REVIEW ESSAY: Yishaq (Eric) Zimmer, ’Olam ke-Minhago Noheg

Summary

THIS TWO-PRONGED STUDY is a work of sound and sober scholarship and of sterling honesty. The first section comprises an analysis of the course and fate of ten religious requirements or customs. Among those addressed are the history of the male head covering (yarmulke or kippah), a topic previously subjected to all types of tendentious studies, which receives here its first objective and comprehensive presentation, and the wearing of pe’ot (earlocks) and its fate over the course of two thousand years of Jewish history. Next comes a fascinating history of prayer gestures—bowing or prostration, closed or open eyes, clasped, folded, or outstretched hands, immobile or swaying body (shokln in Yiddish). All these stances were adopted by one community or another over the course of the past two millennia and, in a path breaking examination, Zimmer provides us with a comprehensive survey of the Jewish postures of prayer. Certain strange practices in some communities on the afternoon of the Ninth of Av are then investigated, as is the fate of a number of variant texts in the prayer book. Eating indoors, rather than in the sukkah, on Shemini Atseret, a practice we associate with hasidic groups, is traced, in all its vicissitudes, back to a family in eleventh-century Rhineland. The section concludes with an enlightening discussion of the disappearance in European Jewry of one of the standard requirements of mourning, ‘atifat harosh (covering one's face up to the eyes).

The second section of the book addresses the issue of cultural cleavage— the rift in many areas of religious practice that occurred in the late Middle Ages between western and eastern Germany—known as Minhag Rheinus and Minhag Ostreich. This split continued until the Holocaust, as Poland adopted the ‘Rite of Ostreich’ early on, while Germany west of the Magdeburg– Regensburg line, which included such famed communities as Mainz, Worms, and Frankfurt am Main, remained true to the old Rhineland traditions. The differences between the rites are many and seem to form no pattern. Zimmer presents the first systematic study of nine of these different practices, from menstrual and postnatal sexual abstinence to the order of lighting Hanukkah lights (left to right or right to left) and seeks to come up with some common denominator.