Yannai the payyetan יניי הפייטן
for a thousand years he was nearly lost—the Genizah gave him back whole
His form is the kerovah on the first three blessings of the Amidah, woven with the weekly portion. By tradition he was the teacher of Elazar ha-Kalir.
A dark tale also travels with him: that out of envy he put a scorpion in Kalir's sandal. It is told by Ephraim of Bonn in the twelfth century—six centuries and more later—and he himself adds that he does not vouch for it. Scholarship rejects the tale: the dates do not meet. We give it as a late story, because the reader will meet it—not as a fact.
The century is argued: scholarship sets the late fifth to early sixth, the encyclopedia the first half of the seventh. The window follows the scholarship; both readings are named.
On the timeline
Related
Sources
Documents of the period
- Mahzor Yannai, from the Cairo Genizah manuscripts (ed. 1919) — the recovered corpus of kerovot
Scholarship
- The Jewish Encyclopedia (1906) — the three fragments known before the Genizah, the Kalir tradition and the dispute over the century
Basis: Talmud and midrash.