It is late March and the weather is still cold. The sounds of mizrahi music and exuberant conversation emanate from an elegant ballroom in Brooklyn, New York. No, it’s not a wedding or a bar mitzvah. A Torah is unfurled and the cantor begins to read from Exodus 12:1, “And God spoke to Moses and Aaron in Egypt, ‘This month is to be for you the first month, the first month of your year.’” The reading is followed by the chanting of liturgical poetry based on this Torah portion, “rishon hu lakhem l’khodshei hashanah”… yom Nisan mevorakh….” “The first month shall it be for you for the months of the year… the month of Nisan is blessed.”
Something seems off; Rosh Hashanah, the traditional Jewish new year, is still six months away. Why the celebration and talk of a new year? This ritual is very familiar, however, to the members of Congregation Ahaba Veahva, a synagogue that follows the Egyptian-Jewish rite. It is a vestige of a very ancient Jewish custom called Seder Al-Tawhid (Arabic for the ritual of the unity).
The ritual takes place annually on the closing of the Sabbath which falls out closest to the first day of the Hebrew month of Nisan. The name “tawhid” denotes a celebration of the unity of God and the miracles that he wrought during this month surrounding the Exodus from Egypt. The way the congregation celebrates it, and how this custom survived, illuminates important dynamics of how Jewish ritual has been standardized over time.
Ahba Veahva’s members celebrate Rosh Hashanah in September like other rabbinic Jews. The Seder al-Tahwid, however, is a remnant of an ancient custom of the Jews of the Near East to commemorate the first day of the Jewish month of Nisan as a minor Rosh Hashanah as per Exodus 12:1. On their website, Congregation Ahaba Veahva explains the celebration as follows:
On Rosh Chodesh, the children of Israel heard the miracle that they were going to be redeemed on the night of the 15th, Passover, later in that very month. We hold this evening to remember the miracles and the kindness that God does for His nation. “In Nisan we were redeemed in the past, and in Nisan we are destined to be redeemed again.” (Exodus Rabbah 15:2), asserting that just as the Exodus from Egypt took place in Nisan, so too will the ultimate messianic redemption.
The only printed version of the Seder al-Tahwid liturgy is found in an anonymous 10 page pamphlet printed in Alexandria. The prayers focus on many themes found in the Rosh Hashanah prayers such as blessing, sustenance and messianic redemption in the year to come. The liturgy is found in a somewhat longer form in a 10th century manuscript fragment from the Cairo Geniza, the repository of documents found in the late 19th c. in the Ben Ezra Synagogue.
The celebration of al-Tahwid begins with special liturgy on the closest Sabbath prior to the day. On the day itself, the community refrains from unnecessary labor similar to intermediate days of Jewish holidays. They also recite a kiddush followed by a festive meal and the recitation of liturgical poetry. One such poem presents a debate among the 12 months to determine which one will have primacy. In one stanza, for example, Nisan argues that the following month of Iyar cannot be chosen since its zodiacal sign is Taurus, the same species as the golden calf that Israel made in the wilderness. The concluding stanza is a triumphal declaration from Nisan:
שליט אנא וריש על כולן, “I am the ruler and the head of all of you.”
תקיפה עבדי פרוק לעמיה ובי הוא עתיד למפרוק יתהון, “A deliverance of slavery did I [Nisan] impart upon the nation and in me [Nisan] is he [God] destined to deliver them [again]” (as per the Talmud in BT Rosh Hashanah 10B). Other prayers more explicitly cast the day as the beginning of the new year. One liturgical poem begins: יהי רצון מלפניך ה’ אלוקינו ואלוקי אבותינו…שתהיה השנה הזאת הבאה עלינו לשלום, “May it be your will Lord our God and the God of our fathers … that this coming year should come upon us in peace.”
The celebration of the first of Nisan as the beginning of the new year is rooted both in biblical, extra-biblical and Talmudic sources. Exodus 12:1-2 states that Nisan is the first month in the setting of the new year. The book of Ezekiel (45:18-19) says: “Thus saith the Lord God: In the first month, on the first day of the month, thou shalt take a young bullock without blemish; and thou shalt purify the sanctuary.”
