Evolution of Torah: Germany
ESTABLISHING TORAH CULTURE (SEASON 2, EPISODE 5)
The German Jewish community was at once highly organized and prosperous. At the same time, they were subject to the potentially violent whims of non-Jewish community around them. These parallels of strength and challenge are at the core of this episode about rabbinic culture in the Germanic provinces in the 13th century. We will focus on the specific struggles of two rabbis, the Maharam (Rabbi Meir ben Barukh) of Rothenberg and Rabbi Mordechai ben Hillel while exploring their and others’ contributions to Jewish practice.
SHOW NOTES
Further Reading
Shoham-Steiner, Ephraim. “Burial ‘Ad Sanctos’ for a Jewish Murderer? Alexander Wimpfen and Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg.” Jewish Studies Quarterly, vol. 23, no. 2, 2016, pp. 124–41. Retrieved via JSTOR.
Bios
- Rabbi Meir ben Baruch of Rothenburg (the Maharam, 1215 – May 2, 1293) Trained in France, Rabbi Meir established an academy in Germany and subsequently led a number of communities in the region, ending with Rothenberg. In 1286, he was captured as he was attempting immigrate with his household. Fearing the precedent that would be set if the Jewish community paid the exorbitant ransom for his release from jail, he stayed imprisoned for seven years until his death.
- Rabbi Mordechai b. Hillel (c. 1250 – d. August 1, 1298) Rabbi Mordecai was a student of the Maharam. His most prominent work is Sefer ha-Mordecai (The Book of Mordecai) in which he cites over 350 authorities to compile existing halakhic material and the outcomes of lengthy discussions. It is modeled on the Rif’s Halakhot and becomes one of the models for Joseph Caro’s Shulhan Aruch. Mordecai, his wife Selda, and his five children were murdered in the Rintfleisch Massacres.
- Rabbi Eliezer ben Joel Ha-Levi (c. 1160 – 1235) Grandfather of Rabbi Mordechai b. Hillel, his Sefer Avi HaEzri explores ritual problems and became authorative in Germany.
Transcript
[Music]
Announcer Welcome to Season two of the Evolution of Torah, a podcast with JTS professor, Rabbi Mordecai Schwartz. In this season, Establishing Rabbinic Culture, Professor Schwartz traces the development of medieval Jewish legal literature through a journey to four key centers of learning across North Africa and Europe. This is episode five in which we travel to Germany.
Rabbi Mordecai Schwartz Today we will speak about one of the most important Jewish communities of the middle-ages, the Jews of the German-speaking lands of central Europe, a community of enormous creativity, learning, piety, and economic success. They were quasi-self-governing at times, and even had judicial institutions such as a fixed system of courts. However they were also often exposed to spasms of sudden violence and vulnerability. I will begin my account as I often do, with a story to illustrate the nature of the society of the Jews in this time and place, but this particular story is suited to a podcast, since it is the story of a mystery and a murder.
The imprisonment of the greatest German Rabbi of the day, R. Meir ben Barukh (the Maharam) of Rothenburg and his subsequent death in prison is one of the most famous episodes in medieval Jewish history. He was a towering luminary, a prolific writer of responsa and one of the most influential figures in 13th-century halakhic circles in Germany. But in the eyes of the non-Jewish authorities he was seen as a threat. Near the end of his life he began encouraging the wealthiest and most influential Jews of Germany to immigrate to Palestine. The nobles of central Europe naturally viewed this as both a political and economic disruption of major proportions.
Arrested in 1286, the Maharam of Rothenburg was imprisoned in the Fortress of Ensisheim by King Rudolf I. An enormous, extortionate ransom was demanded from the Jewish communities in Germany for his release. This was not paid in his life-time. He died in prison in 1293, and his body was not brought to burial until many years following his death.
The Maharam’s tragic story was also documented in a double tombstone placed on his grave and the grave next to his, that of Alexander ben Solomon Susskind Wimpfen, the Jew who eventually paid the ransom to redeem his body. This tombstone has been preserved to this day at the entrance to the ancient cemetery in Jewish Worms. Written on it in reference to Maharam is the following: “Who was imprisoned by the Roman emperor […] in the forty-sixth year of the sixth millennium [which is 1286], and died in prison on the nineteenth of Iyyar in the fifty-third year [1293], and was not brought to burial until […] the sixty-seventh year of the sixth millennium [1307].” If you go to visit the double grave today you will find that people have left little notes scrawled with prayers and requests piled on the graves and heaped up on the top of the tombstones. As you approach you realize that you are undoubtedly in the presence of the grave of a Rabbi that people still view as a saint, and that this is a site of religious pilgrimage and spiritual devotion.
