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These studies explore the history of the Jewish minority of
Ashkenaz (northern France and the German Empire) during the High
Middle Ages. Although the Jews in medieval Europe are usually
thought to have been isolated from the Christian majority, they
actually were part of a 'Jewish-Christian symbiosis.' A number of
studies in the collection focus on Jewish-Christian cultural and
social interactions, the foundations of the community ascribed to
Charlemagne, and especially on the fashioning of a martyrological
collective identity in 1096. Even when Jews resisted Christian
pressures they often did so by internalizing Christian motifs and
turning them on their heads to argue for the truth of Judaism
alone. This may be seen especially in the formation of Jews as
martyrs, a trope that places Jews as collective Christ figures
whose suffering brings about vicarious atonement. The remainder of
the studies delve into the lives and writings of a group of Jewish
ascetic pietists, Hasidei Ashkenaz, which shaped the religious
culture of most European Jews before modernity. In Sefer Hasidim
(Book of the Pietists), attributed to Rabbi Judah the Pietist of
Regensburg (d. 1217), one finds a mirror of everyday
Jewish-Christian interactions even while the author advances a
radical view of Jewish religious pietism.
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Composed in Germany in the early thirteenth century by Judah ben
Samuel he-hasid, Sefer Hasidim, or "Book of the Pietists," is a
compendium of religious instruction that portrays the everyday life
of Jews as they lived together with and apart from Christians in
towns such as Speyer, Worms, Mainz, and Regensburg. A charismatic
religious teacher who recorded hundreds of original stories that
mirrored situations in medieval social living, Judah's messages
advocated praying slowly and avoiding honor, pleasure, wealth, and
the lures of unmarried sex. Although he failed to enact his utopian
vision of a pietist Jewish society, his collected writings would
help shape the religious culture of Ashkenazic Judaism for
centuries. In "Sefer Hasidim" and the Ashkenazic Book in Medieval
Europe, Ivan G. Marcus proposes a new paradigm for understanding
how this particular book was composed. The work, he contends, was
an open text written by a single author in hundreds of disjunctive,
yet self-contained, segments, which were then combined into
multiple alternative versions, each equally authoritative. While
Sefer Hasidim offers the clearest example of this model of
composition, Marcus argues that it was not unique: the production
of Ashkenazic books in small and easily rearranged paragraphs is a
literary and cultural phenomenon quite distinct from anything
practiced by the Christian authors of northern Europe or the
Sephardic Jews of the south. According to Marcus, Judah, in
authoring Sefer Hasidim in this manner, not only resisted
Greco-Roman influences on Ashkenazic literary form but also
extended an earlier Byzantine rabbinic tradition of authorship into
medieval European Jewish culture.
In this original and sweeping review of Jewish culture and history,
Ivan Marcus examines how and why various rites and customs
celebrating stages in the life cycle have evolved through the ages
and persisted to this day. For each phase of life--from childhood
and adolescence to adulthood and the advanced years-the book traces
the origin and development of specific rites associated with the
events of birth, circumcision, and schooling; bar and bat mitzvah
and confirmation; engagement, betrothal, and marriage; and aging,
dying, and remembering. Customs in Jewish tradition, such as the
presence of godparents at a circumcision, the use of a four-poled
canopy at a wedding, and the placing of small stones on tombstones,
are discussed. In each chapter, detailed descriptions walk the
reader through such ceremonies as early modern and contemporary
circumcision, weddings, and funerals. In a comparative framework,
Marcus illustrates how Jewish culture has negotiated with the
majority cultures of the ancient Near East, Greco-Roman antiquity,
medieval European Christianity, and Mediterranean Islam, as well as
with modern secular and religious movements and social trends, to
renew itself through ritual innovation. In his extensive research
on the Jewish life cycle, Marcus draws from documents on various
customs and ritual practices, offering reassessments of original
sources and scholarly literature. Marcus's survey is the first
comprehensive study of the rites of the Jewish life cycle since
Hayyim Schauss's The Lifetime of the Jew was published in 1950,
written for Jewish readers. Marcus's book addresses a broader
audience and is designed to appeal to scholars and interested
readers.
