Liturgy out-survives fame

Claim (verbatim)

Liturgy out-survives fame. Connects the Cairo Geniza's poetry fragments to a calendar-driven model of survival: a piyyut lived in the synagogue year, recopied whenever a cantor needed it, while a courtly secular poem lived in a patron's single elegant copy. Attestation should therefore invert the later literary canon: the difficult early payytanim, recopied on liturgical demand, out-surviving the celebrated Andalusian secular verse in sheer fragment counts — survival tracking the performance calendar, not prestige.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Count distinct Geniza fragments per corpus. Primary clause: fragments carrying classical piyyut (Yannai and Eleazar birabbi Qillir together) outnumber fragments of the secular, non-liturgical poetry of Judah Halevi and Moses ibn Ezra combined by at least 5 to 1. Secondary: Halevi's own liturgical pieces out-attest his secular ones within his corpus. The verdict follows the primary clause.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: the Friedberg Genizah Project fragment catalogue, with poem identifications keyed to Davidson's Thesaurus of Mediaeval Hebrew Poetry.

Novelty / leakage triage

provisional — model-triaged, shepherd review pending

A provisional first pass authored by the model (Opus), not yet confirmed by the shepherd. It carries the same dated-search requirements as an authoritative verdict but is excluded from every headline figure and cannot underwrite a prediction until a shepherd confirms it. Provisional reading: Adjacent (closely related prior work exists).

The performance-calendar survival mechanism is a recognized feature of the Cairo Geniza: liturgical poetry (piyyut) survives in enormous quantity because it was recopied on cantorial demand -- the early payytanim Yannai and Qillir were essentially recovered FROM the Geniza in hundreds of fragments (Fleischer's and Zulay's work), while celebrated Andalusian secular verse survives more thinly. So 'attestation inverts the later canon; survival tracks the performance calendar, not prestige' is qualitatively held. Not located: the specific >=5:1 fragment-count ratio (Yannai+Qillir vs Halevi+ibn Ezra) or the within-Halevi liturgical-vs-secular attestation test against the Friedberg catalogue.

• Ezra Fleischer, Hebrew Liturgical Poetry in the Middle Ages (Heb., 1975) and Geniza piyyut scholarship; Menahem Zulay, Piyyute Yannai (1938) — Massive Geniza survival of early piyyut recovered on liturgical demand
• 'An Initial Survey of Arabic Poetry in the Cairo Genizah', Al-Masaq 30:2 (2018), and Cambridge Genizah descriptions of piyyut vs secular poetry — Geniza as a source for both liturgical and secular poetry; the >=5:1 count not measured

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.