ABSTRACT
Title of Document: SINGING SONGS AND CARRYING CANDLES: THE DEVELOPMENT OF ASHKENAZI JEWISH MARRIAGE CUSTOMS AND RITUALS FROM TALMUDIC AND CHRISTIAN SOURCES, C. 850- 1300 CE
Laina Sara Miller, Master of Arts, 2018
Directed By: Dr. Susan McDonough, Professor, Historical Studies
This thesis studies the communication of wedding traditions between Jews and Christians in medieval Europe, focusing specifically on the Jews of the Ashkenazi region, and challenging the traditional understanding of the origins of medieval Jewish wedding rites.
While the “inward acculturation” phenomenon as defined by Ivan G. Marcus has become a larger focus of the historical study of medieval Ashkenazi Judaism, there has been very little study of how living among medieval European Christians affected Jewish wedding rituals. This thesis argues that the long history of shared community between medieval
Ashkenazi Jews and Christians allowed Jews to borrow, adopt, and adapt Christian rituals to fit their own desires for wedding practices, while the rise and fall of an intensifying adversarial relationship between Ashkenazi Jews and Christians led the newly powerful
Ashkenazi rabbis to reject these origins in favor of the Biblically-focused approach which would come to dominate traditional Judaism.
SINGING SONGS AND CARRYING CANDLES: THE DEVELOPMENT OF ASHKENAZI JEWISH MARRIAGE CUSTOMS AND RITUALS FROM TALMUDIC AND CHRISTIAN SOURCES, C. 850-1300 CE
By
Laina Sara Miller
Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Historical Studies 2018
© Copyright by Laina Sara Miller 2018
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Table of Contents
Table of Contents ...... ii
Introduction ...... 2
Chapter One: Pre-Medieval Jewish Marriage Practices: Biblical Texts, Talmudic Texts, and the Transition into the Medieval Era ...... 21
Marriage Practices in Tanakh ...... 23
Marriage Practices in Post-Biblical Texts: The Talmudic Era ...... 33
Greco-Roman Marriage Practices and the Rise of Christianity ...... 44
In Conclusion ...... 54
Chapter 2: Living in Ashkenaz, Moving Away from Babylon ...... 56
Introduction ...... 56
Arriving in Ashkenaz: Jews, Christians, and Rewriting Ashkenazi History ...... 57
Looking Towards Babylon: An Overview of the Gaonate and its Collapse ...... 66
Moving Away from Babylon: A Shift to Local Leadership ...... 74
Chapter Three: Christian and Ashkenazi Marriage Rituals - Borrowing Traditions ...... 81
Introduction ...... 81
The Development and Codification of Christian Marriage ...... 82
Ashkenazi Jewish Marriage, c.850-1300 CE ...... 91
Moving Forward: A Conclusion ...... 105 iii
Appendix A ...... 109
Appendix B ...... 110
Bibliography ...... 111
Primary Sources: ...... 111
Secondary Sources: ...... 112
2
Introduction
I grew up as an observant Jew, within a relatively isolationist and traditional
Orthodox Jewish community, wherein Biblical commandments and medieval rabbinical commentaries and legal rulings held sway over everyday actions. I attended a private religious Jewish girls’ school for high school, but began to pull away from the community once I left high school and began college. Recently, however, I have found myself back within the traditional circles of the community, as many of my high school classmates have begun to get married and I have attended their weddings, which are celebrated according to Ashkenazi Jewish tradition. As I watched my friend’s parents escort her to the wedding canopy with candles, I found myself wondering about the origins of these wedding rituals. Why did the wedding party sing to the bride? Why did they carry candles to escort her to the wedding canopy? Where did the tradition of the wedding canopy, the chupah, come from? These questions, and more, began to circulate in my mind, leading me to my research topic. I am studying the development of early medieval Ashkenazi Jewish marriage rituals from both their historical precedents and neighboring Christians’ traditions.
Ashkenazi Judaism developed out of cultural and theological divisions in early medieval Judaism between the community leaders in different geographical areas. In the early Middle Ages, the overarching culture of “Judaism” began to split into divergent sects: the Mizrahi, who lived in the Levant and Near East, the Sephardi, who lived in
Iberia and Northern Africa, and the Ashkenazi, who lived in an area roughly correspondent to modern northern France and western Germany.1 Ashkenazim, unlike
1 For the purposes of this paper, Ashkenaz refers to Northern France and Germany. While these two areas can be split into Zarefat and Ashkenaz, I am following Elisheva Baumgarten’s grouping of the entire area 3 the other developing Jewish sects of the Middle Ages, lived under the rule of Christian monarchies, and alongside the ever evolving Christian culture of northwestern Europe.
Between the tenth and the thirteenth centuries, not only was Ashkenazi Judaism developing into its own unique entity, separate from other medieval Jewish sects, but the dominant culture of Western European Christianity was still finding its theological and political footing.2 As theology was formed, and rituals and customs were practiced in both private and public, the neighboring cultures of Ashkenazi Judaism and northwestern
European Christianity began to take shape. My research focuses on the development of medieval Ashkenazi Jewish marriage rituals within this period of change.
Traditionally, the study of medieval Ashkenazi Jewish society in both religious and academic atmospheres argued for the idea of culturally isolated and “purely” Jewish communities. This concept validates modern religious Jewish practices and traditions, whereas the counterargument that Jewish traditions have practical and occasionally non-
Jewish origins lends itself to doubts about the theological validity of these traditions. If
Jewish culture has been influenced by other cultures and religions, particularly
Christianity, are its religious traditions still “valid”? Religious arguments are not the only ones which are shaken by the concept of a Jewish culture influenced by its neighbors.
The image of interactive communities of Jews and Christians in medieval Europe defies as one general Jewish cultural group. See Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 5-6; Ivan G. Marcus, The Jewish Life Cycle: Rites of Passage from Biblical to Modern Times, (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2004), 28; Max Seligsohn, Solomon Schechter, and M. Franco, “Mizraḥi,” In Isidore Singer, ed., The Jewish Encyclopedia: A Descriptive Record of the History, Religion, Literature, and Customs of the Jewish People from the Earliest Times to the Present Day, (New York, NY: Funk and Wagnalls Company, 1901- 1906, Online Reprint, 2002-2011), 8:628-631; Isidore Singer and Meyer Kayserling, “Sephardim,” in Singer, Jewish Encyclopedia 11:197-198. All citations of the Jewish Encyclopedia are henceforth cited as JE.
2 Ruth Mazo Karras, Unmarriages: Women, Men, and Sexual Unions in the Middle Ages, (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 25-36, 54-59.
4 the traditional historical image of the isolated shtetl and the walled-in ghetto, both of which appeared in Early Modern Europe.3 Instead, this idea evokes images of Jews living alongside Christians in cities, towns, and villages, sometimes sharing houses as well as public spaces.4 The cognitive dissonance between these two images often leads to conflict over the relationship between Jewish and Christian medieval culture.
Tension remains between the two interpretations of Jewish-Christian relationships in medieval Ashkenaz, both inside and outside of academia. Often, this debate is not addressed head-on, but approached obliquely, through the channel of focused historical analyses of particular aspects of medieval Ashkenazi Jewish history. This is the strategy not only of many historians writing on the behalf of traditional Jewish history, but also by those arguing against it.5
3 Ivan G. Marcus, Rituals of Childhood: Jewish Acculturation in Medieval Europe, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 11.
4 Baumgarten, Mothers and Children, 121.
5 An early example of this type of argument from a traditional Jewish history perspective can be seen in the works of Avigdor (Victor) Aptowitzer. His most famous published work, Mavo le-Sefer Raviah, was a critical edition of medieval rabbi Eliezer ben Yoel HaLevi’s Sefer Raviah, which also included several biographies of medieval rabbis by Aptowitzer. In some of his other works, such as “Asenath, the Wife of Joseph: A Haggadic Literary-Historical Study,” and “The Influence of Jewish Law on the Development of Jurisprudence in the Christian Orient,” Aptowitzer outright dismisses the idea that there could be any other possible influences on Jewish cultural ideals using the framework of the study of Aggadic Asenath tales in the former paper, and the development of Christian jurisprudence in the latter. More recent examples include E. E. Urbach, Ba’alei Ha-Tosafot (Jerusalem: 1980); wherein his study of the lives of the Tosafists also presses a traditional Jewish history argument, and Avraham Grossman, Ḥakhme Ashkenaz ha- rishonim: ḳorotehem, darkam be-hanhagat ha-tsibur, yetsiratam ha-ruḥanit: me-reshit yishuvam ṿe-ʻad li- gezerot (4)856 (1096), (Jerusalem, Israel: ha-Universiṭah ha-ʻIvrit, 1995), where Grossman also presents a traditional Jewish history through an extensive study of the leading rabbis of medieval Ashkenazi Judaism. On the side against traditional Jewish history, moving away from both the traditional focus on the rabbis of Ashkenaz and the traditional narrative of a culturally isolated Jewish community, see: Ivan G. Marcus, Rituals of Childhood, wherein Marcus studies the formation of a single ritual in medieval Jewish culture in order to argue for the interaction between medieval Jews and Christians in Ashkenaz. Marcus continues this argument in The Jewish Life Cycle, where he extends his treatment of Jewish culture from a single medieval Ashkenazi ritual to a larger overview of the development of various Jewish rituals across all of Jewish history. See also Baumgarten, Mothers and Children; Baumgarten, Practicing Piety in Medieval Ashkenaz: Men Women, and Everyday Religious Observance (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015); Nirenberg, Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
5
The argument over Jewish-Christian relationships in medieval Ashkenaz is not simply an academic debate. This debate has serious religious and political implications in the modern world, as well as in the world of historians and their research. The argument for a society wherein Jews and their Christian neighbors shared traditions, rituals, and lives, is often viewed as dangerous by the contemporary Orthodox Jewish community, particularly the Ashkenazi Jewish community. If Jewish society has always been absorbing the ways of thought and action from Christian society, then how can the modern Jew know if any Jewish laws or traditions are truly divinely inspired or not? In fact, the argument for a shared society argues that none of Judaism is divinely inspired, since it has always been drawing from other cultures. From this very position in the nineteenth and twentieth century Reform Judaism developed. Reform Judaism, often perceived as a threat to Orthodoxy, argues that there is no problem with assimilation into modern culture and that bending or breaking religious laws is merely bringing Judaism into the modern era. In short, the argument that any part of Orthodox Ashkenazi Judaism was not divinely inspired and purely Jewish is perceived a threat to the Ashkenazi practice of the religion itself, and not simply an academic question. When one argues that medieval Ashkenazi Jews often borrowed rituals, rules, and ideas from the surrounding Christian population, the argument becomes a tense point of religious contention.
Religious life is not the only place where this question of shared and interacting cultures has become the focus of conflict. The question of the so-called “purity” and isolation of Ashkenazic Jewry is also intensely political. The theory that Ashkenazic
2014); and, moving into the Early Modern period, Debra Kaplan, Beyond Expulsion: Jews, Christians, and Reformation Strasbourg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011).
6
Jewry lived in social and cultural isolation from their Christian neighbors supports the concept that Ashkenazi Jews are still the same exact nation that was exiled from Judaea during Antiquity, despite living in Europe for an extended period of time reaching between one and two thousand years. This argument is and was one of the strongest foundations for the political rhetoric of the Zionist movement. Zionism as a political movement was and is dependent on the idea that European Jews are owed their homeland, and that Israel remains that homeland. If, as the integrationist theory suggests, the Jewish people have actually become a part of the cultures in which they have lived for the past couple thousands of years, then can Israel truly be called their homeland? Is there, in fact, any validity to the entire basis upon which the State of Israel built? This aspect of the argument is highly volatile, especially considering the current political climate.6 It means that any historian who actively argues for a theory of interacting
6 See Jonathan Boyarin, Palestine and Jewish History: Criticism at the Borders of Ethnography, (University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 5-7, for a brief discussion about the problems attached to the differences between the Jewish and Israeli identities and the political challenges inherent in any such discussion. See also Efraim Karsh, Fabricating Israeli History: The ‘New Historians,’ (London, England: Frank Kass & Co., Ltd., 2000), xv-xliv, 1-36; for an intensive discussion of the politicization of Jewish, Arabic, Islamic, and Near Eastern Studies; Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, “Introduction,” Powers of Diaspora: Two Essays on the Relevance of Jewish Culture, (University of Minnesota Press, 2002), for an in-depth discussion of the tensions between the religious and the political in reference to Jewish historical studies, particularly studies which focus on diaspora Judaism. For a more personal exploration of what it means to be a Western Jew, and the question of Jewish identity, assimilation, and the relationship of Jews with the wider political and cultural world, see Jon Stratton, Coming Out Jewish: Constructing Ambivalent Identities, (London, England: Routledge, 2000). For the official Israeli position on the Jewish claim to Israel, see Binyamin Neuberger, “Zionism: An Introduction,” World Conference Against Racism/Durban I (2001),
7 cultures is putting their work not only in the position to be attacked by academics, but also by the religious Jewish communities and every person who has a political opinion about the Middle East. It is into this minefield that every historian of Jewish law, tradition, and culture, must leap.
One of the founding fathers of Jewish history as an academic field, was Heinrich
Graetz. When he published his History of the Jews in 1853, his work was an impressive leap into an often neglected side of historical research.7 Graetz was a professor of history who championed the Orthodox Jewish cause in the era which birthed Reform Judaism.
The background for much of Graetz’s contribution to the argument of Judaism as an isolated culture can be attributed to his wish to counteract the arguments of absorption of
“modernity” as preached by Reform Jews.8 Graetz was a passionate critic of the idea of
Judaism changing in the face changing times and other cultures, and wrote his history of the Jewish people accordingly.9
Graetz’s History of the Jews is a traditional Rankean history of the Jewish people.
It is a long-running narrative which encompasses centuries of events, focusing on the actions of the secular powers and how they affected the Jewish people.10 The narrative itself is the goal of the book; Graetz’s History of the Jews is an attempt to collect the entire “history” of the Jewish people into a succinct set of volumes. Graetz’s failings
Social Construction of Religious and Secular Extremism, (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2010).
7 First published as Geschichte der Juden, in German, in 1853. The version used for this paper is the 1891 translation into English; Heinrich Graetz, History of the Jews, (London, England: Myers & Co., 1904), 3: v-xi, 3:163-692.
8 Isidore Singer and Gotthard Deutsch, “Graetz, Heinrich (Hirsch),” in JE, 6:64-67.
9 Singer and Deutsch, “Graetz,” 64-67.
10 Graetz, History, v-xi.
8 begin to appear when one searches for his sources – if Graetz utilized sources, he cited none, and his peers were unafraid to attack his research for this reason.11 His analysis of events portrays the traditional perspective of medieval and Early Modern Europe, with the Christian ruling class and the oppressed Jews. Repeatedly within the text, the Jews are acted upon, and never interact with their Christian neighbors.12 Graetz was most blatant with his outright declaration of the Jews (in the context of Catholic persecution) as “this handful of human beings with their clear intellect, their purified faith, their moral force and their superior culture.”13 Within his text, Graetz describes the Jewish faith as
“purified.” As a history, Graetz’s History of the Jews is, in fact, a terrible foundation upon which to build. Despite many critiques of Graetz’s work, however, and despite its many faults and weaknesses, Graetz provided the foundation for the historical concept of medieval Ashkenazi Jews as an isolated culture.
While Graetz’s foundational concept was often criticized, it was taken up soon afterwards by the larger historical community. By the twentieth century, the conceptual framework of European Jewish history had become a history of a deeply split society,
11 See Samson Raphael Hirsch, “A Critical Examination of Dr. H. Graetz’s History of the Jews From the Destruction of the Jewish State Until the Conclusion of the Talmud,” in Origin of the Oral Law, vol. 5 of Collected Writings of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, eds. Elliott Bondi and David Bechhofer, (New York, NY: Philipp Feldheim, 1988), 5-8, 26. For the quotes used below, see Hirsch, “A Critical Examination,” 5, 26. Despite Graetz’s position as a professional historian, and his championship of the Orthodox Jewish cause, his former friend Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch harshly rebuked him for his History of the Jews, criticizing Graetz for his improper use of sources. Hirsch, commonly known today as the father of modern Orthodox Judaism, wrote an extensive and cutting critique of Graetz’s History of the Jews, and published it in series of twelve articles in a monthly periodical called Jeschurun. While mostly concerned with the religious implications of Graetz’s work for the religious Jewish community, Hirsch also was deeply critical of Graetz’s treatment of his sources. Hirsch accused Graetz of ignoring explicit statements within his sources, in one case writing that Graetz’s History of the Jews was a work filled with “caprices of artistic fancy,” and in another case stating that “we see Graetz contradicting explicit statements of the Talmud,” Graetz’s source. According to Hirsch, Graetz was a failure of a historian, incapable of properly using his sources and simply writing about his own fanciful ideas and submitting them into academic circles.
12 Graetz, History, 304-318, 412-434, 510-539.
13 Graetz, History, 512.
9 with Christians on one side, and Jews on the other. Even in recent years, as the study of
Jewish history has followed the trends of new historical methods of study and turned to social and cultural history as well as linear narratives and legal histories, impressive historians continue to be heavily influenced by the traditional narrative of an isolated
Jewish community. Historians such as E. E. Urbach and Ephraim Kanarfogel continued to work closely with and often within the bounds of these traditional narratives. Urbach never acknowledged that Jews and Christians might have intermarried in the Middle
Ages, and pushed a strong argument for a continuous tradition for rabbinic rulings, but he did argue that the intellectual traditions of medieval Jews were connected to medieval
Christian scholars.14 Kanarfogel, similarly, stated that the Tosafists did not “have access to or interest in the developments and changes regarding philosophy and religious thought that were occurring throughout contemporary Christian society,” but he did acknowledge the closeness between the Jewish and Christian societies of medieval
Ashkenaz.15
This traditional reading of Ashkenazi Jewish history has permeated historical research. The isolated culture theory continues to appeal to the religious as well as the academic, due to its seeming validation of the “purity” of Judaism as a religion. Despite all of its seeming strengths, however, the isolated culture theory has begun to sprout a large number of opponents within the field of Jewish history. The days in which the
14 See Efraim E. Urbach, The Sages, Their Concepts and Beliefs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); Irving A. Agus, “Answer to Dr. E. E. Urbach,” Jewish Quarterly Review 49, no. 3 (1959): 216-220; Isaiah M. Gafni, “Ephraim Elimelech Urbach (1912-1991),” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 59 (1993): 5-10.
15 Ephraim Kanarfogel, Peering Through the Lattices: Mystical, Magical, and Pietistic Dimensions in the Tosafist Period (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000), 19. See also: Kanarfogel, “Progress and Tradition in Medieval Ashkenaz,” Jewish History 14 (2000): 287-315, especially pp. 288-291, 300.
10 concept of medieval Ashkenazi Jews as an isolated culture could rule the historiographic path of Jewish history have long since gone. Today, it is one half of an ongoing debate – a debate about how medieval Jewish culture was formed.
In the mid to late twentieth century, many historians of Middle Eastern,
Sephardic, and Italian Jewry began to look at Jewish communities through a new lens: acculturation. These historians began to turn away from the isolated culture theory, arguing instead for a Jewish culture which interacted with their neighbors and overlords.
One example of such a historian can be found in Shelomo Dov Goitein, a historian of
Middle Eastern Jewry, Islam, and Arabic culture. Goitein used the documents found in the Cairo Geniza to paint a vivid picture of a Middle Eastern Jewish culture which was deeply intertwined with the Arabic and Christian cultures which ruled and surrounded them.16 His exhaustive works revealed an astonishing amount of interaction between medieval Arabic culture and the Jews living within Arabic lands, and a great deal of give and take between the two cultures’ traditions and lives.17 Beginning in the late twentieth century, Roberto Bonfil took a similar view on interaction between the Christian ruling culture and Jewish culture in his work on Renaissance Jews in Italy.18 Bonfil even used the word “acculturation,” as he described the shift and share of traditions and ideas between the Christian and Jewish Renaissance Italian communities.19
16 This is discussed in Shelomo Dov Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: An Abridgement in One Volume, ed. Jacob Lassner, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), 25-27. This idea, however, can be found in all of Goitein’s books on medieval Jewry.
17 This can be seen particularly in Shelomo Dov Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, vols. 1-6, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967-1993).
18 Roberto Bonfil, Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy, trans. Anthony Oldcorn, (Berkeley: CA, University of California Press, 1994), 2-9.
19 Bonfil, Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy, 2.
11
As Goitein and Bonfil wrote about medieval Sephardic and Early Modern Italian
Jews, so too did the prolific Cecil Roth, who wrote a great deal about disparate subjects within Jewish history. Similar to Goitein and Bonfil, Roth argued that medieval
Sephardic and Early Modern Italian Jewish interactions were heavily intertwined with their non-Jewish neighbors, and suggested that such interaction was a precursor to the
“symbiotic acculturation” of many modern Jews.20 Roth’s argument that Sephardic and
Italian Jews were slowly secularizing was a form of acculturation, but his thesis implied that those Jewish cultures were becoming less “Jewish” as they absorbed outside influences.21 Roth’s “symbiotic acculturation” argument can be described as the
American-style melting pot, wherein Jewish people became more secular and eventually joined the non-Jewish world.22
The concept of acculturation which slowly evolved out of the works of Goitein,
Bonfil, and Roth entered a new field of Jewish history with the intervention of Ivan G.
Marcus, who adapted and reshaped the acculturation argument to re-address the study of medieval Ashkenazi Jews. While historians such as Roth, Goitein, and Bonfil had agreed that Jews had absorbed outside ideas, (or even assimilated into outside groups,) they had never been discussing Ashkenazi Jews. Both Roth and Bonfil’s arguments were focused on Renaissance Italian Jews, and Goitein was utterly focused on the Middle East and
Arabic lands.23
20 Marcus, Rituals of Childhood, 11-12.
21 Marcus, Rituals of Childhood, 11-12.
22 Marcus, Rituals of Childhood, 11.
23 The Jews under Goitein’s study in A Mediterranean Society were also known as Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews. “Sephardi” refers to those people and traditions which originated in the medieval Iberian Peninsula and North Africa, while “Mizrahi” refers to those originating in the medieval Near East. Marcus, Rituals of
12
In 1996, Marcus called out previous studies of Ashkenazi Jewish history.24
Marcus accused his fellow historians of being overly attached to a linear model, and of using an anachronistic framework built upon modern ideas of religiosity and secularization. Marcus called for a new model of Jewish historical development, stating:
I propose, then, that we distinguish between modern or outward acculturation, and premodern or inward acculturation. The former refers to…the processes of modernization and secularization during the last two centuries… The latter refers to premodern cases…when Jews who did not assimilate or convert to the majority culture retained an unequivocal Jewish identity… I will argue Jews adopted Christian themes…and fused them - often in inverted and parodied ways - with ancient Jewish customs and traditions.25
Marcus wrote his histories of Jewish culture as part of the greater culture of Europe, arguing that Jewish culture in the Middle Ages was highly affected by the surrounding
Christian communities in which they lived.26 Rather than argue that Jewish communities either held themselves in isolation or assimilated, Marcus argued that Ashkenazi Jews
“adapted Christian themes and iconography, which they saw all around them every day, and fused them – often in inverted and parodic ways – with ancient Jewish customs and traditions.”27 In Rituals of Childhood, as well as spearheading his major “inward acculturation” argument, Marcus studied how Ashkenazic Jewry adopted Christian initiation ceremonies to fit their own ritual needs.28 While discussing the individual
Childhood, 11-12; Bonfil, Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy; Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World, vols. 1-6.