In this original and sweeping review of Jewish culture and history,
Ivan Marcus examines how and why various rites and customs
celebrating stages in the life cycle have evolved through the ages
and persisted to this day. For each phase of life--from childhood
and adolescence to adulthood and the advanced years-the book traces
the origin and development of specific rites associated with the
events of birth, circumcision, and schooling; bar and bat mitzvah
and confirmation; engagement, betrothal, and marriage; and aging,
dying, and remembering. Customs in Jewish tradition, such as the
presence of godparents at a circumcision, the use of a four-poled
canopy at a wedding, and the placing of small stones on tombstones,
are discussed. In each chapter, detailed descriptions walk the
reader through such ceremonies as early modern and contemporary
circumcision, weddings, and funerals. In a comparative framework,
Marcus illustrates how Jewish culture has negotiated with the
majority cultures of the ancient Near East, Greco-Roman antiquity,
medieval European Christianity, and Mediterranean Islam, as well as
with modern secular and religious movements and social trends, to
renew itself through ritual innovation. In his extensive research
on the Jewish life cycle, Marcus draws from documents on various
customs and ritual practices, offering reassessments of original
sources and scholarly literature. Marcus's survey is the first
comprehensive study of the rites of the Jewish life cycle since
Hayyim Schauss's The Lifetime of the Jew was published in 1950,
written for Jewish readers. Marcus's book addresses a broader
audience and is designed to appeal to scholars and interested
readers.
In medieval times, when a Jewish boy of five began religious
schooling, he was carried from home to a teacher and placed on the
teacher's lap. He was then asked to recite the Hebrew alphabet and
lick honey from the slate on which it was written, to eat magically
inscribed cooked peeled eggs and cakes, to recite an incantation
against a demon of forgetfulness, and then to go down to the
riverbank with the teacher, where he was told that his future study
of the Torah, like the rushing river, would never end. This book -
Ivan Marcus's erudite and novel interpretation of this rite of
passage - presents a new anthropological historical approach to
Jewish culture and acculturation in medieval Christian Europe.
Marcus traces ancient Jewish and Greco-Roman elements in the rite
and then analyzes it from different perspectives, making use of
narrative, legal, poetic, ethnographic, and pictorial sources, as
well as firsthand accounts. He then describes contemporary medieval
Christian images and initiation rites - including the eucharist and
the Madonna and child - as contexts within which to understand the
ceremony. He is the first to investigate how medieval Jews were
aware of, drew upon, and polemically transformed Christian
religious symbols into Jewish counterimages in order to affirm the
truth of Judaism and to make sense of living as Jews in an
intensely Christian culture.
These studies explore the history of the Jewish minority of
Ashkenaz (northern France and the German Empire) during the High
Middle Ages. Although the Jews in medieval Europe are usually
thought to have been isolated from the Christian majority, they
actually were part of a 'Jewish-Christian symbiosis.' A number of
studies in the collection focus on Jewish-Christian cultural and
social interactions, the foundations of the community ascribed to
Charlemagne, and especially on the fashioning of a martyrological
collective identity in 1096. Even when Jews resisted Christian
pressures they often did so by internalizing Christian motifs and
turning them on their heads to argue for the truth of Judaism
alone. This may be seen especially in the formation of Jews as
martyrs, a trope that places Jews as collective Christ figures
whose suffering brings about vicarious atonement. The remainder of
the studies delve into the lives and writings of a group of Jewish
ascetic pietists, Hasidei Ashkenaz, which shaped the religious
culture of most European Jews before modernity. In Sefer Hasidim
(Book of the Pietists), attributed to Rabbi Judah the Pietist of
Regensburg (d. 1217), one finds a mirror of everyday
Jewish-Christian interactions even while the author advances a
radical view of Jewish religious pietism.
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