I always found it interesting how a certain group of people can tell the world outright that they will not honor any vow, oath, pledge or contract they make for the upcoming year and the world is supposed to think that is a wonderful thing and trust them to tell the truth...
Read and learn...There are two “
histories” regarding the prayer, one popular and the other scholarly. The popular version connects the wording of the prayer with the religious dilemma facing medieval Spanish Jews. In 15th-century Spain, at the height of the infamous Inquisition, the Roman Catholic Church embarked on a determined hunt to seek out and punish all non-practicing Christians.
In response to extreme antisemitism earlier that century, a sizable number of upper-class Jews chose to convert to Christianity in order to, at the very least, avoid social disdain. For a small number, their religious conversion was genuine; but for the majority, their “
conversion” was in name only as they still found creative ways to practice Judaism in the privacy of their own dwellings.
These Jews came to be known as “
marranos” and became one of the
foci of the Church’s inquisitory offensive. The
Kol Nidre prayer, according to this theory, was created in response to these Jews’ desire to nullify their vows of conversion. We can see the potential validity of this historical claim in a literal translation of
Kol Nidre:
“All vows and oaths we take, all promises and obligations we made to God between this Yom Kippur and the last we hereby publicly retract in the event that we should forget them, and hereby declare our intention to be absolved of them.”This legal formula may have allowed
marrano Jews to rid themselves of guilt they felt when, under social and religious duress, they converted to Christianity. By setting
Kol Nidre at the beginning of the first
Yom Kippur service, these Jews developed a way to confront the gravest sin imaginable so that they could devote the remainder of
Yom Kippur to address their other transgressions.
Scholars do not wholly refute this understanding of
Kol Nidre, but they do contend that
Kol Nidre has much earlier roots and probably predated the marranos. According to their research, it is unclear exactly when or where the
Kol Nidre legal formula was created. The wording seems to mimic other legalistic contracts of the Babylonian Jewish community of the 6th and 7th centuries.
The first undoubtable citation appears in an early comprehensive siddur edited by
Rav Amram in the 8th century. Over the next few centuries, the prayer became more widespread and a soulful melody became associated with it. Notably, there were some rabbis who disparaged the prayer as a superstitious attempt by Jewish mystics to nullify vows made by evil forces in the universe intent on hurting the Jewish people. These criticisms were muted by the majority of the people who cleaved to the prayer and aided its spread to other communities.
More history
here.