24 Marcus, Rituals of Childhood, 10-11.
25 Marcus, Rituals of Childhood, 10-11.
26 Marcus, Rituals of Childhood, 11.
27 Marcus, Rituals of Childhood, 12.
28 Marcus, Rituals of Childhood, 16-17.
13 aspects of medieval Ashkenazic life, Marcus argued that Ashkenazi Jews were influenced in a twofold manner by the Christian culture which surrounded them. First, by assimilating Christian rituals and symbology into a Judaic context, and second, by responding negatively to Christian cultural constructs.29 “To deny something is still to be influenced by it; a negative imprint still leaves a mark.”30 Even if Jewish rituals or ideas were in direct denial of Christian rituals or ideas, they were being affected by the
Christian culture which surrounded them, simply by attempting to deny them. Marcus’ argument that Ashkenazi Jews were deeply influenced by the majority Christian culture was swiftly picked up by other historians of medieval Ashkenazi Jewry, who used the
“integrationist” perspective to focus on the issues which concerned them most.31
In 2004, Elisheva Baumgarten entered the historical discourse, approaching
Jewish women’s history from a similar position to that held by Ivan G. Marcus. A social historian, Baumgarten drew on the ordinary and mundane aspects of life to examine how
Jewish and Christian families interacted and shared space in medieval Ashkenaz. Much like Marcus, Baumgarten examined rituals of induction to reveal the interrelatedness between Jewish cultural constructs and the surrounding Christian culture, although
29 Marcus, Rituals of Childhood, 12, 102.
30 Marcus, Rituals of Childhood, 102.
31 Including: Ivan G. Marcus, The Jewish Life Cycle: Rites of Passage from Biblical to Modern Times, (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2004); Marcus, Rituals of Childhood: Jewish Acculturation in Medieval Europe, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996); Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Baumgarten, Practicing Piety in Medieval Ashkenaz: Men Women, and Everyday Religious Observance (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015); Nirenberg, Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Israel Jacob Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006);
14
Baumgarten focused on circumcision and baptism rather than an older child’s induction into religious schooling.32
The growth within the field of medieval Ashkenazi Jewish history, as spurred on by Marcus’ “acculturation” argument, however, often neglects the ritual of marriage.
While multiple historians, including Marcus and Baumgarten, have turned their focus to the development of Jewish traditions, customs, and rituals, few have looked at how the study of the development of marriage might be transformed by the “integrationist” argument. This address of medieval Jewish marriage rituals has appeared in the works of
Shelomo Dov Goitein and his students, but only focusing on the world of medieval
Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews, leaving the field of medieval Ashkenazi acculturation as it applies to marriage almost completely wide open.33 Some historians have loosely addressed the development of Ashkenazi Jewish marriage rituals alongside Christian marriage rituals, but only within the terms of parallel development.
In the early twentieth century, at the height of the field of Jewish historical studies before the Second World War, Jacob Lauterbach wrote a detailed paper studying the origins of the ceremony of breaking the glass in Ashkenazi Jewish weddings.34 The tradition of breaking a glass at weddings, is examined intensively throughout
Lauterbach’s nearly thirty page paper. Many of the points which Lauterbach makes continue to hold impact today, including his introduction, wherein he states:
Jewish ceremonies have been unduly neglected in modern times, both in study and in practice. The effects of this double neglect are reciprocally cumulative.
32 Marcus, Rituals of Childhood, 14-16; Baumgarten, Mothers and Children, 55-89.
33 See n.23 for the definition of Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews.
34 Jacob Z. Lauterbach, “The Ceremony of Breaking a Glass at Weddings,” Hebrew Union College Annual 2 (1925): 351-380.
15
With the decline in the practical observance of the ceremonies, the scholarly interest in them is also waning, so that very few students devote themselves to the study of the origins, and the development of the religious ceremonies. On the other hand, the failure on the part of scholars to choose religious ceremonies as subjects for scholarly research ultimately results in a general ignorance of the actual meaning and significance of the ceremonies. This ignorance of the meaning of the ceremonies naturally causes more neglect of the practical observance of them. For ceremonies are merely a means to an end. They are vessels used to carry ethical ideas, to convey religious lessons. Without a knowledge of the ideas they contain and the lessons which they are to teach they appear empty vessels, meaningless forms, which do not appeal to the people and consequently are ignored and neglected by them.35
Lauterbach’s points were well-made, and clearly resonated. For all that I continue to find large gaps in the modern study of Jewish religious ceremonies, many scholars responded to Lauterbach’s appeal. In 1949, Louis Finkelstein published The Jews: Their History,
Culture, and Religion, in three volumes - a series which would be republished multiple times.36
By the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, historians such as Naomi Feuchtwanger and
Joseph Gutmann had picked up the study of Jewish ceremonial practices.37 Both of them would also write specifically about Jewish wedding practices in the Middle Ages.
Feuchtwanger’s short 1985 study reflects upon the similarities between medieval
Christian and Jewish wedding ceremonies, while Gutmann’s earlier “Wedding Customs and Ceremonies in Art” and later “Jewish Medieval Marriage Customs in Art: Creativity
35 Lauterbach, “Breaking a Glass,” 351.
36 Louis Finkelstein, The Jews: Their History, Culture, and Religion (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1949). Reprinted in 1955, 1960, 1979, and 1993.
37 Joseph Gutmann, Beauty in Holiness: Studies in Jewish Customs and Ceremonial Art (New York, NY: Ktav Publishing House, 1970); Ivan G. Marcus, Piety and Society: The Jewish Pietists of Medieval Germany (Leiden: Brill, 1981), previously published as dissertation “Penitential Theory and Practice Among the Pious of Germany,” (New York, NY: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1974); Ivan G. Marcus, Rituals of Childhood: Jewish Acculturation in Medieval Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996); Naomi Feuchtwanger, “Interrelations Between the Jewish and Christian Wedding in Medieval Ashkenaz,” Proceedings of the World Congress of Jewish Studies (1985): 31-36.
16 and Adaptation” studied the depictions of Jewish wedding traditions in art.38 In 1990,
Esther Cohen and Elliot Horowitz addressed the Jewish and Christian rituals of marriage in medieval Europe, focusing on what they described as “the sacralization of marriage.”39
They drew parallels between the shifts in marriage practices in medieval Jewish tradition and medieval Christian tradition.40 And yet, despite quoting Israel Abrahams’ “probably the give and take between Church and Synagogue is marked in the wedding more than in any other social rites of the Middle Ages,” Cohen and Horowitz repeatedly stop short of declaring that Jewish rituals may have been borrowed from their Christian neighbors.41
Instead, they argue that “Jewish and Christian weddings ran parallel in two fields… Both groups shared many common perceptions of marriage and remarriage, and consequently the two visual renditions of these perceptions bore some clear resemblances.”42 While they mention “the interaction of popular and elite cultures…both Christian and Jewish,”
Cohen and Horowitz’s exploration of late medieval developments in Jewish and Christian marriage rituals stops short of the outright exchanges of practice which would be argued first by Ivan Marcus in Rituals of Childhood, and then later in Marcus’ The Jewish Life
38 Feuchtwanger, “Interrelations Between the Jewish and Christian Wedding,” 31-36; Joseph Gutmann, “Wedding Customs and Ceremonies in Art,” in The Jewish Marriage Anthology, ed. Philip and Hanna Goodman, (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1965), 175-183; Joseph Gutmann, “Jewish Medieval Marriage Customs in Art: Creativity and Adaptation,” in The Jewish Family: Metaphor and Memory, ed. David Kraemer, (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1989), 47-62.
39 Cohen and Horowitz, “In Search of the Sacred,” 226.
40 Cohen and Horowitz, “In Search of the Sacred,” 225-226, 231-234, 236-237, 242, 249.
41 Israel Abrahams, Jewish Life in the Middle Ages (London, England: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1896), 203, in Cohen and Horowitz, “In Search of the Sacred,” 225.
42 Cohen and Horowitz, “In Search of the Sacred,” 249.
17
Cycle, Elisheva Baumgarten’s Mothers and Children, as well as her more recent
Practicing Piety in Medieval Ashkenaz.43
It is in this gap – the gap between the study of medieval Ashkenazi Jewish marriage and Marcus’ inward acculturation argument – that I intervene. This thesis focuses on the development of early medieval Ashkenazi Jewish marriage rituals from neighboring and preceding cultures. I step into the new historiological narrative from a slightly different angle. In my examination of these cultural intersections at this specific era in history, I ask how the rituals of early medieval Ashkenazi Jewish marriages were affected by the Christian cultures which surrounded them. Reactionary traditions were formed by Jewish leaders, in order to prove Jewish separation from Christianity, particularly in the face of borrowed traditions. Borrowed traditions were re-explained so that they fit medieval Ashkenazi Jewish theology in a manner acceptable to the Jewish leaders of the day.
I hope to address these aspects of the development of medieval Ashkenazi Jewish marriage rituals, to explore how a central milestone in Jewish tradition was affected by the position of Jews as a minority culture living alongside a still-developing majority culture, and how much of the earlier Jewish traditions were retained throughout the early medieval period. Both in the Middle Ages and today, scrupulously religious Jews were fervently aware of the possibility of assimilation, and feared that possibility. The continuity of Jewish tradition from the mists of time until the present was vital for people who believed that their lifestyle had been ordained by God. If new ideas were
43 Marcus, Rituals of Childhood; Marcus, The Jewish Life Cycle; Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Elisheva Baumgarten, Practicing Piety in Medieval Ashkenaz: Men, Women, and Everyday Religious Observance (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014).
18 introduced, or old traditions were dropped, “they transgress[ed] the injunctions ‘Remove not the ancient landmark which thy fathers have set,’ and ‘Thou shalt not remove thy neighbors’ landmark, which they of old time had set.’”44 I am arguing that, while a residual framework of pre-medieval Jewish marriage traditions remained within the
Jewish marriage ceremony, medieval Ashkenazi Jews borrowed Christian rituals and practices in order to build their own marriage ceremonies.
My thesis has three chapters. In Chapter 1, “Pre-Medieval Jewish Marriage
Practices: Biblical Texts, Talmudic Texts, and the Transition into the Medieval Era,” I argue that the pre-medieval Jewish sources and traditions revolving around marriages and weddings are of vital importance for understanding the ways in which Jewish tradition has always interacted with surrounding non-Jewish cultures, and as a foundation upon which medieval rabbis built their own narratives. Here, I lay out the background for
Jewish marriage ceremonies, including the Biblical stories and rules, Talmudic elaborations and late Greco-Roman era developments in conjunction with the rise of
Christianity.45
Sefer Ḥasidim, Bologna ”,עובר משום אל תשיב גבול עולם אשר עשו בו אבותיך לא תשיג גבול רעך אשר גבלו ראשונים“ 44 Printed Edition, (1538), 114, under “Sefer Hasidim Database: Bologna Printed Edition 1538 paragraphs 1- 392,” Princeton University Sefer Hasidim Database. 2015. https://etc.princeton.edu/sefer_hasidim/manuscripts.php.
45 The Talmud is a collection of texts, with two parts, the Mishna and the Gemara. According to Jewish tradition, the Mishna is a written version of the Oral Torah, and is given similar weight as any laws from the Written Torah, also known as the Five Books of Moses, or the first five books of the Bible. The Mishna is believed to have been transcribed from the oral form during the Tannaic era, while the Gemara is a compilation of rabbinical interpretations from the Amoraic era, presented in the Classical philosophical style of possibly artificial debates, alongside the Mishna. The Tannaic era covers all events and literature which can be dated from approximately the beginning of the Common Era until approximately 200 CE, and the Amoraic era refers to the period between approximately 200 CE and 650 CE. The Mishna and the Gemara is often published within one text, with later commentaries in the framing gloss. See Gedaliah Alon, The Jews in Their Land in the Talmudic Age (70-640 C.E.), trans. Gershon Levi, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 27-28, 34. For information about the eras of Jewish history, see Joseph Jacobs, “Chronology (I),” in JE 4:64-75; Louis Ginzberg, “Tannaim and Amoraim,” in JE 12: 49-54; Moses Mielziner, “Amora,”in JE 1:527-528.
19
In the Chapter 2, “Living in Ashkenaz, Moving Away from Babylon: The
Transition to Local Rabbinic Rulings,” I posit that the transition of Ashkenazi rabbis away from dependence on rabbinic leaders in the Near East had a strong impact on how local rabbis dealt with the developing local wedding traditions. Previous to the shift to local rulings, rabbis often deferred their religious decisions to the opinions of the
Gaonim, rabbis who were leaders of their schools in Bablyonia and Palestine between the sixth and eleventh centuries. By the ninth century, Ashkenazi Jews had begun to shift to local rulings, rather than depending on the judgements of the Gaonim.46 The slow collapse of the Babylonian and Palestinian schools, combined with the growing difficulty involved with communicating across the rift between Christian Europe and the Muslim
Near East, forced an ever-growing divide between the Jews of Ashkenaz and their previously acknowledged spiritual leaders.47 This led to localized rabbinic rulings, influenced by local pressures, and an intensification of rabbinic writings which either forbade new traditions, or explained them away in a fashion which attributed them to
Biblical or Talmudic sources.
In Chapter 3, “Christian and Ashkenazi Marriage Rituals: Borrowing Traditions,”
I draw the pieces of my argument together, and argue that medieval Ashkenazi Jewish marriage rituals, while sometimes related to earlier traditions, were often derived and borrowed from western Christian customs and traditions. Beginning with an examination of Christian marriage traditions changed throughout Late Antiquity and the early Middle
Ages, I will then move on to examine the Ashkenazi Jewish wedding ceremony itself.
46 See W. Bacher, “Gaon (plural, Geonim),” in JE 5:567-572.
47 W. Bacher, “Gaon (plural, Geonim),” in JE 5:567-572; Moshe Gil and David Strassler, Jews in Islamic countries in the Middle Ages, (Boston, MA: Brill, 2004), 448.
20
By studying the development of three different aspects of medieval Ashkenazi Jewish wedding ceremonies, fertility, warding, and sacralization, I will prove how the Jewish wedding traditions of medieval Ashkenaz were borrowed from their Christian neighbors’ traditions.
I close with a brief discussion of the continued developments of Ashkenazi traditions in the later Middle Ages, including how the ideology of Ashkenazi isolationism strengthened, and the growth of veneration for previous rabbis by Ashkenazi religious leaders.
The development of Ashkenazi isolationism had deep ties to the long traditions of interaction which preceded it. The shared culture of medieval Ashkenaz, between Jews and their Christian neighbors, had a long and tumultuous history, littered with moments of friendship and hatred. There was no golden age of perfect Judaism, wherein it lived separate from Christianity and Christianity’s pagan predecessors, no matter how much the medieval Ashkenazi rabbinical authorities may have wished it to be so. The wedding traditions of Ashkenaz were of Ashkenaz, not only Jewish or Christian or Germanic. Rite and ritual grew out of both friendly and adversarial relationships. The final nail in the coffin of the history of Ashkenazi Jewish wedding rituals, however, lay at the feet of those Ashkenazi rabbis who lived through the harrowing days of the First Crusade, and the decades of bitterness and hatred which followed. Their determination to draw away from their Christian neighbors would lead them to rewrite the history of Jewish ritual, leaving the history of Ashkenazi Jewish wedding rituals to lie abandoned behind their written veil for centuries into the future.
21
Chapter One: Pre-Medieval Jewish Marriage Practices: Biblical Texts, Talmudic Texts, and the Transition into the Medieval Era
In an oasis in the desert, a procession approaches. Sixty men guide a bridegroom, who is seated on a litter made from cedar wood and covered with silver and gold, with purple cloths hanging around the litter. The entire procession is surrounded with expensive incense, and the bridegroom is crowned with a circlet of flowers.48
Seven hundred years later, two processions approach a house, surrounded by crowds of people carrying torches and singing songs in Aramaic, Hebrew, and possibly even Greek. One procession guides a bride on a litter, wearing a crown of flowers and expensive jewelry, while the other guides the bridegroom in a similar manner.49
A further seven hundred years later, one procession approaches a synagogue, bombarded with grain.50 Noise and music fills the air, a cacophony of French and
Hebrew tangled into songs.51
As these short anecdotes reveal, Judaic traditions have developed over a long period of time. In order to understand the development of medieval Ashkenazi marriage rituals and ceremonies, it is vital to first gain a background in the foundations of Jewish marriage ritual. What did Jewish marriage rituals look like previous to the Middle Ages?
What sources did medieval rabbis use to form their ideas of marriage and justify their traditions?
48 Song of Songs 3:6-11.
49 Michael Satlow, Jewish Marriages in Antiquity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 170- 171; Sotah 49a. See fn.55 and fn.58 for explanations of citation involving the Talmud.
50 Abraham Chill, The Minhagim: The Customs and Ceremonies of Judaism, Their Origins and Rationale (New York, NY: Sepher-Hermon Press, 1979), 281; Simḥah ben Shemu’el of Vitry, Maḥzor Vitry, par. .(מחזור ויטרי, פרק תע) .470
51 Kirsten A. Fudeman, “‘They Have Ears But Do Not Hear:’ Gendered Access to Hebrew and the Medieval Hebrew-French Wedding Song,” Jewish Quarterly Review 96, no. 4, (Fall 2006): 542-546. Laina Miller 22
Medieval rabbis relied upon an extensive collection of sources in order to construct a religious structure for Jewish marriage. The oldest of these sources was also the basis for Jewish faith - the Tanakh.52 The Tanakh, which contains origin stories, historical records, prophecies, and laws, has an extraordinary amount of marriages recorded within its pages. The Tanakh itself, the product of decades (and possibly centuries) of tradition and separate texts, was collected into one product at some point between the 6th century BCE and the 1st century CE.53 Its cultural context is difficult to pin down; the Tanakh could date from directly after the Babylonian Exile, in the 6th century BCE, or from the Roman occupation, during the 1st century CE. Whatever their historical context, however, the tales and laws related in the Tanakh were perceived as
Divinely inspired. This makes the accounts of marriage within the Tanakh some of the most important sources for understanding the medieval rabbis’ foundational beliefs about marriage. When in doubt, it was to the Tanakh that medieval rabbis would turn, in search of an explanation or ruling which might fit the circumstances in which they lived.
Unfortunately, despite the many times that the Tanakh mentions marriage, the
Tanakh does not go into the details of marital ritual. In the following section, several examples of marriage from the twenty-four books of the Tanakh will be examined, from
52 The word “Tanakh" is a Hebrew acronym, TaNaKH (or TanNaḤ). It stands for Torah, Nevi’im, and Ketuvim, the three sections of the Jewish Bible. The Torah is generally known as the Five Books of Moses, or the Pentateuch, Nevi’im is the Hebrew term for Prophets, and Ketuvim literally means “Writings,” and refers to the books of Chronicles, Psalms, Job, Proverbs, Ruth, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, Lamentations, Esther, Daniel, and Ezra/Nehemiah. Thus, Tanakh refers to the Torah, Nevi’im, and Ketuvim collectively.
53 Julia M. O'Brien and L. Michael White, “Biblical Literature,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East, (Oxford University Press, 1997). http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780195065121.001.0001/acref-9780195065121-e- 163; Nahum M. Sarna, Roger T. Beckwith, and Andrie B. du Toit, “Canon,” in The Oxford Companion to the Bible, (Oxford University Press, 1993). http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780195046458.001.0001/acref-9780195046458-e- 0126.
Laina Miller 23 all three major sections of the Tanakh - the Torah, Nevi’im, and Ketuvim. After examining these anecdotal descriptions of marriage throughout Tanakh, this section will conclude with an examination of the legal description of marriage according to the
Tanakh.
Marriage Practices in Tanakh
The first detailed description of marriage in Tanakh takes place early in Genesis.
While later theologians would point to the creation of Adam and Eve as the model for marriage, the first description of a marriage takes place in Genesis 11. In this chapter, the text explains that Avram and Naḥor married Sarai and Milcah. The text reads:
54”נחור מלכה-ושם אשת ,שרי ,אברם-שם אשת :נשים ,ויקח אברם ונחור להם.“
“And Avram and Naḥor took for themselves wives: the name of Avram’s wife was Sarai, and the name of Naḥor’s wife was Milcah.”55
While there are no more details of the marriage described, the phrasing provides an insight into the concept of marriage at the point at which this text was written. Rather than use any of the numerous words in Hebrew which translate as “to wed,” or “to
The Tanakh does not say .”לקח“ - ”marry,” the text in this verse uses the verb “to take that Avram and Naḥor married Sarai and Milcah, but instead, that they took them as wives. This type of phrasing gives all of the agency to the men. Sarai and Milcah are passive partners in the act of marriage, while Avram and Naḥor are the active partners, who take them from their fathers’ home. This particular depiction of the roles of the
54 Genesis 11:29. All translations from the Tanakh are my own.
55 Genesis 11:29.
Laina Miller 24 male and female participants in a marriage continued through the betrothal and marriage traditions of Talmudic Judaism, and the bedeken tradition of the medieval period.56
The next, slightly more detailed, description of the rituals of marriage is set thirteen chapters later, in Genesis 24. This chapter details the trip that Avraham’s servant takes to find a wife for Avraham’s son, Yitzḥak.57 Over the course of chapter 24, multiple steps in the process of marriage are described. The servant is sent to find a woman within Avraham’s extended family, indicating that endogamous marriage was preferred over exogamous marriage.58 Rather than using marriage as a way to create allies, the Biblical authors seem more concerned about maintaining a pure bloodline within the followers of God. As the text implies in a later chapter, there appears to be a concern that the blessing of God upon Avraham and the relatives of Avraham be conveyed to later generations from both the paternal and maternal lines.59 This concern for a pure connection between God and his chosen people would follow the Jewish people throughout the generations, both in the literal sense of a bloodline, and as a way to justify traditions. A direct connection from God’s word to the traditions of the day meant
56 See the discussion of the procession from the father’s home to the groom’s home in the next section of this chapter for more on the subject of the female participant being taken to the active male participant. See chapter 3 for a discussion of the bedeken tradition.
57 In Genesis 17:5, God changes Avram’s name to Avraham. From this point onward, the Tanakh refers to him as Avraham.
58 Genesis 24:3-9, 24:15, 24:42-52. See also Étan Levine, “Biblical Women's Marital Rights,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 63 (1997): 87-135. For an anthropological analysis of the benefits and drawbacks of exogamous and endogamous marriage, see Gregory K. Dow, Clyde G. Reed, and Simon Woodcock, “The Economics of Exogamous Marriage in Small-Scale Societies,” Economic Inquiry 54, no. 4 (October 2016): 1805-1823. For a simple explanation of exogamous and endogamous marriage, see Peter Kassebaum, “Kinship and Social Groups: A Modular Approach: Cultural Anthropology,” ERIC (Kentfield, CA: College of Marin, 1985): 11,
59 Genesis 27:46-28:5.
Laina Miller 25 that no one could challenge those traditions without entering into the realms of heresy.
The concern with bloodlines shown in Tanakh, which continued in Jewish tradition throughout history, was a claim of a direct connection between the Jewish people and their God, who originally chose the first in those long ancestral lines, Avraham, as his own.60
Once Avraham’s servant finds Yitzḥak’s intended bride, Rivka, who is beautiful and young, he gives her two large gold bracelets and a gold ring.61 Then, Avraham’s servant goes to Rivka’s father’s house, where he speaks with father and brother. He gives more gifts of great value to Rivka’s family, including ten camels’ worth of luxurious clothing and silver and gold items. Avraham’s servant then requests that Rivka be allowed to travel with him to Avraham’s home.62 Rivka is sent with Avraham’s servant, escorted by female chaperones, and veils herself once in the presence of her husband-to-be.63 The marital narrative concludes with Rivka moving into the tent which formerly belonged to the previous head woman of the household, Avraham’s wife and
Yitzḥak’s mother, Sara.64
This narrative has eight points which illustrate the ritual of marriage within the context of the story. It explains the importance of endogamy, and describes the giving of gifts to the bride-to-be.65 There are negotiations with the men of the household, who
60 Genesis 17:5.
61 Genesis, 24:32-52.
62 Genesis, 24:53-58.
63 Genesis, 24:59-65.
64 Genesis, 24:67.
65 Genesis, 24:3-9, 24:22-24.
Laina Miller 26 agree to allow Rivka to wed.66 Gifts are then given to Rivka’s father’s household, and
Rivka is permitted to leave her father’s household.67 She is escorted by female chaperones, one described as her nurse, and leaves her father’s home to join Avraham’s household and marry Yitzḥak.68 When she discovers herself in the presence of her husband-to-be, Rivka veils herself.69 Finally, as the new woman in the household, Rivka takes over Yitzḥak’s deceased mother’s empty tent.70 All eight of these points continued to be important to the Jewish tradition of marriage throughout Antiquity. Later, in the
Middle Ages, many traditions would be attributed to the structure of this tale, as well as following story, the tale of Rachel and Leah.
The next description of marriage in Tanakh after the tale of Rivka and Yitzḥak, related in Genesis 29-30, reinforces many of the stages of marriage described above.
