Ashkenazic Piyyut: Hebrew Poetic Prayer in a Latin Environment (The Tenth to the Twelfth Centuries)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

ASHKENAZIC PIYYUT: HEBREW POETIC PRAYER IN A LATIN ENVIRONMENT (THE TENTH TO THE TWELFTH CENTURIES)

Johannes Heil

PIYYUT : The Historical Context and Tone of Hebrew Ashkenazic Poetry

A legend states that the tomb of Rav Shimon ben Isaac ben Abun, who was born in Mainz and later died there around 1015, had a well- spring of healing waters ﬂ owing from it from which the whole Jewish contemporary society drank in hope. Historical sources call him the schaliach zibbur, that is the liturgist of the leading community among the Jewish settlements along the Rhine River during the High Middle Ages; even in late medieval Nuremberg the Memory Book commemorates him as Rabbenu Shimon ha-gadol (Our great teacher).1 The title is remark- able, since among the early generations of sages in Ashkenas (the land from the Rhine to the Danube River), he is the only one who is known solely for his poetical work. No halahkic decisions2 on religious and/or social matters were attributed to him by later generations. By way of contrast, others, like Meshullam ben Kalonymos or Gershom ben Jehuda, were experts in both ﬁ elds, halakha and poetry, which generally went hand in hand.3

1 Das Martyriologium des Nürnberger Memorbuchs, ed. Sigmund Salfeld (Berlin, 1898), pp. 86, 298. 2 Halahkic decisions are adaptive judgments on religious and social matters on the basis of the “Torah from Sinai”, the “Written Torah” (the Pentateuch together with the Prophets and other Books of the Bible) and the “Oral Torah” (Mishnah and Talmud). 3 See Abraham M. Habermann, “The Beginning of Hebrew Poetry in Italy and Northern Europe: Northern Europe and France,” The Dark Ages, ed. Cecil Roth, The World History of the Jewish People, Medieval Period, vol. 2 (Tel Aviv, 1966), pp. 267–73; Avra- ham Grossman, Hakhme Ashkenaz ha-rishonim (The Early Sages of Ashqenas 900–1096), ( Jerusalem, 1988); Israel Ta-Shema, “Ashkenazi Jewry in the Eleventh Century: Life and Literature,” Ashkenaz. The German-Jewish Heritage, ed. Gertrude Hirschler (New York, 1988), pp. 23–56; Ivan G. Marcus, “A Jewish-Christian Symbiosis. The Culture 338 johannes heil

This article offers an analysis of poetic prayer from “Ashkenas”—that is, what the Jews called the lands east and west of the Rhine River, which later also included northern France and England in the west and Bohemia and Poland in the east. Ashkenas draws on the biblical name for the land of the descendants of Noah’s son, Japhet (Genesis 10:3, 1 Chronicles 1:6), who was believed to have moved to the north ( Jeremiah 51:27). The examples discussed below will show that Ash- kenasic spirituality derives from a speciﬁ c distinct Jewish Rhineland culture, which emerged in a Latin-Christian environment (in contrast to Spanish/Sephardic culture). Many of the hymns and prayers from these lands—in Latin as well as in Hebrew—which are in part recited down to the present day from this tradition, were written at about the same time: the Latin ones from the eighth century onwards, the Hebrew ones from the tenth or eleventh centuries on. Since this article aims to explore the spirit of these prayers, it will focus on the period in which this poetry arose among Jews, from the mid-tenth century until the pogroms during the ﬁ rst crusade (1096), a time when the Jews were still largely unaccustomed to experiences of later persecutions. It will discuss texts which amount to the earliest documents of Jewish life in Latin Europe and the formation of communities in the Rhineland and along the Danube River.4 This paper in part will try to distinguish how the tone of this early poetry was distinct from poems written after 1096. And this paper will also try to examine the unique voice of the poetic prayer among individuals and in the spirit of the entire Ashkenazic community; this will lead to an examination of the social importance of poetry in this particular context. Finally this article will show how these Jewish texts interacted with other poetic motifs and forms within their Latin environment. At the outset it is important to note that the Jewish poetic liturgical tradition did not so much imitate the Latin writings, but—as I will show below—rather there is antagonistic dialogue and an ongoing tension between these corpora of texts. With regard to the Jewish prayers the purpose of their composition was for the worship

of Early Ashkenaz,” Cultures of the Jews. A New History, ed. David Biale (New York, 2002), pp. 449–516. 4 It is the opinion of this author that there was no continuity from the Roman to the medieval Jewish communities in the cities on the Rhine, and the immigration from Italy started as late as in the early tenth century, says Michael Toch (“The Formation of a Diaspora. The Settlement of Jews in the Medieval German ‘Reich’ ” Aschkenas 7.1, 1997, pp. 55–78). For others hold differing views, for example see Norman Golb, The Jews in Medieval Normandy. A Social and Intellectual History (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 137–169.