Jewish prayer (Hebrew: תְּפִלָּה‎‎, tefilláh; plural Hebrew: תְּפִלּוֹת‎‎, tefillos or tefillót; Yiddish תּפֿלה tfíle, plural תּפֿלות tfílles; Yinglish: davening from Yiddish דאַוונען davnen ‘to pray’) are the prayer recitations that form part of the observance of Judaism. These prayers, often with instructions and commentary, are found in the siddur, the traditional Jewish prayer book.

Traditionally, three prayer services are recited daily:

Additional prayers:

According to the Talmud, prayer is a Biblical commandment and the Talmud gives two reasons why there are three basic prayers: to recall the daily sacrifices at the Temple in Jerusalem, and/or because each of the Patriarchs instituted one prayer: Abraham the morning, Isaac the afternoon and Jacob the evening. A distinction is made between individual prayer and communal prayer, which requires a quorum known as a minyan, with communal prayer being preferable as it permits the inclusion of prayers that otherwise must be omitted.

Maimonides (1135–1204 CE) relates that until the Babylonian exile (586 BCE), all Jews composed their own prayers, but thereafter the sages of the Great Assembly composed the main portions of the siddur. Modern scholarship dating from the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement of 19th century Germany, as well as textual analysis influenced by the 20th Century discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, suggests that dating from this period there existed "liturgical formulations of a communal nature designated for particular occasions and conducted in a centre totally independent of Jerusalem and the Temple, making use of terminology and theological concepts that were later to become dominant in Jewish and, in some cases, Christian prayer." The language of the prayers, while clearly from the Second Temple period^{[citation needed]} (516 BCE–70 CE), often employs Biblical idiom. Jewish prayerbooks emerged during the early Middle Ages during the period of the Geonim of Babylonia (6th–11th Centuries CE)