קינות.

The Hebrew word קינות (qinot, singular qinah) designates a poetic and liturgical genre: the funeral elegy, the song of mourning. In the Jewish tradition, this term came to name a precise corpus: the body of lamentation poems recited on the 9th of the month of Av (Tisha be-Av), a day of fasting and mourning that commemorates the destruction of the two Temples of Jerusalem as well as the subsequent catastrophes of the Jewish people. The term designates both the literary genre and the collection — often a booklet distinct from the ordinary siddur — used on that day.

According to contemporary usage, instead of the ordinary siddur a special prayer book is used for Tisha be-Av, the Kinot (Elegies), which contains the services (Maariv, Shaharit and Minha), the text of Lamentations, a selection of additional elegies and the scriptural readings of the day. This booklet thus fixes, around the biblical core, a stratification of several centuries of poetic creation.

The present work retraces the history of this corpus: from its biblical root in the book of Lamentations (Eikha), through the flowering of liturgical poetry (piyyut) during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, to the elegies born of medieval and modern persecutions. It is an object that is at once literary, liturgical and historical, in which the collective memory of the Jewish people has sedimented in the form of song.

At the origin of the genre lies the biblical book of Lamentations, Eikha in Hebrew, after its first word (« How! »). This book, which mourns the destruction of Jerusalem and the First Temple by the Babylonians in 586 before the common era, constitutes the formal and thematic matrix of all later elegies. Rabbinic tradition attributes its composition to the prophet Jeremiah, witness to the catastrophe; modern scholarship tends to see in it a collective or anonymous composition, dated to the decades following the fall of the city [Encyclopaedia Judaica, art. « Lamentations »].

The book consists of five poems, four of which are alphabetical acrostics — a formal device that the medieval payyetanim would systematically take up in their own qinot. The public reading of Eikha during the evening service of Tisha be-Av is the heart of the day's liturgy. The liturgy of the 9th of Av includes Lamentations and special additional elegies. It is from this structure — ritualized mourning, acrostic, evocation of the destroyed Temple — that the entire corpus of qinot unfolds [Encyclopaedia Judaica, art. « Kinah »].

The designation of Tisha be-Av as a day of national mourning, established by Tannaitic tradition (Mishna, tractate Taanit 4, 6), gave a stable liturgical framework that gradually called for an abundant poetic production to accompany and amplify the biblical text.

Late Antiquity, in the Land of Israel (between the fourth and eighth centuries), saw the rise of the piyyut, the Hebrew liturgical poetry intended to enrich the services. It was within this framework that the first qinot properly speaking were born, designed to be inserted into the liturgy of Tisha be-Av after the reading of Lamentations.

The dominant figure of this period is the poet Eléazar ben Qalir (Elazar ha-Qalir), regarded as the most prolific and influential of the ancient payyetanim. The most popular kinot were written by Elazar Hakallir, an eighth-century liturgical poet. His elegies, in a dense, allusive language laden with midrashic references, remain at the heart of the Ashkenazi rite to this day. In them the Qalir deploys a learned art of acrostic, refrains, and biblical and talmudic allusions, which presupposes in the listener a vast scriptural culture [Encyclopaedia Judaica, art. « Kalir, Eleazar »].

The corpus of qinot from this period is not limited to the destruction of the Temple: it already incorporates the memory of other griefs, notably that of the ten martyrs (Asarah Harugei Malkhut), sages put to death by Rome, whose account provides the substance of some of the most moving elegies of the rite. Thus, from the very beginning, the genre tends to aggregate the successive catastrophes under the single sign of the 9th of Av.

From the 10th century onward, the creation of qinot diversified according to the great cultural spheres of medieval Judaism. In Muslim Spain (Sefarad), the golden age of Hebrew poetry produced elegies of great formal perfection, marked by the quantitative metre borrowed from Arabic poetry.

The major figure here is Yehuda ha-Levi (Judah Halevi). Judah Halevi (1085–1145), a Spanish philosopher also regarded as the greatest post-biblical poet, composed "Songs of Zion" (Shirei Tziyon), the most famous of which, Tziyon ha-lo tish'ali ("Zion, will you not ask?"), was incorporated into the qinot and expresses a heart-rending nostalgia for the Holy Land. Solomon ibn Gabirol is likewise among the poets whose compositions nourished the corpus [Encyclopaedia Judaica, art. "Judah Halevi"; "Ibn Gabirol"].

In the Ashkenazi sphere (the Rhineland and northern France), elegiac production took on a darker hue, marked by persecutions. Most of the kinot chanted after Eicha were composed during the difficult times of the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition. These works, often written by rabbis and poets who were direct witnesses of the massacres, transform the mourning of the ancient Temple into a renewed mourning for contemporary communities.