While the man searching for the bride is the husband-to-be, instead of a servant, the tale still exhorts the importance of endogamous marriage.71 The father of the bride expects rich gifts, and when disappointed, negotiates a deal for the marriage which will benefit his household.72 Both brides in the story, Rachel and Leah, bring female members of their own household into their new home with their new husband, Yaakov.73 Eventually,
66 Genesis 24:29-52.
67 Genesis, 24:53-59.
is translated literally as a wet nurse. The woman was likely a mother-figure to ,”מינקת“ ,The word used 68 Rivka, considering the fact that she left her home to travel to a new land and a new household alongside Rivka. Genesis, 24:59-61.
69 Genesis, 24:64-65.
70 Genesis, 24:67.
71 Genesis, 29:4-14.
72 Genesis, 29:13-28.
73 Genesis 29:24, 29:29.
Laina Miller 27 as in Rivka’s tale, both brides leave their father’s home. Some years later, when Yaakov leaves the household of Rachel and Leah’s father, they become the matriarchs of a new household, which is separate from their father’s home. The story of Yaakov, Rachel, and
Leah, would eventually join a larger collection of tales cited by Talmudic-era and medieval rabbis in order to discourage and eventually outlaw polygamy in Jewish communities. The stories in later chapters of Genesis following the marriage of Yaakov to Leah and Rachel seemed to have a clear moral to medieval rabbis: if even the great
Patriarch, Yaakov, could not maintain a peaceful household with multiple wives, then how could an ordinary Jew possibly succeed? These stories would often be paired with the other major story in Tanakh about a leader with several wives; the tale of Shlomo
(King Solomon). Again, rabbis would reference the story of Shlomo as proof that polygamy caused more problems than it solved.74
This second extended description of a marriage, revolving around Yaakov,
Rachel, and Leah, echoes the main points of the first, from the gifts given to the father’s household to the movement of the bride from her father’s house to her husband’s household. This creates a continuous version of marriage for most of the book of
Genesis. Throughout Antiquity and the Middle Ages, traditional Judaism held these stories close. Repeatedly, these tales attributed traditions of marriage to Judaism, even if the traditions had originally sprouted up elsewhere. As the concept of marriage gained religiosity, marital tales such as these from one of the holiest books in the Jewish canon would take on a new role as exemplary tales. The final marriage story of Genesis,
74 See Genesis 29:14-18 and Genesis 37 for stories about how Yaakov’s family was divided and encountered problems due to Yaakov’s unequal treatment of his wives and their children. See 1 Kings 11 for the tale of how Shlomo’s multiple wives led to his downfall.
Laina Miller 28 however, stands apart from these congruent narratives, even though it retains some of the details previously discussed.
The final marriage story in Genesis is the tale of Yehuda and Tamar, a story which combines themes of forbidden marriage, prostitution, and shame. Tamar, the woman who married Yehuda’s eldest son, is widowed twice - first by Yehuda’s eldest son, and then by Yehuda’s second son.75 Yehuda orders her to return to her father’s household, until his youngest son is old enough to marry her.76 Tamar, after some time, dresses as a prostitute and tricks Yehuda not only into sleeping with her, but also giving her tokens of great worth which clearly belonged to him.77 Tamar, who becomes pregnant, is accused of illicit sex.78 She produces these tokens as a sign not only of her right as a bound woman to the man who slept with her, but also to mark Yehuda as the father of her child.79 Once Tamar produces the tokens which Yehuda gave to her,
Yehuda acknowledges his responsibility, and brings her into his household.80
While this final tale in Genesis is only distantly about marriage, the same themes which were in the previous marriage narratives echo within it. The text describes the act
as it was in the first mentions of marriage in ,”לקח“ of marrying a woman using the verb
Genesis. The movement of the woman from her father’s household into her husband’s household is portrayed as an action of marriage, and the exchange of items of monetary
75 Genesis, 38:1-11.
76 Genesis.
77 Genesis, 38:12-23.
78 Genesis, 38:24-25.
79 Genesis, 38:24-25.
80 Genesis, 38:26.
Laina Miller 29 value create a contract binding enough to make sexual actions licit. The glaring absence of any sort of religious ceremony in the marital descriptions in Genesis would cause problems for Talmudic and medieval-era rabbis, as they attempted to use the Tanakh as a guide for Jewish marriage. The inclusion in these tales of the exchange of money or objects of worth, as well as the movement of the new wife from her father’s home into her husband’s home, would eventually lead to these stories becoming etiological tales for marital traditions, whether or not those traditions were truly derived from the Tanakh.
Further on in Tanakh, the book of Judges describes the marriage of the prophet
Shimshon with a woman known as “the woman from Timnah.”81 In Judges 14,
Shimshon encounters a woman in a town called Timnah, a Pelishti town.82 After deciding that he wishes to marry her, Shimshon demands that his parents “take” the
His parents react badly, scolding Shimshon for .”לקח“ woman for him, using the verb violating the practice of endogamy due to his lust for a foreign girl.83 In the end,
Shimshon convinces his parents, and his father goes to Timnah to negotiate for the marriage.84 Shimshon marries the woman from Timnah, throws a grand feast, and challenges the men of Timnah to a game of riddles in return for expensive gifts.85 The men of Timnah pressure the answers to the riddles from Shimshon’s new wife, and win the game.86 Shimshon, who figures out how the men of Timnah got their answers, kills
81 Judges 14.
refers to the (”פלשתים“) ,”The word “Pelishti”, which is an adjective derived from the noun “Pelishtim 82 people and lands of the Philistines.
83 Judges 14:1-3.
84 Judges 14:5-10.
85 Judges 14:11-18.
86 Judges 14:11-18.
Laina Miller 30 them all and returns home, taking their possessions as reparations for their cheating.87
Since Shimshon returns to his home, leaving his wife at her father’s house, her father gives her to a different man, and refuses to acknowledge Shimshon as his daughter’s husband when Shimshon returns.88 This, in turn, leads to Shimshon killing more men from Timnah, and inciting violence between the people of Israel and the people of
Pelishtim.89
The description of the marriage of Shimshon and the woman from Timnah exemplifies the importance of the stages of marriage, as delineated in the stories from
Genesis, to Judaic tradition. The importance of endogamy is exhorted in the text, even if it is not followed in the way that it is in the stories in Genesis. Rather, the marriage between Shimshon and the woman from Timnah seems to be an impressive example of precisely why exogamy was ‘wrong.’ From the very beginning of Shimshon’s marriage, problems arise. The traditional negotiations and gift-giving goes awry, and the all- important transition of the bride from her father’s house falls through leading her father to conclude that she can be married off to someone else. There is, however, one major deviation from the marriage rituals described in Genesis. In Judges we have the first description of a marriage feast. This is the first time that marriage is related to celebration, instead of a negotiation process for creating a licit sexual union and bringing about fertility and wealth.
One other time in Tanakh, there is a description of a grand feast as part of a marriage. This is in the description of the marriage between Esther and Achashverosh,
87 Judges 14:18-19.
88 Judges 14:20, 15:1-8.
89 Judges 15:1-20.
Laina Miller 31 the king of Persia.90 The Book of Esther, stated that Esther was “taken” to the king, who preferred Esther over all of the other women he had seen.91 The king then “places the royal crown on her head,” and Esther is made Achashverosh’s queen.92 Achashverosh then throws a grand feast, and gives gifts to many of his subjects.93 The missing pieces of the marriage ritual as described throughout the Tanakh, negotiations with the father and monetary exchange, are explained away by the story. Esther does not reveal her family or ethnicity, which prevents these customary parts of the marriage from occurring.94 Importantly, when Esther does reveal Mordechai to be her father-figure, and the Jews to be her people, Achashverosh enriches Mordechai and privileges the Jewish people under his reign.95 While delayed, these traditional aspects of the marriage ritual do still occur.
One final point of note on the subject of marriage in Tanakh can be found in chapter 22 of Exodus, which states:
וכי-יפתה איש, בתולה אשר לא-ארשה--ושכב עמה: מהר ימהרנה לו, לאשה .אם-מאן ימאן אביה, לתתה לו- -כסף ישקל, כמהר הבתולת.96 If a man persuades a young girl who is not betrothed, and lies with her, he will surely pay her dowry, for her to be his wife. If her father absolutely refuses to give her to him, he will pay money in the amount of a young girl’s dowry.97
.also known in English as Ahasuerus ,”אחשורוש“ ,Esther 2:16-20. Achashverosh 90
91 Esther 2:16-17.
92 Esther 2:17.
93 Esther 2:18-20.
94 Esther 2:18-20.
95 Esther 9:1-6, 10:1-3.
96 Exodus 22:15-16.
97 Exodus 22:15-16.
Laina Miller 32
This is one of the few legislative statements on the subject of marriage within
Tanakh. Its declaration implies that the sexual act must be accompanied with an exchange of money in order to make a marriage legally binding, despite the main subject matter of the paragraph being focused on illicit sex. Exodus 22:15-16 is one of the rare non-anecdotal pieces of evidence that both sexual intercourse and monetary exchange were necessary to create a marriage.98 These sentences also explain that, in the case that the girl’s father shuts down the marriage negotiations, the man who had sex with the girl is still required to pay her dowry, in order to make up for her loss of worth on the marriage market.99 There are no ritual requirements discussed in Exodus on the subject of marriage, but there are the precursors to ritual in the legalization of the dual acts of monetary exchange and sexual intercourse.
The subject of marriage in Tanakh was almost entirely anecdotal, and for centuries, it was taken in the way that it was presented. Biblical marriage had no attachment to religion beyond the Judaic belief that exogamous marriage would end in disaster. The secular framework of Biblical marriages made Judaic marriage traditions no different than the traditions of those who conquered the Judaic lands in the post-
Biblical Near East. The true importance of the marital tales explored in Tanakh lies in their existence as a foundation of traditions for the post-Biblical Judaic leaders to reference and build upon. As Jewish traditions grew more complex and entrenched in religious law, the stories of marriage in the Tanakh became more than simply stories: they became guidelines and structures for the Talmudic rabbis to build upon.
98 Exodus 22:15-16.
99 Exodus 22:15-16.
Laina Miller 33
Marriage Practices in Post-Biblical Texts: The Talmudic Era
In this section, I will examine the details of Jewish marriage rituals contained within the text of the Talmud Bavli, and conclude with secondary research which focuses on the Talmudic era. The Talmudic era encompasses some of the earliest codifications of
Judaic law into two sets of texts - first the Mishna, codified in the first and second centuries CE, then the Gemara, a series of commentaries and explanations first codified in Judea in the fourth century CE, and later expanded and recodified by Babylonian rabbis in the sixth and seventh centuries CE.100 The combined texts of the Mishna and the Babylonian Gemara became known as the Babylonian Talmud.101 The Babylonian
Talmud, known as the Talmud Bavli, became the basis for later Jewish law and rabbinical interpretations. The books of the Talmud contain legal arguments, ritual delineations, and anecdotes attributed to the first, second, and third centuries CE. These contents make this collected Hebrew and Aramaic text a valuable source on the subject of Jewish marriage practices and rituals in the Greco-Roman and pre-medieval period.
The Mishna is divided into six books, Zeraim, Mo’ed, Nashim, Nezikin,
Kodashim, and Taharot, and further sub-divided into a sixty-three books.102 Out of these,
100 Lawrence H. Schiffman, From Text to Tradition: A History of Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism, (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav Publishing House, 1991), 227; John Walton Burnight, “Rabbinical Judaism,” in World History Encyclopedia, edited by Alfred J. Andrea and Carolyn Neel, vol. 6, Era 3: Classical Traditions, 1000 BCE-300 CE, (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2011), 566-567.
101 Schiffman, Text to Tradition, 227; Burnight, “Rabbinical Judaism,” World History Encyclopedia, 566- 567.
are (טהרות) and Taharot ,(קודשים) Kodashim ,(נזיקין) Nezikin ,(נשים) Nashim ,(מועד) Mo’ed ,(זרעים) Zeraim 102 the six major books of the Mishna. Zeraim is divided into eleven books, Mo’ed is divided into twelve books, Nashim is divided into seven books, Nezikin is divided into ten books, Kodashim is divided into eleven books, and Taharot is divided into twelve books.
Laina Miller 34 thirty-seven are contained and expanded upon within the Talmud Bavli.103 Two of these books, Ketubot and Kiddushin, spend a great deal of time discussing and expanding upon
Judaic laws and anecdotes about marriage. Both contained within the larger book of
Nashim, or “Women,” Ketubot is a text primarily about marriage contracts, betrothals, and prenuptial agreements, while Kiddushin focuses on the act of betrothal and the stages of becoming married.104
The first discussion in Ketubot, ranging from daf 2a to daf 5a, focuses on which days of the week are permissible days for a wedding.105 The Mishna states:
בתולה נשאת ליום הרביעי ואלמנה ליום החמישי שפעמים בשבת בתי דינין יושבין בעיירות ביום השני וביום החמישי שאם היה לו טענת בתולים היה משכים לבית דין.106 A young woman is married on the fourth day, and the widow on the fifth day, because twice a week the court of law sits in the towns, on the second day and on
103 Only the first book of Zeraim is included in the Talmud Bavli, eleven out of the twelve are included in Moed, all seven books are included in Nashim, eight out of the ten books are included in Nezikin, nine out of the eleven books are included in Kodashim, and only one book is included out of the twelve books in Taharot. There may have been more texts, but they have been lost to time.
translates as “writ, deed, marriage contract,” according to Jastrow’s Dictionary of ,(כתובות) Ketubot 104 translates (קידושין) Targumim, the Talmud Bavli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature. Kiddushin as “proclamation of sanctity, sanctification…the act of betrothal,” according to Jastrow’s Dictionary. See Marcus Jastrow, Dictionary of Targumim, the Talmud Bavli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature, (Leipzig, Germany: W. Drugulin, 1903; New York, NY: G. C. Putnam’s Sons, 1926), 680, 1355.
105 When studying the Talmud Bavli, it is important to note that the traditional editions are laid out in the medieval gloss style, with the Mishna and Gemara laid out in a block in the center of the page, and the later commentaries are placed around the main text. The pages are numbered by folio number and side. One can thus search the Talmud Bavli either by Mishna, which dictates the subject matter of the Talmudic means “page” and searching by daf is the most common (דף) ”commentators, or by daf. The word “daf way to find information in the Talmud Bavli. The daf refers to both the folio number and the side, written in English with the Arabic numerals 0-9 and the Latin letters “a” and “b”. In Hebrew, and in traditional replacing the Latin letters “a” and (ב) and bet (א) Judaism, the daf is cited with the Hebrew letters aleph .אb”. Therefore, I will begin in Ketubot with daf 2a, or 2“
106 Ketubot 2a. All translations from the Talmud, both Bavli and Yerushalmi, are mine, produced with the aid of Jastrow, Dictionary of Targumim, the Talmud Bavli and Yerushalmi; as well as the Talmud Bavli: The Schottenstein edition: The Gemara: the classic Vilna edition, with an annotated, interpretive elucidation, as an aid to Talmud study. Brooklyn, NY: Mesorah Publications, Ltd., 2000; for the traditional interpretations.
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the fifth day, so that if he (the husband) had a claim about the young woman he could be early (in the morning) at the court of law.107
Following the Mishna, the Gemara explains that this distinction of best days for a wedding is entirely based on practicality, and not for any special reason. Using the explanation in the Mishna, the distinction of the fourth day is so that, should the new husband believe his wife was not a virgin, or was somehow not what he wanted, he could run to get a divorce first thing in the morning after the wedding.108 Another practical reason brought up is for the convenience of the husband, who needs time to prepare for the wedding.109 Therefore, the wedding should take place later in the week.110 The specification of the fourth and fifth days of the week are so that people do not get married on Friday, the Gemara then explains, because the first consummation of the marriage must not take place on Shabbat.111
The Gemara amplified this reasoning and added that there must be seven days of feasting following the wedding.112 Even if a relative has died, the new husband cannot sit shiva, the seven days of ritual mourning, until the seven days of celebration and feasting are completed.113 This protracted celebration is the first Talmudic mention of a pre- established wedding tradition, and it provides an explanation for why the husband-to-be
107 Ketubot 2a.
108 Ketubot 2a-3b.
109 Ketubot 2a.
110 Ketubot 2a.
111 Ketubot 4b-5a. According to the Judaic tradition, Shabbat (the Sabbath) is the seventh day of the week. Thus, the fourth day of the week is Wednesday, the fifth day of the week is Thursday, and the sixth day of the week is Friday.
112 Ketubot 3b-4a.
113 Ketubot 3b-4a, 7a-7b. No explanation is given to explain why the wedding supersedes the mourning.
Laina Miller 36 would need several days to prepare for the wedding. These seven days of celebration are not only necessary, but are only the inside limit for the days dedicated towards the wedding celebration.114 There may be as many more than seven days of celebration as the family desires, but seven days is the absolute minimum.115 On each of these seven days, the couple is blessed from a series of seven benedictions, all of which are recited on the day of the wedding itself.116 These blessings thank God for the creation of humanity, celebrate the creation of fertility and reproduction, and exhort the listeners to bring joy and happiness to the married couple and rejoice in the Jewish nation.117
Later in Ketubot, during an explanation of the definition of “witnesses” to a wedding, the Gemara argues that bringing joy to the bride, particularly by way of singing and dancing, is not only recommended, but required.118 Not only is the ritualization of such celebration necessary to the wedding, but it supersedes all other aspects of life, including funeral processions and the study of Torah.119 According to the Gemara, even if one is in mourning, one should dance and sing before the bride on her wedding day.120
The only other aspect of a wedding which might be associated with traditions and ceremonies which is discussed in Ketubot is a quick mention of the bride’s clothing. On
and why it ”,הינומא“ ”,daf 17b, the Gemara discusses the definition of the word “hinuma
114 Ketubot 7a-7b.
115 Ketubot 7a-7b.
116 Ketubot 7b-8a.
117 Ketubot 7b-8a.
118 Ketubot 16b-17a.
119 Ketubot 16b-17a.
120 Ketubot 16b-17a.
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While defining the 121”.הינומא“ might be important for a bride to be in public with a
a covering the bride“ ”,קריתא דמנמנה בה כלתא“ is ”הינומא“ the Gemara states that a ”,הינומא“ may sleep beneath.”122 The only other times that the Gemara in Ketubot discusses the traditional clothing of a bride, it explains that a bride would make or purchase a new and beautiful dress, and special jewelry.123 Nowhere in the discussion of a bride’s clothing, other than the possible mention on daf 17b, does the Mishna or Gemara mention something which might be interpreted as a veil. Even in the mention on daf 17b, the description of a bride wearing a veil is not set in stone as a tradition, but as a possibility - it is a covering that she may wear, not a requirement of the wedding.124 This note will become particularly important in my later discussion of medieval traditions, since medieval Jews did have a tradition for the bride to wear a veil.125
Moving on to the book of Kiddushin, the text immediately focuses on the ritual stages to a marriage, specifically debating which rituals are vital to the creation of a valid marriage.126 According to the Mishna in Kiddushin 2a:
האשה נקנית בשלש דרכים וקונה את עצמה בשתי דרכים נקנית בכסף בשטר ובביאה…127
The woman is acquired with three things and acquires herself with two things: she is acquired with money, writ, and intercourse…128
And if there are witnesses that she went out with a“ ,”ואם יש עדים שיצתה בהינומא“ .Ketubot 17a-17b 121 hinuma…”
122 Ketubot 17a-17b.
123 Ketubot 57a-b.
124 Ketubot 17b.
.”קריתא“ ,Rashi’s Commentary of Ketubot, 17b 125
126 Kiddushin 2a-2b.
127 Kiddushin 2a.
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The Gemara then explains precisely what the Mishna means by “money, writ, and intercourse.” According to the Gemara, the exchange of money from the husband-to-be’s family to the bride-to-be’s father is the first stage in a marriage, often tentatively translated as the act of “betrothal.”129 All of the Rabbis in the Gemara agree that intercourse is necessary for a valid marriage, but the Gemara makes a point of asking why intercourse is necessary in addition to the exchange of money and the creation of a legal document detailing the union.130 After asking the question, the Gemara answers by explaining that the creation of a document and the exchange of money simply creates a binding contract, similar to that of a master and servant (or slave).131 The inclusion of intercourse within the ritual is what makes a marriage into a marriage.132
Following the discussion of intercourse, the Gemara goes into detail about the requirements to create a valid and binding document. The document, known as the
must have both the man’s and the woman’s written consent, and is ”,כתובה“ ”,Ketubah“ validated when both the husband-to-be and the bride-to-be publicly and verbally consent to the marriage.133 The Gemara stresses the importance of mutual consent, to the point that it must be part of the marriage ritual.134 The Ketubah places the weight of the obligation upon the husband-to-be. The contract delineates the obligations of the
128 Kiddushin 2a.
129 Kiddushin 2a-2b, 3b.
130 Kiddushin 5a.
131 Kiddushin 5a.
132 Kiddushin 5a.
133 Kiddushin 5b-6b, 9a-9b, 46a-46b.
There is no marriage without both of“ ”אין כותבין שטרי אירוסין ונשואין אלא מדעת שניהן.“ .Kiddushin 9b 134 their knowledge.”
Laina Miller 39 husband: how he must provide for and support his wife, the money he owes her for daily upkeep, and provisions for her in the event of his death. In return, the wife’s obligations are almost entirely summed up in the phrase “Be my wife.” 135 In the context of the
Ketubah, the term “wife” is culturally imbued with all of the meaning that the text needs, similarly to the way that the word “slave” might be in a master-slave contract. 136 Like the master in the master-slave contract, the husband agreed to provide the necessities of daily living, in exchange for loyalty, work, and the expectations inherent in the title of
“wife.”137
After both the husband-to-be and bride-to-be have signed this Ketubah, the husband-to-be must give the bride-to-be a small possession of value, to seal the contract with an exchange of value – much like a payment.138
Within the discussion of the three necessary actions to create a marriage, the
Gemara ‘interrupts’ itself with a short argument attributed to the Talmudic Rabbi known as Rava, asking why the ḥupah is not a necessary part of the wedding ceremony.139 The
Talmud is unclear about the precise definition of ḥupah, which in the modern era refers to a canopy under which the marital vows and blessings are recited. Kiddushin 4a describes a bride being “brought to” the ḥupah, while Kiddushin 10b not only describes a bride
The use of this phrasing dates back, at the very least, to the first and second centuries"תיהוי לי לאנתו." 135 CE, when it was cited in the Tosefta commentary of the Mishna. It appears again in the fourth century This particular phrase ”תהויין לי לאינתו.“ :recension of the Talmud, Talmud Yerushalmi, Ketubot 29a continued to be used in the Ketubah into the Middle Ages, as can be seen from its appearance in the מחזור ויטרי, פרק ) .See Simḥah ben Shemu’el of Vitry, Maḥzor Vitry, par. 553 ”הוי לי לאינתו.“ :Mahzor Vitry (תקנג
136 Ketubot 58b-61b. Especially Ketubot 59b, which specifically delineates what a wife is obligated to do for her husband.
137 Kiddushin 15a; Ketubot 58b-61b.
138 Kiddushin 46a-46b.
139 Kiddushin, 5b.
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“entering” a ḥupah, but also associates the ḥupah with the act of intercourse.140 If one refers to the earlier recension of the Talmud, Talmud Yerushalmi, in Ketubot 19b, the
ḥupah is quite literally a place in which intercourse occurs.141 The Rabbis eventually conclude this side argument by deciding that the ḥupah has no power on its own, but rather, represents the binding power of the Ketubah, monetary exchange, and sexual intercourse.142
The brief digression into the subject of the ḥupah, while relatively minor within the text of the Talmud, would come to have a larger impact in later years. The inclusion of the ḥupah into the discussion reveals that a tradition called ḥupah was already well- established in Jewish tradition long before the Middle Ages. On the other hand, the
ḥupah argument in the Talmud seems to imply something wildly different from the tradition with the same name that was a central part of medieval Jewish weddings. As will be discussed later, by the thirteenth century in Ashkenaz, there was a visible tradition of a canopy, much like the modern ḥupah tradition.143
The wedding traditions brought up and discussed in Ketubot and Kiddushin represent the developing Judaic legal dialogues between the educated Rabbis of the
Talmudic era. This era was particularly important for the development of the medieval
Jewish tradition, since it marked the true beginning of Judaism as a diasporic religion.
