Subject: JUICE History 12 - Jews in Medieval Europe Date: Thu, 11 Jun 1998 00:21:27 +0000 To: "Hebraic Heritage Newsgroup"<heb_roots_chr@geocities.com>
From: JUICE Administration <juice@wzo.org.il> To: history@wzo.org.il Subject: JUICE History 12 ============================================================== World Zionist Organization Jewish University in CyberspacE juice@wzo.org.il birnbaum@wzo.org.il http://www.wzo.org.il ============================================================== Course: Medieval Jewish History Lecture: 12/12 Lecturer: Prof. Howard Adelman XII. Jewish Culture in Medieval Christian Europe In this concluding lecture, which touches on so many subjects to which entire courses and even academic fields are devoted, we will discuss the development of medieval Jewish social and cultural life in Christian Europe, both in the Askenazic lands of northern Europe and the Sephardic area of the Iberian peninsula. As we have shown, Jewish fortunes deteriorated in Europe by the fifteenth century, and the Jews left in many directions, taking their culture with them to Poland, Italy, the land of Israel, north Africa, north America, and eventually back to northern Europe. In many of these places Askenazic and Sephardic cultures would come into contact with each other as well as with the culture of country. As a result of these interactions several questions arise about Jewish culture: 1) To what extent has it been a product of independent lines of development among Jews? 2) To what extent has it reacted to the violence that Jews experienced? 3) To what extent was it influenced by trends among other peoples and nations? Ultimately, then, these questions raise the fundamental issue of what it means to be Jewish: Is there some sort of eternal essence that Jews in each generation share or does each generation, even each location, produce a synthesis between variously transmitted qualities and local circumstances? By asking this question and by phrasing it as I have, not to mention the material presented during this course, I have already indicated my sense of Jewish history as a dialectic between a rich, flexible heritage and changing circumstances and influences. What has surprised me over the years is how resistant so many of my students, Jews and non-Jews, religious and secular, Americans, Germans, and Israelis, are to such a notion. I am regularly confronted with the demand that certain values, norms, ethics, and beliefs are "Jewish" while others are not. These discussions invariably lead to the scenario in which members of the class try to construct what they often will call "normative" Judaism. The process inevitably involves including all those elements about Judaism with which one is personally comfortable and rejecting everything that makes one uncomfortable. Some of the topics which tend to produce such conversations include: the role of mediators between the deity and people, attitudes towards non-Jews, issues of gender, the use of language, and the position of the land of Israel. Some build their positions on halakhah, often prefaced with "the," some on Jewish rational philosophy, and some on various ideologies, such as Yiddishism, Zionism, Feminism, or Pacifism. These conversations tend to have a reductionist quality because of the inability to accept the fact that among Jews in the past, a range of attitudes and behaviors existed side by side. Universalism and particularism competed with each other in the past as they do today. Christianity and Islam influenced the beliefs and behaviors of Jews as much as they produced reactions against them--which are also, by the way, a form of influence. Most historically based discussions about contemporary Jewish life tend to look for patterns of continuity and points of disjuncture. Again, most depict as continuous that with which they are comfortable and see as forces of division that which they do not accept. The Jewish community often appears as a bastion of traditional, rabbinic authority, universally accepted by all Jews. The rise of the Reform and Conservative movements in the nineteenth century are therefore depicted has having been the first break in a continuous tradition usually attributed to having lasted for four thousand years. Others present a yearning for return to the land of Israel as a central feature of Jewish thought. And Hebrew or Yiddish are variously described as eternal languages of the Jewish experience. Contrary to widely circulated myths, Jews and Judaism did not enter the modern world unified. Diversity and pluralism, perhaps overused terms, did characterize Jewish life: Karaites and Rabbanites, Maimonideans and anti-Maimonideans, rich and poor, men and women, rabbinic and lay, Ashkenazic, Sephardic, and