Excerpt from Songs of Zion by Hebrew Singers of Mediaeval Times The originals of the following poems are, with one or two exceptions, to be found in the Sabbath and festival prayer-books in use in the synagogues of English and foreign Jewish communities. By far the larger number come to us from mediaeval Spain, where Hebrew poetry reached the highest point of devotional and poetical excellence. There the Jewish hymnologists were alike poets and philoso phers, and the stream of learning and cultivation, mingling with that of poetry, flowed through the plains of religious life and enriched them in a thousand ways, while the fruit of the tree of know ledge was used both to enlighten and strengthen religious faith, and to adorn and beautify divine service. For some centuries after Judea ceased to be a separate state, Hebrew poetry remained as it had been in Bible times, z'.e. Unrhymed and undivided into lines and stanzas. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.