The period begun with the Babylonian exile and concluded with the collapse of the
140 Kiddushin 4a, 10b.
141 Talmud Yerushalmi, Ketubot, 19b.
142 Kiddushin, 5b.
143 Simḥa ben Yehuda, Maḥzor Worms, 1272, Worms (Germany), vol. 1, fol. 72v, Ms. Heb. 781°4, National Library of Israel.
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Roman Empire encompassed the era during which Jewish leaders recognized the importance of creating a discrete set of rules and traditions which separated the Jewish people from their neighbors. Throughout this period, conflicts between the Rabbinical decisions and beliefs about marital traditions, and the actual practices of exiled Jews, grew stronger. Many Jews had long since adopted the local traditions of marriage ritual, with a growing distinction between the practices of Babylonian Jews, and Judean Jews.
In Late Antiquity, Babylonian Jews borrowed the tradition of extremely strong betrothals from their Babylonian neighbors.144 As the time between the betrothal and the marriage decreased, the expectations of chastity between the bride and groom decreased.145 The betrothal itself was considered almost as binding as the marriage itself, and a pseudo-divorce was necessary in order for either of the betrothed to marry someone else.146 Betrothals were celebrated with a party, and documented with a written agreement known as a Kiddushin, which detailed how the marriage and monetary exchanges would fall out.147 The Talmudic Kiddushin was invented by Babylonian rabbis during this period, as a way of differentiating Jewish betrothals from their non-
Jewish neighbors.148 The Kiddushin focused on the rights of both partners in the upcoming marriage, and the exchange of gifts and money between the husband-to-be, wife-to-be, and their families.149
144 Michael L. Satlow, Jewish Marriage in Antiquity, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 69.
145 Satlow, Jewish Marriage, 166-167.
146 Satlow, Jewish Marriage, 69-72
147 Satlow, Jewish Marriage, 69-73, 82-85, 163-164; Kiddushin, 64a-65a, 68a.
148 Satlow, Jewish Marriage, 82-85.
149 Satlow, Jewish Marriage, 71-73, 82-85, 122.
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At the Jewish betrothal party itself, celebrations lasted well into the night, and the monetary exchange between the husband-to-be and the bride’s family as detailed in the
Kiddushin took place.150 Three types of valuable gifts were given to the bride’s family at this point: money to pay for the betrothal feast, a gift which would return to the groom’s household with the bride after the wedding ceremony, and gifts which would stay with the bride-to-be’s father’s household.151 While the traditions of monetary exchange and strong betrothals were likely borrowed from the Babylonian traditions, the complex stratification of these practices were the acts of Talmudic rabbis, determined to create a difference between the Judaic practices and the practices of their Babylonian neighbors.152
The Talmudic era not only built the foundations of the rabbinical insistence on creating distinctions between Jewish marital rituals and neighboring marital rituals, but also provided descriptions of the pre-medieval Jewish marriage ceremony, itself. The marriage began with a procession, beginning at the home of the bride’s father, and moving towards the household of the groom.153 It is possible that the groom’s family may also have had its own procession, moving in the opposite direction in order to meet in the middle.154 The bride was brought along the procession in a litter, and both the bride and the groom wore garlands and were escorted with loud music.155 In a tradition
150 Satlow, Jewish Marriage, 163-166.
151 Satlow, Jewish Marriage, 164-166; Bava Basra, 146a.
152 Satlow, Jewish Marriage, 82-85.
153 Satlow, Jewish Marriage, 170-171.
154 Satlow, Jewish Marriage, 170-171.
155 Satlow, Jewish Marriage, 170-171; Sotah, 49a.
Laina Miller 43 possibly borrowed from a Babylonian custom to ward off evil, Babylonian Jews put ashes on the forehead of the groom.156 Talmudic rabbinical tradition argued that this practice was an act of mourning, in order to remember the destruction of the Second Temple during a time of celebration.157 While this may be true, it is equally likely that many people who practiced the ritual of placing ash on the groom’s forehead believed that the act would ward off evil, as the non-Jewish Babylonians did.158
Once the celebrants had united and the party had begun, the celebrants of the
Talmudic-era Jewish marriage were not only expected, but required by rabbinical law, to sing and dance before the bride.159 At some point during the festivities, the bride and groom were escorted to the ḥupah.160 A married woman, possibly the bride’s mother, would help the bride undress and get in bed, at which point the groom would enter the
ḥupah and consummate the marriage.161 The ḥupah in this era, unlike the modern tradition of the ḥupah, referred to either a tent or a room set aside for the occasion, as was implied in the Talmud Yerushalmi.162 The tradition of the ḥupah discussed in the Talmud
Bavli is the same type of ritual - the consummation of the marriage in a tent or set-aside room. 163 There may have also been a tradition of a small in-room sacrifice, to bring good
156 Satlow, Jewish Marriage, 171-172.
157 Satlow, Jewish Marriage, 171-172.
158 Satlow, Jewish Marriage, 171-172.
159 Satlow, Jewish Marriage, 173.
160 Satlow, Jewish Marriage, 172-175.
161 Satlow, Jewish Marriage, 172-175.
162 Satlow, Jewish Marriage, 172-175; Talmud Yerushalmi, Ketubot 19b, 28b.
163 Talmud Yerushalmi, Ketubot 19b, 28b; Talmud Bavli, Ketubot 48b.
Laina Miller 44 fortune and fertility, but if so, the Talmudic rabbis refused to acknowledge the practice.164
After the marriage was sealed, the marriage feast and celebration continued for multiple days.165 According to rabbinic law, the feasting and celebration was required to last for at least seven days, but the actual practice may have been closer to three or four days.166
After either a handful of days or the rabbinically required seven, the marriage was considered valid and unbreakable short of a divorce.167
By the end of the Talmudic period, Jewish marriages had developed their own detailed rules and rituals, both borrowed from their neighbors and created by Jewish leaders. Betrothal and marriage ceremonies had begun to develop a shape distinct from the more general concepts discussed in the Biblical texts. The traditions described in
Tanakh, from the exchange of gifts and money, to the movement of the bride from one household to another, were elaborated upon and given ritual accompaniment in order to create a type of marriage that was derived from religious texts, borrowed from local culture, and legislated by Talmudic rabbis.
Greco-Roman Marriage Practices and the Rise of Christianity
The Jewish people of the Greco-Roman period believed that Greco-Roman weddings were implicated in idolatrous worship.168 To that point, Talmudic rabbis
164 Satlow, Jewish Marriage, 174-175. This practice is discussed in the Book of Tobit, which dates to an era approximately concurrent with the early Mishnaic period, as well as in the writings of Philo and Josephus.
165 Satlow, Jewish Marriage, 178; Talmud Bavli, Ketubot, 2a-4a, 7b-8a.
166 Satlow, Jewish Marriage, 178; Ketubot, 2a-4a, 7b-8a.
167 Satlow, Jewish Marriage, 178; Ketubot, 2a-4a, 7b-8a.
168 Avodah Zarah 8a-b.
Laina Miller 45 forbade Jews from attending Greek or Roman weddings, for fear that one might accidentally commit the sin of idol-worship.169 The reality of Greco-Roman marriage rituals was significantly more complicated than the simple polytheistic acts of worship that the Talmudic rabbis believed them to be. Karen K. Hersch describes the Roman wedding ceremony as a “socioreligious” event, arguing that, while the gods and the worship of the gods played a role in the wedding, such religious activity was more symbolic and traditional than necessary for the validity of the marriage.170
Many aspects of the Roman marriage ceremony developed from earlier Classical
Greek and Athenian rituals. Three major aspects of the Classical Athenian wedding, the act of engye, the dowry, and endogamous marriage, continued into the traditions of
Republican and Imperial Rome.171 The act of engye was the ritualized handing over of a young woman from her father to her husband, a public event which legitimized the union and implied the bride’s purity in her direct passage from her father’s household to her husband.172 This tradition remained a part of the Roman wedding ceremony, despite the fact that a Roman marriage was theoretically a contractual union between consenting adults in order to produce legitimate children.173 This tradition, in fact, was more
169 Avodah Zarah 8a-b.
170 Karen K. Hersch, The Roman Wedding: Ritual and Meaning in Antiquity, (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 229-230.
171 Cheryl A. Cox, “Marriage in Ancient Athens,” in A Companion to Families in the Greek and Roman Worlds, edited by Beryl Rawson, (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, Ltd., 2011), 231-232, 240-241; Suzanne Dixon, “From Ceremonial to Sexualities: A Survey of Scholarship on Roman Marriage,” in A Companion to Families in the Greek and Roman Worlds, edited by Beryl Rawson, (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, Ltd., 2011), 247-249; Hersch, Roman Wedding, 123-131, 140-141; James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe, (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 87-88.
172 Cox, “Marriage in Ancient Athens,” 231-232.
173 Dixon, “From Ceremonial to Sexualities,” 247-249; Alan Watson, The State, Law, and Religion: Pagan Rome (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1992), 32; Susan Treggiari, Roman Marriage: Iusti
Laina Miller 46 accurate to the reality of a Roman marriage than the theoretical joining of two adults - a
Roman marriage was usually set up by the fathers of the couple, and not the couple themselves.174
Early Roman marriage practices differed by class and locale. The three major styles of “marriage” in early Rome were usus, farreum, and coemptio.175 The simplest and most common form of union, as well as the form with the least fanfare, was usus, one unbroken year of cohabitation.176 At the end of that year, the man and woman were considered married, but the woman was not necessarily in manus.177 To be in manus was a legal term for the position of a wife in relation to her husband.178 Previous to her marriage, a bride was in the manus, or “possession,” of her father.179 If a marriage was carried out as coemptio or confarreatio, the bride entered into the manus of her new husband. With coemptio, a form of marriage which was structured as a symbolic ‘sale’, the bride was exchanged for money and/or property.180 This form was likely the most common form of marriage in the early Roman period, and remained symbolically within the rituals of the Imperial Roman marriage ceremony.181 The third form of early Roman
Coniuges from the Time of Cicero to the Time of Ulpian (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1991), 13.
174 Dixon, “From Ceremonial to Sexualities,” 247-249; Eva Cantarella, “Women and Patriarchy in Roman Law,” Oxford Handbook of Roman Law and Society (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2016), 421.
175 Hersch, Roman Wedding, 23-27; Treggiari, Roman Marriage, 16-17.
176 Hersch, Roman Wedding, 23-27.
177 Treggiari, Roman Marriage, 17-21.
178 Treggiari, Roman Marriage, 16-17.
179 Treggiari, Roman Marriage, 16-17, 32-33; Watson, The State, Law, and Religion, 51.
180 Hersch, Roman Wedding, 23-27; Cantarella, “Women and Patriarchy,” 421.
181 Hersch, Roman Wedding, 40-43, 123-131.
Laina Miller 47 marriage was ceremonial, an actual religious ritual over which Roman priests presided.182
Unfortunately, no record of the actual rites remain, but it is presumed to have been a ritual involving some type of sacrifice of grain to Jupiter or an associated deity.183 This ritual marriage, known as confarreatio, had already nearly vanished from practice by the second century BCE, and may have been entirely out of practice by the first century
BCE.184 At least by the late Republic, it appears that the importance of the confarreatio was entirely attached to the practice of religion: in Republican and Imperial Rome, priests were required to have been legitimate children from a confarreatio marriage.185
By the Imperial Roman period, the practice of confarreatio had vanished altogether, and all forms of manus marriage appear to have faded, but that did not remove the practice of ritualized marriage from Imperial Rome.186 Romans believed that
Kalends, Nones, and Ides were unlucky days for a wedding, as well as any holy days dedicated to the dead or devoted to purification.187 It is unclear how seriously the people of Rome took this tradition of lucky and unlucky days for marriage, but it was important enough for several Roman writers to record it, as well as for the tradition to carry over into early Christian belief.188
182 Hersch, Roman Wedding, 23-27.
183 Watson, The State, Law, and Religion, 51.
184 Hersch, Roman Wedding, 23-27.
185 Watson, The State, Law, and Religion, 51.
186 Watson, The State, Law, and Religion, 51-52; Cantarella, “Women and Patriarchy,” 425.
187 Olga Tellegen-Couperus, Law and Religion in the Roman Republic (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 103; Hersch, Roman Wedding, 45-51; Treggiari, Roman Marriage, 162.
188 Hersch, Roman Wedding, 45-51.
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The structure of Imperial Roman wedding traditions focused on the bride. From her actions to her clothing, the bride was hemmed in by ritual. The bride was dressed by her mother in a complex costume, from a detailed hairstyle which may have been borrowed from the Vestals, to a vibrant veil which was a vibrant shade between red and yellow.189 The hairstyle may have had multiple symbolic meanings. Some argue that the bride’s hairstyle was meant to symbolize her liminal status between households, while others claim that it was meant to represent the bride’s movement from maidenhood into adulthood.190 The bride’s hair was crowned with a garland or wreath of flowers, which may have been used to evoke either fertility and sexuality, or death. Flowered garlands were used as gifts for the dead, and there is significant evidence that Romans drew parallels between weddings and funerals.191 Another possibility is that the bride’s crown of flowers evoked the celebratory atmosphere of the wedding party - garlands were traditional party attire, and the groom was also crowned with a garland at the wedding ceremony.192 The bride’s tunic was cinched with a belt, which was meant to represent her virginity.193 Her husband’s removal of the belt would then imply the successful consummation of the marriage.194
189 Ariadne Staples, From Good Goddess to Vestal Virgins: Sex and Category in Roman Religion (London, England: Routledge, 1998), 145-146; Hersch, Roman Wedding, 70-71, 75-76, 227; Treggiari, Roman Marriage, 149-150, 163.
190 Staples, Good Goddess, 145-146; Hersch, Roman Wedding, 75-76.
191 Hersch, Roman Wedding, 72, 90-91.
192 Hersch, Roman Wedding, 91-92.
193 Staples, Good Goddess, 146; Hersch, Roman Wedding, 109-111.
194 Hersch, Roman Wedding, 109-111.
Laina Miller 49
The piece of clothing that held the most symbolic value in the Imperial Roman wedding was the bride’s veil. The veil, known as the flammeum, may have only covered the bride’s hair, like a matron’s everyday veil, or it may have obscured her entire face, as veils often did to propel the plot in comedic plays.195 Sources disagree over whether the veil was meant to be red, orange, or yellow, but they agree that the veil was a vibrant color and recognizable from a distance, and that the veil was the ultimate symbol of the bride. 196 Some Roman authors even used the word ‘veil’ to stand in linguistically for the word ‘bride’.197 In a ritual which mirrored an earlier Athenian tradition, a bride was brought from her father’s home to her husband’s house in a large procession, showered with nuts and escorted with torches.198 The nuts were representative of fertility and plentitude, while torches were associated with both weddings and funerals in Greek traditions, traditions which the Romans took for their own.199 Throughout this procession, the bride was visible to all by her veil, which stood out among the crowds.
The veil symbolized the transition from maiden to matron, and was thus incredibly important for the honor of both families involved in the wedding.200
Modern knowledge of the Roman wedding ceremony itself is piecemeal. Many parts and pieces of the ceremony are mentioned in sources as wildly different as Juvenal
195 Staples, Good Goddess, 146; Hersch, Roman Wedding, 96-99.
196 Fay Glinister, “Veiled and Unveiled: Uncovering Roman Influence in Hellenistic Italy,” in Votives, Places, and Rituals in Etruscan Religion: Studies in Honor of Jean MacIntosh Turfa, ed. Margarita Gleba and Hilary Becker, (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 195-196; Hersch, Roman Wedding, 96-102.
197 Glinister, “Veiled and Unveiled,” 195-196; Hersch, Roman Wedding, 96-102.
198 Staples, Good Goddess, 84-86; Hersch, Roman Wedding, 140-141, 164-165.
199 Staples, Good Goddess, 84-86; Hersch, Roman Wedding, 140-141, 164-165.
200 Hersch, Roman Wedding, 101-102; Treggiari, Roman Marriage, 169.
Laina Miller 50 and Cato, but their connections and timing within the ceremony are uncertain. 201 Both the bride and the groom were expected to make sacrifices to multiple gods on their wedding day.202 This either took place before the wedding, or during the wedding ceremony.203 Brides gave sacrifices to the gods to symbolize the end of their childhood, and the sacrifice of their virginity.204 After arriving at her husband’s house, the bride also gave a sacrifice to the household gods, the Lares.205 The Lares, as the gods of the new household, were vital to the wedding, but otherwise, no specific gods were attached to the
Roman wedding ceremony.206 Rather, while sacrifices were traditional, they seem to be directed at gods chosen by the participants.207 Different parts of the ceremony were symbolically related to specific gods, but Romans, like their Greek predecessors, did not feel that one god had complete dominance over the ritual transition from unmarried to married.208 Many gods, including Hymenaeus, Concordia, Juno, Ceres, and Venus, were considered to be related to the wedding rituals, particularly in connection to many of the semi-religious songs and poems which were sung and recited at the wedding.209 Vesta
201 Treggiari, Roman Marriage, 161-162.
202 Hersch, Roman Wedding, 119-120.
203 Hersch, Roman Wedding, 119-121.
204 Treggiari, Roman Marriage, 180.
205 Hersch, Roman Wedding, 176-177.
206 Hersch, Roman Wedding, 227-232.
207 Hersch, Roman Wedding, 227-232.
208 Hersch, Roman Wedding, 227-232.
209 Staples, Good Goddess, 84-86; Hersch, Roman Wedding, 232-266.
Laina Miller 51 and Janus, both gods of liminality and thresholds, were also occasionally associated with marriage.210
At some point during the wedding, likely at the end of the procession, there was a mock abduction of the bride from her mother (or a substitute matron).211 This was a ritual of good luck meant to invoke the success of the Romans over the Sabine women.212
Plutarch argued that this mock abduction included the ritual of carrying the bride over the threshold.213 Most other sources agree that the bride was meant to avoid stepping on the threshold, although it is unclear whether this threshold refers to the threshold of her husband’s house, or the threshold of her husband’s bedroom.214 According to many sources, the bride smeared the fat of either a wolf or a pig over the doorposts of her new home before she ever entered it, in order to ward off evil.215 Then, to ensure good luck, she could not step on or kick the threshold, which was presided over by the same gods who preside over all points of liminality - including her own, as a woman between both childhood and adulthood and two different households.216
Amidst all of this ritual, the bride recited a phrase of verbal consent, which may have had no more meaning than to invoke symbolic mutual consent, and the bride and groom clasped hands.217 Sexual intercourse, while validated by the marriage, was not
210 Hersch, Roman Wedding, 274-275.
211 Staples, Good Goddess, 28-29; Hersch, Roman Wedding, 140-150.
212 Staples, Good Goddess, 28-29; Hersch, Roman Wedding, 140-150.
213 Staples, Good Goddess, 28-29; Hersch, Roman Wedding, 180-182.
214 Hersch, Roman Wedding, 180-182.
215 Treggiari, Roman Marriage, 168.
216 Hersch, Roman Wedding, 180-182, 274-275; Treggiari, Roman Marriage, 168.
217 Hersch, Roman Wedding, 187-190, 208-212.
Laina Miller 52 considered to be part of the marriage rituals, although most couples consummated their marriage the evening of their wedding day.218 Significantly more important to the validity of the marriage was the creation and signing of a contract of marriage, which was originally a simple dowry contract.219 In the later years of the Roman Empire, the marriage contract grew more and more vital.220 On the same day as all of this semi- religious tradition and ritual, a festive wedding celebration and a large feast was celebrated; a public event which was nearly as important as all of the preceding ritual due to its ability to publicize, and thus, validate, the wedding.221
The validity and ritual of a Roman wedding did not change in the early days of the Christian church’s rise.222 Marriage was considered the only path to sex which was not a sin, but the Christian church did not immediately address itself to making any significant changes to the rituals of the wedding itself.223 By the second century CE, however, Christians had begun to create religious rituals to append onto secular Roman weddings, which included the participation of a bishop.224 During this era, it was necessary that a marriage be public.225 A secret wedding ceremony was considered
218 Hersch, Roman Wedding, 220-221.
219 Hersch, Roman Wedding, 123-131.
220 Hersch, Roman Wedding, 123-131.
221 Hersch, Roman Wedding, 212-219.
222 Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, 66.
223 Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, 66.
224 Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, 66; Ignatius of Antioch, “Epistle of Ignatius to Polycarp, Chapter 5,” translated and edited by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1, (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885), revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight.
225 Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, 66
Laina Miller 53 practically invalid, both because marriage was believed to affect the entire Christian community, and because of the belief that parents had the right to have final say over their children’s spouses.226
As the Christian church grew in popularity and power, Christian law began to change the requirements for a valid marriage. In the fourth and fifth centuries CE, the
Christian Roman law required marriages to be blessed by a priest.227 In Gaul, this blessing was received over the marriage bed, while in Italy, this blessing was received in or beside a church, at which point mutual consent for the marriage was given.228 During this period, sexual intercourse was not considered to be a necessary part of a Christian marriage, but dowries moved from the status of tradition into a legal requirement for a valid marriage.229 The long-standing Greco-Roman and Judaic traditions of endogamy were crushed beneath new Christian incest laws, which created strict rules about who was permitted to marry whom.230
As part of his overhaul of Roman law, the Emperor Justinian pushed for the codification of laws about marriage. While he claimed that love and affection were what made a marriage, strengthening the importance of mutual consent, Justinian was increasingly concerned with creating legal proofs of a proper Christian marriage.231
Concurrently, western Christian theologians and bishops began to put significantly more
226 Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, 66.
227 Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, 87-88.
228 Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, 87-88.
229 Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, 89-93.
230 Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, 89-93.
231 Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, 113-114, 122-123.
Laina Miller 54 emphasis on the Roman laws of consent than the presence of a clergy member. 232
Similarly concerned with ascertaining the legitimacy of a marriage, Justinian decided that one was required to have documents from the marriage which concerned the monies and properties within the marriage.233 Eventually, Justinian resolved that this was only required for upper-class citizens, but despite the softening of the rules, the Roman-
Christian focus on proving the legitimacy of the marriage remained.234 By the early
Middle Ages, the Roman rituals that Christians had borrowed remained in practice in regions where Roman presence was strongest, while the rituals and traditions of
Germanic peoples began to blend with the loose Christian rites of marriage.235
In Conclusion
Beginning with the oldest records of marriage from the Tanakh, Jewish traditions have evolved over time from a solely social and financial affair into an event perceived as significantly more important. By the time the Talmudic texts had been ratified in the sixth and seventh centuries CE, Jewish marriage had adopted a ritualistic side, picking up small traditions and practices from the many cultures which controlled Jewish communities throughout the centuries. Greek and Roman traditions mingled alongside
Babylonian and Jewish ritual towards the end of Late Antiquity. At the same moments that Jewish rabbis struggled to justify Greco-Roman and Babylonian intrusions into
Jewish ceremony, Christianity was flooding the Roman Empire, and developing opinions
232 Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, 89.
233 Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, 113-114, 122-123.
234 Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, 113-114, 122-123.
235 Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, 124-126.
Laina Miller 55 about marriage in response to their own theological concerns. While Jewish theologians clung to the Near East, their communities were spreading westward, and becoming embroiled in a new world of problems and concerns.
Tradition insisted that Jewish rituals of marriage, prior to the Middle Ages, were divinely inspired. In the Talmud, every effort is made to explain Jewish actions in a purely Judaic way, with no interference from heretical or pagan influences. And yet, what I argue in this chapter is that the precise opposite is true: Jewish tradition has a long history of borrowing rituals and practices from their non-Jewish neighbors, and reshaping them into their own wedding traditions. Inward acculturation had long been the norm, and the rituals of the Jewish wedding had never been stagnant, even before the Jews’ arrival in Western Europe. Babylonian, Greek, and Roman influences slipped into
Jewish practice, becoming so central to Jewish traditions that Talmudic rabbis found themselves inventing a Jewish history and reasoning for those traditions. In Late
Antiquity, Jews warded off evil at their weddings in the Babylonian manner, adapted dowries akin to the Greeks’, and sealed their marriages with the same type of strong contracts that the Roman legislators had instituted for Roman weddings. By the time the
Islamic empire began to spread across the Near East and the Mediterranean, such retroactive explanations had become a part of official rabbinic Judaism, where they were taught and explained by rabbis in the east, and rabbis in the west.