We find a similar reference in the Temple Scroll (11Q19) of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Temple Scroll describes the ideal Temple of the Qumran sectarians. The festival of the first day of the first month (Nisan) is one of three additional extra-biblical festivals that are mentioned in the Dead Sea Scrolls:
“On the first day of the [first] month [the months (of the year) shall start; it shall be the first month] of the year [for you. You shall do no] work.”
The Mishna in Tractate Rosh Hashanah 1:1 describes the first of Nisan as one of the four beginnings of the Jewish New Year.
Ezra Fleischer postulates that the kiddush ceremony on the holiday was based on an earlier Mishnaic-era institution. The Mishna in Rosh Hashanah 2:7 describes how the Sanhedrin, the high religious court of Talmudic-era Israel, consecrated the new month by declaring “it is sanctified,” at which point the entire assemblage would respond in kind, “it is sanctified, it is sanctified.” This declaration was performed with pomp and publicity in order to make it clear that the final word in setting the Jewish calendar belonged to the rabbis of Eretz Yisrael and no one else.
If the first of Nisan is such an important date to both the Bible and Talmud then, why is the day celebrated today only by this small Jewish community? To answer this question we must look to the Geonic period of Jewish history, corresponding roughly to the second half of the first millennium. Over the past decade, historians increasingly see this period as one in which a number of variations of Judaism were vying for supremacy. Two of the most prominent schools were the Babylonian (based in Baghdad), and Minhag Eretz Yisrael rites.
The Sanhedrin in Jerusalem was abolished in the 5th century by Byzantine decree. Its various successors could not recapture its prestige and the rabbis of Eretz Yisrael gradually lost their power to sanction the new moon. The Karaites developed their own system for setting the calendar. But within the rabbinic tradition, in the absence of the Sanhedrin, the Babylonians and Eretz Israelis often found themselves at odds.
The most notorious controversy between the two schools involved Saadiah Gaoni, the head of the Babylonian Academy, and Aharon ben Meir, the head of the Eretz Israel Academy. In 921-923, the two engaged in an extended and very public argument regarding the sanctification of the Hebrew year 4682 (921/22). While the core of this debate surrounded the complicated methods of calculating the Jewish calendar, it became a referendum on which academy, and by extension rite, would become authoritative in the Diaspora. Saadiah emerged victorious.
In Eretz Israel, however, the Jewish community, based in Jerusalem, continued to follow the minhag Eretz Yisrael, which also exerted influence on other Near Eastern Jewish communities such as Egypt. The heads of the Jerusalem academy still often insisted that the right to set the calendar rested solely with them. As late as the 11th century, Rabbi Evyatar Ha-Kohen, the head of the Palestinian Academy (partially in exile in Cairo) would declare:
The land of Israel is not part of the exile such that it would be subject to an exilarch (a title often applied to the head of the Babylonian Academy) and furthermore one may not contradict the authority of the prince (a title at times applied to the head of the Palestinian Academy), on the word of whom [alone] may leap years be declared and the holiday dates set according to the order imposed by God before the creation of the world.
The competition between Babylonia and Eretz Israel ended in a decisive Babylonian victory. This was due to several factors.
Already during the period following the end of the first millennium, the celebration of the first of Nisan as the Jewish new year, became the domain of a very small minority of Jews. Whereas during the Geonic period this festival was celebrated among the Jews of the Land of Israel, as well as their satellite communities across the Middle East, by the time of the great Jewish rabbi and philosopher Maimonides (who was a proponent of the Babylonian rite) this unique rite would become rarer and rarer until becoming nearly extinct.
