Medieval Ashkenaz Research Articles

Our Lady at the Seder Table

This paper discusses a unique miniature in a fifteenth-century Ashkenazi Passover Haggadah. The image represents a young woman holding an open book at a spread Seder table at the opening words of the Maggid, the narrative part of the Haggadah. The image of the woman is reminiscent of Christian representations of female patrons, saints, and the Virgin Mary herself. Having demonstrated this similarity, this article attempts to explain it by exploring to what degree the concept of the ‘ideal woman’ was shared in Jewish and Christian cultures. Since the lady in the Haggadah is clearly interacting with a book, the article also surveys textual evidence of female education in medieval Ashkenaz and women’s participation in religious rituals, to examine to what degree portraying the lady this way could reflect the reality of fifteenth-century Ashkenaz. The findings suggest that the authorship of the Haggadah may have deliberately drawn a visual parallel between the lady in the Haggadah and the Virgin Mary in order to challenge the latter’s unique position in Christianity and counterweight her ever-growing cult.

The Right to Light: Jews, Christians and Shared Legal Practices in Medieval Ashkenaz

The Right to Light: Jews, Christians and Shared Legal Practices in Medieval Ashkenaz

Ritual Chairs of Circumcision Ceremonies: Reassessing Meaning through Materiality

Abstract This essay will showcase a process of contextualizing a Jewish ritual object through synthesizing a range of sources. The object at the center of this research is the chair in the context of the circumcision ceremony in medieval Ashkenaz and the early modern Ashkenazi diaspora. The two ceremonial chairs are designated, respectively, for the ba′al brit, who holds the infant, and Elijah the Prophet, whose association with circumcision will be explored. The essay will present the central themes that medieval Ashkenazi Jews wished to highlight during the ceremony and suggest how these themes were reflected and communicated in the affordances of the chair.

The Jews’ Hat in Medieval Ashkenaz: Formal Attire for Everyday Men?

Abstract This article nuances the dominant historiographical narrative of the Jews’ hat as an allegedly pejorative iconographic marker of Jewish men in medieval Ashkenaz. Considering the perceptions and functions of the Jews’ hat, this article will offer new conclusions regarding if, when, and by whom it was worn. Drawing from a variety of sources in Hebrew, Latin, and vernacular languages, and on visual sources, the overall argument presented here is that the Jews’ hat was not everyday attire and that it was not likely owned by all Jewish men. Rather, featuring among the variety of hats Jewish men wore based on their socioeconomic or religious status in their communities from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, the Jews’ hat was a costume worn by those of more common status and on formal occasions when distinguishing oneself according to any urban group was required, such as during urban processions, oath-taking, public forms of punishment, or matters of civic administration.

Accounting for the Commandments in Medieval Judaism: Studies in Law, Philosophy, Pietism and Kabbalah ed. by Jeremy P. Brown and Marc Herman