56
Chapter 2: Living in Ashkenaz, Moving Away from Babylon
Introduction
According to Jewish legend, the first community of Ashkenazi Jews was built under the orders of either Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman Emperor and King of the
Franks, or his grandson, Charles the Bald.236 According to the tale, these Jews, led by
Rabbi Moses Kalonymos from their homes in Lucca, traveled up the Rhine River and settled in Mainz.237 This tradition, recorded in the medieval Sefer Rokeach and repeated in the early modern text Mitzraf L’Chochma by Joseph Delmedigo, posited that Jews migrated into Ashkenazi lands at a relatively late point in the early Middle Ages.238
The legend of the Carolingian transportation of Jews from Italy placed the movement of Ashkenazi Jews into Northwestern Europe within the bounds of the eighth or ninth century. This legend reinforced the determined Ashkenazi belief that they were more closely culturally bound to the traditional Jewish community than to their Christian neighbors, by implying that their arrival in Ashkenaz was relatively recent. Sources from
Late Antiquity and the very early Middle Ages prove, however, that there have been Jews in Western Europe for a significantly longer period of time than the traditional tale would have us believe. Late Antiquity Jews were still tied to the Near Eastern traditions of the
Babylonian schools, even as they became established in Western Europe.
In this chapter, I argue that the transition from reliance upon Eastern Rabbis to
Ashkenazi Rabbinic leadership led to a shift in the way that local leaders interacted with
236 Joseph Solomon Delmedigo, Mitzraf L’Khokhma, (Basel: 1629; repr. New York, NY: Biegeleisen, 1992), 50-51.
237 Delmedigo, Mitzraf, 50-51; Joseph Solomon Delmedigo, Mechov Khokhma, (London, England: 1653), 45.
238 Delmedigo, Mitzraf, 50-51; Delmedigo, Mechov, 45. Laina Sara Miller 57
European wedding traditions. In the days of Late Antiquity, local Rabbis could reach out to the Rabbis in the Near East for rulings about what was and was not permitted at a wedding. The occasional odd local tradition here and there was dismissed as something that the uneducated masses did, and was ignored. Once local Rabbis were fully responsible for the religious behaviors of their locales, however, Rabbis had to justify these traditions, and consequently obscure the Christian origins of these traditions, by rewriting the history of Ashkenazi Jewish wedding rituals. As this chapter illustrates, medieval Ashkenazi Jewish wedding rituals were built upon centuries of shared culture and interaction. Christians and Jews lived alongside each other for generations, before the Rabbis of Ashkenaz became concerned with the practices of their constituents and reacted reflexively to the horrors of the Rhineland Massacre and the First Crusade. The
Ashkenazi Rabbis’ response, endeavors towards a distinctly Jewish self-identity, unfortunately, had the effect of partially erasing their European past prior to the medieval period.
Arriving in Ashkenaz: Jews, Christians, and Rewriting Ashkenazi History
The traditional narrative of Jews arriving in western Christian Europe in the
Carolingian era erases the centuries of Ashkenazi Jews that were present prior to the rise of the Carolingians. This narrative had a twofold effect - it elevates the historical figure of Charlemagne, already an important figure in medieval Christian Europe, and it reduces the amount of time that the Jews of Ashkenaz spent as part of western Christian culture.
If Ashkenazi Jews were only present in western Europe beginning in the ninth century, then rabbinic tradition could ignore any suggestions that Jews had become a part of the
Laina Sara Miller 58 society in which they lived, and insist that there was only a recent presence of Jews in western Europe. This also allowed Ashkenazi rabbis to trace a timeline of Jews in western Christian Europe which began almost simultaneously with the rise of powerful local rabbis in medieval Ashkenaz in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries.
Furthermore, a tradition ignoring the Jewish presence in the area of Ashkenaz during the late Roman Empire helped rabbis turn a blind eye to the uncomfortable relationship between Christians and Jews throughout that era - both the uncomfortably harsh rulings of the Christian Roman Emperors and local bishops, and the uncomfortably close relationships between Jews and Christians at that time.
As early as the fifth century, multiple texts imply the presence of Jews in the
Diocese of Gaul.239 Theodosius II and Valentinian III, emperors of the Eastern and
Western Roman Empires, respectively, sent a decree to the prefect of Gaul in 425 CE, prohibiting Jews from holding public office and practicing law:
Iudaeis quoque vel paganis causas agendi vel militandi licentiam denegamus: quibus Christianae legis nolumus servire personas, ne occasione dominii sectam venerandae religionis inmutent.240
To Jews and also to pagans: We deny the right to plead cases and to be members of the imperial service. It is Our will that persons of the Christian faith shall not be slaves of such persons, lest by the occasion offered by ownership they should change the sect of the venerable religion. Therefore We order all persons of such ill-omened false doctrine to be banished, unless swift reform should come to their aid.241
239 In this case, I am referring to the Roman Imperial Dioecesis Galliarum, excluding the later-established Diocese of Vienna.
240 “Impp. Theodosius A. et Valentinianus Caesar Amatio V. I. Praef(ecto) Pr(ae)t(o)r(io) Gall(iarum),” Constitutiones Sirmondianae 6, found in Thomas Mommsen and Paul Meyer, eds., Theodosiani Libri XVI cum Constiutionibus Sirmondianis et Leges Novellae ad Theodosianum Pertinentes (Berlin: Weidmann, 1905), 912, lines 23-28.
241 Constitutiones Sirmondiae 6, in Clyde Pharr, trans., The Theodosian Code and Novels and the Sirmondian Constitutions, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1952), 480.
Laina Sara Miller 59
By forbidding Jews from positions of power over Christians, not only does this text expect the reader to understand that there were Jews living in the prefecture of Gaul, but that they were living with comfortable and even powerful status. This idea is reinforced by the declarations of the Council of Vannes, forty years later, which banned Christian clergy from eating meals with Jews:
Omnes deinceps clerici Judaeorum convivia evitent, nec eos ad convivium quisquam excipiat, quia cum apud Christianos cibis communibus non utantur, indignum est atque sacrilegum eorum cibos a Christianis sumi cum ea quae apostolo permittente nos sumimus, ab illis judicentur immunda, ac sic inferiores incipiant esse clerici quam Judaei, si nos quae ab illis apponuntur, utamur, illi a nobis oblata contemnant.242
All clerics and laymen should henceforth avoid the banquets of Jews, nor shall anyone receive them to a banquet; as they do not consume food in common with Christians, it is shameful and sacrilegious for their food to be consumed by Christians; for what we consume - with the Apostle’s permission - they would judge unclean, and thus the catholics shall begin to be inferior to the Jews, if we should consume what they serve while they should despise what we offer.243
This canon, which aimed to increase a cultural separation between the Jews and the
Christians of Gaul and support Christian pride above Jewish actions, intensifies the implication inherent in the 425 CE Imperial decree. Jews were not only widespread and well-established in fifth-century Gaul, but were intermingling with the Christian communities as well. Bishops themselves, even as they condemned the Jewish
“perfidiam,” used Jewish messengers to send letters all across Gaul.244
242 Canones Concilium Veneticum, Canon XII, in Joannes Dominicus Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio, vol. 7 (Florence, Italy: Antonio Zatta, 1762), col. 951-953.
243 Translation of Canones Concilium Veneticum, Canon XII, found in Amnon Linder, The Jews in the Legal Sources of the Early Middle Ages (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 467. The use of the word “catholics” in this case, would be in reference to the clerics.
244 Sidonius Apollinaris, Epistuale, vol. 6, letter 11. “...sane quia secundum vel negotia vel iudicia terrena solent huiuscemodi homines honestas habere causas, tu quoque potes huius laboriosi, etsi impugnas perfidiam, propugnare personam, memor nostri esse dignare, domine papa.” In Sidonius Modestus Apollinaris, Poems and Letters with an English Translation, ed. W. B. Anderson, trans. William
Laina Sara Miller 60
By the sixth century, Jewish-Christian interaction in Gaul was so common, that five different church synods forbade intermingling, intermarriage, shared holidays, and the Christian practice of the Jewish Sabbath.245 The subject was considered serious enough for the members of the Second Council of Orléans to order the excommunication of any Christians who did not dissolve their marriages with Jews:
Placuit, ut nullus Christianus Iudeam neque Iudeus Christianam in matrimonio ducat uxorem, quia inter huiusmodi personas illicitas nuptias esse censuimus. Qui si commoniti a consortio hoc se separare distullerint, a communiones sunt gratia sine dubio submovendi.246
It has been resolved that no Christian should take a Jewess in matrimony to be his wife, nor a Jew a Christian woman, for we have decreed that marriages between such persons are illegal. Those who put off severance from this association, though warned, shall undoubtably be removed from the communion’s grace.247
There is a similar repetition of legislation from Church Councils which addressed the issue of Jews who possessed Christian slaves. The repeated consideration of this subject seems to imply that the Jews of early Franco-Germany were well-to-do enough to maintain large households, with slaves, as well as implying that the earlier edicts were not well-enforced.248
Heinemann, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936), 2:276, found on Perseus Digital Library,
245 These are: the Synod of Agde (506), the First Council of Orléans (511), the Second Council of Orléans (533), the Council of Clermont (535), and the Third Council of Orléans (538). See Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum, vol. 8, col. 319-347, 347-372, 836-840, 860-870; Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum, vol. 9, col. 10-24.
246 Canones Concilium Aurelianense II, Canon XIX, in Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum, vol. 8, col. 838.
247 Linder, Jews in the Legal Sources, 469.
248 Canones Concilium Aurelianense III, Canon XIII, in Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum, vol. 9, col. 15-16; Canones Concilium Aurelianense III, Canon XXXI, in Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum, vol. 9, col. 118; Canones Concilium Matisconense, Canon XVI, in Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum, vol. 9, col. 935.
Laina Sara Miller 61
During the seventh century, during the reign of Dagobert I, it seems that there was a growing perception that the repeated passage of laws and canons against Jews had not achieved the desired effect of ridding Christian lands of the Jews. According to an almost certainly apocryphal tale, Dagobert received a missive from Heraclius in the
Eastern Roman Empire, ordering him to baptize all of the Jews within his borders. The tale claims that Heraclius was afraid that the Jews would be his downfall, due to an astrologer’s prediction that a ‘circumcised people’ would defeat him. This tale is of ninth-century origin, and ends with a “joke’s on you” style ending, wherein Heraclius later discovers, after Dagobert had obeyed him and Heraclius himself had persecuted the
Jews within his own control, that the prediction was about the growing Islamic Empire, rather than the Jews.249 A more likely interpretation of the events of Dagobert I’s reign is that Dagobert’s life-long connection to the Church led him to actions which he saw as
God-ordained actions for the betterment and protection of Christianity.250 Dagobert almost certainly did forcibly baptize large groups of Jews within his borders, actions which were perceived as being terribly righteous and the works of a good Christian king.251 The existence of the odd explanatory tale from the ninth century may have been a medieval ‘historian’s’ attempt to explain why Dagobert would have expelled the Jews
249 J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, The Fourth Book of the Chronicle of Fredegar; with its continuations, (London: Nelson’s Medieval Texts, 1960), 53-55.
250 J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, Early Germanic Kingship in England and on the Continent (Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1971), 48.
251 Wallace-Hadrill argues that the independent confirmation of two separate sources, the Gesta Dagoberti and the Chronicle of Fredegar make it highly likely that some type of large-scale forced baptisms did occur during Dagobert I’s reign. See J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, The Long-Haired Kings and Other Studies in Frankish History (New York, NY: Barnes and Noble, Inc., 1962), 211; Wallace-Hadrill, The Frankish Church (Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1983), 392.
Laina Sara Miller 62 of his kingdom, when the Carolingian dynasty of Franco-Germany was quite tolerant of the Jewish presence within its borders.252
It is precisely this Carolingian tradition of tolerance for the Jewish presence in
Ashkenaz which, mostly likely, fed the tradition that it was Charlemagne himself who brought Jews into Ashkenaz. Mainstream Jewish tradition resolutely traces the presence of Jews in Ashkenaz to the invitation of Charlemagne in the eighth century. While there was definitely at least one Early Modern Jewish writer who had enough access to sources which suggested otherwise, most Jewish traditions push past those facts to focus on the endearing account of Charlemagne bringing the Jews to Ashkenaz. It is likely that
Charlemagne did invite some Italian Jews, such as Rabbi Kalonymos and his family, to move to the area of Ashkenaz, and his recorded actions with other Jews speaks to a relationship with Ashkenazi Jews that was possibly even friendlier than mere tolerance.
In Einhard’s Vita Karoli Magni, there is evidence that Charlemagne employed a
Jewish merchant to go to Palestine and bring back important merchandise for his household. Einhard describes an odd episode wherein Charlemagne conspired with one such Jewish merchant in order to take an overly prideful bishop down a few notches.253
The story that Einhard relates is an example of Charlemagne willingness to teach even the most arrogant of churchmen proper humility, in contrast with a preceding story in which Charlemagne raises up the lowly.254 According to Einhard, Charlemagne conspired with a Jewish merchant who was well-known for bringing fabulous and exotic items from
252 Wallace-Hadrill, Chronicle of Fredegar, 53-55.
253 A. J. Grant, ed., Early Lives of Charlemagne by Eginhard and the Monk of St. Gall, (London, England: Chatto and Windus, 1907), 80-82. The man who wrote Vita Karoli Magni is known both as Einhard and Eginhard.
254 Grant, Early Lives of Charlemagne, 80.
Laina Sara Miller 63 the Near East, in order to trick an overly haughty bishop into spending copious amounts of silver on a painted and stuffed mouse.255 Possibly the most fascinating aspect of this story is not that Charlemagne and a Jewish merchant managed to trick the bishop into paying the Jew for this gussied-up mouse, but that there is no mention of the Jew being forced to give back the money.256 In fact, the tale ends with Charlemagne scolding the haughty bishop in public, with no further mention of what happened to the Jewish merchant.257
Isaac the Jew, who was sent by Charlemagne with two ambassadors to Harun al-
Rashid in 797 CE, was probably another of these Jewish merchants in Charlemagne’s service.258 According to the Annales Regni Francorum, Isaac was originally sent to
“Persia” with two Christians by the names of Lantfrid and Sigimund, but that both of the men accompanying Isaac died during their travels.259 Instead, Isaac the Jew, as he is called in the text, returned from the East by way of Africa in 801. Over the winter, the
Annales state, Isaac stayed over Vercelli due to the impossibility of crossing the snowed-
255 Grant, Early Lives of Charlemagne, 81.
256 Grant, Early Lives of Charlemagne, 81-82.
257 Grant, Early Lives of Charlemagne, 82.
258 Friedrich Kurze and G. H. Pertz, Annales Regni Francorum, inde ab a. 741. usque ad a. 829.: qui dicuntur Annales laurissenses maiores et Einhardi, (Hanover: Impensis bibliopolii Hahniani, 1950), 114- 117; Bernhard W. Scholz and Barbara Rogers, eds., Carolingian Chronicles: Royal Frankish Annals and Nithard's Histories, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 81-82.
259 “Qui Isaac Iudeum, quem imperator ante quadriennium ad regem Persarum cum Lantfrido et Sigimundo miserat, reversum cum magnis muneribus nuntiaverunt; nam Lantfridus ac Sigimundus ambo defuncti erant…”
“(They reported) that Isaac the Jew, whom the emperor four years earlier had dispatched with Lantfrid and Sigimund to the king of the Persians, was returning with large presents, but that Lantfrid and Sigimund had both died…”
The Latin text is from Kurze and Pertz, Annales Regni Francorum, 114-117; the English text is from Scholz and Rogers, Carolingian Chronicles, 81-82.
Laina Sara Miller 64 in Alps. He returned to Charlemagne’s court in July 802, with an elephant named Abul
Abaz.260
Charlemagne was succeeded by his son, Louis. Louis’ actions may have reinforced the Jewish myth of Charlemagne the magnanimous friend of Jews.
Throughout his reign, Louis enshrined protections for the Jews within his borders in law, and seemed to have appreciated their value as merchants and travelers as much as his father had done so.261 Louis’ actions triggered angry responses from churchmen such as
Agobard of Lyon, and later, Agobard’s successor, Amulo.262 Louis ruled that Jews who owned slaves were permitted to bar the baptism of their slaves into Christianity, something which had been forbidden by Roman Christian law, and a ruling which infuriated Agobard of Lyon.263 Fourth century edicts had prohibited Jews from purchasing Christian slaves, and had automatically freed any slaves that Jews had circumcised.264 But with Louis at the helm, secular law ruled that slaves owned by Jews
260 “…Ipsius anni (801) mense Octobrio Isaac Iudeus de Africa cum elefanto regressus Portum Veneris intravit; et quia propter nives Alpes transire non potuit, in Vercellis hiemavit.…Ipsius anni (802) mense Iulio, XIII. Kal. Aug., venit Isaac cum elefanto et ceteris muneribus, quae a rege Persarum missa sunt, et Aquisgrani omnia imperatori detulit; nomen elefanti erat Abul Abaz…”
“…In the month of October of the same year (801) Isaac the Jew returned from Afric [sic] with the elephant and arrived at Porto-Venere. Since he could not cross the Alps because of the snow, he spent the winter at Vercelli.…On July 20 of this same year (802) Isaac arrived with the elephant and the other presents sent by the Persian king, and he delivered them to the emperor at Aachen. The name of the elephant was Abul Abaz.”
The Latin text is from Kurze and Pertz, Annales Regni Francorum, 114-117; the English text is from Scholz and Rogers, Carolingian Chronicles, 81-82.
261 D. Malkiel, “Jewish-Christian Relations in Europe, 840-1096,” Journal of Medieval History 29 (2003): 56; Anna Beth Langenwalter, “Agobard of Lyon: An Exploration of Carolingian Jewish-Christian Relations” (Ph. D. diss., University of Toronto, 2009), 28-29.
262 Malkiel, “Jewish-Christian Relations,” 56.
263 Langenwalter, “Agobard,” 29-31.
264 Codex Theodosianus 16.9.1, in Clyde Pharr, The Theodosian Code and Novels: And the Sirmondian Constitutions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1952), 471.
Laina Sara Miller 65 were protected from being forced to convert to Christianity, and Jewish ownership of non-Jewish slaves was shielded from Church interference as well.265 This flew directly in the face of the sixth-century work of Gregory of Tours and Avitus of Clermont, both of whom had put a great deal of effort into pushing the baptism of Jews in Frankish territories, and the many Synodal laws which prohibited Jews from owning Christian slaves or circumcising their slaves.266 For a short while, it would seem that the Jews of ninth-century Christian Europe were protected by their Christian rulers, and allowed to continue integrating into Christian European society.267
With the choice to begin Ashkenazi Jews’ societal autobiography with the rule of
Charlemagne and his son, Louis, rather than in the days of Late Antiquity, Ashkenazi rabbis could overlook the long centuries when Ashkenazi Jews were close enough to their
Christian neighbors to share feasts and celebrations such as holidays and weddings.
Ashkenazi rabbis could thus ignore the days when they allowed themselves to mostly ignore the growing give and take of ritual and tradition between Jewish and Christian communities. The medieval rabbis in tenth and eleventh century Ashkenaz who rewrote
Ashkenazi Jews’ traditional histories were also purposefully disregarding the era in which their predecessors paid little attention to the developing shared Jewish-Christian culture of Ashkenaz in favor of sending their most pressing questions eastward. This eastward gaze had been the foundation of Jewish law and thought throughout the Late
Antique and early medieval periods, and had maintained a certain sense of security in the
265 Langenwalter, “Agobard,” 29-33.
266 Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks, trans. O. M. Dalton, (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press,1927), 177-179, 235-238, 250-251; Langenwalter, “Agobard,” 29-32.
267 Langenwalter, “Agobard,” 29-32; J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, The Frankish Church (Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1983), 229, 232; Malkiel, “Jewish-Christian Relations,” 56.
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Jewish identity as an ultimately Near Eastern culture. As those bonds began to snap, however, and rabbis struggled to justify the position of their communities in the west, they rewrote their histories to suit their new goal of maintenance: maintenance of a traditional Jewish identity in spite of their now-obvious lack of connections to the east.
Looking Towards Babylon: An Overview of the Gaonate and its Collapse
The collapse of east-west communications in Jewish tradition was a long slide.
Even by the ninth century, despite the strong ties forming between western European
Jews and their Frankish overlords, Jewish communities still looked to the east for legal knowledge and judgement.268 Two examples of eastern rabbinical leaders sending information to western Jews can be found in the writings of R’ Amram Gaon and R’
Natronai Gaon.269 Both of these ninth century Rabbis sent copious letters and texts into western Europe, in response to requests from western Jewish communities.270 One of the most famous of these missives is the Seder Rav Amram, a prayerbook sent to the Jewish community of Barcelona.271 While this text was originally sent to Spain, it had been adapted and put to use by Ashkenazi Rabbis by the time that the Mahzor Vitry was collated in the eleventh century. The fact that this kind of epistolary connection between eastern Rabbis and western Rabbis continued throughout the early medieval period was vital for the Ashkenazi communities’ continued assurance of their Jewishness.
268 Norman A. Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands: A History and Sourcebook (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1979), 31.
269 Robert Brody, The Geonim of Babylonia and the Shaping of Medieval Jewish Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 132-134.
270 Brody, The Geonim of Babylonia, 132-134.
271 Brody, The Geonim of Babylonia, 132-134.
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Social and political upheaval across the medieval world, beginning in the tenth century, began the extended decline of the Ashkenazi Jewish cultural connection to the eastern world. By the end of the tenth century, the Jewish schools of Pumbedita and Sura in the Near East were collapsing in on themselves.272 The Jews of Ashkenaz slowly stopped sending letters and Rabbis to these schools, due both to the problems these schools faced, and the challenges with reaching the Near East. The double effect of changes in the west and the east caused a deep splinter to erupt between the Jews of
Ashkenaz and the Jews of the Near East.
Historical study of Late Antique and early medieval Judaism reveals the absolute centrality of the schools of Pumbedita and Sura to Judaic practice throughout that era.273
Their heads, the Gaons, were often seen as the leaders of the Jewish world. For the centuries between the rise of Christianity and the establishment of the Capetian dynasty in France, Jewish communities across Europe and the Mediterranean world sent their questions about theology and religious practice eastward. The seminal work of Jewish law, the Babylonian Talmud, was born from the schools of Pumbedita and Sura, and its status as the defining word on post-Antiquity Judaic law would remain, throughout
272 Brody, The Geonim of Babylonia, 11-13.
273 The most recent work focusing specifically on the Gaons and their schools is Brody, The Geonim of Babylonia. This text leans heavily on the works of Jacob Mann, whose collected writings appear to remain the authority on the topic. Mann’s research was almost entirely completed before World War II, and has since been collected into a volume: Jacob Mann, The Responsa of the Babylonian Geonim As a Source of Jewish History (Tel-Aviv: Zion, 1970). It appears that the two authoritative authors in English on the subject of the Gaons, to this day, are Mann and Louis Ginzberg, whose work also predates World War II. See Louis Ginzberg, Geonica, vol. 1 (New York, NY: Jewish Theological Seminary of America Press, 1909); Moshe Gil, “The Babylonian Yeshivot and the Maghrib in the Early Middle Ages,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 57 (1990-1991): 69-120; Daniel Frank, ed., The Jews of Medieval Islam: Community, Society, and Identity: Proceedings of an International Conference held by the Institute of Jewish Studies, University College London, 1992 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995); Haim Hillel Ben- Sasson, On Jewish History in the Middle Ages (Tel Aviv: 1969); Mark R. Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands.
Laina Sara Miller 68 western Europe, until the Early Modern period. Rabbis and ordinary Jewish men traveled to Pumbedita and Sura themselves, bringing back letters and religious rulings to western
Europe. As the Middle Ages moved into the ninth and tenth centuries, however, this connection was wounded by a series of troubles that the travelers and the schools faced.
The first major political changes to impact the function of the academies of
Pumbedita and Sura were, doubtlessly, the sweeping conquests of the Islamic empire.
