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“You Have Saved Me from the Judgment of Gehenna”: The Origins of the Mourner's Kaddish in Medieval Ashkenaz

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 May 2015

David I. Shyovitz
David I. Shyovitz*
Affiliation:
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois
*
davidshy@northwestern.edu

Abstract

This article traces the origins and rapid spread of the Mourner's Kaddish, a liturgical custom first attested in late twelfth- early thirteenth-century Ashkenazic halakhic texts. While scholars have traditionally linked it to the martyrological needs of post-1096 Ashkenazic communities, this article suggests that the rise of the Mourner's Kaddish was one manifestation of a broader shift in medieval Jewish conceptions of the afterlife. An analysis of the exemplum that provided the new custom with a “myth of origins” reveals carefully inserted allusions and symbolism, which together propound a coherent theology of eschatology, divine recompense, and intercessory prayer. This theology closely mirrors doctrinal developments underway in Christian Europe—specifically the “birth of purgatory” and its accompanying commemorative and intercessory practices. The exemplum, moreover, couches its message in subtly polemical terms, criticizing and ridiculing those very elements of Christian belief and practice that were being covertly incorporated into the Jewish liturgical realm.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
AJS Review , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , April 2015 , pp. 49 - 73
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Jewish Studies 2015 

Sometime in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, the Jewish communities of northern Europe began to recite a weekly prayer for the dead. That fact would likely have been lost on an outside observer, who almost certainly would not have noticed. After all, the prayer in question, the Kaddish, contained no references whatsoever to death, and had already been a key component of the Jewish liturgy for many centuries.Footnote 1 The change that took place in the twelfth century was a very subtle one: at one prayer service a week—on Saturday night, at the conclusion of the Sabbath—an orphan would specifically be chosen as the one to recite the Kaddish prayer. An apparently minor innovation—and yet within several decades, this liturgical development had exploded. From its initial attestation in several German liturgical guides,Footnote 2 the recitation of the Mourner's Kaddish spread throughout the Rhineland,Footnote 3 to northernFootnote 4 and southernFootnote 5 France, to Bavaria and Austria,Footnote 6 and eventually to SpainFootnote 7 and Italy.Footnote 8 As it spread, it expanded—before long, the Mourner's Kaddish was being recited daily, and then thrice daily,Footnote 9 and rabbinic decisors fielded increasingly complex halakhic questions as to the particularities of its place in the liturgy.Footnote 10 Soon, orphans were competing with one another for the chance to recite the Kaddish, and communal leaders had to devise increasingly elaborate systems in order to determine who would take precedence in doing so.Footnote 11 Before long, it was impossible to remember a time when the Mourner's Kaddish was not a key component of the liturgy—to the extent that congregants were increasingly in doubt as to whether non-orphans could be permitted to lead services on Saturday nights at all if no orphans were present. R. Jacob Molin of Mainz (d. 1427), for example, reassured the addressee of a responsum that “those whose parents are alive need not fear to recite Kaddish or to pray on Saturday night,”Footnote 12 while Molin's younger contemporary R. Israel Isserlein of Wiener-Neustadt categorically stated that “there is no prohibition in the matter—for the evening prayer was not established [only] for orphans!”Footnote 13 Some rabbinic figures deemed this enthusiasm for Kaddish excessive, and sought to curb it: thus Molin observed that

Even adults focus a great deal on the Mourner's Kaddish, more than on the other Kaddishes and on Barkhu, because this Kaddish is extra, and not mandatory, and [these people] therefore think that it will bring greater relief to their relatives than other prayers. But I do not agree with them in this matter. For the opposite is true. He who performs a mandatory action is greater [than he who performs a voluntary action].Footnote 14

R. Isaac Tyrnau, meanwhile, lamented the fact that “it is commonly found in the mouths of people that Kaddish is the most significant [mourning ritual].”Footnote 15

How did such an ostensibly minor innovation—that an existing component of the liturgy simply be recited by an orphan once a week—spread so rapidly and become so deeply entrenched? Although the text of the Kaddish has no obvious connection to death, it had long been associated with motifs of redemption and eschatology in the rabbinic writings of the late antique and early medieval periods.Footnote 16 If the need arose for a new prayer for the dead, the Kaddish was a natural choice.Footnote 17 But why was a new prayer for mourners introduced in high medieval northern Europe in the first place?

The majority of scholars who have addressed this question have invoked the 1096 attacks on the Jewish communities of the Rhineland as their explanation, suggesting that a new commemorative prayer for the dead was necessitated by the collective trauma of the Crusader massacres.Footnote 18 This explanation has a certain intuitive appeal, for attacks on Ashkenazic communities did indeed provoke liturgical responses throughout the Middle Ages, including the ’Av ha-raḥamimFootnote 19 and assorted kinot and piyyutim.Footnote 20 Nonetheless, this account of the origins of the Mourner's Kaddish is difficult to accept, for the earliest texts prescribing its recitation regard the prayer not as commemorative, but rather as intercessory—the Kaddish, as we shall see, is to be recited specifically in order to free one's family members from punishment in hell.Footnote 21 For medieval northern European Jews, it would be inconceivable to imagine that the martyrs of 1096—heroes who left an indelible mark on the identity and collective consciousness of Ashkenazic Jewry—were suffering in hell, or that they required any intercession whatsoever.Footnote 22 As a number of recent studies have shown, medieval Jews believed that martyrs were granted immediate entry into paradise—and the desire to attain such heavenly reward may have even motivated the Jews who gave up their lives in the face of the Crusader onslaughts.Footnote 23 In fact, even after the custom of reciting the Mourner's Kaddish had become ubiquitous, and its recitation viewed as incumbent on all orphans, some Ashkenazic figures were uncomfortable with requiring the children of martyrs to recite it, and continued to question whether they were obliged to do so.Footnote 24 As one late medieval questioner put it, surely a martyr's death “brought him forgiveness for his sins, and thus he cannot be considered a wicked man. Stringency [in requiring his children to recite Kaddish] would impose a taint on the family!”Footnote 25

Rather than seeking to tie the prayer's origins to a discreet historical event like the 1096 attacks, this article argues that the rise and spread of the Mourner's Kaddish was a manifestation of changing beliefs about the nature of the afterlife and the relationship between the living and the dead. Over the course of the High Middle Ages, both Jewish and Christian theologians developed new ideas about the nature and purpose of postmortem suffering. In particular, these thinkers stressed the fundamentally temporary duration of divine punishment in the afterlife, and the concomitant notion that the living could help cleanse the sins, and thus expedite the suffering, of their deceased relatives. This developing theological consensus allowed for, even necessitated, new ritual means of intercession. The halakhists of medieval Ashkenaz thus added an intercessory prayer to their liturgy particularly in the late twelfth century because it was precisely at that moment that the theological ground was shifting beneath their feet. To be sure, the belief that family members can intercede on behalf of their relatives in the next world was attested in some prior works of rabbinic literature.Footnote 26 But by standardizing and formalizing an intercessory prayer, and by making its recitation available to, and eventually incumbent upon, all orphans, twelfth-century Jews effectively “codified” this position, linking belief to practice in ways that reinforced both.

