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The Early Ashkenazi Practice of Burial with Religious Paraphernalia

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The Early Ashkenazi Practice of Burial with Religious Paraphernalia Nati Barak The Early Ashkenazi Practice of Burial with Religious Paraphernalia In his research dealing with initiation rites in medieval Jewish society, Ivan Marcus mentioned that these rites had a starting point and an ending point. These points might serve, according to Marcus, as indicators of the changes undergone by the culture of which they were part.1 Burial practices, according to which the dead were laid to rest with para- phernalia of a spiritual-religious meaning, probably appeared in Ashkenaz in the first quarter of the eleventh century, when Rabbenu Gershom Me’or Ha- Gola died. Rabbenu Gershom was probably the first to practise the custom of burial with a ṭalit, and thus pioneered a custom that came to be observed by both leaders and laymen.2 One may also claim that the practice of burial with religious paraphernalia in the Jewish world is of authentic Ashkenazi origin. As with many other practices to be addressed below, which were mainly or exclusively chracteristic of Ashkenaz, this practice, too, is an entirely Ashkenazi one. This eleventh-century practice of burial with such paraphernalia contin- ued into the late Middle Ages, and was observed by the generations that fol- lowed the Black Death, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and subse- quently. What are the lines of continuity, and what are the points of discontinuity and change, between the way this practice was implemented by the generations that preceded the Black Death, and how it was pursued in the period that followed it? The answer to this question is a crucial one, since it may help to provide the historian of these and, by extension, similar practices, with a clear picture of the changes in the design of Ashkenazi death rituals in the generations that followed the Black Death. Robert Scribner has discussed, in his research, the folkloristic traditions of the late Middle Ages, or, as he defines it, the development of ‘unofficial religion’ in that period. One of the important fourteenth-century changes that he emphasizes, concerns the manner in which women in Christian society became more religiously devout and more dominant. They achieved this by 1 I. G. Marcus, Rituals of Childhood: Jewish Acculturation in Medieval Europe (Hebrew; Jeru- salem: Shazar Centre, 1998), p. 32. 2 Maharam, Responsa, Rulings and Customs, ed. I. Z. Cahana, (Hebrew; Jerusalem, 1957–62), vol. 2, p. 36. N. Barak, ‘Time of Rage. Changing Attitudes Toward Death in Ashkenaz Commu- nities: from the first Crusade to the Black Death’ (Hebrew doctoral dissertation, Tel Aviv Uni- versity, 2010), pp. 40–98. DOI 10.1515/9783110339185.187, © 2018 Nati Barak, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 License. 188 Nati Barak utilizing, on the one hand, more channels of spiritual development, and by expanding, on the other, their capacity to influence mundane affairs. This view, and Philippe Ariès’s treatment of the rise in the use of the dead person’s room as a public place for communicating messages, may facilitate our under- standing of one of the most intriguing literary documents of the age of the Black Death, the document named Evel Rabbati.3 This document, written by R. Ya‘aqov ben Shelomo Ha-Ṣarfati, describes the last hours of his beloved daughter, who died in a late wave of the plague at the end of 1382. His essay combines elements of a testament – the daughter having expressed final wishes on her deathbed – with those of lamenation, since the father lamented his daughter in the presence of a multitude of people who were present: ‘It would have been unbelievable had it not been heard by the crowd of men, women and children standing in the gallery. Those who came to console me heard a speech that was inspired by the Almighty.’ And all this, out of an explicit wish to convey to the listeners an appropriate set of values and form of behaviour in the event of such a loss. Before I further examine the custom that is at the heart of our discussion, I would like to correct something that seems to me crucial for our understand- ing of the original text. Ron Barkai, who analysed and closely read this docu- ment, remarked, among other things: The book Evel Rabbati has great importance, since it presents us with first-hand evidence of practices, that were common in the communities of fourteenth-century Provence, and that relate to the event of any person’s death in general, and to the case of Esther, the daughter of Ya‘aqov, in particular.4 Evel Rabbati was indeed written in the city of Avignon in southern France, but it is difficult to define the practices described