It used to be that daily prayers were recited by heart, or a leader prayed aloud and the congregation acknowledged with “Amen”. There were no prayer books as writing down the text of blessings was taboo. However, after the Talmud as written, people began to write prayer books. Rabbi Amram ben Sheshna haGaon wrote the first Siddur in about 875CE, which was written especially for scholars. During the Middle Ages, the prayer books grew longer as Jews wanted to spend more time in prayer because of the people’s desire to pray and also because literacy was extremely high amongst Jews when most men in Europe could not read. Before 1446 ,all prayer books were written by hand, but this was ridden with errors. A German Jewish scholar, Seligman Baer, printed a definitive siddur in 1886, after he had carefully traced all sources and compared all manuscript versions available. As some Jews in the 16th century lost the skills in Hebrew that their ancestors had possessed, translations became necessary.