The theological notions that grounded the liturgical innovation were neatly encapsulated in an exemplum that consistently accompanied discussions of the Kaddish in the halakhic texts that mandated its recitation. That tale, an apparently mundane “ghost story” that provided the new practice with a myth of origins, was already widespread in earlier aggadic literature. But despite these appearances, the medieval halakhists did not simply adopt a well-known story, and use it to justify a new practice. The version of the narrative that accompanied discussions of the Kaddish differed subtly but significantly from prior rabbinic attestations. It included carefully deployed allusions and symbolism that shed light upon both the meaning that the Mourner's Kaddish had to those who recited it, and the high medieval sociocultural setting within which the custom developed and spread.

In particular, an analysis of the narrative highlights the extent to which high medieval Jewish and Christian conceptions of the afterlife mirrored one another, and shifted in tandem—and suggests that this parallel was not lost upon the Jews who composed and circulated the tale. This interrelationship between narrative, theology, and practice thus complements and complicates recent discussions of the relationship between medieval Jewish and Christian eschatological schemes. More broadly, it sheds further light upon the embeddedness of ostensibly “internal” Jewish customs and beliefs within their medieval Latin Christian surroundings.

Who Was the “Wandering Dead Man”?

The custom of a mourner reciting Kaddish on Saturday night appears nearly simultaneously in three halakhic collections composed in medieval Ashkenaz: in R. Eleazar b. Judah of Worms's commentary on the prayerbook, in the ’Or zaru‘a of R. Isaac b. Moses of Vienna, and in a manuscript of the Maḥzor Vitry that contains glosses and other supplemental material appended by R. Isaac b. Dorbelo, a student of R. Jacob Tam.Footnote 27 In all three texts, discussion of the custom is preceded by a lengthy retelling of a famous exemplum, called by scholars of medieval Hebrew folklore “the story of the Tanna and the dead man.”Footnote 28 By the twelfth century, this narrative had already appeared in a number of midrashic collections;Footnote 29 in those prior versions, the tale centered around the encounter between a rabbi (usually R. Akiva, but sometimes R. Yoḥanan b. ZakkaiFootnote 30) and a dead man, whom the rabbi witnesses being punished for his sins (which vary in the different iterations from theft to murder to sexual immorality). The rabbi asks the dead man if there is anything he can do to help alleviate his suffering, and the dead man responds by asking that the rabbi find his son, and have him recite a prayer (usually Barkhu) on his behalf. When the son does so, the reader is informed that the dead man was indeed freed from his punishments.

The story that accompanied discussions of the Mourner's Kaddish in twelfth and thirteenth-century sources comports with these prior versions in its broad outline. Because of its significance for what follows, it is worth citing the later version at length; the passage below comes from the Maḥzor Vitry version:

It once happened that Rabbi Akiva was passing through a cemetery, and he came upon a man who was naked, and black as coal, and carrying a great burden of thorns on his head. Rabbi Akiva thought that the man, who was running like a horse, was alive. Rabbi Akiva commanded and stopped him, and said to him: “Why does that man (’oto ha-’ish) do this difficult work? If you are a servant and your master treats you this way, I will redeem you from his hands; if you are poor and people are treating you unfairly, I will enrich you.”

[The man] said to him: “Please do not delay me, lest those appointed over me become angry.”

[Rabbi Akiva] said to him: “What is this, and what are your deeds?”

[The man] said to him: “That man is dead, and every day I am sent out to chop trees.”

[Rabbi Akiva] said to him: “My son, what was your profession in the world from which you came?”

[The man] said to him: “I was a tax collector (gabba'i ha-mekhes), and I would favor the rich and kill the poor.”

[Rabbi Akiva] said to him: “Haven't you heard anything from those appointed to punish you about how you might be relieved?”

[The man] said: “Please do not delay me, lest those in charge of my punishments become angry, for there is no relief for that man. But I did hear from [those appointed over me] one impossible thing: ‘If only this poor man had a son who would stand in front of the congregation and say “Let us bless God, Who is blessed” (barkhu ’et ’adonai ha-mevorakh), and have them answer “May His great name be blessed,” (yehe shmeh rabbah mevorakh) he would be immediately released from his punishments.’Footnote 31 But that man never had a son—he left his wife pregnant, and I do not know if she had a boy. And even if she did have a boy, who would teach him Torah? That man does not have a friend in the world.”

Immediately, Rabbi Akiva decided to go and see if he had a son, in order to teach him Torah and stand him in front of the congregation. He said to [the man]: “What is your name?”

[The man] said to him: “Akiva.”

“And your wife's name?”

[The man] said to him: “Shoshniba.

“And the name of your city?”

“Laodicea.”

Immediately Rabbi Akiva was extremely saddened, and went to ask after [the man]. When he arrived in that city, he asked after him. [The townspeople] said to him: “May the bones of that man be ground up.”

[Rabbi Akiva] asked after [the man's] wife. They said to him: “May her memory be erased from the world.”

He asked about her son. They said to him: “He is uncircumcised—we did not even engage in the commandment of circumcision for him.”

Immediately, Rabbi Akiva circumcised him, and put a book in front of him. But he would not accept Torah study, until Rabbi Akiva fasted for forty days. A heavenly voice said to him: “For this you are fasting?”

[Rabbi Akiva] said: “Master of the Universe! Is it not for You that I am preparing him?”

