Nusach Edot HaMizrach

Of all the Jewish rites, the eastern Sephardic liturgy stands closest to the oldest complete prayer books in existence. The order of Amram Gaon in the ninth century and the siddur of Saadia in the tenth were composed in the academies of Babylonia for communities that asked how to pray, and the rite of the eastern communities descends from their answers with fewer detours than any other.

The Spanish exile of 1492 folded the developed liturgy of Sepharad into the existing communities of the Ottoman world and North Africa, and the two streams, Babylonian foundation and Iberian superstructure, fused over the following centuries into a broadly common eastern rite. The third layer is mystical. The kabbalah of Isaac Luria, itself built on Sephardic prayer, flowed back into the eastern synagogues through Safed, and its usages, the meditative preambles, the Psalm sequences, the wordings adjusted to kabbalistic doctrine, were given halakhic authority for the East by Yosef Hayyim of Baghdad, the Ben Ish Hai, whose homiletic code of that name remains a household book in Sephardic homes.

The nineteenth-century printing presses of Livorno turned this Baghdadi-Lurianic synthesis into the standard text, shipping siddurim across the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean trade routes, so that a worshipper in Calcutta, Cairo or Casablanca came to hold substantially the same book, above local melodies and pronunciations that remained gloriously unstandardised.

The name Edot HaMizrach, the communities of the East, is an Israeli coinage, and it names a consolidation as much as a tradition. Before the twentieth century there was no single eastern rite but a constellation of local ones: Aleppo with its ancient usages, Baghdad with the Ben Ish Hai's rulings, the Moroccan communities with their own piyyut and Andalusian music, Yemen apart with its distinctive Baladi rite, Persia, Bukhara and Cochin each with local custom.

The mass immigration to Israel in the 1950s threw these communities together, and the printed siddur did the rest: editions labelled Edot HaMizrach, following the Baghdadi standard, became the common denominator of Sephardic synagogues, and the rulings of Ovadia Yosef, the dominant Sephardic halakhist of the era, deliberately promoted a unified Sephardic practice as a matter of communal restoration. The consolidation has its critics and its exceptions. Moroccan congregations increasingly print and defend their own nusach; the Yemenite rites were never absorbed; and liturgical scholars note that the standard text's Lurianic layer is itself a late addition that some older Spanish communities, notably the Spanish and Portuguese congregations of London, Amsterdam and New York, never adopted, their sober pre-Lurianic rite forming yet another branch. The eastern rite on the Israeli shelf is therefore a living compromise, one that made a shared public worship possible for a million immigrants while the older local traditions continue underneath it, remembered, revived and argued over.