Daniel ben Judah Dayyan

Daniel ben Judah Dayyan was a Jewish liturgical poet associated with Rome in the fourteenth century. Reliable biographical information about him is limited. Jewish reference works describe him as a dayyan, or rabbinic judge, and traditionally attribute to him the Hebrew hymn Yigdal, a metrical meditation on the thirteen principles of Jewish faith associated with Moses Maimonides.

Some traditional accounts state that the poem was refined over a period of years and completed in 1404. The attribution is historically important but should not be treated as entirely uncontested: other scholarly discussions have proposed different authors, including Immanuel of Rome. The Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology therefore describes Daniel ben Judah as the probable or traditional author rather than presenting the matter as beyond dispute.

Yigdal became established in Jewish liturgical practice in several rites and eventually provided the textual foundation for Thomas Olivers’s eighteenth-century Christian paraphrase “The God of Abraham Praise.” Olivers substantially reshaped the material, so Daniel ben Judah should be understood as the traditional author of the Jewish source rather than as the author of Olivers’s English Christian text.