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Daily Commodities and Religious Identity in the Medieval Jewish Communities of Northern Europe*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
Extract
The Hebrew chronicle written by Solomon b. Samson recounts the mass conversion of the Jews of Regensburg in 1096.’ The Jews were herded and forced into the local river where a ‘sign was made over the water, the sign of a cross’ and thus they were baptized, all together in the same river. The local German rivers play another role in the accounts of the turbulent events of the Crusade persecutions. They were also the place where Jews evaded conversion, drowning themselves in water, rather than being baptized by what the chronicles’ authors call the ‘stinking waters’ of Christianity. Reading these Hebrew chronicles, one is immediately struck by the tremendous revulsion expressed toward the waters of baptism. Indeed, in his analysis of the symbolic significance of the baptismal waters for medieval Jews, Ivan Marcus has suggested that baptism by force in the local rivers was so traumatic that they instituted a ritual response during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. One component of the medieval Jewish child initiation ceremony to Torah study was performed on the banks of the river, expressing Jewish aversion to baptism (see Fig. i).
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- Research Article
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- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2014
Footnotes
*
I am grateful to Alexandra Walsham for inviting me to explore these themes. Judah Galinsky, Debra Kaplan and Julia Smith made important comments on this article and I thank them for their critique and suggestions. My research was supported by grant no. 420/10 of the Israel Science Foundation.
References
1 I have used the recent edition of the Hebrew Crusade chronicles: Eva, Haverkamp, ed., Hebräische Berichte über die Judenverfolgungen während des Ersten Kreuzzugs (Hanover, 2005), 481.Google Scholar
2 The expressions mei tsahanatam and mei tinufam, meaning ‘stinking waters’, recur regularly in the chronicles as terms for baptismal water: ibid. 263, 271, 277, 347, 373, 379, 385, 395, 447, 461.
3 See Ivan, Marcus, Rituals of Childhood: Jewish Acculturation in Medieval Europe (New Haven, CT, 1996), 106–8.Google Scholar Another instance of polemic concerning water is the Saturday night ritual related to Miriam’s well: see Ta-Shma, Israel M., Early Franco-German Ritual and Custom (Jerusalem, 1992), 201–20, esp. 214–6 (Hebrew)Google Scholar, and the study by my student Inbar Gabai-Zada that expands the discussion of this ritual: ‘Miriam’s Well in Ashkenaz in the Middle Ages’ (MA thesis, Bar-Ilan University, 2013). See also Ephraim, Shoham-Steiner, ‘The Virgin Mary, Miriam, and Jewish Reactions to Marian Devotion in the High Middle Ages’, Association for Jewish Studies Review 37 (2013), 75–91.Google Scholar
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7 A note for readers unfamiliar with Jewish legal texts: one of the most basic and at the same time complex aspects of studying medieval Jewry, and especially the medieval Hebrew sources, is the need to constantly move from the Bible, the Mishnah and Talmud written in late antiquity to the medieval communities within which the Jews lived and their contemporaneous surroundings. This motion back and forth, to and from late antiquity, is essential not only because of the links medieval Jews saw between themselves and their ancestors but because the Mishnah and Talmud form the basis of the Jewish halakhah or legal literature and the medieval Hebrew texts were often organized around the themes and order of the late antique literature. As a result, in the interest of simplicity, the different examples I trace in this article will all follow the same pattern – moving from medieval practice to late antique Jewish ritual instructions back to the Christian urban centres within which medieval Jews lived.
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27 Ta-shma, , ‘Danger’, 21–32.Google Scholar
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29 See Carlebach, Elisheva, Palaces of Time: Jewish Time in Christian Paris (Cambridge, MA, 2011);Google Scholar and we await Justine Isserles’s study of medieval calendar manuscripts.
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32 Ta-Shma, ‘Danger’, focuses on this season.
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34 This is a topic I hope to develop more in future study. At the moment one can note the references in Hebrew texts to Christian holidays, e.g. in the Crusade chronicles: Hebräische Berichte, 407, 473.
35 The tekufah was a rare occasion in the calendar in that it had household consequences more than communal ones. While the tekufot were important for calendric computations, no prayers or fasts accompanied the days of the solstices and equinoxes.