Immediately the Holy One opened [the child's] heart, and [Rabbi Akiva] taught him Torah, and the Shema, and grace after meals. He then stood [the child] in front of the congregation, and [the child] recited “Let us bless,” and the congregation answered after him “Blessed be the blessed God.” In that hour, they freed [the man] from his punishment. Immediately, the man came to Rabbi Akiva in a dream, and said “May it be the will of the Holy One, blessed be He, that you rest in the Garden of Eden, for you have saved me from the judgment of Gehenna.” Rabbi Akiva exclaimed: “God, your name endures forever; your renown, God, through all generations” [Ps. 135:13].

Therefore, it is customary to appoint a person who does not have a father or mother to lead the services at the conclusion of the Sabbath, in order to say Barkhu or Kaddish.Footnote 32

At first glance, the twelfth-century versions of the exemplum do not deviate significantly from the earlier attestations; they follow the same narrative arc, and seem to offer their readers identical guidance. The details in the later versions do differ, however, in a number of seemingly incidental ways. One example is the question of the dead man's sins. Earlier versions of the tale varied in their identification of the sin committed by the condemned man, ranging from murder to theft to sexual transgressions. In one early medieval text, the dead man admits that “there is not a single sin remaining that I did not commit.”Footnote 33 Yet by the twelfth century, all three versions of the story specify that the sinner had been a crooked tax collector. The appearance of the dead man is also described in much greater detail in the twelfth-century versions—he carries “a great burden of thorns on his head,” and is said to be “black as coal.” Neither of these details is included in the earlier versions of the narrative. Also noteworthy is the attention given in the twelfth-century versions to the dead sinner's son. In earlier texts, the son simply responds to Akiva's prodding and recites the appropriate prayers. In the twelfth-century versions, however, the reader is informed that the child is uncircumcised, and that he is unwilling or unable to absorb Akiva's teachings until God has intervened directly.

Many scholars who have analyzed the twelfth-century version of this story have treated it merely an expanded version of the earlier ones, with its new details originating as explanations or misunderstanding of details found in the prior versions of the tale. But to a learned Jewish reader in twelfth-century Ashkenaz, these subtle differences would have spoken volumes. Indeed, the unique elements of the story combine to dramatically reshape the fundamental message of the tale, and it seems clear that the editor who reshaped the story did so quite consciously.

To begin with, many of the new details found in the twelfth-century version seem to have been borrowed from a famous sugya in the Babylonian Talmud concerning the fates of sinners in the afterlife:

Jews and non-Jews who sin with their bodies descend to Gehenna and are judged there for twelve months. After twelve months, their bodies are annihilated and their souls are burnt and the wind scatters them under the feet of the righteous … But the heretics, traitors, and the Epicureans, who denied the Torah and the resurrection of the dead, and those who separate themselves from the ways of the congregation, and those who “instill their terror in the land of the living” … descend to Gehenna and are judged there eternally.… Rabbi Isaac bar ’Avin said: “Their faces resemble the bottom of a pot.”

[Who are] those who “instill their terror in the land of the living”? R. Ḥisda said: This is a parnas who instills excessive fear in the community, not for the sake of heaven. R. Judah said in the name of Rav: Any parnas who instills excessive fear in the community, not for the sake of heaven, will not see his son become a scholar.…Footnote 34

A number of the details newly introduced into the twelfth-century version of the exemplum can be better comprehended on the basis of this talmudic text. First and foremost, the description of the sinner as a merciless tax collector who oppressed the poor conforms to the Talmud's description of a parnas, or communal leader, who “instills excessive fear in the community.” In medieval northern Europe, communal functionaries were still referred to specifically as parnasim, and the office of parnas seems to have been particularly prominent in the Rhineland; contemporary Christian sources refer to them frequently using terms such as Judenbishof, episcopus Judaeorum, archi-synagogos, magister Judaeorum, Judenmeester, and Judenältester.Footnote 35 The chief duties of the parnas included both tax collection and administration of charitable funds.Footnote 36 The Talmud's authoritarian parnas who favors the rich at the expense of the poor thus may well have been understood to be a crooked tax collector (gabba'i ha-mekhes).Footnote 37 Indeed, parnasim were explicitly identified with gabbai'im in contemporary sources,Footnote 38 and their propensity for corruption was frequently described, and decried, in Ashkenazic texts. Sefer Ḥasidim, for instance, repeatedly cites the Talmud's condemnation of the “parnas who instills excessive fear,”Footnote 39 while a passage preserved in the Bologna recension of Sefer Ḥasidim expands upon it considerably:

If one wants to instill fear in one's household—or upon the community, if one is a parnas—he should pretend to be angry in front of them, but keep his mind calm inwardly—like a man who is pretending to be angry but is not angry in his heart.... A parnas should not instill fear in the community if it is not for the sake of heaven, or forcefully dominate or oppress or coerce them in order to glorify himself, or to make them scared or frightened of him.… Those “who instill their terror in the land of the living” … descend to the pit of destruction and never leave … rather, fire bursts forth from their bones and they are incinerated.Footnote 40

The same work cites a midrashic injunction warning communal officials against exercising excessive force in their collection of charity, but replaces the original addressee, the gabba'i, with parnas—suggesting that the two terms were at times used interchangeably.Footnote 41

To an Ashkenazic audience with warnings like these fresh in their minds, the dead man in the exemplum would have immediately recalled the talmudic parnas—indeed, the versions of the story in ’Or zaru‘a and Perush siddur tefillah le-Rokeaḥ specify that the tax collector was “one of the heads of the nation” (mi-roshei ha-‘am). The other details in the story would have confirmed this association. That the sinner in the exemplum is “black as coal” accords with the Talmud's description of “those who instill their terror in the land of life,” whose “faces are like the bottom of a pot.” The fact that the sinner's son proves unable to comprehend the liturgy that Akiva attempts to teach him also alludes to the Talmud's promise that the sinful parnas will “not see his son become a scholar.”