Reviewed by: Accounting for the Commandments in Medieval Judaism: Studies in Law, Philosophy, Pietism and Kabbalah ed. by Jeremy P. Brown and Marc Herman Dana Fishkin jeremy p. brown and marc herman (eds.),Accounting for the Commandments in Medieval Judaism: Studies in Law, Philosophy, Pietism and Kabbalah (Études sur le judaïsme médiéval 86; Leiden: Brill, 2021), Pp. vii + 300. $188. This collection on the commandments in medieval Jewish thought brings together a wide range of scholars and topics, reinforcing the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to Jewish studies. The enumeration and rationalization of the commandments emerged from the realms of medieval philosophical and mystical thinking, and this book demonstrates how fundamental those approaches were to various medieval thinkers for concepts as well as imagery and terminology. Often, as revealed by several chapters, one’s approach to the commandments served as a gauge of sorts, signaling one’s ideological, cultural, or intellectual affinities. In “Dê Maḥsoro as the Key to Jewish Almsgiving: A Maimonidean Interpretive Innovation and Its Legal Afterlife to the Fifteenth Century” (pp. 27–44), Alyssa M. Gray traces the commandment of almsgiving, alongside its evolving interpretation, from the rabbinic to the early modern periods. Rabbinic interpretations of “Dê Maḥsoro,” a shorthand reference to the biblical verse (Num 15:8) that orders Israelites to furnish an impoverished person with enough to satisfy his lack, identified concrete and specific acts of charity. Gray demonstrates how Maimonides transformed this concretized concept into a general commandment encompassing all types of charity. However, Gray shows that the Maimonidean reappraisal was not adopted until the fourteenth century when Iberian and Ashkenazic cultural sensibilities became enmeshed. Also indicating engagement between the Ashkenazic and Iberian worlds, according to Ephraim Kanarfogel, the Ashkenazic rationalization of commandments is examined in “Ṭaʿame ha- miṣvot in Medieval Ashkenaz” (pp. 177–90). This important historiographical corrective examines three groups of scholars whose engagement in the rationalization of the commandments signals exposure to Iberian rationalism. Anti-Christian polemicists and exegetes who authored biblical commentaries according to the literal sense (pashtanim) rationalized certain commandments in accordance with natural logic. The robust rationalizations of the mystically inclined German Pietists, however, highlighted their two-tiered [End Page 173] approach, in which mystical adepts and common folk each grasped different reasons for commandments. Similarly, a two-tiered social structure highlighted by the rationalization of the commandments, is also explored by Elisha Russ-Fishbane in “Pietism in the Law and the Law of Pietism: From Moses to Abraham Maimonides” (pp. 191–207). Russ-Fishbane demonstrates Abraham’s nuanced view of the pietistic ideal, founded upon key elements of the Maimonidean approach to law and supererogatory ethic, but reinforcing Sufi mystical ideals. Albert Dov Friedberg, too, examines Maimonidean notions of Pietism in “Maimonides’s Long Journey from Greek to Jewish Ethics” (pp. 97–117). He compares two Maimonidean works on ethics, the Eight Chapters and the laws concerning character traits (Hilkhot De’ot) from Mishneh Torah, to posit a noticeable revision of Maimonides’s position on ethics. In his commentary on Mishnah Avot, known as the Eight Chapters, Maimonides promotes the mean between two extremes as leading to perfect morality. Yet, as Friedberg notes, the Aristotelian stance expressed by Maimonides contradicts the valorization of supererogatory behavior found in rabbinic literature. Inferring Maimonides’s intellectual maturation, Friedberg claims that Maimonides elevates the commandment to imitate God into an independent one expressing rabbinic valorization of Pietism. Using a creative angle through which to appreciate the impact of Maimonides on the enumeration and rationalization of the commandments, Marc Herman’s “Early Evaluation of Maimonides’s Enumeration of the Commandments against the Background of the Eastern Maimonidean Controversy” (pp. 83–96) examines the exchange between a reputed “anti-Maimonidean” Daniel ben Saadia and Abraham Maimonides. Herman’s focus on the congenial exchange between Daniel and Abraham Maimonides leads him to problematize the controversial nature of the Maimonidean controversy in the East, and to conclude that, despite being a student of an anti-Maimonidean scholar, Daniel nevertheless adopted Maimonidean linguistic and conceptual elements in his own approach to Ṭaʿame ha-miṣvot. Guadalupe González Diéguez’s “The Reasons for the Commandments in Isaac...

Tradition, Migration, and the Impact of Print: Local Rites of Seliḥot Recitation in Early Modern Ashkenaz

This article examines the history of the various rites of seli@hot (penitential prayers) recitation for what it can tell us about the changes the legacy of medieval Ashkenaz underwent in the early modern period. An eminently local matter by definition, these penitential liturgies were inevitably affected by the large-scale emigration of Jews from the German lands that marked the end of the Middle Ages. They were also subject to the trend toward standardization that came with the new technology of printing. While the local seli@hot rites were among the first Hebrew books to be printed in northern Italy, in Prague, and in Krakow, a similarly direct transition from practice into print was not an option in post-expulsion Germany. Hence, when Jewish communities began to revive in western Ashkenaz from the sixteenth century onward, local choices were predicated upon the availability of printed editions that had originated elsewhere, and the liturgical landscape changed accordingly. Nevertheless, even as the first seli@hot editions printed in Germany itself followed the Italo-Ashkenazic rite for the bulk of their corpus, they also preserve unacknowledged evidence of an indigenous rite well rooted in medieval tradition. Pockets of local tradition, it turns out, sometimes remained in place when rural Jews continued to uphold the rite of a historical region even after the urban community that had served as its center had ceased to exist. Liturgical sources are thus shown to shed unexpected light on Jewish life in sixteenth-century Germany, a dark age in German-Jewish history in more than one respect.

Kiddush HaShem as Machloket: Martyrdom in the Medieval Ashkenazi and Sephardi Worlds

Religious persecution is one of the most consistent and enduring themes across the diverse history of the Jewish people. The Megillah Esther (The Scroll of Esther) presents an archetype of the perennial existential challenge to Jewish faith and has offered a framework for various Jewish leaders attempting to formulate an adequate response to such challenges when they arise, i.e. kiddush HaShem (martyrdom). This paper specifically explores the interpretive divergence between Jewish leadership in medieval Sepharad (Spain) and Ashkenaz (Germany and Northern France) as informed by their distinct sociohistorical milieus. Writing in the context of the violent First Crusade, Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki of Tosafist authority interprets the Purim narrative as a strong message on religious purity that necessitates kiddush HaShem in the face of forced conversion. Conversely, Rabbi Moses ben Maimon (Maimonides), in the context of the culturally fluid and diverse Andalusia, interprets the Purim narrative to allow for Jews to assume an alien faith in order to preserve their lives. These two titans of Jewish teaching (who lived in similar periods not far from each other) offer seemingly diametric orderings of Jewish values, e.g. ritualistic duty vs. faith. These differences, however, derived from divergent historical circumstances, highlight the malleability of halakhic procedure as a transhistorical tool that allows Jewish authorities to consistently overcome societal adversity.