In prison, the Maharam continued to teach and to advise his disciples and all the people, turning the Fortress into a sort of academy. He also continued to receive and answer letters, though this was made difficult because of the lack of books. For some time he was encouraged by the hope that his imprisonment would be short and he would be released quickly, but the part of a letter that he wrote to his student, The Rosh (Asher b. Yehiel) shows him in a moment of despair:
…In these places of wilderness I do not possess Tosafot to Tractate Gittin, nor works on ritual, and therefore I am putting down all these words just as I have been inspired by Heaven. However, if you find that the Tosafot or the codes decide one way or the other against me, my opinion should be considered null and void. For what can a miserable man know who dwells under the shadow of death, and has lacked all the amenities of life now for three years and six months, has been forsaken to affliction by all good men? I am a trodden threshold which was once called R. Meir ben Barukh.
The Israeli-Canadian scholar, Ephraim Shoham-Steiner has written a convincing theory about an aspect of the events leading up to the redemption of Rabbi Meir’s body. His theory gives us an insight into the rabbinic culture, and the authority that rabbis had in this time and place, Germany in the 13th century. Tradition has it that years after Rabbi Meir’s death the wealthy patron Alexander Wimpfen spent not only a large sum, but in fact all his money, to bring R. Meir’s remains to the Jewish burial ground in Worms. It is for this reason that he was eventually buried next to the Maharam. Shoham-Steiner suggests that the connection between these two men was not made only after the great Rabbi died in the dungeon. He identifies Alexander Wimpfen with another man named Alexander who had had a life-changing encounter with the Maharam decades earlier.
We are in possession of a responsum that records the ruling of the Maharam in a case involving a Jewish man who hired some non-Jewish toughs to bring another Jew to appear in court for a lawsuit. But in the process of forcing him to come the non-Jews killed the man, maybe accidentally. The man who had hired the non-Jews was named Alexander. The Maharam wrote in this case):
How can I respond to you, my rabbis, about this bad deed and grave incident? Be advised that the perpetrator’s adjudication is not in our hands, but rather rests with the Almighty alone. And who would know about the above-mentioned case, how this Alexander should repent for this grave transgression? It seems to me that we need to be more stringent with him, even more than with an Jew who told his emissary “go forth and have someone killed.”
And he concludes:
I wonder who was it that permitted (Alexander) to apprehend him with the aid of non-Jews? Even if we follow his defense that all he wished to do was to force the other party to come and settle in court, even impounding his opponent is not permissible, let alone something of this nature … I therefore believe he requires as severe atonement as a murderer … His person should be bound in iron shackles. He should be whipped, both publicly and privately humiliated and humbled. He should wander in exile until his countenance reveals his deceit and lies – maybe then the Lord will hear his prayer and redeem him.
The Maharam ruled against Alexander, who had caused another Jew’s murder. Alexander tried to claim that while he may have tried to have his opponent coerced into submission, he certainly did not want to have him killed. The Maharam thought otherwise. In his opinion, the man’s death was no accident, since Alexander should have seen the likelihood of violence, and therefore could not be seen as unintentional. Alexander should have anticipated it the moment he hired the thugs. Although he did not commit the murder with his own hands, once enforcement had been outsourced, the murder became inevitable. The Maharam knew that he had no real ability to enforce the Talmudic penal system of Jewish criminal law and inflict the prescribed death penalty on Alexander. All he and his fellow rabbis could do was impose penitential practices. So Alexander was ordered to suffer social ostracism, banishment and harsh penitential practices designed to signal both to him and to his community that he had gravely sinned.
Shoham-Steiner lists a number of good reasons for speculating that Alexander Wimpfen is the Alexander of the responsum. I won’t list them all here, but if he is right, then redeeming R. Meir’s body could be seen to have aided the cleansing of Alexander’s sin. Shoham-Steiner calls the act a reverse mirror image of what had happened between him and the Jewish man whose death he had caused at Gentile hands: The murder of the Jew had triggered Alexander’s banishment and penitence. The redemption of the Maharam of Rothenburg’s body from his Gentile captors may have allowed Alexander to return to the company of the community after the Maharam’s death.
