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 ii 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