Although liturgical materials were among the earliest texts published from the then recently discovered Cairo Genizah, the attic storage room of the Ben Ezra synagogue (S. Schechter, “Geniza Specimens,” JQR 10 [1898]: 654–59), only in recent decades has technology made it feasible to generate a systematic understanding of its boxes of prose prayer texts. Reif's volume provides the first modern English-language foray into this discussion, demonstrating both the field's progress (almost entirely in Hebrew publications) and indicating where questions still remain unanswered.

The title of Stefan Reif's book accurately describes its contents. Each of the volume's twenty-five chapters presents a single Genizah manuscript from the Cambridge University Library's collection (the largest in the world) containing either liturgy, important texts about liturgy, or both. From the thousands of possibilities, he presents a collection that covers “a variety of content, dating, provenance, calligraphy, layout, language, and size,” without pretending to represent a cross section (2–3). Each chapter begins with the manuscript's technical physical description, followed by an image of the manuscript itself, scaled to fit the book's page. The quality of the greyscale reproductions in the print version of the e-book is sufficient that the manuscripts remain legible. Reif's annotated transcription of the manuscript contains technical notes relevant to the manuscript itself, like its scribal practices and his reading decisions where others differ. The notes in the annotated translation that follows more frequently discuss the manuscript's contents or his translations.

Reif titles the final section of each chapter “Comment.” This discursive discussion begins with a discussion of codicology, i.e., the physical characteristics of the manuscript, the scribal practices employed, and its probable dating. This provides a more accessible treatment of some of the technical issues raised in the transcriptions and more, although the discussion is still not geared to the lay reader. Reif then discusses previous publications of the manuscript, where relevant, and ways in which it has been understood, before presenting his own reading of it, most often based on comparisons with the more extensive prayer books preserved from the period, especially for Babylonian-style rites. Frequently, this discussion cites scholarship relevant to the manuscript's contents as well.

Reif has quite reasonably organized his selected manuscripts and chapters roughly as if they were found in a single liturgical text. His selections represent only the variety of liturgical traditions from the Land of Israel and Babylonia that found their way into the Genizah in its heyday (eleventh to twelfth centuries). Some of the manuscripts have received substantial prior attention, like Natronai Gaon's listing of the hundred daily benedictions with which Reif starts. From there he presents a few exemplars of weekday prayers, then moves to the Sabbath, Rosh Ḥodesh, the fall holidays, Passover, Hanukah, concluding with haftarah benedictions, a poetic Grace after Meals, and a text of instructions for the performance of the Sabbath liturgy. The logic for not including this last with other Sabbath texts may be that this provides a sort of inclusio to Natronai's responsum, where the other exemplars are almost entirely texts of prayers.

Reif's brief introduction draws together some of the important threads that come through in the course of his discussion of each individual manuscript. These include his ongoing criticism, evident in many of the chapters, of the accuracy of “matches” suggested on the Friedberg Genizah Project site. This site's digitization of the contents of the Genizah enables the virtual reuniting of manuscript fragments scattered, sometimes, in libraries around the world. While the tool is itself invaluable and some matches are correct, many more are not (4). Two of Reif's chapters (13 and 24) present manuscript pages that had been separated; he rejects other suggested joins (e.g., 148, 308), always with explanations for his choice. His introduction also summarizes issues about scribal choices of Hebrew orthography and vocalization and what this says about the influence of factors like Mishnaic Hebrew or the Masoretes on those producing these manuscripts (6–7).

Most important for our understanding of the emergence of medieval Jewish liturgy, Reif suggests that the still-dominant tendency to identify the liturgical manuscripts of the Genizah as either Palestinian or Babylonian is overly simplistic. He writes, “[o]ne of the over-riding impressions is that few of these Genizah manuscripts can be definitively identified as purely Babylonian or purely Palestinian” (7). Few offer “precise textual matches” to the well-known prayer books of the period and “one is driven to the conclusion that there were a great number more prayer versions and customs than are transmitted by these authorities” (ibid.). Beyond this, he suggests that our knowledge even of the geonic prayer books to which these manuscripts must necessarily be compared is incomplete; some manuscripts that may appear as variants to the published versions of the geonic prayer books of Amram or Sa‘adiah may indeed be preferable or older versions of those texts (ibid.). The introduction's points arise in almost every chapter, but because the volume lacks a conclusion, he never presents a more detailed, coherent discussion of them.

With this volume, Reif seeks simultaneously to “create some sort of scientific memorial to [his] late, great, and much revered teacher, Naphtali Wieder, and his patient, cultured, and charming wife, Miriam” (1), and to provide access to this material for the “many non-specialists who take an interest in the historical appreciation of Jewish liturgical development” (3). In serving nonspecialists, Reif falls short. I found myself having to refer back to the Hebrew texts when reading his translations of them, often because of his decision to be extremely precise and therefore to use unusual translations for standard prayer language like blessings. Nonspecialists are the primary audience for these translations. The lay reader is also less likely to find intriguing the discussions of codicology with which each “Comment” section begins, and the same could be said for the technical nature of many of the content analyses. For such a reader, a more expansive introduction to the Genizah itself and its liturgical materials would be necessary, with clearer explanations of the significance of the details discussed. In contrast, Reif does succeed in honoring Wieder's memory, particularly in the new contributions embedded in virtually every chapter. Like Wieder, he is an extremely carefully reader of texts and their details. This enables him to critique convincingly previous discussions of them and provide new solutions. This volume not only provides a snapshot of the field today, but also indicates many important considerations for future research on liturgical texts of the Genizah.