Practicing Piety in Medieval Ashkenaz. Elisheva Baumgarten

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СКАЧАТЬ shared meals, conducted legal discussions, celebrated and commemorated life-cycle rituals, and gathered in times of joy and crisis alike.⁹ The synagogue symbolized Jewish distinctiveness for adherents of other religions while it constituted a common space for Jews themselves.¹⁰ “Interrupting prayers” (a juridical procedure that involved imposing a break during prayer services so an individual’s complaint could be voiced and addressed) and herem (excommunication—the ultimate punishment, regularly exercised in medieval Europe) were effective precisely because of the close-knit nature of the Jewish community and the constant interdependence that bound the average Jew to the synagogue and related communal institutions.¹¹

      Prayer services were typically held in synagogue: twice a day on weekdays¹² and with more elaborate formats and schedules on the Sabbath, festivals, and fast days. Almost all medieval communities, except for the very smallest, had at least one synagogue,¹³ which would be located in buildings designated for communal purposes or in dedicated rooms within private homes.¹⁴

      Despite serving as the venue for a full range of Jewish communal gatherings,¹⁵ few studies have examined the synagogue as a center for social interaction, a forum for communal policies and religious politics, and a locus where piety was constantly expressed, monitored, and assessed. Among the scholars that have noted the social significance of the synagogue, Israel Abrahams opens Jewish Life in the Middle Ages by describing the synagogue as the “centre of social life” and illustrates this idea with several examples. The vast geographic and temporal sweep of his focus, however, on medieval Europe from north to south and on sources from the tenth to eighteenth centuries, precludes a comprehensive discussion of his claims.¹⁶ In his study of the function of the synagogue in the late Middle Ages, Jacob Katz primarily treats the synagogue as a religious setting, with minimal attention to its other roles.¹⁷ In more recent contributions to this line of inquiry, Robert Bonfil has discussed the synagogue in comparison to the medieval church and as a focal point of Jewish social life. He emphasizes the synagogue as a general meeting place where Jews from all strata of society would encounter each other and where the sacred and the profane would meet, emblematic of Jewish time and space.¹⁸ Alick Isaacs depicts the synagogue as a social center by focusing on the Torah, through public readings and other rituals related to it.¹⁹ Simha Goldin has explored the role of the synagogue in social mediation and community gatherings, especially as a setting for the socialization of children.²⁰

      In contrast to these studies, most research to date has traced the history of specific synagogue-based prayers or religious practices, subjects that pertained most directly to learned male members of the community, particularly religious leaders who determined the order of services and, in some cases, wrote liturgical compositions or introduced prayers to their congregations.²¹ These studies presuppose synagogues that were populated by Jews who shared a high degree of liturgical competence. However, as Ephraim Kanarfogel has recently suggested, it is unlikely that this standard characterized Jewish men in medieval Ashkenaz, much less their female counterparts.²²

      Irrespective of their literacy levels, medieval Jews seem to have attended prayer services regularly. Nevertheless, a range of factors prevented full participation in the synagogue. Simply stated, laxity may well have been the primary deterrent, a quality that is rarely mentioned in medieval sources but was probably manifest in varied if inconsistent ways.²³ In stark contrast to this passive causality, excommunication constituted another cause for keeping a distance; however, permanent banishment from the community cannot be placed on a spectrum with piety except perhaps as its opposite.

      Numerous explanations underlie intentional decisions to refrain from attending synagogue, among them a pious stance to avoid participation if one deemed that the rituals were not being conducted properly.²⁴ In a unique case from the late thirteenth century, Meir b. Barukh of Rothenburg (d. 1293), in a ruling that stands out for its passion and intensity, instructs men to leave the synagogue rather than participate in circumcisions where women serve as ba’alot brit (formal participants in the circumcision ritual), bringing the infants into the sanctuary and holding them on their laps during the ceremony. Meir of Rothenburg himself enlists the language of piety in his reasoning: “Any man who fears the Lord should leave the synagogue.”²⁵

      The extreme directive conveyed in this instruction especially stands out given the absence of comparable instructions in medieval sources. For example, Sefer Hasidim mentions the possibility that a pious man might prefer to pray alone rather than in a synagogue where prayers were not being led according to his standards. In that case, Judah suggests that this pious man should pray at home before going to synagogue, but under no circumstance should he avoid participation in communal services.²⁶ Overall, medieval Jews followed the talmudic teaching that prayers are most efficacious when recited with the community in synagogue.²⁷

      Purity and Impurity: Changing Observance

      Another reason to distance oneself from the synagogue, and the main subject of this chapter, is impurity. Like all synagogues after the destruction of the Temple, the medieval synagogue was considered a mikdash me’at (a little sanctuary), less holy than the Temple but treated similarly.²⁸ Ashkenazic ideas about the physical impurities that could render men and women temporarily disqualified from attending synagogue, and, as a result, diminish their ability to communicate with God in communal rituals, provide a window not only onto the everyday practices of medieval Jews, but also on some of their understandings of sanctity and the development of these notions over the course of the Middle Ages, especially in gendered terms.

      Figure 2. A Jew praying. © Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Darmstadt. Cod. Or. 13, fol. 38v. Mahzor, Germany, 1348.

      Medieval conceptions of purity and impurity are rooted in precedents from the Bible and the Temple period, as first outlined in Leviticus. When the Temple was standing in Jerusalem, any man who experienced a seminal emission was prohibited from entering until he had washed.²⁹ Similarly, any woman who was either menstruating or who held post-partum status and had not yet undergone ritual immersion was barred from bringing a sacrifice to the Temple. This requirement to perform ritual immersion before approaching the Temple applied to other individuals, due to a physical condition or recent action (e.g., lepers or anyone who had been exposed to a corpse).³⁰ These biblical traditions and their implications are debated in rabbinic discourse; thus, ongoing engagement in these topics constitutes part of the medieval Jewish cultural and textual inheritance.

      Despite their transmission in rabbinic literature, the applications of Levitical standards of purity received less attention in the medieval world than they did in antiquity. This reduced emphasis is exemplified in discussions about Takanot Ezra, a collection of statutes on central aspects of ritual life that have been attributed to Ezra the Scribe.³¹ The most relevant instruction for our context declares that any man who is impure due to a seminal emission should neither study Torah nor pray before having washed.³² This statute was suspended by the classical rabbis (prior to the medieval period), who reasoned that, after the Temple’s destruction, impurity had become ubiquitous since sacrifice was no longer available as a means for nullifying the effect of contact with the dead or atoning for sins; thus, this restriction had been rendered inapplicable.³³ Nonetheless, from the second half of the first millennium through the Middle Ages, the question of whether men who were ritually impure must wash before entering the synagogue continued, albeit tangentially.³⁴ However, male impurity was no longer defined by sexual relations but rather by incidental nocturnal emissions of semen (keri laylah), which could affect any man.

      Most medieval halakhic authorities note that such stringencies were no longer practiced and that men who remained concerned need not worry.³⁵ Even Judah the Pious, who frequently addresses matters of purity, devotes far more attention to instructions for avoiding nocturnal СКАЧАТЬ