It seems likely, then, that at least some of the changes inserted by the author of the twelfth-century version of the story allude specifically to this talmudic passage.Footnote 42 Indeed, understanding these allusions allows us not merely to account for specific details of the story, but also to identify its surprising theological underpinnings. As we have noted, the Talmud invokes the parnas who instills excessive fear in the community as an example of a sinner who “descend[s] to Gehenna and [is] judged there eternally.” By making this figure in particular the archetype of the sinner who can be redeemed from hell as a result of recitation of Kaddish, the narrative is conveying a far more radical message than the versions of the tale that had circulated previously. Rather than merely illustrating the power of prayer to benefit the dead, the narrative is forthrightly asserting that all sinners can benefit from the recitation of an intercessory prayer—even those whom the Talmud had promised could never, under any circumstances be redeemed. The Kaddish, according to this narrative, turns out to be far more powerful than twelfth-century Jews would have otherwise thought.

But the sinner in the medieval Ashkenazic versions of the tale is not only linked to the talmudic parnas; he is simultaneously characterized in an even more radical manner. As noted above, the versions of the tale circulating in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Ashkenaz describe the sinner as carrying “a great burden of thorns on his head.” For a medieval audience living in a Christian society, this description could not but recall Jesus, who, according to the Gospels, was led to his crucifixion carrying his heavy cross,Footnote 43 and mockingly crowned with thorns.Footnote 44 This Christological resonance would have found an echo in a syntactical oddity not present in many prior attestations of the tale—namely, the dead man's consistent use of the third person in referring to himself in his dialogue with R. Akiva. Throughout the tale, the sinner awkwardly refers to himself as ’oto ha-’ish (“that man”). Thus ’oto ha-’ish met (lit., “that man is dead”) appears where the intention is clearly “I am dead”; ’oto ha-’ish lo hayah lo ben me-‘olam (lit. “that man never had a son”) for “I never had a son”; and so on. In rabbinic and medieval sources, ’oto ha-’ish appeared frequently as a pejorative moniker for Jesus—“that man.”Footnote 45 These linkages also shed light on the curse uttered by the inhabitants of Laodicea when R. Akiva approaches them to inquire about the dead man. The malediction “may the bones of that man be ground up” (yishaḥaku ‘aẓmotav shel ’oto ha-’ish) would have reminded a learned Jewish audience of the Roman emperor Hadrian, who is identified in many rabbinic sources as 'Adriyanus sheḥik ‘aẓamot, “Hadrian, may his bones be ground up.” Hadrian, who led the Roman suppression of the Bar Kokhba Revolt, during the course of which Rabbi Akiva himself was said to have been executed,Footnote 46 was not only an archvillain of rabbinic literature; after the fourth-century Christianization of Rome, he, along with the Roman Empire more broadly, came to function metonymically as a symbol of Christianity.Footnote 47 Thus, “that man,” crowned with thorns, is cursed by the townspeople in a decidedly anti-Christian idiom.

But why would our narrator link the sinner and Jesus in this manner?Footnote 48 While it might have been viscerally satisfying for a high medieval Jewish author to slyly mock Jesus, the Christological depiction of the sinner is not solely a polemical jab—after all, the story ends with the sinner redeemed, freed from his torments in hell and elevated to the Garden of Eden! Why would Jesus be granted such posthumous relief? A solution to this question might be gleaned from the analysis above, which suggested that the talmudic parnas functions in the tale as an example of a sinner who can never be freed from hell—but who is freed nonetheless, owing to the power of the Kaddish. Jesus, too, is depicted as eschatologically (and scatologically!) irredeemable in prior rabbinic works—most famously in a talmudic passage that describes Jesus as suffering in hell in a boiling cauldron of excrement.Footnote 49 By characterizing the sinner as a conflation of the “parnas who instills excessive fear in the community” on the one hand, and Jesus on the other, our tale constructs a portrait of the sinner least likely to ever be freed from his torments—and then argues, in a shocking twist, that the recitation of the Kaddish can redeem even him. This is not to say, of course, that polemic is absent from the medieval versions of the Akiva tale. Indeed, the story's denouement neatly parodies a key element of Christian doctrine, namely the Harrowing of Hell, the notion that Jesus descended to the netherworld in the interim between his crucifixion and resurrection in order to redeem the righteous, who were suffering there on account of their original sin, and raise them up to heaven. Our medieval narrator embraces the notion that the actions of the righteous can benefit the dead—but in his telling, the crucified Jesus needs to be redeemed from hell rather than redeeming others.

By suggesting that intercessory prayer can benefit even those sinners whom earlier Jewish sources had deemed irredeemable, the narrative that accompanied the Mourner's Kaddish is thus seizing upon a particular conception of the afterlife, one in which all sinners in hell can eventually make it into heaven. Other seemingly extraneous details inserted into the story confirm this impression. The fact that the Kaddish is to be said specifically on Saturday night, for example, draws on a popular Jewish belief, widespread by the twelfth century, that the wicked dead, like the living, rest on the Sabbath, and only return to hell on Saturday night.Footnote 50 The conclusion of the Sabbath is thus the ideal time for the recitation of an intercessory prayer, since such a prayer has the potential to extend the period of respite experienced by the soul of the dead. An eternal, immutable hell—the one promised by the Talmud to the wicked parnas and his ilk—could not allow for such meddling by the living. The fact that the townspeople in the story specify that they have not bothered to circumcise the son of the sinner is also meaningful in this regard. Medieval Ashkenazic thinkers were increasingly attentive to the midrashic notion that children who are uncircumcised are unable to enter heaven, and are consigned to hell—to the extent that some high medieval halakhists mandated postmortem circumcision of infants who died prior to reaching eight days of age.Footnote 51 The townspeople's refusal to circumcise the son of their hated parnas thus confirms that hell was very much on their minds, and highlights the eschatological subtext of the tale as a whole.