Here we see a number of the features of the German Jewish community in the 13th century. A strong sense of piety, sin and redemption. Reliance upon the authority of rabbis, and the oddness of great wealth combined with great personal insecurity. A wealthy, educated, and successful Jewish community, but one that is at the same time subject to the whims of the always potentially violent non-Jewish community around them. Nothing was ever simple for the Jews in the Middle Ages, and certainly not in Germany in the 13th century.
There was a huge importance on piety and custom in this place and time. Much of what we associate with the most popular devotional practices of Judaism actually comes from this place and time, especially if it has a folk-loric quality. So I want to read a passage from the Sefer Ha-avi Ha-ezri of Rabbi Eliezer ben Yoel HaLevi of Bonn where he defends popular custom against the charge of superstition and magic. It reads:
Regarding your claim that we are working omens when we are accustomed to take the heads of sheep on Rosh Hashanah, and eat honey and all sorts of sweet things, and eat barley groats with fatty meat, and rabia and watercress, and that we slaughter chickens on the eve of Yom Kippur according to the number of the members of the household, and that we peer at our fingernails during the blessing of “who creates the lights of the fire,” and pour water in the havdalah cup and wash our faces [with it]. I will respond to you in order: Behold, these are good omens, and most of them have a basis in biblical verses and rabbinic lore.
We see here an Ashkenazic tendency that sets a long Rabbinic paradigm. Rather than object to seemingly superstitious and simple-minded folk custom, the sages of Israel adopt them and imbue them with the highest religious meaning, identifying these practices with biblical and Talmudic precedents. If the people Israel are not prophets themselves, they are nonetheless the children of prophets.
Another thing to know about the German rabbinic context: early on, there had been a series of objections to the dialectic methodology of the Tosafot. Some contemporaries of R. Tam’s in Germany opposed the use of his approach for legal decision-making. We find this in the responsa of Raavan. Within a short time, however, the French Tosafot method’s imprint was felt in the responsa of German scholars. A case in point is Raavan’s grandson, R. Eliezer ben Joel (Raviah) whose passage I read earlier, the Raviah, author of Sefer Avi haezri. This work is organized according to the order of Talmudic tractates, and includes both comments on the Talmud and also responsa.
The characteristically French imprint of the Tosafot approach reached its peak in Germany in the Sefer Or Zarua, a work arranged by topics in the order of their appearance in the Talmud, authored by Raviah’s student R. Isaac ben Moses of Vienna. The author even traveled to study in the French academy with a descendent of Rashi.
This gets us back to the Maharam, with whom we started this episode. The outstanding student of R. Isaac of Vienna was R. Meir of Rothenburg the Maharam.
One prominent student of R. Meir was R. Mordechai ben Hillel, who wrote the Sefer ha-Mordechai (The book of the Mordechai). In it the author follows the sequence of Rif ’s Halakhot. More compendium than commentary, R. Mordechai’s goal was to write a supplement to Rif’s work that included the opinions of scholars of the northern European school, meaning the scholars of Germany. He also quotes extensively from the works of scholars from different centers of learning. Just to make this clear, the Sefer ha-Mordechai is important because it’s the Rif plus the rulings of German rabbis and it’s written in a way which you can read straight through as you would the Talmud and get all of the opinions of both the North African and Spanish scholars from the time of the Rif and also all of the German scholars following the Maharam mi Rothenberg.
Following his teacher, the Maharam, into martyrdom, R. Mordechai ben Hillel was murdered in the Rintfleisch massacres of 1298. His death ended the Maharam’s intellectual legacy in Germany. Jewish legal creativity in the region came to an end. But in the aftermath of R. Meir’s demise, the man who was to become his most famous student, R. Asher ben Yehiel, had moved to Spain with his family. That move both preserved the Maharam’s Torah in Spain and began a new chapter in the history of Jewish legal thinking and production. And we will talk about the continuation of Torah in Christian Spain next time.
[Music]
Announcer Thanks for listening to the Evolution of Torah with Professor Mordechai Schwartz. It was recorded at JTS by Christopher Hickey, and produced by Ellie Gettinger, with editing assistance from Sarah Brown. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts. For those who want to dig a little deeper, visit jtsa.edu/podcasts where you’ll find sources, archival material and more in the evolution of Torah show notes along with links to all of JTS podcasts, exploring Jewish texts, history, culture and experience.
