medieval and early modern Europe, where some Christian authorities and converts from Judaism read it as a veiled insult directed specifically at Christian worship, an interpretation Jewish authorities generally denied, pointing instead to the phrase's older biblical resonance describing idolatry in general terms with no fixed reference to Christianity at all. Regardless of the line's original intended target, the controversy had lasting practical consequences: the phrase was removed or altered under censorship pressure in a great many printed prayer books across Christian Europe from the medieval period onward, and many communities, particularly in central and Western Europe, continued omitting or modifying it long after formal external censorship had lapsed, simply as an accepted local custom inherited from the censored editions.

The result today is real liturgical variation traceable directly to this centuries old controversy: some communities, particularly certain Sephardi and some Ashkenazi traditions less affected by the European censorship history, recite the full traditional line, while others recite an altered or shortened version reflecting the censored textual tradition their own prayer books descend from, so whether a given congregation says the disputed phrase in full is, in many cases, less a live theological choice being made today than an inherited trace of exactly which historical printing tradition their prayer book's text descends from.