Middle Eastern, Crypto-Jews and Jews, and so forth. Jacob Katz, of blessed memory, one of the leading Jewish social historians of the generation, has pointed out that the term Orthodox was only used at the end of the eighteenth century in reaction to changes that were taking place then, including growing dissent from Judaism and a substantial conversionary movement to Christianity, trends which the new movements tried to slow. In a course in modern Jewish history, which I hope to offer next year, we can see how many of the aspects of Judaism that we now see as central developed in response to the challenges of the modern period and cannot be seen as characteristic of the earlier medieval Jewish experience. I make these comments not out of a spirit of gratuitous revisionism or as an academic attacking what is sacred to the people, but as someone committed to working with the Jewish community both in the US, Europe, and Israel. I believe that the critical study of history is not only useful for those concerned about Jewish life, but necessary for its survival. Such a position excludes two other competing myths: 1) That there is an objective version of history and that it is possible to teach simply basic facts. 2) That mere memory, feelings, and good wishes on the part of Jews and others is enough to sustain growth. On the one hand, the historian can be an agent of memory, on the other, its greatest enemy. The historian's use to the Jewish community, however, lies not with the extremes of confirming that which is comfortable nor with being hostile to what he or she is personally uncomfortable, but by bringing the tools of analysis and the methods for coping with competing claims on the truth. While the major goal of an introductory course such as this was to present the larger picture, one of the features of this final lecture is to show the that the history was ultimately made up of individuals. Each individual, sometimes under severe pressure to the contrary, made a conscious decision to retain, to join, or to rejoin Judaism. Once so identified, however, decisions were neither automatic nor easy. Rather than identifying norms, internal Jewish legislation, usually embodied in rabbinic literature, existed because of the wide range of behavior on the part of Jewish men and women. Many of the expectations articulated by rabbis represented their frustration with actions contrary to their wishes. Thus this literature serves the historian not as a description of actual behavior but as a mirror image of it. Just because rabbis said something does not mean that was how Jews acted. Moreover, among the rabbis there were often strident controversies, which ended up with one side excommunicating the other--bans of severance from the community which had short and long term social, economic, and spiritual consequences-- or burning its writings, acts which had little practical impact but great symbolic significance and continue to serve as a marker for the level of the lack of consensus among even rabbis. A. The Medieval Jewish Community At the beginning of the medieval period in Europe individual Jews received charters from the various ruling authorities to provide specific services for them. Gradually charters were granted to Jewish communities on a corporate basis. The exact origins of medieval Jewish communal organization are obscure. Some historians showed the influence external Christian patterns of organizations. Others, argued for not only the ancient Jewish origins of communal structures, but that the Jews brought these to the Christian communities of Europe as well. In fact, each Jewish community combined in a unique manner rabbinic precedents and local circumstances on an ongoing basis (Baba Batra 8b). A key feature of each local community was the way in which rabbinic and wealthy lay leaders wrestled for control. In local ordinances, called takkanot, each Jewish community strove for control over matters of settlement, taxation, real estate, business practices, law and order, marriage and divorce, relations with the Christian authorities, lost and stolen property, religious needs, charity, and orphans. The communal leaders tried base their authority on coercive devices such as excommunication, fines, floggings, recourse to the gentile authorities, and, in a few rare instances, capital punishment. Crucial to understanding these dynamics is an understanding of to what extent the secular authorities tolerated internal Jewish jurisdiction. As we have mentioned on several occasions the polemical impact of Christian understanding of Genesis 49:10, which connected the loss of Jewish political sovereignty with the coming of Christ, added a theological animus for limiting