Chapter 6 - The Biblical Pāṭṭu, Jewish Liturgy, and Bible Commentaries

Summary

Introduction: Literary History and Historical Analysis

If circumstantial evidence of a Jewish community in Kōlattunāṭu between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries is to be taken seriously, then the comparative analysis of the biblical pāṭṭu based on the region and period of the Payyaṉṉūrpāṭṭu adds strength to the assumption that Jews settled in Madayi and morphed into a congregation by the mid- fifteenth century. The performative context is clearly a Jewish wedding, since the biblical pāṭṭu is divided into songs and refrains to serve in different prenuptial and postnuptial rites and rituals indicative of the Jewish lore translated, so to speak, into Malayalam. The benedictory verses of the biblical pāṭṭu have at least three verses implicitly address-ing the bride, especially the second verse on the creation of Eve, the fifth verse on cir-cumcision, and the sixth verse on menstruation. This is paramount to understanding Jewish history in Malabar; weddings with rites and ceremonies translated into the local language can only be celebrated when there are enough Jewish families settled in the region.

It remains to be asked how far the biblical pāṭṭu inspired by Hebrew and Aramaic texts circulating across the Jewish diaspora at the same period. As suggested by Benja-min Hary, one of the criteria of a distinctively Jewish religiolect is the evolution of Jewish literature for Jewish audiences in the “host” language. Thus, in as much as the biblical pāṭṭu represents local networks of Jews, it also bears witness to long-distance Jewish connections across the Arabian Sea and as far as the Mediterranean world. This chapter analyzes the biblical pāṭṭu in relation to Jewish literary networks of the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries, starting with the context of performance, the Jewish wedding.

Crafting the Jewish Wedding in Poetic Words

The ritual complex of Jewish weddings varies from region to region and is anything but fixed and standardized. The modular structure of the biblical pāṭṭu accounts for alterations in the performance structure indicated by the titles of strophes explicitly stating various prenuptial and postnuptial rituals. The oldest record of some of the rites mentioned in Abigail Madayi’s notebook is in the liturgical collection of Hebrew poems compiled by David Castile and printed in Amsterdam in 1757. This David Castile was a descendant of Jacob Castile, the founder of the Tekkumbhagam synagogue in Kochi (1489), of which Abigail Madayi was a member.