Debating Hell's Duration

Rather than an exemplum about the experience of a single sinner in the afterlife, then, the high medieval iterations of “the story of the wandering dead man” are more broadly about hell itself, and specifically its evolution from a place of eternal torment into a temporary way station en route to Heaven. Such a conception of hell has precedents in prior rabbinic literature—but there was hardly a consensus on the matter. Indeed, despite the tendency of some scholars to essentialize the Jewish “doctrine of hell,”Footnote 52 no consistent approach to the nature or duration of postmortem punishment can be found in late antique or early medieval Jewish sources. Rather, we find in rabbinic texts—as in the apocalyptic sources that preceded them—an array of competing ideas about the next world simultaneously in circulation.Footnote 53 The rabbis seemed split as to whether the wicked were (1) punished in hell for all of eternity; (2) punished for a discreet period of time, and then physically annihilated; or (3) punished for a discreet period of time and then allowed into heaven.Footnote 54 While rabbinic sources sometimes attempted to synthesize these various schemes, by, for example, correlating different types of sinners with different types of hells, the competing systems were just as often left to stand independently. Still other rabbinic traditions maintained that Jews—all Jews—could never be consigned to hell in the first place, that is, that hell was reserved exclusively for gentiles.Footnote 55 Peter Brown's description of the theological state of affairs in early Christianity is applicable to the contemporary Jewish setting as well:

Faced with so many vivid narratives, we should be careful not to endow any one of them with universal validity for all Christians of the age.… Forced to think about the unthinkable, Christians … tended to fall back on the fixed conceptions of their thought-world. They drew comfort from well-established imaginative structures. But they found that no one imaginative structure could do justice to the full extent of the problem.Footnote 56

By the medieval period, discussions and descriptions of hell reveal that these debates continued to be live ones. Midrashic compositions like Masekhet Gehinom, exempla detailing the suffering of the wicked in the next world, and visionary “tours of hell” all circulated widely in medieval Ashkenaz, but contained little in the way of consistent doctrine when it came to the nature or duration of punishment in the next world.Footnote 57 Other medieval Ashkenazic sources reflect a concerted effort to reconcile competing rabbinic passages in particular. Thus the Tosafists, characteristically, took note of the inconsistent descriptions of hell found in talmudic sources, and sought to impose a definitive order on them.Footnote 58 R. Moses Taku, too, dedicated extensive space in his Sefer ketav tamim to exploring the fate of the soul after death, and to the relationship between postmortem eschatology and the related constructs of the messianic era, the final judgment, and the resurrection of the dead.Footnote 59 And to be sure, the periodic controversies over the writings of Maimonides, which initially centered on his conceptions of the afterlife, point to the interest and anxiety with which these theoretical questions were treated. Indeed, the “First Maimonidean Controversy” of the late twelfth century, which dealt explicitly with the nature of postmortem reward and punishment, was apparently sufficiently widespread in Ashkenaz as to elicit a response from Eleazar b. Judah of Worms himself!Footnote 60

A comprehensive study of medieval Ashkenazic eschatology remains a desideratum, and is well beyond the scope of this article.Footnote 61 What is noteworthy in our context, however, is that against the backdrop of theological uncertainty and disagreement concerning the nature and duration of hell, practice was rapidly overtaking theory. As the recitation of the Mourner's Kaddish spread, so too did the theology of divine recompense that undergirded it—namely a hell that was fundamentally temporary, from which anyone could be redeemed, and intended to ultimately purge the sinner of his deeds and elevate him, cleansed, to heaven. That subsequent halakhists almost invariably gestured toward, and often retold, the story of Rabbi Akiva and the dead man in their discussion of the practice demonstrates that the tale and the symbolic meaning it evoked continued to resonate, and were understood to be inextricably linked to the liturgical custom itself.

Significantly, it was not only the Jews of medieval northern Europe who were debating the nature and duration of postmortem punishment. In his landmark study, La naissance du Purgatoire, Footnote 62 Jacques Le Goff argued that twelfth-century northern Europe witnessed the comprehensive development of a new eschatological realm: purgatory, a site of temporary suffering intended to cleanse the wicked of their sins. Whereas hell tended to function in prior Christian thought as a realm of eternal punishment, purgatory came to occupy a middle ground that aimed to purify the wicked, so as to speed them on to heaven. Le Goff traced the development of purgatory in Christian doctrine, but also highlighted the means by which theology intersected with ritual. Attempts at intercession on behalf of the dead were illogical so long as hell was viewed as eternal, but the newfound emphasis on temporary purgation invited prayers, masses, charitable donations, and other efforts at shortening the duration of one's relatives’ suffering. Le Goff also highlighted the means by which ideas and practices spread, particularly the upswing in exempla about purgatory, which came to figure prominently in an array of high medieval genres, such as sermons and visionary accounts. Such exempla focused on encounters between the living and the dead, and used narrative to reinforce the notion that the intercessory efforts of the living could indeed bear fruit in shortening the duration of the purgation of the dead.Footnote 63

Le Goff's situation of the “birth of purgatory” in twelfth-century northern Europe has come under fire by an array of subsequent scholars, who have pushed the origins of the doctrine as far back as late antiquity, and have sought to nuance Le Goff's account of the relationship between popular “demand” for a purgative eschatological option and the “supply side” of learned theologians.Footnote 64 Nonetheless, it is clear that what Le Goff calls the “spatialization” of purgatory—its strict cordoning off from heaven and hell as a distinct locale for purification—was increasingly discussed by Christian thinkers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Thus the first recorded use of the noun purgatorium (by Peter Comestor) has been dated by Le Goff to the last third of the twelfth century,Footnote 65 and the doctrine itself was adopted as binding at the Second Council of Lyons in 1274. It is also undisputed that this theological development had vast liturgical implications in high medieval Europe: “In order for the idea of Purgatory to develop, it was essential that the living be concerned about the fate of their dead, that the living maintain contact with the dead, in order to improve their condition through prayer.”Footnote 66

Viewed from this perspective, the development of the Mourner's Kaddish can be seen as an attempt by Jewish halakhists to harness a traditional Jewish practice to fill a ritual need occasioned by shifts in the broader theological milieu. The increasingly “purgatorial” notion of hell presupposed by the Mourner's Kaddish and its accompanying exemplum developed and spread in precisely the same time (late twelfth century) and place (northwestern Europe) that witnessed the “birth of purgatory.” Like their Christian neighbors, the Jews of Ashkenaz (and eventually, Europe more broadly) tied this shifting conception of postmortem punishment to new means of liturgical intercession, and composed exempla that reflected and circulated the new theological development. And notably, the introduction of the Mourner's Kaddish, steeped as it was in the surrounding Christian milieu, was couched by late twelfth-century authors in subtly polemical language that ridiculed Christian eschatological beliefs even as it subtly co-opted them.

