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This is Rabbi Moritz Mayer’s Hours of Devotion: A Book of Prayers & Meditations for the Use of the Daughters of Israel (1866), an anthology of teḥinot, paraliturgical prayers, and translations of prayers made in English for use by Jewish women.

As the title page declares that this anthology is a direct translation of Fanny Neuda’s collection of teḥinot in German, Stunden der Andacht (1855/1858) and lacks any other given attribution details for the included work, many are led to believe that Mayer’s anthology is very simply a translation of Stunden der Andacht, albeit a greatly abridged translation. But a closer look reveals Hours of Devotion to be a collection of teḥinot by multiple authors including Neuda, Marcus Heinrich Bresslau, and quite possibly Mayer’s own work.

Of the sixty-four included prayers, twenty-four are translations by Mayer derived from those by Fanny Neuda.^[1] Most of the teḥinot left untranslated by Mayer were later translated for Julia Watts Belser in the 2007 edition edited by Dinah Berland.   An additional ten prayers are largely reprinted from Marcus Heinrich Bresslau’s Tehinot Banot Yisrael (1852). There are thirty more teḥinot which may be of Mayer’s own composition but which may be translations from still unknown authors and sources.

The edition we used for our transcription was the 1889 reprint of Mayer’s 1866 translation of the 5th edition of Stunden Der Andacht by J. Rosenbaum. A scan of this edition was made from a volume held in the collection of the University of California libraries shared at the Internet Archive.^[2] In preparing this edition, I transcribed the text and formatted it in STML (Sacred Text Markup Language), a format developed by J.B. Hare z”l, founder of the Sacred Texts Internet Archive. Hare used STML as an intermediary format for converting transcribed texts to HTML. Efraim Feinstein, lead developer of the Open Siddur Project, further developed STML as an intermediary format for converting transcribed texts to JLPTEI, the XML schema we use to markup Jewish liturgy and liturgy-related work for the Open Siddur’s database.  

This work is in the Public Domain due to its having been published more than 95 years ago.

Below are the twenty-four translations of Fanny Neuda’s prayers made by Mayer with their corresponding page numbers and titles in Stunden Der Andacht and Hours of Devotion.

“📖 Hours of Devotion: A Book of Prayers & Meditations for the Use of the Daughters of Israel, an anthology of teḥinot compiled by Rabbi Moritz Mayer (1866)” is shared through the Open Siddur Project with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International copyleft license.

Moritz Mayer (translation)

Rabbi Moritz Mayer (originally Moses Maier, later Maurice Mayer; 1821-1867) born in Dürckheim-on-the-Haardt, Germany, fled to the United States and to New York as a political refugee of the 1848 revolution. In 1859, after seven years as the rabbi of Ḳ.Ḳ. Beth Elohim in Charleston, South Carolina, he returned in poor health to New York where he contributed frequently to the Jewish press, and translated various German works into English: Rabbi Samuel Adler's catechism, Abraham Geiger's lectures on Jewish history, and Ludwig Philipson's pamphlet, Haben die Juden Jesum Gekreuzigt? (the Crucifixion from the Jewish Point of View), et al. In 1866, a number of his English translations of Fanny Neuda's teḥinot in German (from her Stunden Der Andacht, 1855/1858) were published in a volume he titled Hours of Devotion. The work also included a number of his own prayers as well as those of Marcus Heinrich Bresslau. The following year, Moritz Mayer passed away. He was 45 years old.(We are indebted to Anton Hieke for his research on Mayer, "Rabbi Maurice Mayer: German Revolutionary, Charleston Reformer, and Anti-Abolitionist" published in Southern Jewish Life, 17 (2014), pp. 45-89.)For Mayer's original prayers, please visit here.

Moritz Mayer

Rabbi Moritz Mayer (originally Moses Maier, later Maurice Mayer; 1821-1867) born in Dürckheim-on-the-Haardt, Germany, fled to the United States and to New York as a political refugee of the 1848 revolution. In 1859, after seven years as the rabbi of Ḳ.Ḳ. Beth Elohim in Charleston, South Carolina, he returned in poor health to New York where he contributed frequently to the Jewish press, and translated various German works into English: Rabbi Samuel Adler's catechism, Abraham Geiger's lectures on Jewish history, and Ludwig Philipson's pamphlet, Haben die Juden Jesum Gekreuzigt? (the Crucifixion from the Jewish Point of View), et al. In 1866, a number of his English translations of Fanny Neuda's teḥinot in German (from her Stunden Der Andacht, 1855/1858) were published in a volume he titled Hours of Devotion. The work also included a number of his own prayers as well as those of Marcus Heinrich Bresslau. The following year, Moritz Mayer passed away. He was 45 years old.(We are indebted to Anton Hieke for his research on Mayer, "Rabbi Maurice Mayer: German Revolutionary, Charleston Reformer, and Anti-Abolitionist" published in Southern Jewish Life, 17 (2014), pp. 45-89.)For Mayer's translations of prayers by other authors, please visit here.

Aharon N. Varady (transcription)

Aharon Varady (M.A.J.Ed./JTSA Davidson) is a volunteer transcriber for the Open Siddur Project. If you find any mistakes in his transcriptions, please let him know. Shgiyot mi yavin; Ministarot naqeni שְׁגִיאוֹת מִי־יָבִין; מִנִּסְתָּרוֹת נַקֵּנִי "Who can know all one's flaws? From hidden errors, correct me" (Psalms 19:13). If you'd like to directly support his work, please consider donating via his Patreon account. (Varady also translates prayers and contributes his own original work besides serving as the primary shammes of the Open Siddur Project and its website, opensiddur.org.)

Works of related interest:

 

📖 Stunden der Andacht. ein Gebet⸗ und Erbauungs-buch für Israels Frauen und Jungfrauen | Hours of Devotion. a Book of Prayer and Edification for Israel’s Women and Maiden, a collection

📖 אמרי לב | Prayers and Meditations, and abridged translation by Hester Rothschild (1855) of a collection of teḥinot and paraliturgial prayers by Rabbi Arnaud Aron & Jonas Ennery (1852)

📖 Devotional Exercises for the Use of Jewish Women on Public and Domestic Occasions, an anthology of teḥinot by Miriam Wertheimer (1852) translated from the work of Dr. Meïr Letteris

📖 אמרי לב | Meditations and Prayers, an unendorsed revision by Isaac Leeser (1863) of an abridged translation by Hester Rothschild (1855) of a collection of teḥinot by Rabbi Arnaud

📖 תְּחִנּוֹת בְּנוֹת יְשֻׁרוּן | Techinôs Benôs Jeschurun ein Gebetbuch für gebildete Frauenzimmer, an anthology of teḥinot in German by Wolf Mayer (1828)

📖 תָּחֲנוּנֵי בַּת יְהוּדָה (Taḥnunei bat Yehudah): Andachtsbuch für Israelitische Frauenzimmer, an anthology of teḥinot in German by Meïr haLevi Letteris (1846)

📖 Gebetbuch für gebildete Frauenzimmer mosaischer Religion, an anthology of teḥinot in German by Pereẓ Beer (1815, 1839, 1843)

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