These schools had risen to prominence in Jewish thought in the third and fourth centuries, as the era of the Amoraim came to a close.274 Three to four centuries later, as the second half of the seventh century began, the swiftly growing Islamic Empire swept through
Persia, swallowing up the Sassanid Empire within which the Jewish schools had flourished. Under first the Rashidun Caliphate, and then the Umayyad Caliphate, the
Jewish schools continued to flourish. There were moments of tension, particularly during the reigns of rulers who felt the need to suppress the non-Muslim populations of the
Empire, but the overall experience of the Jewish academies during the early Muslim rule over Persia was positive, particularly in comparison with the growing problems in western Europe, and the days of Byzantine control in the Near East.275
Islamic culture was a Near Eastern culture with the religious flavor of the
Abrahamic religions. This meant that the Jews living within the Islamic Empire of the
Rashidun and Umayyad Caliphates were thus not faced with a fundamentally different culture when interacting with their neighbors. The Jewish culture that had formed around the Mediterranean was fundamentally Near Eastern, and this made the Jews’ culture a
274 The Amoraic era refers to the period between approximately 200 CE and 650 CE. For information about the eras of Jewish history, see Joseph Jacobs, “Chronology (I),” in JE 4:64-75; Louis Ginzberg, “Tannaim and Amoraim,” in JE 12:49-54; Moses Mielziner, “Amora,”in JE 1:527-528.
275 Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands, 26-27.
Laina Sara Miller 69 comfortable fit with their new Islamic rulers. This lack of cultural conflict allowed
Jewish traditions such as marriage rituals to avoid significant change in the face of the
Islamic conquests. Sources from the Cairo Genizah, which document the lives of
Mediterranean Jews in the medieval Islamic world, reveal wedding traditions which were not fundamentally different from the traditions of the Jews within the Roman Empire.276
The marriage traditions of the medieval Jews of the European and Mediterranean worlds were still almost entirely derived from the Jewish traditions of Late Antiquity - Greco-
Roman and Babylonian traditions layered on top of Judaic theology.
This comfortable continuance of the Roman-era Jewish traditions was reinforced by the governing practices of the Rashidun and Umayyad Caliphates. Throughout the initial decades of the Rashidun and Umayyad Caliphates, the local infrastructure of the newly conquered lands were mostly left in place. There was little in the way of political upheaval in Persia, and the dhimmi system strengthened this stability. The dhimmi system permitted non-Muslims to practice with basic free reign, so long as they paid a tax for the privilege.277 The Jews of Pumbedita and Sura, beneath this system of law, would have faced very little problems continuing their traditional prominence in the Jewish world. Practically, the Jews of the Islamic world, within this system, were actually better off than their brethren in the Christian world.278 They were one group among many non-
Muslim minorities in the Near East, rather than the singular minority that they were in
276 S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, vol. 3 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967), 47-116.
277 Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands, 25-30.
278 Ben-Sasson, On Jewish History, 36; Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross, xvii-xviii.
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Christian Europe, and experienced this difference intensely.279 This comfortable status held by the academies of Pumbedita and Sura throughout the early years of Muslim rule was not to last, however, and it would have an enduring impact on their connection to the western Jewish traditions.
Beginning in the tenth century, the Jewish academies of Pumbedita and Sura began to experience problems. Internal politics between Rabbis and prominent families shook the foundations of these schools, leading to leadership problems in Pumbedita and
Sura. Tensions between the head of the Babylonian Jewish community and the Gaons in
Pumbedita and Sura, such as Saadia Gaon’s conflict with Exilarch David ben Zakkai, led to continued splintering between not only the families of Babylonian Jewry, but also between the exilarchate, the academy of Sura, and the academy of Pumbedita.280 The academy at Sura, overwhelmed by conflict, was eventually forced to close for a period of forty-five years during the second half of the tenth century. The exilarchate continually interfered with the appointment of the Gaons of Sura, and there were internal conflicts over the appointment of leaders in Pumbedita.281 These internal problems destabilized the Babylonian schools, removing much of their influence from the western Jewish world for decades at a time.
279 Ben-Sasson, On Jewish History, 36; Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross, xvii-xviii.
280 The exilarchate: “Title given to the head of the Babylonian Jews, who, from the time of the Babylonian exile, were designated by the term “golah.” The chief of the golah or prince of the exiles held a position of honor which, recognized by the state, carried with it certain definite prerogatives, and was hereditary in a family that traced its descent from the royal Davidic house. The origin of this dignity is not known. The first historical documents referring to it date from the time when Babylon was part of the Parthian empire, and it was preserved uninterruptedly during the rule of the Sassanids, as well as for several centuries under the Arabs.” Quoted from W. Bacher, “Exilarch,” in JE 5:288.
281 Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands, 30-31.
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The greater political world of the Near East, throughout the tenth and eleventh centuries, was dominated by the struggles and challenges faced by the Abbasid Caliphate, which had superseded the Umayyad Caliphate in 750 CE.282 In the ninth century, the
Abbasid Caliphate began to fracture, sending political shockwaves across the Near East as it did so. The Saffarids took Persia in 861 CE, while the Tulunid dynasty took all of
Islamic Egypt and the Near East. The Abbasids managed to regain Egypt and the Near
East, but only for a short while. By the mid-tenth century, the Hamdanids had formed the
Aleppo and Mosul Emirates, and by the end of the tenth century, Fatimids had conquered most of North Africa, Egypt, and a large chunk of the Near Eastern Mediterranean and
Red Sea coastal line.
Even at the core of their Empire, the Abbasids were losing their power. The
Persian Buyids took over the bureaucracy in the capital city of Baghdad in the tenth century, a hold which lasted approximately one hundred and twenty years, and they were followed by the Seljuk Turks.283 Both the Buyids and the Seljuks left the Abbasid Caliph as a figurehead, but this did not stop their dynasties from wielding the true power from
Baghdad.284 Despite the continued name of “Abbasid” as the titular ruler of the Near
East, by the end of the eleventh century, multiple parts of the so-called Abbasid Caliphate had changed hands three or four times in the past century. This kind of political upheaval was unkind to both the citizens of the Abbasid Caliphate, and the trade connections between the East and the West. All of this political chaos and trade difficulty was
282 Stillman, Jews of Arab Lands, 29-31.
283 Brody, The Geonim of Babylonia, 17-18; D. G. Tor, “The Political Revival of the Abbasid Caliphate: Al-Muqtafī and the Seljuqs,” Journal Of The American Oriental Society 137, no. 2 (April 2017): 301-302.
284 Brody, The Geonim of Babylonia, 18; Tor, “The Political Revival of the Abbasid Caliphate,” 301-302.
Laina Sara Miller 72 intensified by the collapse of the unified Seljuk empire into warring states, and brought to a new level of chaos by 1097, when the first of the Crusaders made their way into
Turkey.
The Jewish communities of the Near East had depended upon the relatively stable political world of the early Middle Ages. While they did live as a type of second-class citizens, they had rights as citizens, and the Caliphate had given the Exilarchate and the schools of Pumbedita and Sura governing power over the local Jewish communities. For as long as the Abbasid Empire remained relatively stable, the Jewish situation within the
Empire was relatively stable. They had been given a legal position in the early days of the Caliphate, and their greatest problems must have seemed, to the Babylonian Jews, to be their own infighting.
Beginning in the ninth century, as the Abbasid Caliphate began to face serious internal instability, the traditional tolerance of non-Muslim People of the Book was removed from the law. Caliph al-Mutawakkil, whose reign was particularly turbulent, supported new proponents of Islamic orthodoxy, and passed several laws to restrict the
Jews and Christians living within his borders.285 Houses were to be confiscated, buildings of worship were to be destroyed if they post-dated the advent of Islam, and all
Jews and Christians were to wear honey-colored markers to draw attention to their
Otherness.286 The schools of Sura and Pumbedita began encountering financial troubles, and often ended up in conflict with each other over precedence, or bemired in their own
285 Tayeb El-Hibri, “The Empire in Iraq, 763–861,” in The New Cambridge History of Islam, vol. 1, ed. Chase F. Robinson, (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 298-299; Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands, 167-168.
286 Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands, 167-168.
Laina Sara Miller 73 infighting over the position of the Gaonate.287 Exilarchs and Gaons alike bemoaned what they perceived as a lack of respect from the greater Jewish community towards their positions as leaders.288 Across the Mediterranean, on the Iberian Peninsula, the tenth century Jewish community led by Hasdai Ibn Shaprut made a decisive break from the
Babylonian schools, no longer turning to the Gaonate for answers.289 Even within the eastern Islamic world, as the larger empire broke up into smaller pieces, the local Jewish communities began to stop sending questions and money to Sura and Pumbedita.290 The already loosening ties to Western Europe were strained to the breaking point, and snapped.
Little is known about the actual collapse of the schools of Sura and Pumbedita.
The Book of Tradition, written by Abraham Ibn Daud in the twelfth century, is one of the few sources dating back to the Middle Ages which addresses the fall of the Sura and
Pumbedita schools, but his information is suspect.291 Ibn Daud was writing in order to create a direct lineage from the traditional leaders of Judaism in the east to the flourishing
Jewish communities in Iberia. It was of vital importance to Ibn Daud, as it was to the
Rabbis in Christian Europe, to prove that there was an unbroken chain of tradition from his community, leading back into the mists of Biblical time. In order to achieve this, however, Ibn Daud had to prove that the schools of Sura and Pumbedita had given over
287 Brody, The Geonim of Babylonia, 75-76; Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, vol. 2, 15-16.
288 Brody, The Geonim of Babylonia, 16.
289 Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands, 55-56.
290 Brody, The Geonim of Babylonia, 75-76; Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, vol. 2, 15-16.
291 Brody, The Geonim of Babylonia, 14-17.
Laina Sara Miller 74 their primacy to the Iberian Jewish communities.292 Whatever the truth of Ibn Daud’s information, enough is verifiable against earlier and concurrent records to agree that the eastern schools struggled to retain their primacy throughout the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and disappeared at some point in the following decades. The political upheaval in the east, particularly after the beginning of the Crusades at the end of the eleventh century, can only have hastened the protracted collapse of the power of the Gaonate.
Moving Away from Babylon: A Shift to Local Leadership
Alongside the slow fall of the Gaonate in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries, there were new stars rising in the west. In Italy, R’ Kalonymus II ben Moshe and his son, R’ Meshullam the Great, rose to precedence.293 Both Rabbis were consulted, and eventually outshone, by another rising star of the medieval Jewish world: R’
Gershom ben Yehudah.294 R’ Gershom ben Yehudah, often referenced as either Rabbenu
Gershom, meaning “Our Teacher Gershom,” or Rabbenu Gershom Me’Or HaGolah, meaning “Our Teacher Gershom, Light of the Exile,” lived and taught in late tenth- century and early eleventh-century Mainz.295 Many rulings of late tenth century and early eleventh century in Ashkenaz are attributed to R’ Gershom. He is cited multiple times in the Mahzor Vitry, and tradition states that R’ Gershom called an assembly of
Ashkenazi Rabbis in order to form a base consensus on specific legal questions within the
292 Brody, The Geonim of Babylonia, 14-17.
293 Louis Finkelstein, Jewish Self-Government in the Middle Ages (Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1924; repr., Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972), 20.
294 Finkelstein, Jewish Self-Government, 20.
295 Finkelstein, Jewish Self-Government, 20-21; Esther Benbassa, The Jews of France: A History from Antiquity to the Present, trans. M. B. DeBevoise, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 33.
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Ashkenazi Jewish community.296 Unfortunately, the only evidence of this meeting comes from Rabbis a generation after the fact, making it unclear whether or not this meeting occurred.297 One of the most important things about this meeting, however, is the belief that it occurred, because it marks the beginning of an era in Ashkenazi Jewish Rabbinical thought - the rise of independent, local leaders.
One of the many legal fictions which allowed Christian rulers in the Ashkenazi region to keep Jewish communities within their borders, without seriously offending the
Church, was the concept of the Jews as “slaves of the king’s chamber.”298 This legal fiction framed the Jewish communities as beholden only to the king, and thus, only answerable to the king. As a result, the Jewish communities were supposed to govern themselves, and answer to the king through their leader, when necessary.299 While they were culturally and socially a part of the wider Christian European society in which they lived, the Jews of Ashkenaz were legally and economically a separate entity, with different laws and local leaders.300
There was also the matter of religious affairs. As previously discussed, the ability of western Jews to communicate with the Near Eastern schools had been collapsing for centuries. By the tenth and eleventh centuries, there were multiple factors which made
-Finkelstein, Jewish Self ;(פרק קכה ,מחזור ויטרי) ,Simḥah ben Shemu’el of Vitry, Maḥzor Vitry, par. 125 296 Government, 33-35.
297 Discussed in Avraham Grossman, Pious and Rebellious: Jewish Women in Medieval Europe, trans. Jonathan Chipman (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2004), 70-75; Grossman, “The Historical Background to the Ordinances on Family Affairs Attributed to Rabbenu Gershom Meor Hagolah (The Light of Exile),” in Jewish History: Essays in Honor of Chimen Abramsky, ed. Ada Rapoport-Albert and Steven J. Zipperstein (London, England: Halban Publishers, 1988), 3-23.
298 David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996, repr. 2015), 21.
299 Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross, 123-124.
300 Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross, 123-124.
Laina Sara Miller 76 having local religious authorities into a necessity. The world of the Ashkenazi Jew was monumentally different from that of the Maghrebi or Babylonian Jew. The communities of medieval Ashkenaz had been living under Christian rule for centuries, and issues particular to their world were not questions that might be answered by some foreign Jew who knew nothing about current events.
A classic example of this kind of difficulty is the Ashkenazi response to conversions. In the early eleventh century, R’ Gershom ruled that there should be no bad treatment or shunning of Jews who have returned to the faith after having previously converted to Christianity.301 This particular judgment, repeated in later years by other
Rabbis, was deeply rooted in the world of Ashkenazi Judaism, and their particular issues of Christianity and conversion in the tenth and eleventh centuries.302 Forced conversions were not unheard-of in Ashkenaz, and had been common in the years of bishops like
Agobard of Lyon and Gregory of Tours.303 Persecutions intensified throughout the eleventh century, culminating the Rhineland massacre of 1096 and the First Crusade.304
Several times throughout these decades, Jewish communities were faced with one of two ultimatums: convert or die, or convert or be exiled.305 While martyr narratives from the
First Crusade and later would have the reader believe that not a single Jew was willing to convert to save his home or even his life, the reality was much more mundane. It is highly likely that many of the Jews in Ashkenaz converted to Christianity in order to
301 Finkelstein, Jewish Self-Government, 30-31.
302 Finkelstein, Jewish Self-Government, 30-31.
303 Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks, 177-179, 235-238, 250-251; Langenwalter, “Agobard,” 29-32.
304 Malkiel, “Jewish-Christian Relations,” 79-83.
305 Malkiel, “Jewish-Christian Relations,” 79-83.
Laina Sara Miller 77 avoid punitive measures, and they simply quietly returned to Judaism as soon as the persecution of the moment was over.306 R’ Gershom’s ruling on the return of apostates to
Judaism was visibly influenced by these factors - his own son converted to Christianity at some point around 1012, when Henry II of the Holy Roman Empire ordered the Jews of
Mainz to convert or be exiled.307
A ruling like that of R’ Gershom’s could not have come from the Babylonian schools. The struggling Gaonate was too concerned with their own affairs to respond to urgent questions about daily life in a timely manner, and they had no grounding in the kind of threats and tensions faced by Ashkenazi Jews in the eleventh century. That was not to say that Ashkenazi Jews did not understand the necessity for a general consensus on theological, legal, and social matters. The weakening connections to the east merely meant that the consensus of the Jewish communities would now need to be formed by
Jews in Ashkenaz.
During the First Crusade, and some of the worst hardships that Ashkenazi Jews had faced in centuries, a new Rabbi rose to prominence in Ashkenaz. Trained by one of
R’ Gershom’s students, this man would become important not only for the Jewish community, but also Christian theologians. His name was R’ Shlomo ben Yitzhak, or, R’
Shlomo Yitzhaki. His initials would create the name remembered throughout the centuries: RaSHI.
Rashi was both a theological leader and a commentator. His commentaries on
Tanakh and the Talmud were revolutionary in their simplicity, and attracted the attention
306 Malkiel, “Jewish-Christian Relations,” 79-83; Finkelstein, Jewish Self-Government, 30-31.
307 Malkiel, “Jewish-Christian Relations,” 79-83; Solomon Schechter and Isaac Bloch, “Gershom ben Judah,” in JE 5:638-639.
Laina Sara Miller 78 of Christians as well as the Jews for whom they were written.308 Like R’ Gershom before him, Rashi accrued numerous disciples, and his teachings would become the foundation for the future of medieval Ashkenazi Jewish law and theology. Three of Rashi’s grandsons, R’ Shmuel ben Meir, R’ Yakov ben Meir, and R’ Yitzhak ben Meir, would lead the school of thought known as the Rashi school alongside R’ Yitzhak ben Shmuel, and R’ Shimshon of Sens.309 Rashi’s school of Jewish thought was the parent of many of the leaders of late eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth century Ashkenaz. Most of the texts from medieval Ashkenaz which are not Pietist texts were written by members of the
Rashi school. Rashi himself, however, harkened back to the work of his predecessor, R’
Gershom, stating that every Rabbi in Ashkenaz was a student of R’ Gershom:
וכל שכן רבנו גרשום מאור הגולה שמפיו אנו חיין כולנו, וכל בני גלות אשכנז וכותים תלמידי תלמידיו הן.310 And all that which came from the mouth of Rabbenu Gershom Me’Or HaGolah, we are all obligated (to follow), and all the sons of the exile of Ashkenaz and the nations, they are the students of his students.311
Rashi cited R’ Gershom repeatedly, and his practice of citing previous Rabbis would be a practice rigorously followed by his students and later followers of the Rashi school.
These Rabbis, often grouped under the overarching title of “The Tosafists,” were the local Jewish leaders of their own generation, and it is through the responsa and writings
308 Benbassa, The Jews of France, 34-35.
309 Benbassa, The Jews of France, 36. R’ Shmuel ben Meir, like his grandfather, was known to the larger Jewish community by his initials, RaSHBaM. R’ Yakov ben Meir was known as Rabbenu Tam, which meant “Our Teacher, Straightforward,” the second a moniker first attached to the Biblical Yakov (Jacob). R’ Yitzhak ben Meir was also known by his initials RIVaM (the Hebrew letter for ‘b’ also makes the ‘v’ sound).
310 Israel S. Alfenbaum, ed., Teshuvot Rashi, (Brooklyn, NY: 1943), 83.
311 Alfenbaum, Teshuvot Rashi, 83.
Laina Sara Miller 79 of Rashi and the Tosafists that we have access to the world of the medieval Ashkenazi
Jew from the Jewish perspective, complete with the stresses over their Christian overlords.
The era of Rashi and his students was the era of the First Crusade, and in the years that followed the massacres of 1096, the Jewish communities of Ashkenaz were more stressed than ever about their relationships with their Christian neighbors. Their earlier closeness had not saved them from death and destruction, and the protections of the
Church and the nobility, feeble as they had been, had failed in the face of the Crusade.
Ashkenazi Jewish legislation had parted from the Babylonian schools of thought, and their new leaders were concerned with the Jews of Ashkenaz first and foremost. In the wake of the violence of 1096, many Jewish leaders searched for a reason that God might punish their communities. Had their adoption of practices that originated with their
Christian neighbors led to a punishment from God? Could something so simple as a new tradition, a new ritual, lead to the furious punishment of 1096? A new form of Jewish writing, the martyrology, grew up in the ashes of the First Crusade, and the Ashkenazi perspectives on relations with their Christian neighbors and overlords were changed swiftly.312 Connections between Jewish and Christian traditions, already a concept that theologians did their utmost to avoid, developed poisonous connotations alongside a bitter feeling towards their Christian neighbors, who were now cast as persecutors and enemies to be watched warily.
312 For an intensive discussion of the development of the Ashkenazi martyr narrative developed out of the First Crusade, see Jeremy Cohen, Sanctifying the Name of God: Jewish Martyrs and Jewish Memories of the First Crusade (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
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The long-standing Jewish concern with tying traditions into an unbroken chain back into the mists of pre-exile Judaism, by time of the rise of the Ashkenazi Rabbinic leadership, had gained new importance. The long history of Jews in Ashkenaz had, by the nature of living hand-in-hand with non-Jewish neighbors, formed a shared culture and built up a give-and-take of traditions between the two communities. The Ashkenazi
Jewish wedding, like much of their lives, had developed traditions which had no discernable Jewish origin. This shared culture, in the eyes of post-1096 Ashkenazi
Rabbis, had to be erased. When efforts to simply stop the practice of these traditions failed, a new form of storytelling was employed instead, explaining away blatantly non-
Jewish traditions with Jewish backstories. The centuries of uncomfortable community were wiped away with careful words, leaving behind both the stresses of early Roman
Christian bishops and the brief comforts of early Carolingian rule. Gone were the weddings and celebrations that bishops harangued their flocks to stop attending, gone were the days when it was difficult to discern if a wedding song or ritual might be Jewish or Christian. The era of looking towards Babylonian and Roman Jewish traditions from the east had passed, the years of awkward acculturation were frowned upon, and the
Ashkenaz-centered, isolationist system of the Tosafists and Pietists had risen in its stead.
81
Chapter Three: Christian and Ashkenazi Marriage Rituals - Borrowing Traditions
Introduction
By the time that Rabbenu Tam began to write responsa in the twelfth century, the
Jews of Ashkenaz had been living in the area for centuries. Their Christian neighbors were restructuring their own religious rules, and the division between the Eastern and
Western Churches had been solidified only one century previously. Both Christian and
Jewish theologians alike wrote copiously in an effort to delineate the licit from the illicit.
This was the era of Sefer Hasidim, Sefer Rokeach, the Maḥzor Vitry, and the Maḥzor of
Worms; the era when commentaries on Biblical and Talmudic texts were circulating between cities and towns throughout northern France and the Holy Roman Empire.
The cross-cultural stress on religious rules and structure of this era influenced every aspect of life, including marriage ceremonies. In this chapter, I am going to first follow the development of Christian marriage theology and ceremonies. Then, I am going to compare three types of Ashkenazi Jewish marriage rituals with traditions and practices from Christian marriage ceremonies and other ritualized events. This comparison reveals that many of the rituals in medieval Ashkenazi Jewish weddings were borrowed from the Christian traditions being practiced in the towns and cities that they shared, in direct contrast with their brethren further abroad, who lived within the borders of the Islamic Empire. 313
313 Unlike the Ashkenazi developments discussed in this chapter, it appears that the Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews, those living within the borders of the Islamic Empire, continued in the same direction as those of the Talmudic era for a good distance into the Middle Ages. For a considerable study of the world of medieval Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews, as well as a record of their rituals, traditions, and practices, see Shelomo Dov Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, 6 vols. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967-1993). Laina Sara Miller 82
I am arguing that the development of Christian marriage rituals directly affected the development of medieval Jewish Ashkenazi rituals. The Jews of medieval Ashkenaz lived alongside their Christian neighbors, and borrowed those traditions that made sense to them, often rewriting the origins of these traditions in their later explanations of Jewish ritual and ceremony, justifying these not-quite-Jewish practices to themselves.
The Development and Codification of Christian Marriage
Beginning in Late Antiquity, early Christian theologians tied themselves in knots over the question of marriage. Was marriage a necessity, a pale shadow of what could be achieved through asceticism, or was it a holy commandment from God? Was it, as
Augustine argued in On the Good of Marriage, “sacramentum,” a holy bond?314 Or was it, as other Christian theologians in late Antiquity argued, a necessity created to make sexual contact and reproduction as low on the scale of sinfulness as possible?315 By the time Eastern and Western Christianity had begun traveling in separate directions, in the early Middle Ages, religious authority had bound marriage to religion, rather than the more secular affair of the Greco-Roman and Babylonian worlds.
Despite being firmly attached to religion, however, weddings and marriage continued to be a tumultuous subject as medieval Christianity evolved. Several times throughout the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, western Church officials and Franco-
German aristocracy clashed over marriage - what made marriage valid, which marriages were valid, whether marriage could be dissolved, which marriages could be dissolved,
314 Ruth Mazo Karras, “The Christianization of Medieval Marriage,” in Christianity and Culture in the Middle Ages: Essays to Honor John Van Engen, ed. David Charles Mengel and Lisa Wolverton, (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), 9. 315 Karras, “Christianization of Medieval Marriage,” 8-9.