36 Adamson, Melitta Weiss, Food in Medieval Times (Westport, CT, 2004), 1.Google Scholar
37 Lev. 11. This was further expanded in late antiquity: see Friedenreich, David, Foreigners and their Food: Constructing Otherness in Jewish, Christian and Islamic Law (Berkeley, CA, 2011).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
38 Babylonian Talmud [hereafter: BT] Shabbat, 17a.
39 Ibid.; see also BT Avodah Zarah, 36a–b.
40 See n. 13 above.
41 I have based my discussion on a Master’s thesis by David L. Strauss that remains the most exhaustive treatment of this subject to date, ‘Pat ‘Akum in Medieval France and Germany’ (Bernard Revel Graduate School, Yeshiva University, 1979); see also Woolf, Jeffrey, ‘The Prohibition of Gentile Bread during the Ten Days of Repentance: On the Genesis and Significance of a Custom’, in Studies on the History of the Jews of Ashkenaz: Presented to Eric Zimmer, ed. Bacon, Gershon et al. (Ramat Gan, 2008), 83–99.Google Scholar
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43 Strauss, ‘Pat ‘Akun’, xx.
44 Mahzor Vitry, nos 506-7.
45 Strauss, ‘Pat ‘Akum, 8-9; Woolf, ‘Prohibition of Gentile Bread’, 89-90.
46 Woolf’s article attempts to explain how this custom emerged: ibid. 92-9. In addition, some especially pious women when preparing for the Sabbath would be careful to prepare their own dough to bring to the furnum, so as to separate the dough as outlined in the Bible, a commandment that was considered a female responsibility: see Fram, Edward, My Dear Daughter: R. Benjamin Slonik and the Education of Jewish Women in Sixteenth-Century Poland (Portland, OR, 2007), 132.Google Scholar
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48 ‘Et quia in contemptum nostrum Judei aliquibus cibis nostris et potibus non utuntur firmiter inhibemus ne aliqui Christiani audeant uti suis’: Grayzel, Solomon, The Church and the Jews in the Thirteenth Century (New York, 1966), 336–7.Google Scholar
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51 E. g. Finkelstein, Louis, Jewish Self Government in the Middle Ages (New York, 1924), 123 Google Scholar, where these candles are noted in community ordinances.
52 Ex. 35: 3.
53 Shabbat, Mishnah, Mishnayolh: Order Mo’ed, transl. Blackman, Philip (New York, 1963)Google Scholar, ch. 2, Mishnah 1.
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57 I have used the facsimile Sefer Hasidim Parma H 3280, intro. I. G. Marcus (Jerusalem, 1985), no. 623, and the earlier published Das Buch des Frommen, ed. Wistinetzki, J., intro. Freimann, J. (Frankfurt, 1924), no. 623 Google Scholar. References are to the Parma version [hereafter: SHP]. For variants I have utilized the Sefer Hasidim Database at Princeton University, online at: <https://etc.princeton.edu/sefer_hasidim>.
58 Mishnah shabbat, ch. 2, Mishnah 7. An eruv was a line delineating an area within which certain activities could be practised on the Sabbath.
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60 This connection is already made in Mishnah Shabbat, ch. 2, Mishnah 6; see Fram, My Dear Daughter, 44, 294.
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63 Baumgarten, Mothers, 137.
64 Haverkamp, Hebmische Berichte, 483. This idea also comes across in b. Isaac, R. Barukh, Sefer ha Terumah (Warsaw, 1897), no. 63.Google Scholar
65 Lev. 19: 19; Deut. 22: 11.
66 b. Judah, R. Jacob of London, Sefer Etz Hayim, ed. Brodie, Israel, 2 vols (Jerusalem, 1962), 2: 119;Google Scholar Menahem b., R. Elijah Moses of London, Pemshci R. Eliyahu meLondrish (Jerusalem, 1956), 5, no. 1 Google Scholar (Hebrew numbers).
67 SHP, no. 1792; Paris, BN, MS Paris héb. 363, b. Judah, R. Eleazar, ‘Sefer Rokeah’, fol. 8b. Haim Sha’anan, ‘Piskei Rabenu R’ i MeCorbeil’, in idem, Sefer Ner LiShcmaya (B’nei Berak, 1998), 21, no. 41 Google Scholar, where he debates the extent to which one can wear clothes belonging to a non-Jew that are left as a pawn and also discusses the issue of sha’atnez. He stipulates that one can surely wear gentile clothes if one’s life is in danger.
68 SHP, nos 259, 261.
69 Baumgarten, ‘Remember’; Carlebach, ‘Water into Blood’.
70 Minty, Mary, ‘Judengasse into Christian Quarter: The Phenomenon of the Converted Synagogue in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Holy Roman Empire’, in Scribner, Robert and Johnson, Trevor, eds, Popular Religion in Germany and Central Europe, 1400-1800 (Basingstoke, 1996), 56–86.Google Scholar
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