That Jews were attuned to developing Christian views of the afterlife should come as no surprise. After all, descriptions of hell and its torments were a mainstay of both Jewish and Christian polemical writings, and adversarial encounters between religious rivals served as a means of transmission of doctrinal content. The doctrine of the Harrowing of Hell in particular figured prominently in high medieval disputational tracts composed by Jews and Christians alike. The anonymous thirteenth-century Ashkenazic compiler of Sefer niẓẓaḥon yashan, for instance, describes in detail both the doctrine itself, and the theory of “ransom” on which it is predicated, before subjecting both to a lengthy and withering critique.Footnote 67 How, he wonders, could Christians assert that all people were consigned to hell prior to Jesus's death when the Gospels themselves contain the story of Lazarus, who after his death occupies the “Bosom of Abraham” “in contentment, gladness, and joy”!Footnote 68 Indeed, the very notion that God needed to send Jesus in order to circumvent Satan's claims on the souls of the dead is deemed offensive: “Is God to be praised for dealing with his creatures through stratagems, indirection, and trickery?”Footnote 69

The same comprehensive knowledge of Christian doctrine is reflected in an anonymous Ashkenazic tract titled Sefer ha-vikuaḥ teshuvah le-minim, which engages extensively with the Harrowing of Hell.Footnote 70 Among the arguments in this text is the notion that the doctrine must be false since it is not even discussed explicitly in the text of the New Testament.Footnote 71 The northern French polemical tracts Milḥamot ha-shem and Sefer Yosef ha-Mekane devote attention to disproving the Harrowing of Hell as well, running through the scriptural prooftexts thought to prefigure the doctrine and then refuting each in turn.Footnote 72 Finally, thirteenth-century Bible commentaries composed in Ashkenaz also had occasion to reference, and dispute, this teaching. In discussing Jacob's cryptic pronouncement in Genesis 37:35 that he will “go down to my son mourning into Sheol,” the Tosafists took pains to point out that Jacob did not believe he would descend to hell on account of his original sin, but only because of his inadvertent role in hastening the death of his son Joseph.Footnote 73 As Isaac b. Judah ha-Levi combatively puts it, “this [verse] is a response to the heretics who say that everyone descended to hell until the great abominable, deceiving, misleading one arrived and saved all of humanity from hell.”Footnote 74

The role of Jesus in redeeming those suffering in hell is frequently interrogated by the imagined Jewish interlocutors in Christian treatises as well—for instance, in the twelfth-century Disputatio Iudei et Christiani of Gilbert Crispin,Footnote 75 and in the anonymously authored Dialogus inter Christianum et Iudeum de fide Catholica.Footnote 76 The contents of the latter were likely based on real-life encounters between its author and Jewish disputants.Footnote 77 And significantly, the manner in which the anonymous author of that text describes the punishment of the righteous in hell prior to Jesus's intervention aligns closely with developing notions of purgatory, “reflect[ing] the growing interest on the part of twelfth-century scholars in that part of the next world which was imagined to lie between heaven and hell.”Footnote 78 Christian polemicists also took pains to explore Jewish views of hell, the better to rebut and ridicule them. Thus Peter the Venerable, the twelfth-century abbot of Cluny, cites at length from a midrashic description of hell in his Tractatus adversus Judaeorum inveteratam duritiem;Footnote 79 he is particularly appalled by the text's assurance that all Christians, “because they believe in the son of Mary, and do not keep the law of Moses, and especially because they do not believe in the Talmud,” are consigned to hell, a notion he disputes with characteristic vitriol.Footnote 80 By the mid-thirteenth century, Christian exploration of the Talmud had turned up the passage describing Jesus's fate in a cauldron of excrement, which figured prominently in the “Trial of the Talmud” that took place in Paris in 1240.Footnote 81 Indeed, the 1240 disputation between Nicholas Donin and R. Yeḥi'el of Paris that culminated in the burning of the Talmud devoted extensive attention to the teachings about hell contained in B. Rosh ha-Shanah 17a, the same passage underlying the exemplum of R. Akiva and the dead man in its twelfth-century iteration.Footnote 82 Clearly, both sides took pains to analyze their opponents’ traditions on the nature of the afterlife, and to “operationalize” their conclusions for maximum polemical payoff.

In addition to overtly combative encounters, Ashkenazic Jews would certainly have had occasion to view Christian sculpture, paintings, and other representations of hell and its workings. Images of the Last Judgment, the entry of sinners into the mouth of hell, and so on, were mainstays of contemporary visual culture, and medieval Ashkenazic Jews, who often lived in close proximity to local churches and cemeteries, would surely have encountered frescos, sculptures on church exteriors, and other manifestations of contemporary views of the realm of punishment in the afterlife.Footnote 83 Indeed, at least one medieval Ashkenazic source refers specifically to the portraits that were commonly found depicting the suffering of sinners in hell. The Sefer ha-vikuaḥ teshuvah le-minim suggests that Jewish disputants challenge Christians as to the permissibility of icons and other sacred material images—is this not a violation of the second commandment, which prohibits the worship of graven images? Should the Christian opponent respond that the Jews, too, were guilty of this sin, since the biblical Ark that held the ten commandments was itself adorned with “graven” Cherubic figures, the text offers a ready response:

I will offer a parable: A king of flesh and blood wrote a directive on the walls of his palace: “Be pure, and do not sin.” But he thought to himself, “The commoners, and women and children do not know how to read!” He therefore commissioned beneath the directive a painting of a corpse laid out on a bier, with fire burning beneath it. This painting would allow everyone to understand that the directive was teaching them not to sin, in order that they not be judged in hell like the figure in the painting. So too, the Holy One, blessed be He, wrote in the Ten Commandments, “Thou shalt not make a graven image or picture,” and placed the tablets in the Ark. He thought, “There are women and children and slaves who cannot read the writing ‘Thou shalt not make a graven image.’” What did He do? He commanded that an image be made on the Ark, namely the Cherubs, [to indicate] “See, these countenances are what I have commanded you not to make.” Thus, the images of the Cherubs prevent the performance of idolatry, and are not themselves idolatrous.Footnote 84

Just as the artistic depictions of hell serve as visual illustrations of the fate awaiting sinners, the Cherubs on the Ark were meant to serve as illustrations of exactly what kind of graven images were prohibited. The Sefer ha-vikuaḥ teshuvah le-minim, it should be noted, also contains lengthy transcriptions of New Testament verses in Latin—suggesting that its author's familiarity with Christian imagery, and knowledge of the contents of the Christian scripture, were part and parcel of a deep and broad familiarity with contemporary Christian doctrines.