Let us return for a moment to the issue of the long standing disagreements between the two great Jewish centers of the world during the better part of the first millennium: The Land of Israel and Iraq/Babylonia. The discord between the Babylonians and the Eretz Yisraelim was not limited to calendrical matters, as previously expanded upon. Another issue which found the two at loggerheads was the liberal nature and the non-standardization of Jewish liturgical texts among the EY. For instance, the Babylonians looked askance at the Palestinian custom of introducing fresh liturgical poetry and inserting them into the fixed prayers during the annual festivals. These and other customs like the celebration for the first of Nisan were deemed exotic at best and incompatible with normative Halakha at worst
As the scholar Steven Reif points out in his article on prayer and liturgy when for instance, in the 8th century, the Andalucian Jewish community sought guidance in liturgical matters, they contacted the Babylonian geonim, Natronay and Amram, who provided instructions that, of course, followed the ancestral rites of Babylonia. Eventually these texts were recorded and later compiled to form what we now call a “siddur.” As the centralization and standardization of Jewish liturgy took off across the Diaspora, this left the Jews who followed the Eretz Yisrael rite—who were fast becoming a minority—to feel more isolated and entrenched. As mentioned before, the Jews of Eretz Israel had long felt that they maintained primacy in matters of religious ritual. The Palestinians sought to establish their power bases in their own satellite communities. There is also evidence of correspondence and cross cultural fertilization between the center of Byzantine Eretz Yisrael and those in Christian Europe.
The great competition between Babylonia and Eretz Yisrael ended in a decisive Babylonian victory. This was due to several factors, not least of which is the fact that Babylonian Jewry experienced much more stability under Sassanian—and later Islamic rule—while its Eretz Israel counterpart was constantly experiencing persecution and uprooting. The final death knell for minhag Eretz Yisrael was delivered in July of 1099 when an army of Crusaders broke through the walls of Jerusalem and massacred the city’s Jewish inhabitants—the Babylonian-rite and the Palestinian-rite communities, as well as the Karaites were put to the sword. One of the unfortunate consequences of the Babylonian victory was the gradual decline and eventual disappearance of many unique Eretz Yisrael customs. It is only due to the discovery of the Cairo Genizah that scholars have become aware of many of those long-lost traditions and customs.
Although Babylon did achieve victory, its status as a center of world Jewry began to change and it in fact began to experience a precipitous decline as the Sephardic communities of the Iberian Peninsula and the Ashkenazic communities of France and Germany were increasingly on the ascendancy. Both of the aforementioned communities maintained traditions that came out of Babylonia (although as the scholar Israel Ta Shma points out in his book on early Ashkenazic prayer, both the Sephardic and Ashkenazic rites and customs are an amalgamation of both schools, although the influence of Eretz Yisrael was perhaps more evident in the Ashkenazi rite, probably due to the old ties between the proto Ashkenazim in Christian Europe and the Academy in Byzantine Eretz Yisrael see for instance here.
The latest evidence of the celebration of the first of Nisan comes to us from the 13th century and it would seem that even by this time it was all but stamped out by those who were determined to establish the primacy of the Babylonian school. This period coincides with the increased activism of Rabbi Abraham Maimonides, the son of Moses Maimonides, the great Spanish codifier of Jewish law. Rabbi Abraham, who championed standardization based on his father’s codification, exerted great pressure against the Synagogue of the Palestinians in Fustat, Old Cairo to bring their ritual into line with Babylonian standards. He was for the most part successful but, as we have already seen, this unique custom was retained (albeit in diminished form) among Egyptian Jews to this very day.
In an April 20, 1906 article for the English Jewish Chronicle, Herbert Loewe provides an eyewitness account of an Al-Tawhid ceremony in the fashionable Abbasiya neighborhood of Cairo. Two years later, a more detailed description was recorded by the Chief Rabbi of Egypt, Refael Aharon ben Shimon in his book Nehar Misrayim.
After extolling this “beautiful custom,” ben Shimon laments how the custom had become so weakened and how so many had become lax in keeping it. He states that this is largely due to the fact that the city had experienced such large-scale expansion and many members of the Jewish community had relocated to the suburbs. He concludes on an optimistic note with the hope that the custom will experience a renaissance in the near future.
By Joel Davidi Weisberger
The author can be reached at [email protected]
