2 - Catastrophe and Halakhic Creativity: Ashkenaz—1096, 1242, 1306, and 1298

Summary

THE TITLE of this essay is, in a sense, a misnomer; most of it is a survey of the Franco-German Tosafists and complements the preceding essay, ‘The Printed Page of the Talmud’. The study assumed the form that it did as I sought to rectify a growing misconception that the massacres of the First Crusade precipitated an intellectual crisis. Traumatic the events of 1096 certainly were; psychological shock, however, is not the same as intellectual decline or stagnation. I found the notion of either of these consequences without foundation, indeed, contrary to everything that we know about the tosafist movement of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and its immortal achievements. So I decided to preface the argument with a brief survey of that famous movement. (To some of the readers, this preface may be the essay's real raison d’être.) To broaden somewhat the scope of the study, I addressed four crises of the Ashkenazic community in the high Middle Ages and their significance in its intellectual history.

THE TITLE ‘Catastrophe and Halakhic Creativity’ is a misnomer—the dead don't think. The actual question being posed is: is the loss of creativity occasioned by death significant? This, in turn, hinges on where the field stood when catastrophe struck. For example, had a plague hit London in the year 1600, its effect on English literature would have been devastating, whereas had this happened in 1630, the impact would have been minimal. So the question we have to address is: where did halakhic creativity stand, in France and Germany, when catastrophe struck: in 1096—the Crusade massacres of German Jewry; in 1242—the burning of the Talmud; in 1306— the expulsion from France; and, finally, the corresponding destruction of the German cultural community in the closing decades of the thirteenth century and the early years of the fourteenth—by the imprisonment of R. Me’ir of Rothenburg in 1286, soon followed by his death in 1293, by the martyrdom of R. Mordekhai in the Rintfleisch pogroms in 1298, and, some six years later, in 1304, by the flight to Spain of R. Asher and his son, the future author of the Tur?