The Jewish mosque

TheTorah.com recently posted a capsule summary of London chief-rabbi Joseph Hertz, the Dennis Prager of his times. Hertz commented on something called the חומש. This חומש might be anglicised the Fifthery; Hertz as an Ashkenaz in a somewhat Teutonic somewhat Protestant nation transliterated it accordingly "Chumash". I've been copies here and there around the bookstores but, like so much else post-9-Ab, I never had much of a handle on what this was. About time I looked it up, nu?

So: lectionary, at least the basis for lections like pesikta. It's in codex form where an actual Torah is/are in scroll format. The pentateuchal readings are supplemented with "Haftorot" (Hertz again), which are selections from the Prophets.

Haftorot are cantillated - the reader does tajwîd. Various theories exist as to when this started. It is noted in at least the Bavli Talmud, which I concede was still a w.i.p. up to Sa'd's entry into the Sasanian Babylonia, but also in the Tosefta which seems late-antique. I will guess, based on the Christian practice of memra, and on the aforementioned Arabic tajwîd, that the Talmud and Tosefta witness that cantillations were common and that their beginnings are lost to time.

I'll go further. The psalms were chanted from the get-go. Many Prophets are transparently poetic and certainly survived from Isaiah's time primarily in that oral format. How better, than by cantillation, in religious services.

The Temples weren't in control over this; Samaritans - possibly being first-on-the-draw in rebuilding Gerizim - excluded anything Judaean or anything that might deny a Temple at all. The Samaritans as far as we know have rejected the Prophets, even northern prophets. Possibility exists that some locals owned their own recensions of, say, Hosea and Asaph; but if they did, their priestly hierarchy didn't care about them much, since those texts were lost with much else that was lost, and said priesthood never bothered to find them again (that "Joshua" sefer is about as far as it goes).

The cantors from Prophets would instead find their natural allies among itinerant priests in tabernacles. Some editor of Numbers recalled that when the Ark moved, a war-ritual was intoned; its Tabernacle was a military threat. Tabernacle had ties to Egypt, no less (cf. Hertz, in fact). These religious groups might even have designed the "wanderings in the desert" narratives to oppose temples; their Mesopotamian lords tolerated Shechem precisely because its Samaritans had settled a temple.

The mosque and the recitation of Prophetic tajwîd represents Arabic tabernaclism. Either a revival, or else a longstanding practice of the exiled fringe.