SINCE LEOPOLD ZUNZ'S literary history of pre-modern synagogue poetry (piyyuṭ) and Ismar Elbogen's history of the Jewish liturgy, dramatic advances have been made in the study of Hebrew hymnography. These were due in large part to Solomon Schechter's discovery in 1896 of the Cairo Geniza (storeroom). Given the Jewish practice of not destroying texts in which the name of God was written, synagogues would preserve their business documents and letters, and their prayer-books when these were no longer fit for public use. The Jews in Old Cairo (Fustat) purchased their synagogue from the Copts in 882. In 1012 the building was destroyed by vandals and later rebuilt. The new edifice included an attic for the purpose of storing these texts. Schechter took with him some 100,000 fragments from the Cairo storeroom to Cambridge, where he was a Reader in Rabbinics. Geniza materials were also obtained at that time by the British Museum; the Bodleian, Oxford; St Petersburg Library; the Hungarian Academy of Budapest; Dropsie College Library, Philadelphia; and the Jewish Theological Seminary Library, New York, among others. In 1902 Schechter became president of the Jewish Theological Seminary and brought some of the Cairo Geniza texts with him. Israel Davidson, a member of Schechter's faculty, found among the fragments the writings of Yannai (6th c.), one of the earliest Ereṣ Yisra'el synagogue poets, and in 1919 he published a collection of his works (Maḥazor Yannay). Davidson's studies led him to produce his monumental bibliography in four volumes, Thesaurus of Mediaeval Hebrew Poetry (New York, 1923-33).

Exploiting the Cairo Geniza treasure trove, scholars in Berlin and later in Jerusalem published the works of hitherto unknown synagogue poets. Pioneering in this effort were H. Brody and his collaborators, M. Zulay, Ḥ. Schirmann and A. Habermann, at the Research Institute of Hebrew Poetry, and their students working at the new Research Institute of the Piyyuṭ in the Geniza. Following the publication of Davidson's Thesaurus the research moved in two separate, albeit at times intersecting, directions. The prime focus of Brody and his colleagues was the study of post-biblical Hebrew poetry in its regional setting.