Jewish communal autonomy, especially in matters of civil and criminal jurisdiction and sometimes even in matters of religion and economics, although usually Jews were allowed enough corporate autonomy and coercive authority for the efficient collection of taxes for the government. Rabbinic literature from Germany and Spain reports instances of corporal and capital punishment. To what extent these events constituted extraordinary measures and tolerated extremes as opposed to theoretical rhetorical posturings requires further research. What is clear, however, is that the Jews did not live in insular communities. They did not live in ghettos and enjoyed a wide range of relations with Christians. Despite communal tensions, communal authority was hardly voluntary and it was to each Jew's benefit to conform to expectations or suffer official or informal sanctions. B. The Languages of Jews in the Middle Ages The main language of Jewish literature was Hebrew and the Jews spoke the language of the country whether it was German, French, Spanish, Italian, or English, or one of the local dialects. Contrary to popular opinion, until around the year 1250 there appeared very few sources and little evidence of the Yiddish language, a combination of middle high German and Hebrew vocabulary later mixed with Slavic grammar. The key element in the development of Yiddish, therefore, was the movement of Jews from the Germanic lands of western Europe to the Slavic environment of eastern Europe. Early Yiddish, really still Judeo-German, developed from 1250 to 1500 in southeastern Germany and Bohemia. The meager evidence from this period includes glosses on a twelfth century biblical manuscript, verses in a prayerbook from Worms in 1272, fables in a manuscript from 1382, a letter from 1392, and epics verse adaptations of biblical tales from the fourteenth century. C. Major Figures in the Development of Ashkenazic Rabbinic Culture 1. Rabbenu Gershom, Meor Hagolah, "the light of the Exile," of Mainz (960-1028) may have been born in Metz and died in about 1028 although later tradition tried to extend his years till 1040 so that he would die the same year that the famous Rashi was born, following Ecclesiastes 1:5 (and Ernest Hemingway), "The sun also rises and the sun goes down." Little is known about Rabbenu Gershom or the Jews of the Rhineland at this time, when Jews began to receive protection in the area, especially Mainz, a center for the preservation and study of rabbinic texts. Rabbenu Gershom devoted a major component of his work to copying texts, including, in his own hand, the entire Mishnah, Talmud, and Bible--including the Massorah, the critical apparatus of the vowels and accents--and Jossipon, a Hebrew rendition of Josephus from tenth century Italy, editions that would become important reference works for future generations. He also wrote religious poetry. To enhance their authority, many takkanot formulated by the early synods of German Jewry were attributed to Rabbenu Gershom. Among these rulings were a ban on polygamy (whose many exceptions make it almost meaningless), a ban on a man divorcing his wife without her consent, a ban on reading the mail of others, a ruling making Jewish transients subject to the local Jewish courts, a policy allowing disgruntled members of the community to stop the synagogue service in order to present their grievances, a ban on excluding other Jews from services held in private homes, the assertion that the majority rules, and the provision that Jews must pay contested tax assessments and then discuss them with the authorities. The central principle of these ordinances was that the Jewish community had the right to make rules according to the time and the place and to punish violators with excommunication (For these texts, see Louis Finkelstein, Jewish Self-Government in the Middle Ages). Rabbenu Gershom wrote important responsa, she'elot uteshuvot, in which he granted rabbinic scholars the exclusive right, at the expense of other Jews, called a maarufiah, to monopolies as suppliers, lenders, or financial administrators to knights, merchants, priests, and monasteries. He also ruled that Jews could take as pledges on loans ecclesiastical vestments from Churches, a practice denounced by the Church; deal with Christians on Christian holidays, also a practice denounced by the Church; lend money on interest to other Jews; use wine touched by non-Jews; flog a Jew who bought a horse on the Sabbath; disinherit converts to Christianity, against Church policy; grant to converts who revert back to Judaism all previous privileges, including serving as priests; and not rent a house from which a gentile owner has expelled a Jewish tenant. These rulings show a