in it as exclusively those of Provençal communities. First of all, Ya‘aqov ben Shelomo is not a Provençal Jew, but belongs to those who were expelled from northern France, where he had gained some of that education that his deceased daughter also absorbed. Secondly, the daughter’s names also testify to the French origin of this man. 3 R. W. Scribner, ‘Elements of Popular Belief’, in Handbook of European History: 1400–1600 Late Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation, ed. by T. A. Brady, Heiko A. Oberman, J. D. Tracy (Leiden: Brill, 1994–95), pp. 244–49; P. Ariès, Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present (London: Boyars, 1974; repr. Baltimore: The John Hopkins Press, 1990), p. 12; R. Barkai, ‘A Medieval Hebew Text on the Death of Children’, in Women, Children and the Elderly: Essays in Honour of Shulamit Shahar, ed. by M. Eliav-Feldon, Y. Hen (Hebrew; Jerusalem: Shazar Center, 2001), pp. 76–84 (includes an edition of Paris, Bibliothèque Natio- nale de France, Ms. Heb. 733, 61r–67r). 4 Barkai, ‘A Medieval Hebrew Text’ (see n. 2 above), p. 71. The Early Ashkenazi Practice of Burial with Religious Paraphernalia 189 The names given in a such family are not only names that commemorate a deceased relative, but also those that point to the social identity of the people who applied them to their descendants. One of the names in this testament is Yentish, a clearly Ashkenazi name, and the dying daughter’s other name is Trina, which is also an Ashkenazi name. These are Ashkenazi names that occur frequently in memorial books of Ashkenazi communities in this period.5 The conflict between the essay’s writer and those who indulge in polemics is not uniquely Provençal in this period. It is a conflict that is represented among many of the leaders of the period, the most prominant among them being Yom Ṭov Lipman from Muelhausen, undoubtly an Ashkenazi scholar. Another example of this conflict may be found in Shim‘on ben Shemuel, the Ashkenazi author of the kabbalistic essay, Hadrat Qodesh, who struggled against the philosophers and ‘scholars of nature’. Furthermore, in his essay (Evel Rabbati) the father describes the large crowd of people who came to be with his daughter in her last hours, a crowd [‘standing in the gallery’]. The custom to stand while a person is dying is an Ashkenazi one that is echoed in the customs book of R. Shalom of Neustadt, one of the most prominent leaders of Ashkenaz in the period following the Black Death. Some of the practices mentioned in the testament cannot be regarded as Provençal, since they were not familiar in that region. According to her testament, Esther wished to take to her grave her scarf and her wedding ring. This reflects the burial practice that was followed in Ashkenaz during the period that preceded the Black Death, a practice rejected by the Sefardi tradition that influenced the Provençal Jews. Furthermore, in the period that followed the plague, many Ashkenazi women asked to be buried with items very similar to those requested by Esther, the daughter of R. Ya‘aqov (as we shall later see). Before dealing with her requested manner of burial, we should take note of the fact that Esther wished to be buried with her scarf. The scarf and the girdle (belt) are items known from the Ashkenazi Sivlonot practice, according to which, a day before the wedding, the groom sends his first gift to the bride through the rabbi or one of the community leaders. This present was known as Sivlonot, and usually comprised several items, such as a scarf and a girdle. I am not suggesting that the Sivlonot was practised in southern France, but the choice that Esther made, to be buried with her scarf, has a particularly Ashkenazi flavor. The girdle had another function in Ashkenaz, that is detailed 5 S. Salfeld, Das Martyrologium des Nürnberger Memorbuches (Berlin: Leonhard Simion, 1898), pp. 73–77; S. Cooper, ‘Names as Cultural Documents’, in These are the Names, ed. by A. Demsky and J. Tabory (Hebrew; Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University, 2000), pp. 13–22. 190 Nati Barak below. Thus, one cannot regard these practices in general, and certainly not her request to be buried with her ring and scarf, as particularly Provençal wishes, and distinct from Ashkenazi ones. The essay Evel Rabbati goes further and reports additional wishes expressed by Esther: Indeed you will cry for Sarah, my lady, my sister, the fairest among women, my dove, my undefiled one. Beside her, make a place to bury my body, because she taught me knowledge. And you, my father, please take from me my rings, that are on my fingers. They should be removed so they do not fall or get lost, and so that you do not suspect any innocents, while everybody cries aloud like the Philistines.
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