Laina Sara Miller 83 and by whom.316 D. L. d’Avray explores the content and context of six clerical sermons about marriage from the twelfth century, he points to a positive ideal of marriage which was being pushed by Christian clerics.317 Despite the fact that the preachers of these sermons were celibate men, d’Avray argues, they saw the rite of marriage as positively holy.318 While their theological ideals colored their perspective of how marriages ought to be, their arguments were not in favor of chaste marriage, but a marriage which had a sexual component.
At the forefront of the study of the medieval interactions between Christian theologians and the development of marriage concepts and legalities is James Brundage, who traces the development of medieval legal concepts about sex and sexuality from
Ancient Rome and Judaism, into medieval Europe and its body of clerical lawmakers.
Particularly while discussing the medieval shifts in marital and sexual law, Brundage creates an argument and summation of the medieval legal developments of marriage which is difficult to debate.319 He argues that the heavy Roman foundation upon which western Christian law was built, as well as the medieval Christian disgust with the act of sexual intercourse, combined with medieval conceptions about the relationship between the physical and the Divine, in order to form the sexual taboos and societal perspectives
316 Ruth Mazo Karras, Unmarriages: Women, Men, and Sexual Unions in the Middle Ages, (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 38-42; Georges Duby, The Knight, the Lady, and the Priest: The Making of Modern Marriage in Medieval France, trans. Barbara Bray, (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 4-9. 317 D. L. d’Avray, Medieval Marriage Sermons: Mass Communication in a Culture Without Print, (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001), 3, 13. 318 d’Avray, Medieval Marriage Sermons, 3, 13. 319 James Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 174.
Laina Sara Miller 84 with which we still live today, in the modern era.320 It is at this point, the disagreement of Western European Christian clerics upon a ‘universal’ Christian law of marital and sexual realities, that we enter the Christian medieval world of marriage.
In the sixth and seventh centuries, the first defining lines of marital ritual for the following centuries would be recorded by Archbishop Isidore of Seville. His definition of a valid Christian wedding, repeated in Gratian’s Decretum more than six centuries later, defined the wedding as the veiling of the bride and the exchange of rings to symbolize the binding of the couple together.321 Isidore also mentions the presence of a priestly blessing at a wedding, justifying it as “explained by the fact that this was done by
God in the first condition of men… Therefore in this likeness there is now done in the church what was done then in paradise.”322 Importantly, particularly in the centuries between Isidore and Gratian, is the absence of any mention by Isidore that consummation is necessary to a marriage ceremony.
The Visigothic Code, a law code collated in the seventh century, continued in the tradition of Roman marital law, maintaining the importance of parental consent.323 The
320 Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, 2-4, 6-8, 22-24, 27-30, 32-38, 66, 75-79, 82, 135-136, 577- 579. 321 “Femine, dum maritantur, ideo velantur, ut noverint, se semper viris suis subditas esse et humiles. Item, quod nubentes post benedictionem vitta invicem, uno vinculo copulantur, videlicet fit ideo, ne conpagem coniugalis unitatis disrumpant. At vero, quod eadem vitta candido purpureo que colore permiscetur, candor quippe est mundicia vite, purpura ad sanguinis posteritatem adhibetur, ut hoc signo et continentia et lex continendi ab utrisque ad tempus admoneatur, et posthec reddendum debitum non negetur. tem, quod in primis annulus a sponso sponse datur fit nimirum vel propter mutue dilectionis signum, vel propter id magis, ut eodem pignore corda eorum iungantur. Unde et quarto digito annulus inseritur, ideo quod in eo vena quedam, ut fertur, sanguinis ad cor usque perveniat.” Isidore of Seville, De Ecclesiasticis Officiis II, 20.6-8, in Thomas L. Knoebel, trans., Isidore of Seville: De Ecclesiasticis Officiis (New York, NY: Newman Press, 2008), 99-100; also quoted in Decretum Gratiani C. 30, q. 5, c. 7. 322 Isidore of Seville, De Ecclesiasticis Officiis II, 20.5; English translation from Knoebel, Isidore: De Ecclesiasticis Officiis, 99. 323 S. P. Scott, The Visigothic Code (Forum Judicum) (Littleton, CO: F.B. Rothman, 1982), 3.1.1-10.
Laina Sara Miller 85 ninth century archbishop of Reims, Hincmar of Reims, followed in this tradition, going further than the Visigothic Code in stricture and insisting upon “a public marriage” for a valid marriage as well as parental and mutual consent.324 On the matter of parental consent, Hincmar was in agreement with the Papal rule of his era; Pope Nicholas I similarly insisted upon the necessity of parental consent for a marriage to be considered valid.325
Enter Gratian, at the beginning of the twelfth century.326 Practically nothing is known about this theologian, aside from his position as a canon lawyer in Bologna.327
His collected writings were an intensive attempt to reconcile the many contradictions of the canon law codes directly preceding his efforts, such as the canonical collections of
Anselm of Lucca, the Pseudo-Ivonian Collectio Tripartita, and Ivo of Chartres’
Panormia.328 Upon addressing the subject of marriage, Gratian encounters an immediate problem that commentators on his own Decretum as well as rival theologians would also encounter: Mutual consent of the bride and groom, according to Gratian, is the only
324 Hincmar of Reims, “XXXVII: Ad Rodulfum et Frotarium Archiepiscopos, de nuptiis Stephani et filiae Regimundi Comitis,” Hincmari archiepiscopi Remensis opera: dvos in tomos digesta, ed. Jacob Sirmond, (Paris: S. Cramoisy et G. Cramoisy, 1645), 652. “Quibus sententiis euidenter ostendit, quia tunc est vera legitimi coniugii copula, quando inter ingenuos et inter aequales sit, et paterno arbitrio viro mulier iuncta, legitimè dotata, et publicis nuptiis honestata, sexuum commixtione coniungitur.” Translation can be found in Rachel Stone and Charles West, “Letter on Stephen 3: patristic quotes on marriage,” Collaborative Hincmar Project Blog, September 2, 2010, http://hincmar.blogspot.co.uk/2010/09/letter-on-stephen-3- patristic-quotes-on.html. “By which sentence he clearly shows, that there is then true joining of legitimate marriage, when it happens between free and equals, and by paternal authority a free woman is joined to a man, legitimately dowered and honoured by a public marriage, with sexual intercourse.” 325 Nicholas I, “Nicolai Papae I responsa ad consulta Bulgarorum,” in Sacrorum conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio, vol. 15, ed. Giovan Domenico Mansi, Philippe Labbe, (Venice: 1770; repr. Paris: Welter, 1902), col. 402-403. 326 “Gratian,” Funk & Wagnalls New World Encyclopedia (2017): EBSCOhost (accessed January 1, 2018). 327 Anders Winroth, The Making of Gratian’s Decretum (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 2-3, 5-7. 328 Winroth, Gratian’s Decretum, 15-17; Anders Winroth, “Marital Consent in Gratian’s Decretum,” in Readers, Texts and Compilers in the Earlier Middle Ages: Studies in Medieval Canon Law in Honour of Linda Fowler-Magerl, ed. Martin Brett and Kathleen G. Cushing, (Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2009), 113- 115.
Laina Sara Miller 86 thing that is absolutely necessary for a valid marriage. Citing Pseudo-Evaristus and
Nicholas I, Gratian argues that parental consent is also important for a valid marriage, but the overall consensus that Gratian eventually arrives at is that the consent of the couple that was to be wed was more important than the consent of their parents.329
Gratian further supported the power of consent by bringing up the marriage of
Joseph and Mary, the epitome of perfect marriage in Christianity. According to Western
Roman Christianity, Joseph and Mary’s marriage was entirely based on consent, and never consummated.330 Unfortunately, therein lay the problem. If consent, either between the betrothed or between the betrothed and their parents, was the only thing that is necessary for a valid marriage, then how could one justify sex? Was not the consummation of marriage (and thus, procreation,) the only reason that sex was tolerated?331
Long tradition, dating back to the legal codes predating the Christianization of the
Germanic regions, insisted upon the necessity of consummation in order to validate a marriage.332 But in the twelfth century, the clash between the Germanic tradition of consummation and the Christian theological dependence upon the Roman rules of consent reached its height. Gratian came down upon the side of consent, but with one
329 Winroth, “Marital Consent in Gratian’s Decretum,” 115; Decretum Gratiani C. 30, q. 5, c.1-3. In C. 30, q. 5, c. 1, Gratian attributes his quote to Pope Evaristus, but the decretal that Gratian cites has since been proven a forgery which was roughly of an age with Pope Nicholas I and Hincmar of Rheims. On the subject of pseudo-Evaristus and the forged decretals, see Philip Lyndon Reynolds, Marriage in the Western Church: The Christianization of Marriage During the Patristic and Early Medieval Periods (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994), 391. 330 Penny S. Gold, “The Marriage of Mary and Joseph in the Twelfth Century Ideology of Marriage,” in Sexual Practices and the Medieval Church, ed. Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage, (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1982), 107-108; Margaret McGlynn and Richard J. Moll, “Chaste Marriage in the Middle Ages,” in Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, ed. Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage, (New York, NY: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1996), 108; Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, 354. 331 Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, 64-66, 83-86, 135-136. 332 Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, 135-136.
Laina Sara Miller 87 caveat - consummation, Gratian decided, “perfected” a marriage.333 Other twelfth century theologians disagreed. Many argued that consummation was not required to create a binding and valid marriage, although once the marriage had been consummated, spouses were required to surrender to conjugal debt.334 One theologian from the generation following Gratian, the otherwise anonymous Rolandus, decided that there were two parts to a valid marriage: the matrimonial contract, created through consent, and the carnal joining of man and wife, through sex.335 If the marriage was only based on consent, then it could still be dissolved if one or both parties wished to enter a religious order.336 Once the marriage had been consummated, Rolandus argued, the marriage was permanent, and indissoluble.337 This kind of conflict over the precise theological rules of marriage was common, and each new attempt to reconcile the laws spurred on new argument.338
Theologians were not the only sources of marital law decisions in medieval
Europe, however. Beginning in the early twelfth century, with the First Lateran Council,
Western ecclesiastical officials attempted to place rules and regulations upon just who could and could not marry, when, how, and why.339 These regulations, which continued to be reiterated and added to in the Second, Third, and Fourth Lateran Councils, discussed the Church definitions of incestuous marriage, forbade clerical marriage or
333 Charles Donahue, Jr., Law, Marriage, and Society in the Later Middle Ages: Arguments About Marriage in Five Courts (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 37. 334 Gloss to C. 31 q. 2 pr., in Decretum Gratiani with Anglo-Norman Glosses, Caius College MS 283/676, fol. 189rb, cited in Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, 355n150. 335 Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, 263. 336 Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, 263. 337 Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, 263. 338 Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, 260-276. 339 H. J. Schroeder, Disciplinary Decrees of the General Councils: Text, Translation and Commentary, (St. Louis: B. Herder, 1937), 192-193; Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, 191.
Laina Sara Miller 88 anything vaguely similar to clerical marriage, and eventually outlawed the practice described as “clandestine marriage.”340 Despite the seemingly definitive declarations within these texts, however, many of the assertions in the Second, Third, and Fourth
Lateran Councils are merely reiterations of previously stated regulations relating to marriage. The regulations imposed by church officials seem to have had very little in the way of serious effects for the people of Western Europe.
Of particular importance for the changes in the practice of marriage rites in
Christian western Europe were two specific regulations imposed by the Catholic Church: the necessity of a priestly benediction over the marriage, and the ban on “clandestine marriages.”341 Both traditions, that of public weddings and blessings over the marriage, were common throughout the Middle Ages. The tradition of blessing a marriage in western Europe, predated the Christianization of the region.342 Even after most Frankish and Germanic communities had converted to Christianity, older traditional blessings continued to be recited in order to bring the best of luck to the new marriage.343
The religious regulation of medieval Western Europe, however, both emphasized the Christian Church’s assertion that marriage was sacred and to be defined by the
Church, and made it difficult for people to claim that illicit relationships were legitimate.
The obligation of a priestly blessing, as well as a tradition of a Mass to follow, solemnizing the entire event, tied the Western Christian wedding ceremony to the church
340 Schroeder, Disciplinary Decrees, 192-193, 200, 207, 210, 221, 279-282. 341 Schroeder, Disciplinary Decrees, 210, 221, 280-281; Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, 189- 191. 342 Michael M. Sheehan, “Choice of Marriage Partner in the Middle Ages: Development and Mode of Application of a Theory of Marriage,” in Medieval Families: Perspectives on Marriage, Household, & Children, (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 175-177. 343 Sheehan, “Choice of Marriage Partner,” 175-177.
Laina Sara Miller 89 as an institution and the church as a social center. The prohibition of “clandestine marriages” also made it increasingly difficult to perceive a wedding as a private affair.
The wedding traditions of Western European medieval Christians had become the concern of the community, rather than the two families affected by the match.
“Clandestine marriages” were a point of tension in medieval Christian theology.
Clandestine marriages were generally defined as marriages carried out without the public posting of banns or a proper priestly blessing in public, an issue that racked theologians with concerns about how to define valid from invalid marriages.344 Within canon law, they were the sticking point which made it necessary that there be another requirement for a valid marriage beyond mutual consent. The public knowledge of a marriage could mean the difference between an unsolvable tangled knot of ‘he-said-she-said’s and finding a definitive answer to the question of a valid marriage.345 If a couple could wed simply by agreeing upon it in secret, too many problems erupted. Perhaps one of them might have been previously promised in marriage by their parents, or perhaps they would become promised in marriage after the event. How could the issue of consanguinity be avoided, if those promising themselves were doing so in secret? Consanguinity was a serious issue in medieval Christian European theology. Sexual intercourse or marriage between two persons related by blood or by marriage within the assigned seven degrees of canon law was strictly forbidden, and considered incest.346 The issue of forbidden marriages was emphasized using the language of pollution and illness, much like
344 Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, 142, 189-190. 345 Karras, Unmarriages, 209-213. 346 Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, 140-141.
Laina Sara Miller 90 discussions of intercultural interaction throughout medieval Europe.347 Without public knowledge of all marriages in a locale, there was no way to know if a marriage was actually prohibited due to a secret marriage. In order to prevent this, the obligatory priestly blessing over the marriage and the observance of a Mass was stressed with greater and greater anxiety as the centuries passed, harkening back to the priestly presence required in the fourth and fifth centuries.348 In reality, however, Churchmen were often more concerned with the principle of the theological rulings than the practical applications. While the priestly blessing, stressed in theological text after theological text, became mainstream, the stress of the seven degrees of incest was more important to the theologians than to those enforcing the rules.349
Even as the medieval wedding was brought to the doors of the church, however, priests stopped the celebrations at that point. The so-called ‘superstitions’ and ‘drunken gossiping’ of the wedding party was considered to be inappropriate for the more sacred ground within the walls of the church building.350 Rather, the bride and groom would participate in a Mass, solemnizing the event and tying it firmly to the Christian traditions, before the wedding party was turned back over to local traditions and celebrations.351
All of the continuous theological stress over marriage was, in part, due to its constant violation. Though a great deal of this theologizing was, in fact, confined entirely to the Christian theologian, it represents a moment when changing traditions met
347 Rachel Stone, Morality and Masculinity in the Carolingian Empire (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 263. 348 Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, 66, 89, 142, 254, 362. 349 Stone, Morality and Masculinity, 141-142, 182. 350 Burchard of Worms, Decretorum Liber Decimus Nonus, trans. John Shinners, in Medieval Popular Religion, 1000-1500: A Reader, (Toronto: Higher Education University of Toronto Press, 2008), 448. 351 Thomas M. Finn, “Sex and Marriage in the Sentences of Peter Lombard,” Theological Studies 72 (2011): 46.
Laina Sara Miller 91 the changing official perspectives of marriage in Christianity, much as it did on the
Ashkenazi Jewish side of events.
Ashkenazi Jewish Marriage, c.850-1300 CE
Ashkenazi traditions which were borrowed from medieval Christian wedding rituals can be divided into three basic groups: fertility rites, warding traditions, and the sacralization of the marriage ritual. Here I will first examine the tradition of throwing grains, sometimes referred to as Maien, and its derivation from medieval German
Christian fertility traditions.352 This section will examine the earliest recorded medieval examples of this practice within Jewish tradition, the explanations provided by medieval
Jewish rabbis, and a brief discussion of the tradition in contrast with a similar Talmudic tradition. After discussing the Maien tradition, I will turn to two different traditions which were meant to ward off demonic attacks and influences, and again describe the earliest Jewish mentions of these traditions, their connection to Christian traditions, and medieval rabbinic explanations provided in order to make the traditions seem more inherently Jewish.
The tradition of Maien in the Jewish communities of medieval Ashkenaz can be traced to the 11th century via the Mahzor Vitry, which was compiled by Simḥah ben
Shemu’el of Vitry in Northern France. While not described as Maien, this ritual is mentioned in the text, wherein it is simply noted that the practice of throwing grains is to
וזורקין עליהם חיטים לסימן ברכה פרו “ :symbolize that the bride and groom should be fruitful
352 Marcus, Jewish Life Cycle, 151.
Laina Sara Miller 92
And the throwing of (wheat) grains upon them is for a sign of“ 353”.ורבו בהצלחת כל טוב blessing: “Be fruitful and multiply with the success of all good (things).”354
This tradition, associated openly with fertility and good luck in the Mahzor Vitry, is mentioned approximately a century later, in the Sefer Rokeach. The Sefer Rokeach was written by Elazar ben Yehudah of Worms either at the end of the twelfth century, or during the first years of the thirteenth century.355 The mention of throwing grains in the
Sefer Rokeach does not differ significantly from the phrasing in the Mahzor Vitry.
And what the throwing of grain“ 356”.ומה שזורקין חיטין סימן הוא שיהו פרין ורבין כחיטין“
(wheat) is a sign for is that they should be fruitful and multiply like grain (wheat).”357
Again, the Jewish text does not shy away from acknowledging that these actions are nothing but a ritual to induce fertility in the new couple.
Medieval rabbis, in an effort to find a Jewish cause for the ritual of throwing grains, referred back to the Talmudic era.358 This connection has been cited in some modern studies of the tradition, including Lauterbach’s 1925 discussion of Jewish marriage rituals and their superstitious origins.359 Here I challenge Lauterbach, who argued that the Maien tradition was the same tradition as that described in the Talmud, by arguing that medieval rabbis searched the Talmud for an appropriate explanation for a new tradition borrowed from local Christian traditions. The fact that the tradition had
Translations from the (מחזור ויטרי, פרק תע) .Simḥah ben Shemu’el of Vitry, Maḥzor Vitry, par. 470 353 Mahzor Vitry are my own. 354 Maḥzor Vitry, par. 470. 355 Elazar of Worms died in 1238, in Worms. See Isaac Broydé and Kaufmann Kohler, “Elazar ben Judah ben Kalonymus of Worms,” in JE 5:100-101. (ספר רוקח, סימן שנ’’ג) .Elazar ben Yehudah of Worms, Sefer Rokeach, section 353 356 357 Sefer Rokeach, section 353. 358 Lauterbach, “Breaking a Glass,” 358-359. 359 Lauterbach, “Breaking a Glass,” 358-359.
Laina Sara Miller 93 become known as Maien by the late Middle Ages, pulls the practice of throwing grains away from a ritual with Aramaic, Roman, or Babylonian roots, and towards a more
Germanic tradition. This Germanic tradition was one of many which were associated with fertility rites practiced on May Day, the first of May and a traditional holiday tied to fertility celebrations.360 Medieval German May Day celebrations included the custom of tossing grains at couples, in order to evoke fertility in the upcoming year. This tradition is a much more probable origin for the medieval Jewish practice of throwing grains, particularly due to the medieval rabbinic belief that they needed to explain the practice, and fact that the practice was called “Maien.” If the practice did, as Lauterbach argued, go back into the Talmudic era, medieval rabbis would have had no reason to explain away the practice, because such explanation had already occurred.
Another medieval tradition which attracted significant efforts at etiological creation on the behalf of medieval Ashkenazi rabbis was the tradition of shattering a glass dish, sometimes a cup, during or before the wedding ceremony. By the High Middle
Ages, the Tosafists and other medieval rabbis argued that this tradition was in remembrance for the destruction of Jerusalem, particularly the Temple, and that it was derived from Talmudic traditions.361 This was a nice, neat explanation for a tradition which seemed out of line with the celebration of a wedding, and ensured that there were no uncomfortable references to the practices of their Christian neighbors.
Academically, this tradition has garnered some side-eyes in the past century.
Jacob Lauterbach agreed with the concept that the ritual shattering of the glass was from the Talmudic era, but argued that the act of shattering a glass dish was explicitly in order
360 Marcus, Jewish Life Cycle, 151. 361 Marcus, Jewish Life Cycle, 167; Gutmann, “Jewish Medieval Marriage Customs,” 52.
Laina Sara Miller 94 to scare off evil spirits. He claims that the sparse wording of the Talmudic tales which reference breaking a dish at a wedding lend themselves to this interpretation.362 In contrast, Joseph Gutmann claimed that the ritual shattering of the glass was in order to ward off demons, and that the ritual only arose in the twelfth century.363
An important note which undermines Lauterbach’s claims that the traditions were continuous from the Talmudic era can be found in the Even Ha-Ezer, wherein Eliezer ben
Natan muses on the tradition of breaking a glass at a wedding. This twelfth century rabbi reflects that he does not know where the tradition came from, nor why people continue to practice this tradition, since he believes that it is a disrespectful thing to do to a cup which has been blessed. If the tradition was continuous from the Talmudic era into the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, it is more than likely that R’ Eliezer ben Natan, who was part of the larger network of Ashkenazi rabbis in twelfth century France and
Germany, would have known something about the origins of the tradition.364 It is clear that the etiology of the tradition of breaking the glass as argued by Lauterbach was one that pervaded Judaism - as has been discussed previously, medieval Judaism put a lot of stock in what they perceived as an unbroken chain of tradition between the Torah and their own practices. In the generation following R’ Eliezer ben Natan, Tosafist R’ Moshe ben Schneur of Evreux wrote, in his commentary on the Talmudic tale wherein a glass
From here we have“ 365”מכאן נהגו לשבר זכוכית בנישואין.“ :vessel is shattered at a wedding
362 Lauterbach, “Breaking a Glass,” 356, 361-366. 363 Gutmann, “Jewish Medieval Marriage Customs,” 50. 364 Marcus, Jewish Life Cycle, 167-168. ”…So he brought a cup of white glass“ ”אייתי כסא דזוגיתא חיורתא…“ ,Berakhot 31a, Tosafot Commentary 365 The Tosafot commentary for Berakhot which is used today was compiled/written in the early 13th century by R’ Moshe ben Shneur of Evreux.
Laina Sara Miller 95 the tradition to break a glass at a wedding.”366 This construction of a connection to the past by R’ Moshe ben Schneur, while convincing, is destabilized by the fact that rabbis in the century previous to his commentary had no such perception of a connection. The discussion in the Talmud itself, upon which R’ Moshe has imposed this tradition, is a discussion about the state of solemnity which is appropriate for prayer and for mourning.
The Talmud relates two very similar stories, wherein the main character sees that people are becoming overly joyous at a wedding, and breaks an expensive dish in order to stem the tide of cheer.367
The ritual of shattering a dish is not necessarily the same act as the modern tradition of breaking a glass cup.368 In some mentions, the dish is made from glass, but is not necessarily a cup, while in others, the dish is a cup, but not necessarily made from glass.369 The relationship between the “cup of glass” in the Mahzor Vitry and the “dish of glass” in the Sefer Rokeach, lies in their origins in the Rhineland.370 In the Mahzor Vitry, the glass cup is not only shattered, but the wine is poured out onto the ground,
”…So he brought a cup of white glass“ ”אייתי כסא דזוגיתא חיורתא…“ ,Berakhot 31a, Tosafot Commentary 366 367 Berakhot 30b-31a. "מר בריה דרבינא עבד הלולא לבריה חזנהו לרבנן דהוו קבדחי טובא אייתי כסא דמוקרא בת ארבע מאה זוזי ותבר קמייהו ואעציבו. רב אשי עבד הלולא לבריה חזנהו לרבנן דהוו קא בדחי טובא אייתי כסא דזוגיתא חיורתא ותבר קמייהו ואעציבו." “Mar the son of Ravina made a wedding feast for his son. He observed that the rabbis were excessively cheerful, (so) he brought a precious glass cup worth four hundred zuz and broke it in their presence and they were saddened. Rav Ashi made a wedding feast for his son. He observed that the rabbis were excessively cheerful, (so) he brought a cup of white glass and broke it in their presence and they were saddened.” English translation by R’ Yosef Widroff from Hersh Goldwurm, Yisroel Simcha Schorr, and Chaim Malinowitz, eds., Talmud Bavli: The Schottenstein edition: The Gemara: the classic Vilna edition, with an annotated, interpretive elucidation, as an aid to Talmud study, vol. 2 (Brooklyn, NY: Mesorah Publications, Ltd., 2000), 30b4-31a1. 368 Marcus, Jewish Life Cycle, 170. 369 Marcus, Jewish Life Cycle, 166-170. 370 Joshua Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic and Superstition: A Study in Folk Religion, (New York, NY: Behrman’s Jewish Book House, 1939), 133.