"Who was a ḥasid or ḥasidah in Medieval Ashkenaz? Reassessing the Social Implications of a Term,"

"Who was a ḥasid or ḥasidah in Medieval Ashkenaz? Reassessing the Social Implications of a Term,"

Brothers from Afar: Rabbinic Approaches to Apostasy and Reversion in Medieval Europe by Ephraim Kanarfogel

Reviewed by: Brothers from Afar: Rabbinic Approaches to Apostasy and Reversion in Medieval Europe by Ephraim Kanarfogel Ahuva Liberles Ephraim Kanarfogel. Brothers from Afar: Rabbinic Approaches to Apostasy and Reversion in Medieval Europe. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2020. 260 pp. In his exciting new book, Brothers from Afar, Ephraim Kanarfogel tackles one of the greatest challenges for the religious leaders of the Jewish minority in Christian Europe—the mild but constant seepage of Jews into the arms of the Christian religion, by choice or under threats and coercion. Focusing on medieval northern Europe, this book presents the diverse rabbinic approaches to apostasy and shows how these approaches were translated into rabbinic decisions. Kanarfogel also identifies the complexity of rabbinic attitudes toward individuals who sought to rejoin the Jewish community after their conversion, and how these judgments were challenged and changed over the course of the Middle Ages and in different geographic areas. This book is the conclusive outcome of the author's many years of extensive research on this subject. As the author clarifies in his introduction, this is a book about the history of Halakhah as it relates to apostasy and reversion, rather than a book about medieval converts or conversion per se. At the same time, it reveals much about actual acts of conversion and medieval converts. Drawing on an extremely impressive corpus of medieval Jewish manuscripts, many of which were previously unknown or had never been addressed, Brothers [End Page 164] from Afar examines the sources against the backdrop of the linguistic and legal context in which they were created. Throughout the monograph, the reader will find profound rabbinic discussions illuminating several aspects of the intricate religious identity of apostates. How was an apostate supposed to comprehend his or her religious affiliation according to Jewish law? Did he or she relinquish Judaism by undergoing baptism? It is important to distinguish between the social and economic distance that the Jewish community, according to its rabbinic leaders, was expected to maintain from apostates, and rabbinic expectations from the converts to continue to fulfill their obligations to their Jewish family regardless of their baptism and new religious affiliation. In this context, the act of religious immersion upon the return of a convert to the fold is justified as a communal necessity, to publicly demonstrate the return to the Jewish community, rather than as a religious requirement to overturn one's conversion. In the first chapter, "Assessing the Ashkenazi Context," Kanarfogel challenges the generally accepted thesis suggested by Jacob Katz in his work, Exclusiveness and Tolerance (1961), that Rashi was the first to understand the talmudic principle that "A Jew remains a Jew even if he has sinned grievously" (ʾaf ʿal pi she-ḥataʾ Yisraʾel hu) as holding halakhic significance for the individual Jew who converted to Christianity, rather than merely as a general attitude. Until now, it has been widely accepted that Rashi's perception of apostates as still belonging, in most respects, to the Jewish people, was an approach embraced by most rabbinic adjudicators in medieval Ashkenaz. Even though earlier scholars acknowledged that some rabbinic authorities suggested apostates should undergo ritual immersion upon their return, this position was deemed to result from a desire on the part of lay Jews to gauge the sincerity of the apostate. It was also seen as an expectation that stemmed from popular culture and served to undo the convert's previous baptism (6–8). One of the goals of Brothers from Afar is to demonstrate that some rabbinic approaches were much closer to this view than was previously thought and that ritual immersion was indeed demanded by some rabbinic authorities. Kanarfogel asserts that mid-thirteenth-century northern French Tosafists prescribed immersion for apostates returning to Judaism, in contrast to earlier scholarly claims that apostates were encouraged to return to the Jewish community without being required to undergo any special ceremony or act. In chapter 2, "Establishing Boundaries: Immersion, Repentance, and Verification," Kanarfogel paints a rich picture of medieval rabbinic scholarship by examining dozens of medieval Hebrew manuscripts dealing with halakhic questions concerning converts and conversion, closely noting and revealing variations in the choice of words and shifts in the order...