rabbi attempting to protect a vibrant Jewish community from some of the usual limitations that the Church tried to impose on them and to encourage them to take advantage fully of opportunities available to them. The Jewish community--or the various communities to which he wrote-- was also flexing its muscles to control members of the community who violated the basic principles of the community (See S. Freehoff, A Treasury of Responsa). In 1012, perhaps because a Christian clergyman converted to Judaism, again providing evidence of the attractiveness of Judaism to some Christians and the Church's panic over such a possibility, an attempt to forcibly convert the Jews of Mainz and their expulsion followed. During this period, Rabbenu Gershom's son was converted to Christianity, but he died before he had a chance to revert to Judaism. As a result, Rabbenu Gershom mourned him deeply. An extant marriage contract from 1013 for Rabbenu Gershom indicates that he either issued his wife a new one or he had remarried. During the 1940s his tombstone was discovered, but without any dates on it. 2. Rabbi Solomon Itzhaki, Rabbi Shlomo Hatzarfati, or Rashi, 1040-1105: The towering figure of medieval Ashkenazic Jewry during the middle ages, Rashi was born in Troyes, the chief city of Champagne, the mercantile and industrial center where fairs were held twice a year. About a hundred Jewish families there, involved in grape growing and trade, spoke French, and enjoyed good relations with their Christian neighbors. The Jews gave the Christians Purim gifts, because it was the Lenten period, and the Christians gave the Jews food on the last day of Passover, because the Jews could not have prepared leavened food during the preceding week. The exchange of food between Christians and Jews was viewed by medieval religious leaders as problematic, thus the Jews and Christians clearly enjoyed intimate relations. Without much information about his parents or his youth, later generations invented miraculous legends about Rashi's youth. After his marriage in around 1065 at the age of about 25 Rashi went to Worms and Mainz to study the important rabbinic manuscripts there. He returned to Troyes, where he set up a school for the study of the Bible and the Talmud, and for a while was able to return to Worms until he became too involved with his wine production in France to return. During the nineteenth century his tombstone was discovered but it did not contain any dates on it. In Worms, the synagogue, which had been built in 1035, survived nine hundred years until 1938, but it was rebuilt during the 1950s. The chapel there associated with Rashi was built in 1642, but it may contain the chair that he sat in. One of the fascinating sights in Worms includes the generations of Hebrew graffiti carved into the sandstone of this chapel. Behind it now stands a Jewish museum and the well preserved medieval underground ritual bath. The Jewish cemetery in Worms, mentioned previously in connection with Meir of Rothenburg, located across town, remains an enchanting place to visit for its beauty and the presence of so many important graves that are located there. Rashi had three daughters: One, Yocheved, married Meir ben Samuel, one of Rashi's students, and they had four sons, Jacob--Rabbenu Tam, Samuel--Rashbam, Isaac, and Solomon. Rashi's grandsons became the nucleus of the Tosafists, the medieval French school of Talmudic interpretation whose extensive comments appear in the margin's of the published text opposite those of Rashi. They became the fundamental basis for subsequent Ashkenazic rabbinic law and practice, and in many instances their influence was felt in Sephardic and Middle Eastern Jewish communities as well. Another daughter of Rashi, Miriam, married Judah ben Nathan, one of her father's students. Not much is known about the third daughter Rachel. According to legend when her father was sick she copied a responsum for him for Rabbi Abraham Cohen of Mainz. His granddaughters, Anna and Miriam, were later cited as authorities on the Jewish dietary laws. Rashi also had either an aunt or cousin named Belle Assez or Joselin who may have converted to Christianity. Rashi's commentaries on the Bible and the Talmud made him central to all subsequent Jewish study. The commentaries are noted for an economy of style and a felicity of expression, including many turns of phrase that became standard in Hebrew. In his biblical commentaries he blends selected aspects of traditional midrashic commentary and the literal sense of the text to establish the continuity of the narrative. All Rashi's manuscripts, many of which also provided diagrams and illustrations which were never published, are no longer extant, lost in the