Thus, the “purgatorial” conception of hell underlying the rise of the Mourner's Kaddish, and implicitly described in the Akiva story, did not develop in a vacuum. In high medieval northern Europe, both Jews and Christians were reimagining the nature of postmortem punishment, and were creating new means by which doctrinal beliefs could be manifested in practice. And they were doing so in dialogue with one another, telling themselves and one another tales that expressed these new beliefs, and that allowed them to spread rapidly throughout Europe and beyond.

*****

The notion that the rise of the Mourner's Kaddish might be linked to contemporary Christian views of the afterlife was tentatively raised in 1998 by Leon Wieseltier in Kaddish, his historical and phenomenological meditation on death and Judaism. Wieseltier concluded, however, that the development of the Mourner's Kaddish was propelled solely by “internal” Jewish momentum:

The birth of Purgatory may have occurred at the same time as the birth of the Kaddish. But this is, as I say, a coincidence. I do not believe for a minute that the one was the cause of the other. Judaism was diversified by influence, but it was developed by its own force.Footnote 85

Yet, there is no need to distinguish so starkly between internal “development” and external “diversification.”Footnote 86 As much recent scholarship has demonstrated, medieval Ashkenazic culture was profoundly embedded within its surrounding Christian society.Footnote 87 But this does not mean that Christian theological developments “caused” the birth of the Kaddish. Far from being a mere co-option of regnant Christian beliefs, the rise of the Mourner's Kaddish reflected a far more nuanced and complicated process of simultaneous distancing and appropriation. Thus the Akiva tale, whose genre and underlying theological symbols both reflect contemporary Christian mores, expresses itself in a polemical idiom, parodying the Harrowing of Hell and describing the suffering of Jesus in the next world—even as it unexpectedly concludes with the Jesus-figure redeemed and restored to heaven. The developments traced here are thus textbook examples of what Ivan Marcus has called “inward acculturation.” As in other spheres of medieval Jewish life, the halakhists of Ashkenaz in this instance “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.… Jews absorbed into their Judaism aspects of the majority culture, and understood the products to be part and parcel of their Judaism, and they continued to think of themselves as completely Jewish.Footnote 88 Talya Fishman's formulation is also fitting in this regard: “At a time and place when it would have been unthinkable to acknowledge the influence exerted by the despised majority culture, the anxiety engendered by this ineluctable influence triggered the Ashkenazi search for a useable past.”Footnote 89 By drawing on a well-attested narrative, and a ubiquitous prayer, and investing both with new meaning, the Akiva story subtly mitigates between the familiarity of the past and the theological needs of the present.

The development of the Mourner's Kaddish serves as a case study of a number of broader, interrelated phenomena. On a methodological level, it belies the notion that ostensibly derivative medieval texts should be analyzed primarily diachronically, as “witnesses” to earlier “urtexts.” While our tale bases itself on a well-known trope, its specific treatment of that trope reflects the decidedly synchronic concerns of the audience that generated, and would consume it.Footnote 90 The parallel shifts in Jewish and Christian conceptions of the fate of the soul after death, meanwhile, reflect the embeddedness of Jewish practices and beliefs within their Latin Christian surroundings, and illustrate that polemical texts often paradoxically served to anchor the Jewish minority within their majority surroundings, and served as a conduit through which Jews and Christians could engage with one another's texts, beliefs, and traditions.Footnote 91

References

1. On the origins and development of the Kaddish prayer prior to the twelfth century, see for example: De Sola Pool, David, The Old Jewish-Aramaic Prayer: The Kaddish, (Leipzig: Rudolph Haupt, 1909)Google Scholar; Heinemann, Joseph, “Prayers of Beth Midrash Origins,” Journal of Semitic Studies 5 (1960): 264–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Weitzman, Michael, “The Origins of the Qaddish,” in Hebrew Scholarship and the Medieval World, ed. de Lange, Nicholas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 131–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lehnardt, Andreas, Qaddish: Untersuchungen zur Entstehung und Rezeption eines rabbinischen Gebetes (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002)Google Scholar; Blumenthal, David, “Observations and Reflections on the History and Meanings of the Kaddish,” Judaism 50, no. 1 (2001): 35–51Google Scholar; Hoffman, Lawrence A., The Canonization of the Synagogue Service (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), 56–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ullendorff, Edward, “Some Notes on the Relationship of the Paternoster to the Kaddish,” Journal of Jewish Studies 54, no. 1 (2003): 122–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Graubard, Baruch, “The Kaddish Prayer,” in The Lord's Prayer and Jewish Liturgy, ed. Petuchowski, Jakob J. and Brocke, Michael (New York: Seabury, 1978), 59–72Google Scholar; Idelsohn, A. Z., Jewish Liturgy and Its Development (New York: Henry Holt, 1932), 307–308Google Scholar; Elbogen, Ismar, Jewish Liturgy: A Comprehensive History, trans. Scheindlin, Raymond P. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1993), 81–84Google Scholar; Gartner, Yaakov, “Ha-me‘aneh ba-Kaddish yeheh shmeh rabbah mevorakh,” Sidra 11 (1996): 39–53Google Scholar; Karl, Zvi, “Ha-Kaddish,” Ha-shiloaḥ 35 (1918): 36–49Google Scholar, 426–30, 521–27. On the lack of reference to death in the Kaddish, see the comments of Blidstein, Gerald, “Kaddish and Other Accidents,” Tradition 14, no. 3 (1974): 80–85Google Scholar. Also notable is Wieseltier, Leon, Kaddish (New York: Knopf, 1998)Google Scholar, a “meditation” on Kaddish that is equal parts historical exploration and personal memoir.

2. Eleazar b. Judah of Worms, Perush siddur he-tefillah la-Rokeaḥ, ed. Herschler, Moshe (Jerusalem: Makhon ha-Rav Herschler, 1992), 602Google Scholar (and cf. 580); Isaac b. Moses of Vienna, Sefer ’or zaru‘a, vol. 2 (Jerusalem: Makhon Yerushalayim, 2010), 62Google Scholar; Simḥah of Vitry, Maḥzor Vitry , ed. Goldschmidt, Aryeh, vol. 1 (Jerusalem: ’Oẓar Ha-poskim, 2004)Google Scholar, 223 (this latter text is a later German addition to the originally French compilation).