“Beautiful Books with Beautiful Covers”: The Bindings of Hebrew Manuscripts in Late Medieval Ashkenaz

Binding, which adapts a written text to its intended use, is one of the most formative stages of book production. The scarcity of extant medieval bindings makes any discussion of how Hebrew manuscripts were originally bound rather speculative, but such a discussion is nonetheless worthwhile. To shed light on the practices of bookbinding among Jews, this article examines various aspects of bookbinding in Ashkenaz on the basis of selected examples of extant medieval bindings and primary written sources relevant to the matter. The aspects to be discussed include the question of Jewish binders, the role of bindings as a material marker of manuscripts in Jewish private libraries, and the ways in which Hebrew books were rebound when they entered Christian book collections.

Situated Fathering in Medieval Ashkenaz

Situated Fathering in Medieval Ashkenaz

Medieval Ashkenaz: Views from the 21st Century

Medieval Ashkenaz: Views from the 21st Century

Moving Bodies: Corpses and Communal Space in Medieval Ashkenaz

Moving Bodies: Corpses and Communal Space in Medieval Ashkenaz

The Twenty-Four Egyptian Days in Yiddish

Abstract The object of this study is a list of twenty-four Egyptian days in Yiddish discovered at the end of a Hebrew miscellany from medieval Ashkenaz, preserved in the Basel Universitätsbibliothek. Egyptian days are inauspicious days for bloodletting; these are listed according to the Julian calendar and sometimes identified by saint names and feast days. The list is edited and translated into English. Dates and variants of these Egyptian days are then compared with those of the only other known list of its kind, found in the earliest dated astro-medical fragment in Old Western Yiddish, from 1396–1397. A tabular comparison and descriptive commentary of the names and dates in both lists follows. Preceding this analysis, the status and knowledge of Jewish physicians in medieval Ashkenaz is addressed, as well as a brief description of Ms R IV 2, revealing its rich content and some of its codicological and paleographical characteristics.

Was Judah he-Ḥasid the “Author” of Sefer Ḥasidim?

Sefer Ḥasidim (The Book of the Pious) has long served as a crucial source for medieval Jewish historiography. Yet the dual question of who composed the anonymous text and how its varying recensions came into existence has been a contentious one among scholars of medieval Ashkenaz. In particular, opinions have been split on the issue of the book’s authorship. Ever since the 1538 publication of the editio princeps, Judah he-Ḥasid (“the Pious,” d. 1217) has been credited as the work’s singular “author,” but in the intervening years numerous theories of composite authorship have been proposed as well. The present article reassesses notions of “authorship” in medieval Ashkenaz and does so in dialogue with Ivan Marcus’s recent Sefer Ḥasidim and the Ashkenazic Book in Medieval Europe (2018), a work that seeks to deconstruct the reductive category of unitary “books” in medieval Ashkenaz, but which simultaneously reifies Judah’s self-conscious “authorial identity.” In contrast, I argue on methodological and conceptual grounds that “authorship” is a problematic category in medieval Ashkenazic culture and suggest that in the case of Sefer Ḥasidim there are textual reasons to doubt that a single individual (Judah he-Ḥasid or anyone else) was solely responsible for “authoring” the text in its entirety.

Beyond the Rabbinic Paradigm

Using medieval Cologne as an example, this paper seeks to extract traces of a lay leadership from rabbinic texts of medieval Ashkenaz. It reveals evidence of a culture of leadership and arbitration that was based on Jewish tradition and common sense, rather than an emphasis on talmudic law and argumentation. This is demonstrated by a discussion of known leaders, texts about Cologne Jews, rabbinic statements that criticize Cologne's Jewry for halakhic leniency in favor of economic gain, and cultural assimilation to the Christian environment. The sources presented in this study suggest the existence of a lay leadership entrusted with governance and arbitration, existing in Cologne and possibly other places in medieval Ashkenaz. This system of governance and arbitration seems to have been possible in Jewish communities that had no strong rabbinic presence and probably existed in many places. Only with the arrival of strong local rabbinic authorities did the lay leadership yield its place to rabbinic leadership.

Situated Fathering in Medieval Ashkenaz

Situated Fathering in Medieval Ashkenaz

Moving Bodies: Corpses and Communal Space in Medieval Ashkenaz

Moving Bodies: Corpses and Communal Space in Medieval Ashkenaz

Meals and Mourning: The Seudat Havraʾah and the Seudah Mafseket of Tisha bʾAv in Medieval Ashkenaz

Meals and Mourning: The Seudat Havraʾah and the Seudah Mafseket of Tisha bʾAv in Medieval Ashkenaz

Medieval Ashkenaz: Views from the 21st Century

Medieval Ashkenaz: Views from the 21st Century