burning of Hebrew books in Paris in 1242. Therefore, contrary to popular belief, what is known as "Rashi script," the type font in which many traditional rabbinic texts are published, including Rashi's commentaries, was not based on his handwriting, but invented by Christian Hebrew typesetters in Italy during the sixteenth century. Rashi used two thousand French terms in his Bible commentary and 1,000 French terms in his Talmud commentary, showing that the knowledge of French possessed by the Jews of his day and the way that it was pronounced. Because of its great popularity, Rashi's commentary on the Torah was published three times during the fifteenth century, even before the publication of the Torah itself. Additional proof of his popularity is seen in over a hundred commentaries on his biblical commentary. In his talmudic commentaries, based on Rabbenu Gershom and the Geonim of Babylonia as well as his own insights, he did not provide summaries of the arguments, only useful explanations of terms, occasionally indicating that he could not understand the text. On a few of these occasions he tried to emend the talmudic text with an alternative reading, some of which have been incorporated into the text of the Talmud itself. Rashi wrote at least 360 responsa, 260 of which have been published. One of his most important decisions, based on talmudic precedents, involved the right of converts to return to Judaism, "A Jew who sins is still a Jew," was cited throughout the generations. Rashi, a wine merchant, also ruled that the wine of Christians was not to be considered the wine of idolaters, either a liberal interfaith attitude or a good business decision (Marcus, nos. 60 and 74). 3. Judah ben Samuel the Pious of Regensberg (Ratisbon): A talmudist and rabbinic scholar in Speyer, he was involved with the movement known as Hasidei Ashkenaz, the German pietists, which flourished from about 1150 to 1250 in Regensberg, Speyer, Worms, and Mainz. He compiled the central text of this movement, Sefer Hasidim, The Book of the Pious, an ethical work that covers all aspects of life, showing a Jewish reaction to the violence against them during the First Crusade and parallels with Christian ideas. Some historians, such as Yitzhak Baer, thought that Judah the Pious had had discussions with Christians which had influenced his thinking. Gershom Scholem, however, asserted that Sefer Hasidim had developed out of the whole of Jewish life and folkways since antiquity. In fact, Jewish mysticism, he argued, reached Germany before Christian mysticism. Persecution created apocalyptic feelings among Jews that were expressed spontaneously. Scholem, like many other Jewish historians on other themes, refused to accept the fact that Jewish practices could have been influenced by people from other religions and he consistently asserted that any apparently new expressions of spirituality among Jews represented longstanding ancient traditions (Other recent authors on Hasidei Ashkenaz include Ivan Marcus and Joseph Dan). Aspects of the world view of Sefer Hasidim which has led researchers to such conclusions of Christian influence include: ascetic aspects, including a renunciation of the world; a call for serenity of mind and the ability to endure shame and insult; a spirit altruism beyond the duty to seek strict justice; a love of God which was expressed at times in erotic terms; the practice of magic, including the creation of a golem, an animated clay man, the use of secret names, and alphabetical manipulations, and concern with demons; a call for penitence, including physical self-inflicted punishments in snow, ant hills, and with bees, often taking on sadomasochistic tendencies; and the notion of a strong a connection between the living and the dead, including the idea that the dead pray for the living. This Jewish ethical system went beyond that of the Talmud, asserting that a Jew can be innocent according to the law of the Torah, but guilty according to the law of heaven. Sefer Hasidim tried to come to grips with Jewish involvement in moneylending as a function of living in the diaspora, justifying it on the grounds that Christians were idol worshipers, unreliable allies, and violent oppressors. This constituted a mirror image of Christian thought at the time that allowed Jews to lend money to Christians in spite of the commandment in Deuteronomy 25 not to lend money to one's brother precisely because they did not believe that the Jews were their brothers. Nevertheless, Jews were urged to show righteousness in all business transactions. Sefer Hasidim also displayed a great deal of concern with physical cleanliness, especially in matters of excrement, urine, flatulence, and other bodily functions, attempting