The Crusades mark a turning point in the history of the qinot. The massacres of 1096 in the communities of the Rhine valley (Speyer, Worms, Mainz) gave rise to a flowering of elegies commemorating the martyrs (qedoshim) who perished or took their own lives rather than be forcibly converted. These poems, together with the Av ha-Rahamim prayer (« Father of mercy »), became part of the Ashkenazi mourning liturgy [Encyclopaedia Judaica, art. « Av ha-Rahamim »].

Among these elegies, some commemorate events precisely dated and located: thus the qinah on the burning of the Talmud in Paris in 1242, attributed to Meïr de Rothenbourg, which laments the destruction by fire of cargoes of sacred manuscripts. These poems establish a remarkable intersection between liturgical Memory and the historical archive: modern scholarship can compare the facts evoked by the elegies with contemporary chronicles, Hebrew and Latin, and confirm the reality of the events mourned [Salo W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews].

The expulsion from Spain in 1492 added a new stratum of mourning, with certain communities composing qinot specific to this catastrophe. The genre thus demonstrates its proper function: to absorb successive traumas into a stable liturgical form, binding them all to the founding paradigm of the destruction of the Temple [Encyclopaedia Judaica, art. « Kinah »].

With the invention of Hebrew printing in the fifteenth century and its subsequent spread, the fluid corpus of qinot — until then transmitted through liturgical manuscripts (mahzorim) that varied according to local rites — gradually became fixed in printed collections. Each major rite — Ashkenazi (with its Polish and German variants), Sephardi, Italian, Romaniote, Yemenite — preserved its own selection and its own ordering of elegies, attesting to distinct communal traditions [Encyclopaedia Judaica, art. « Liturgy »].

The Kinot booklet, as we have seen, is distinct from the ordinary siddur and constitutes an autonomous liturgical object, distributed to the faithful for the day of fasting. Standardization through print did not erase diversity: one still distinguishes, for example, the Kinot of the Polish rite from that of the German rite, by the number and ordering of the poems retained.

In the twentieth century, the scholarly study of this corpus underwent a decisive flourishing. The philologist Daniel Goldschmidt established the reference critical editions of the mahzorim and the qinot, comparing manuscripts and textual traditions in order to reconstruct the genesis of the poems and their arrangement [D. Goldschmidt, Seder ha-Qinot le-Tisha be-Av]. More recently, bilingual annotated editions have made this corpus accessible to a wide audience, offering translations and historical annotations intended to illuminate texts that had become largely opaque to modern worshippers.

The corpus of qinot is not fixed. Its logic of accumulation — absorbing each new catastrophe into the framework of mourning on Tisha be-Av — has continued into the contemporary era. After the Shoah, several rabbinic authorities composed or authorized new elegies evoking the annihilation of the Jewish communities of Europe. Thus Rabbi Shimon Schwab and, above all, qinot recited in many communities, integrate the memory of the destruction of European Jewry into the traditional cycle of mourning [Encyclopaedia Judaica, art. "Kinah"; Holocaust Kinnot].

This continuity illustrates the genre's deeper function: it offers a ritual matrix in which each generation can inscribe its own mourning while embedding it within a chain of memory reaching back to the destruction of the Temple. The intersection between inherited tradition and recent historical event remains vivid, even though the appropriateness of adding new elegies is the subject of halakhic and liturgical debates within the various streams of Judaism.

In terms of usage, the Kinot remains today a book read intensely only once a year. Its recitation, on the morning of Tisha be-Av, seated directly on the ground or on low chairs according to the customs of mourning, prolongs without interruption a practice attested since late Antiquity and continuously enriched ever since.

The corpus of קינות constitutes one of the longest chains of poetic transmission in Judaism. Born from the biblical matrix of Lamentations, fixed liturgically around the fast of Tisha be-Av, it was enriched over the centuries by the voices of Eléazar ha-Qalir in the land of Israel, of Yehouda ha-Lévi in Sefarad, of the poet-martyrs of Ashkenaz during the Crusades, all the way to the elegies of the Shoah. Gathered in a distinct prayer book containing the services, the text of Lamentations, a selection of elegies, and the scriptural readings of the day, this collection is at once a literary work of considerable richness and an instrument of collective Memory.

Its history reveals a singular mechanism: the capacity of a liturgical form to integrate new catastrophes indefinitely by linking them to a foundational mourning. To study the qinot is therefore to read, between the lines, the history of the trials of the Jewish people, but also that of its poetic resilience and its fidelity to a two-thousand-year-old ritual of Memory.