Laina Sara Miller 96 beforehand.371 This action may have also been intended to ward of demons. There are distinct parallels between the medieval Jewish treatment of wine over which a blessing had been said, and the medieval Christian treatment of holy water. During the Middle
Ages, Christians believed that holy water had the power to ward off demons, and the action of pouring out the wine, which had been blessed as part of the wedding ceremony, may have been directly connected to this belief.372
Outside of the action of pouring out the wine, the simple action of shattering a dish has medieval German roots as well. A German pre-wedding ceremony which persists to this day, the Polterabend, involves the communal action of shattering dishes.373
During the Polterabend, friends and family of the couple bring dishes, usually made from porcelain and pottery due to the association between broken glass and bad luck, and shatter the dishes upon the ground. There are many folk traditions revolving around the meaning of this ritual, but the tradition which echoes into the medieval era and across the fluid Judeo-Christian boundaries is the tradition that loud noises and sharp shards will ward off evil spirits.374 Both the action of emptying the dish of wine, as well as the act of shattering the dish, in that case, are warding gestures.
Another traditional warding gesture which entered into medieval Jewish wedding ceremonies was the ritual which would eventually become known as the bedeken.375
Traditionally associated with the veil of Rebecca in Tanakh, this ritual can be found in
.(מחזור ויטרי, פרק תע) .Maḥzor Vitry, par. 470 371 372 Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic, 168-169. 373 Feuchtwanger, “Interrelations Between the Jewish and Christian Wedding,” 35. 374 Feuchtwanger, “Interrelations Between the Jewish and Christian Wedding,” 35; Lauterbach, “Breaking a Glass,” 370; Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic, 133-134. 375 Abraham Chill, The Minhagim: The Customs and Ceremonies of Judaism, Their Origins and Rationale (New York, NY: Sepher-Hermon Press, 1979), 280-281.
Laina Sara Miller 97 images as well as written documents.376 One particularly vivid image, which was drawn in thirteenth century northern Germany, depicts a bride and groom, with a rabbi officiating and holding a cup of wine.377 Located in the Maḥzor Worms, in this image, both the bride and the groom stand beneath a cloth which is likely a talit, a Jewish prayer shawl, and the bride’s face is hidden beneath a cloak held over her face.378 This tradition, rather than a simple evocation of Biblical narratives, is a tradition in which the bride is hidden. Before the creation of the manuscript image, eleventh century Torah and Talmud exegete Rashi twice mentioned the bridal veil in his commentaries on the Torah and the
Talmud. In Exodus 26:9, Rashi compares the curtain covering the entrance of the
Tabernacle with “a modest bride whose face is covered with a veil.”379 In his commentary on the Talmud, Rashi not only mentions a bridal veil, but specifically describes it as “a veil on her head hanging over her eyes, like it is done in our region.”380
The rest of his commentary further reinforces the image of the opaque veil in the Maḥzor
376 Chill, The Minhagim, 280-281; Simḥa ben Yehuda, Maḥzor Worms, vol. 1, fol. 72v. Ms. Heb. 781°4. (Jerusalem, Israel: The National Library of Israel). 377 Maḥzor Worms, vol. 1, fol. 72v. See Appendix A. 378 Maḥzor Worms, vol. 1, fol. 72v. See Appendix A. English translation by A. J. Rosenberg, The .”אל מול פני האהל“ ,Exodus 26:9, Rashi’s commentary 379 Complete Jewish Bible with Rashi Commentary, (The Judaica Press, chabad.org), ”חצי רחבה היה תלוי וכפול על המסך שבמזרח כנגד הפתח, דומה לכלה צנועה המכוסה בצעיף על פניה:“ “Half its width (of the sixth curtain) was hanging and folded over the screen on the east(ern side of the Mishkan), before the entrance, resembling a modest bride whose face is covered with a veil.” .”קריתא“ ,Ketuvot 17b, Rashi’s commentary 380 ”צעיף על ראשה משורבב על עיניה כמו שעושין במקומינו ופעמים שמנמנמת בתוכו מתוך שאין עיניה מגולין ולכך נקרא הינומא על שם תנומה:“ “A veil on her head hanging over her eyes like it is done in our region, and sometimes she drowses inside of it because her (closed) eyes are not betrayed (by the veil hiding her sleeping face). And this is why the hinuma is named after a nap.”
Laina Sara Miller 98
Worms: Rashi describes the veil as opaque enough that the bride could “drowse” within it, without other people knowing that she has fallen asleep.381
Abraham Chill attributes this tradition to hiding from the “evil eye,” while
Lauterbach and Trachtenberg both attribute this to yet another ritual to hide the bride from evil spirits.382 All three historians also attribute the tradition of draping a talit over the bride and groom, as described in Sefer Rokeach and depicted in the image in the
Maḥzor Worms, as another warding gesture.383 The ritualized act of hiding the couple, both of whom were supposed to be looking forward to a fruitful and successful marriage, necessitated the prevention of any demonic attacks - attacks which seem superstitious to the modern reader, but were a deeply ingrained part of the shared Western Christian culture which encompassed the people of Ashkenaz, whether Jewish or Christian. The famed Rashi himself, in his commentary on the Talmud, stated:
[חולה] שהורע מזלו לפיכך השד מתגרה בו וכן חיה אשה שילדה וכן אבל. [חתן וכלה] מקנאתו מתגרה בהם.384 [A sick man is] a man who has lost his luck, so a demon challenges him, and also a woman who has given birth, and a person in mourning. [A Bridegroom and Bride,] his (the demon’s) jealousy causes him to challenge them.385
Warding gestures and acts of holiness were necessary for the members of a wedding party, if they were to protect themselves from demonic attacks. And just as medieval Ashkenazi Jews borrowed rituals of protection and good luck from their
.”קריתא“ ,Ketuvot 17b, Rashi’s commentary 381 382 Chill, The Minhagim, 280-281; Lauterbach, “Breaking a Glass,” 356; Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic, 134. 383 Chill, The Minhagim, 280-281; Lauterbach, “Breaking a Glass,” 356; Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic, 134; .Maḥzor Worms, vol. 1, fol. 72v. See Appendix A ;(ספר רוקח, סימן שנ’’ג) ,Sefer Rokeah, section 353 ”חולה, חתן וכלה.“ Berakhot 54b, Rashi’s commentary for 384 ”חולה, חתן וכלה.“ Berakhot 54b, Rashi’s commentary for 385
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Christian neighbors, they also followed the lead of Christian weddings in another way: the change of marriage from a socio-cultural event, into a religious event.
The Jewish traditions for blessing a marriage, while differing slightly depending on the locale, dated back to the Temple era. These traditions, however, remained mostly private. Weddings remained in the home, and not a public affair, and any person could recite the blessings over the wedding.386 It was only in the medieval period, as Christian theologians began to tie weddings to public celebration and blessing in a church, that a similar concept began to penetrate Ashkenazi Jewish thought. The wedding was held outside of the synagogue, sometimes either preceded or followed by religious services, and the celebrations would conclude the wedding.387 As was slowly becoming both tradition and a requirement in Christian wedding ceremonies, Ashkenazi Jewish ceremonies began to consider the presence of a rabbi as a necessary part of the proceedings.388
A similar development, which points to the influence of Christian wedding traditions upon Jewish wedding rituals, was the institution of the wedding itself as a sacred event.389 As discussed above, throughout this era Christian theologians stressed over the details of what constituted a valid marriage, in part due to their efforts to enforce the sanctity of marriage. This perspective of the holiness of marriage soon entered
Ashkenazi Jewish culture. The inclusion of a rabbi took the place of the priest in the
Christian ceremony, but this was not the only way in which this sacralization made itself apparent. Jewish weddings, while traditionally including the Seven Blessings from the
386 Karras, “Christianization of Medieval Marriage,” 17-18. 387 Chill, Minhagim, 281. 388 Cohen and Horowitz, “In Search of the Sacred,” 226. 389 Cohen and Horowitz, “In Search of the Sacred,” 226.
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Talmud, had not considered the wedding itself to convey something holy upon the participants. The institution of a blessing which implied this idea, similar to the benedictions of the Christian priest, developed in Ashkenazi and Provencal Jewish culture around the tenth century.390 This development was considered such a deviation from proper Jewish tradition by R’ Hai Gaon of Baghdad, who was geographically separated from the shared culture of medieval Europe, that he claimed that such a blessing detracted from the sanctity of the Jewish people.391
Another feature of the medieval sacralization of the Ashkenazi Jewish wedding ceremony was the shift in timing. While Talmudic rules had carefully delineated which days were and were not permissible to hold a wedding ceremony, medieval Ashkenazi
Jews began to ignore those rules, instead choosing to hold their weddings on either
Fridays, or Saturday nights.392 In this way, they tied the wedding to the Sabbath, a day which was inherently holy according to Jewish law. Rabbinical law actually forbade holding weddings so close to the Sabbath, in fear that preparations or celebrations might inadvertently desecrate the Sabbath.393 In spite of this, Ashkenazi Jews pressed their celebrations as close to the Sabbath as they dared, in order to tie a little bit more of the
Sabbath’s holiness to their marital ritual.
Not only through time, but also through ritual, did medieval Ashkenazi Jews tie their wedding ceremonies to the Sabbath. One of the most important rituals of the
390 Cohen and Horowitz, “In Search of the Sacred,” 226. 391 Cohen and Horowitz, “In Search of the Sacred,” 226. 392 Ketubot 4b-5a; Ze’ev W. Falk, Jewish Matrimonial Law in the Middle Ages (London, England: Oxford University Press, 1966), 36; Cohen and Horowitz, “In Search of the Sacred,” 227-228. 393 Ketubot 4b-5a.
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Sabbath, going back into the Talmudic period, was the ritualized blessing over wine.394
This blessing over the wine was also a part of the betrothal and wedding ceremony, possibly predating the Middle Ages, but its importance to the wedding ceremony increased in medieval Ashkenaz. Around the twelfth century, Ashkenazi Jews began using a style of cup used by their Christian brethren for benedictions and sacred toasts.395
This cup, known alternately as the doppelkopf, the doppelscheuer, and the minnetrinken among Germanic peoples before and after their conversion to Christianity, was a double cup that was used exclusively for special occasions.396 After the Germanic conversion to
Christianity, these cups were used on saints’ days and at wedding feasts by Germanic
Christians.397 When the Jews of Ashkenaz adapted the double-cup for their own use, it was taken for use during holidays and on the Sabbath, and, like their Christian neighbors,
Ashkenazi Jews began to use the double-cup during weddings, to signify the sacred importance of the benediction over wine during the ceremony.398
The Ashkenazi Jewish wedding ceremony had undergone an important transformation in significance throughout the Middle Ages. From the relatively secular and financially based ritual and contract of Late Antiquity, the ceremony had been elevated to a position of holiness. Physically, it moved from the public arena into the synagogue, and temporally, Ashkenazi Jews attempted to move their celebrations as close to the sacred time of the Sabbath as possible. The town’s rabbi, rather than simply an honored guest, became an officiant of the wedding in a similar manner to that of the
394 Berakhot 42b-43a. 395 Vivian B. Mann, “"New" Examples of Jewish Ceremonial Art from Medieval Ashkenaz,” Artibus Et Historiae 9, no. 17 (1988): 21. 396 Mann, “Jewish Ceremonial Art,” 18, 21. See Appendix B for image. 397 Mann, “Jewish Ceremonial Art,” 21. 398 Mann, “Jewish Ceremonial Art,” 18-22.
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Christian priest. Benedictions, over the bride and groom and over wine in a symbolically sacred cup, added an extra layer of sacrality over the entire ceremony. While living alongside their Christian neighbors, the Jews of Ashkenaz had adapted the very concept of sacred marriage as they borrowed traditions and rituals.
Throughout this chapter, I have argued that, rather than simply developing in parallel lines, Jewish traditions were liberally borrowed from their Christian neighbors.399
In most of these cases, such actions may have simply been unconscious cases of “inward acculturation.”400 In the case of sacralization, however, this may have been a conscious choice on the part of the Jewish communities of Ashkenaz. The eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries were periods of great tension between the Jews and Christians of western Europe. Some of these tensions dated back to the origins of Christianity, while others were rooted in the rising anti-Jewish rhetoric of the Crusading era.401 Christian law, by the twelfth century, had declared that all non-Christian marriages were simply not-quite-valid.402 What better a response to hearing that Christians thought their marriages invalid than to imitate that which Christians did to make their marriages valid?
Bring in a figure of holiness to say the blessings, bring out the wedding into the public, where everyone can see and know that the marriage is valid.
399 As discussed earlier, these particular developments are discussed in some depth by Esther Cohen and Elliott Horowitz in “In Search of the Sacred,” wherein they argue for the paralleled development of Jewish and Christian ideas based on a shared overarching culture, but they stop short of outright declaring Christian influence on Jewish traditions in “In Search of the Sacred.” See Cohen and Horowitz, “In Search of the Sacred,” 225-249. 400 Marcus, Rituals of Childhood, 10-11. 401 See Israel Jacob Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006); Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982); Jeremy Cohen, Sanctifying the Name of God: Jewish Martyrs and Jewish Memories of the First Crusade (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 402 James A. Brundage, “Intermarriage between Christians and Jews in Medieval Canon Law,” Jewish History 3, no. 1 (Spring 1988): 29.
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Declarations of identity inform the formation of many cultures’ rituals, and the marriage rituals of medieval Ashkenazi Jews were no exception.403 In some cases, as with the sacralization of marriage, Jewish practices were intentionally modeled upon the developing sacralization of Christian weddings. It was an action of self-defense, and self-conscious determination to “win” the religious “competition” between the dominant and minority religions. In other cases, the transition of practice from one community to another is less purposeful. This is often the case of attempts to ward off bad luck.
For many people throughout history, the idea of “bad luck” was a deeply serious matter. While it has become an informal quantity in modern society, the idea of bad luck at a wedding was a shared concept in medieval Ashkenaz which was tied to a Germanic tradition of demons and ritual. As weddings across western Europe became
Christianized, particularly in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the older traditions of fertility rites and warding off demons were incorporated into Christian wedding and holiday rituals. The Jewish communities of Ashkenaz, living within and alongside the western Christian society, absorbed the traditions and fears of their neighbors, and incorporated the slightly Christianized rituals into their own weddings. Medieval rabbis, much like their Christian counterparts in the priesthood, attempted to make the wedding ceremony into something that didn’t contain pagan and extra-religious flavors, but often ended up simply creating new origin stories for old traditions.
The attempts to erase any Christian or pagan origins of Ashkenazi practices in mainstream Judaism in the medieval and early modern period had a long-lasting effect.
Modern historians continue to fall into the traps set by these well-meaning rabbis who
403 For a brief discussion of ritual and identity formation, see Kirsten Sandborg, “Malay Dress Symbolism,” in Carved Flesh Cast Selves: Gendered Symbols and Social Practices, ed. Vigdis Broch-Due, Ingrid Rudie, and Tone Bleie, (Oxford, England: Berg Publishers, 1993), 202-203.
Laina Sara Miller 104 simply did not want to acknowledge that their well-established traditions were based upon anything but the Tanakh and the Talmud. It is time to look past the traditional narrative about traditions. Neighbors share belongings, language, and traditions, even if they don’t intend to do so. Sharing good ideas about protection against demons, or about invoking fertility, is simply what happens. In the modern era, we borrow traditions from novels, from recommendations on the radio, and the television. Sometimes we act with purpose, and other times our actions creep into our daily lives from exposure to other traditions. As is stated in Sefer Hasidim:
When (Jews) look around for a place in which to live, they should take stock of the residents of that town… Know that if Jews live in that town, their children and grandchildren will also behave just as the Christians do. For in each and every town, the customs of the Christians are the customs of the Jews that are with them.404
404 Sefer Hasidim, Parma H 3280, §1301. Found on the Princeton University Sefer Hasidim Database. ”שמהלכים בארץ למצוא מקום לגור שם יעיינו ביישובי הארץ באותה העיר מה עניין הגוים אם גדורים בערוה. דע אם ידורו יהודים באותה העיר גם בניהם ובנותיה יהיו עושים כיוצא בהם כאותם גוים כי כל עיר ועיר כמנהג הגוים כן מנהג היהודים שעמהם.“ The translation above is based upon the translation found in David I. Shyovitz, A Remembrance of His Wonders: Nature and the Supernatural in Medieval Ashkenaz (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 13: “When (Jews) look around for a place in which to live, they should take stock of the residents of that town - how chaste are the Christians there? Know that if Jews live in that town, their children and grandchildren will also behave just as the Christians do. For in every town…Jews act just like Christians.” I have altered the translation slightly in order to maintain the emphasis provided in the final line of the Parma manuscript quote: ”כי כל עיר ועיר כמנהג הגוים כן מנהג היהודים שעמהם.“ “For in each and every town, the customs of the Christians are the customs of the Jews that are with them.”
105
Moving Forward: A Conclusion
“The casual remark of a Gentile is believed only when it refers to the death of a
Jew,” R’ Meir of Rothenburg stated at the end of the thirteenth century. With one sentence, R’ Meir of Rothenburg expressed the deep divide that had been drawn between the Jewish and Christian communities of Ashkenaz by the end of the thirteenth century.
The world of Ashkenazi rabbis like R’ Meir of Rothenburg had changed from the days when Christian authorities were forced to pass laws preventing Christians from partaking in Jewish celebrations, or even the more recent world of R’ Gershom ben Yehudah and
Rashi. The Ashkenaz of R’ Meir of Rothenburg was a post-Rhineland Massacre
Ashkenaz, an Ashkenaz that had not communicated significantly with the Near Eastern rabbis and the Near Eastern schools of thought in over a century.
The days when consulting the texts of the Tanakh and Talmud could answer all questions were over, and traditions had grown organically throughout the centuries. The
Ashkenazi wedding bore little resemblance to the purely secular financial exchanges of the Biblical era, and the Tanakh was used more as a text to explain away new traditions than as a guide. Long centuries within the bounds of the Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and
Roman Empires had affected the rites and rituals of the Jewish people. As Christianity rose to prominence, the Jewish wedding had distinctly ritualistic traditions attached, borrowed from Babylonian and Roman traditions. This tendency to adapt local traditions and reshape them to fit a Jewish narrative followed the Jews themselves, out of the Near
East, and into Ashkenaz.
Ashkenaz became a centuries-long home for Jewish communities, and the Jews’ comfortable lives alongside their Christian neighbors led to cultural interaction which Laina Sara Miller 106 disconcerted the lawmakers of both religions. While Christian bishops and church councils passed law after law forbidding Christians from partaking of Jewish food, celebrating Jewish holidays, or marrying Jewish women, the Jews of Ashkenaz progressively became more and more entrenched in western Europe. When communications between Jewish religious lawmakers in the east and west began to fail,
Ashkenazi rabbis found themselves with a dilemma: should they forbid the new traditions, which were suspiciously similar to those practiced by their Christian neighbors, or should they simply find ways to assert that these new laws were entirely in line with proper Judaism?
Over the course of a handful of generations, Ashkenazi rabbis responded to the presence of relatively new wedding traditions and their Christian origins by rewriting the story. They became overly concerned with proving the purity of Ashkenazi Jewish practices, at the expense of their history and the history of their traditions. Traditions such as throwing grain at the new couple, shattering a glass dish at the wedding, and draping the bride and groom with a cloth - all of these traditions were re-explained by medieval Ashkenazi rabbis with properly Jewish explanations.
In this thesis, I have followed the development of medieval Ashkenazi marriage rituals from their foundations in pre-medieval Judaism to their background in non-Judaic sources. I demonstrated just how foundational cultural interaction and shared traditions has been to Judaism, beginning in the days before Christianity, and leading directly into the Middle Ages. I explored how, as the strong rabbinical ties to the Near East began to fall away, Ashkenazi rabbis became more concerned with the origins of Ashkenazi
Jewish traditions, focusing on explaining away anything that was not quite Jewish
Laina Sara Miller 107 enough to suit them. These traditions, which stretched from fertility rites to warding and protective rituals, I argue, were directly adapted from the traditions of the Christians who lived alongside Ashkenazi Jews. While efforts were made, from the top, to hide the origins of these traditions, their sources peek out long after the texts fade into silence.
The anxieties which fueled the purposeful erasure of Ashkenazi Jewish history continue to this day. Traditions, more than simple repetitions, help cultures form their identities. To question the sources of traditions such as those attached to the wedding ceremony, therefore, is to question the identity of the culture to whom the wedding party belongs. But - this should not stop us from asking questions.
There are many questions that I did not have the opportunity to follow through to their conclusion. The Chupah, now known as the wedding canopy, and originally, in
Antiquity, the tent of consummation, underwent a transformation in definition at some point in the medieval period. By the thirteenth century, the Chupah began to appear in
German Jewish art in the more modern form with which we are acquainted today. 405
Unfortunately, I was not able to chase down the sources suggested by Gutmann, who implied that the tradition of a canopy was borrowed from medieval Catholicism, due to the fact that his sources were in German.406 Nor was I able to follow some of the older research about the disruptions of the Gaonic schools and the shift of Ashkenazi rabbis away from the East, due these sources being almost uniformly in German, and from the
405 Joseph Gutmann, “Jewish Medieval Marriage Customs in Art: Creativity and Adaptation,” The Jewish Family: Metaphor and Memory, ed. David Kraemer, (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1989), 48- 50. 406 Gutmann, “Jewish Medieval Marriage,” 48-50, 60.
Laina Sara Miller 108 early twentieth century. 407 I cannot help but ask: in the decades and centuries following the scope of this thesis, and the geographic dispersal of Ashkenazi Jews into eastern
Europe, the Americas, and eventually Israel, how did new adjacent cultures and traditions affect the Ashkenazi Jewish wedding? Did the gender roles of the rite remain the same?
Did the fertility and warding rituals of medieval Ashkenaz remain, or were they replaced by the traditions of Christians and Muslims from the new homelands of Early Modern and modern Ashkenazi Jews?
When I attend the wedding of my former classmate, there are still echoes back into medieval Ashkenaz. When they carry candles and proceed towards the chupah, when they sing songs to the bride and groom, the medieval Ashkenazi processions of singing celebrants carrying torches follow, represented in ghostly form.
407 These historians were writing in the same era as Louis Ginzberg and Jacob Mann, both of whom are briefly discussed in fn. 273. Unfortunately, it appears that nearly none of this early twentieth century research has been translated into English.
109
Appendix A
Simḥa ben Yehuda. Maḥzor Worms, vol. 1, fol. 72v. Ms. Heb. 781°4. Jerusalem, Israel: The National Library of Israel. http://primo.nli.org.il/primo_library/libweb/action/dlDisplay.do?vid=NLI&docId =NNL_ALEPH000410313.
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Appendix B
Example of medieval Christian doppelkopf (doppelscheuer, doppelbecher, minnetrinken):
Double-cup of Rootwood with Coat of Arms on Cover (Doppelbecher aus Wurzelholz mit Wappen auf Deckelknopf), ca. 1300, boxwood, partly gilded with silver and enamel, 14.5 x 15.3 cm, Historisches Museum Basel, http://www.hmb.ch/en/collection/object/doppelbecher-aus-wurzelholz-mit-wappen-auf- deckelknopf.html.
111
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