Baladi-rite Prayer

The Baladi-rite Prayer is the oldest known prayer-rite used by Yemenite Jews, transcribed in a Siddur called Tiklāl in Yemenite Jewish parlance.

It contains the prayers used by Israel for the entire year, as well as the format prescribed for the various blessings (benedictions) recited. Until the 16th century, all of Yemen's Jewry made use of this one rite. Older Baladi-rite prayer books were traditionally compiled in the Babylonian supralinear punctuation, although today, all have transformed and strictly make use of the Tiberian vocalization. The text, however, follows the traditional Yemenite punctuation of Hebrew words.

The Baladi-rite prayer book or Tiklāl remained in manuscript form until 1894, when the first printed edition was published in Jerusalem by the Yemenite Jewish community, which included the Etz Ḥayim commentary written by Rabbi Yiḥyah Salaḥ. Today, it is used primarily by the Baladi-rite congregations of Yemenite Jews in Israel and the Diaspora. Baladi is an Arabic word denoting "of local use" (i.e. Yemeni), as distinguished from the prayer-rite widely used in the north (i.e. Syria and the Land of Israel), which is called in Arabic Shāmī "Levantine, Eastern".

The Baladi-rite prayer differs in many aspects from the Sephardic rite prayer, or what was known locally as the Shāmī-rite prayer book, which by the 18th and 19th centuries was already widely used in Yemen, although only lately introduced into Yemen by Jewish travelers. Their predilection for books composed in the Land of Israel made them neglect their own hand-written manuscripts, though they were of a more exquisite and ancient origin.

The nineteenth century Jewish historiographer, Hayyim Habshush, has given some insights into the conflict that arose in the Jewish community of Sana'a on account of the newer Sephardic prayer book being introduced there. Yiḥya ben Shalom Ha-Kohen al-Iraqi, the son of one of the community's respectable leaders, had tried making it the standard prayer-rite of all Jews in Yemen in the early 18th century. This caused a schism in the Jewish community of Sana'a, with the more zealous choosing to remain faithful to their fathers' custom (i.e. the Baladi-rite) and to continue its perpetuation, since it was seen as embodying the original customs practised by Yemenite Jews. Out of a total of twenty-two synagogues in Sana'a, only three synagogues in the city chose to remain with the original Baladi-rite prayer, while the others adopted the Spanish-rite prayer with its innovations introduced by Isaac Luria. By the time of the Jewish community's demise, owing to mass immigration in the mid-20th century, most synagogues in Sana'a had already returned to praying in the Baladi-rite, albeit, in the vast majority of towns and villages across Yemen they clung to their adopted Sephardic-rite as found in the printed books of Venice, Thessaloniki, Amsterdam and, especially, the Tefillath Haḥodesh and Zekhor le-Avraham prayer books printed in Livorno.

...
Wikipedia