to establish a high level of purity during prayers. For this reason, perhaps others as well, Jewish men were discouraged from picking up babies during the prayers. An extensive section on excommunication borrowed from Maimonides shows the continued concern with communal coercion as well as the interchange between Ashkenazic and Middle Eastern Jews. 4. Meir ben Baruch of Rothenburg, the Maharam, 1215-1293: Born in Worms, he studied in Wuerzburg, little else is known about his life. He may have studied with Rabbi Isaac ben Moses of Vienna, the author of Or Zarua, a student of Judah the Pious, and Rabbi Yehiel of Paris, who engaged in a disputation with Nicholas Donin in Paris in 1240. As a result, when Hebrew books were burned there he wrote an elegy. Until 1286 he lived with his students in Rothenburg in a twenty-one room house where he wrote over a thousand responsa, serving as a high court of appeals among medieval rabbis. To earn his living he read Torah, served as a cantor, engaged in business, and taught students. As mentioned earlier, during a chaotic interregnum he tried to leave for Italy, but was apprehended and died in captivity in 1293, refusing to allow the Jews to pay additional taxes to the emperor for his release. C. Major Figures in Sephardic Rabbinic Literature 1. Solomon ibn Adret, Rashba, 1235-1310, of Barcelona, a student of Nahmanides, a rabbi, kabbalist, and bible commentator whom we discussed concerning his involvement in the disputation of Barcelona in 1263. Rashba ran a rabbinic academy and wrote commentary on the Talmud, a code of Jewish law, and thousands of responsa to Jews all over the world. His responsa and those of Meir of Rothenberg represent the fullest and most often cited collections from the middle ages. Adret also opposed the study of Maimonides' philosophy by Jews and proposed a ban to limit the age of those who studied it. 2. Asher ben Yehiel, Rosh, 1250-1327, a student of Meir of Rothenberg came from Germany to Barcelona in about 1303. He became a rabbi in Toledo where he held rabbinic, teaching, and judicial positions in the Jewish community. He wrote responsa and a code of Law, Hilkhot Harosh which dealt with Ashkenazic and Sephardic traditions. 3. Jacob ben Asher, Baal Haturim, 1270-1340, the son of Asher ben Yehiel succeeded his father as rabbi in Toledo. Born in Cologne, Germany, he preceded his father to Spain. He first compiled a law code, Piskei Harosh, based on his father's Hilkhot Harosh, then set out to develop a code, Arbaah Turim, the four columns, that would encompass all of Jewish law, talmudic and post-talmudic, practiced by both Ashkenazim and Sephardim. To do so he, he drew on the work of the Rashba and the Rosh and developed four new inclusive categories for Jewish law: 1. Orah Hayyim, The Way of Life, prayers, Sabbath, holidays, 2. Yoreh Deah, Teacher of Knowledge, ritual law, diet, 3. Even Haezer, The Stone of Help, laws related to women, 4. Hoshen Hamishpat, The Breastplate of Judgment, civil and criminal law. These categories became definitive and, after he wrote an exhaustive commentary on the Tur, Joseph Caro used them in compiling his sixteenth century Shulhan Arukh as well. Writing in the land of Israel, Caro preserved rules for converting proselytes to Judaism, a practice long illegal in Europe, and the administration of corporal punishment among the Jews, also a practice highly limited for Jewish communities (Marcus, no. 42). D. Suesskind von Trimberg, 1200-1250, a Jewish Minnesinger, singer and poet Record of the only known medieval Jewish poet who wrote in German is preserved in the fourteenth century manuscript of Minnelieder, the Manesse Codex, now at the University of Heidleberg. Depicted with a long beard and a pointed yellow hat, typical of those the Jews had to wear, like other minstrels he may have traveled from castle to castle to sing before knights and ladies. In his six extant poems, there are no references to Christians, only Jews (Recently a novel about Suesskind was published in German, but it has not yet been translated into English). Why should I wander sadly, My harp within my hand, O'er mountain, hill, and valley? What praise do I command? Full well they know the singer Belongs to race accursed; Sweet minne doth no longer Reward me at first. Be silent, then my lyre, We sing 'fore lords in vain. I'll leave the minstrels' choir, And roam a Jew again. My staff and hat I'll grasp, then, And on my breast full low, By Jewish custom olden My grizzled beard shall grow. My days I'll pass in quiet,-- Those left to me on earth-- Nor sing for those who not yet Have learned a poet's worth. (translation in G. Karpeles) **********************************************************************