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The experience of persecution and catastrophe throughout Jewish history created the frame of reference for the literary lamentation. The biblical Lamentations are archetypal; they provide a stock of motifs and topoi on which later texts draw. While the hermeneutics of violence are subject to the changes of secularization, the recurrent motifs of sin, punishment, and inconsolable sorrow form a constant that reflects the cyclic experience of catastrophic events from the destruction of Jerusalem in antiquity up to the Shoah.1. Songs of lamentationLamentation in the Jewish con…