3. Discussion of the Mourner's Kaddish appears in Sefer Ḥasidim, ed. Margaliyot, Reuven (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1957)Google Scholar (henceforth SHB), §722; Sefer Ḥasidim, ed. Wistinetski, Judah (Frankfurt: Meikiẓe Nirdamim, 1891)Google Scholar (henceforth SHP), §314; the excerpts from Sefer Ḥasidim preserved in MS Vatican 285 (published by Hershler, Moshe, “Sefer Ḥasidim le-Rabbenu Yehudah he-Ḥasid: Mahadurah ve-nusḥah ḥadashah mitokh ketav yad,” Genuzot 1 (1984): 129Google Scholar; Eleazar b. Judah of Worms, Sefer ha-Rokeaḥ ha-gadol, ed. Schneersohn, Barukh Shimon (Jerusalem: n. p., 1967)Google Scholar, §53; R. Meir of Rothenburg's views are recorded by R. Shimshon b. Ẓadok, Sefer Tashbeẓ, ed. Engel, Shlomo (Jerusalem: Makhon Yerushalayim, 2011)Google Scholar, §427; Molin, R. Jacob, She'elot u-teshuvot Maharil (Jerusalem: Makhon Yerushalayim, 1980)Google Scholar, §36, 64; Molin, , She'elot u-teshuvot Maharil ha-ḥadashot, ed. Sats, Yitshak (Jerusalem: Makhon Yerushlayim, 1977)Google Scholar, §28; Molin, , Sefer Maharil: Minhagim, ed. Spitser, Shlomo (Jerusalem: Makhon Yerushalayim, 2005), 446–47Google Scholar, 608.

4. See for example the responsum of R. Isaac of Corbeil, preserved in the sixteenth-century responsa collection of R. Benjamin ben Matityahu, She'elot u-teshuvot Binyamin Ze'ev (Jerusalem: Wolf and Stitzberg, 1959)Google Scholar, §161.

5. R. Aharon ha-Kohen of Lunel, 'Orḥot ḥayim, ed. Schlesinger, Moses, vol. 2 (Berlin: Mekiẓe Nirdamim, 1902), 601Google Scholar; Sefer kol bo (Lemberg: S. L. Flecker, 1860)Google Scholar, §114. See also Shatzmiller, Joseph, “Tumultus et Rumor in Synagoga: An Aspect of Social Life of Provencal Jews in the Middle Ages,” AJS Review 2 (1977): 227–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar, on a communal dispute in Manosque; according to Israel Ta-Shma, M. (Minhag ’Ashkenaz ha-kadmon [Jerusalem: Magnes, 1999], 309)Google Scholar at issue was the suitability of a minor orphan to recite Kaddish during the evening prayer service.

6. R. Israel of Brno, She'elot u-teshuvot Mahari mi-Bruna, ed. Herschler, Moshe (Jerusalem: n.p., 1960)Google Scholar, §193; R. Shalom of Neustadt, Hilkhot u-minhagei Rabbenu Shalom mi-Neustadt, ed. Spitser, Shlomo Y. (Jerusalem: Makhon Yerushalayim, 1997), 39Google Scholar; Tyrnau, Yiẓḥak Isaac, Sefer ha-minhagim, ed. Spitser, Shlomo (Jerusalem: Makhon Yerushalayim, 1979)Google Scholar, esp. 171 ff; R. Israel b. Isserlein, Petaḥiyah, Sefer terumat ha-deshen, ed. Avitan, Shmuel (Jerusalem: n. p., 1991)Google Scholar, §294; R. Joseph b. Moses, Leket yosher, ed. Freimann, Yaakov (Berlin: H. Itzkowski, 1903)Google Scholar, I:56; II:97. In She'elot u-teshuvot Maharil §36, Jacob Molin reports on the status of the custom both in his own native Mainz, as well as in Austria, singling out for mention the views of R. Avraham Klausner and R. Barukh b. Meir ha-Levi of Fulda.

7. See for example the commentary of R. Bahya ben Asher ibn Halawa to Deut. 21:8; R. Isaac b. Sheshet Perfet, She’elot u-teshuvot le-Rabbenu Yizḥak bar Sheshet, ed. Meẓger, David, vol. 1 (Jerusalem: Makhon Yerushalayim, 1993)Google Scholar, §115. The views of R. Yosef Abudraham, R. Yiẓḥak de Leon, and R. Shem Tov ibn Shem Tov are reflected in a responsum published by Spiegel, Yaakov, “Teshuvat R. Yiẓḥak de Leon ’el R. Yosef ’Abudraham,” Sinai 83 (1978): 181–83Google Scholar (and cf. Beit Yosef to Tur ’oraḥ ḥayim 53).

8. R. Yosef Colon b. Trabotto, Shlomo, She'elot u-teshuvot Maharik (Warsaw: Joseph Unterhandler, 1884)Google Scholar, §30; Trabotto, Piske Maharik §290; Landau, R. Jacob, Sefer ha-'agur ha-shalem, ed. Hershler, Moshe (Jerusalem: Kiryat No‘ar, 1960)Google Scholar, §334, 335; Mintz, R. Judah, She'elot u-teshuvot Mahari Mintz (Krakow: Yosef Fischer, 1882)Google Scholar, §9.

9. See for example Sefer Maharil, 608; Tyrnau, Sefer ha-minhagim, refers in passing to the Mourner's Kaddish as part of the liturgy in the context of weekday, Sabbath, and holiday services.

10. Among the questions dealt with in the sources cited above: How long should the Mourner's Kaddish be recited following the death of a parent? Must the Kaddish be recited for a longer time span than usual during a leap year (when a thirteenth month is added to the calendar)? May one recite the prayer on behalf of one's deceased mother while one's father is still alive? One of the most contentious issues had to do with whether orphans below the age of legal majority (i.e. thirteen) could lead the Kaddish, which, as a davar she-bi-kedushah ought to have been off limits to them (Soferim 16:12). That many authorities allowed minors to lead the congregation in this prayer may have been owing to the precedent set by a preexisting French custom, which had a child below the age of majority recite Kaddish at points during the Sabbath prayer service; Maḥzor Vitry explains that “this Kaddish is only in order to teach the children, but doesn't count [as one of the seven Kaddishes to be formally recited each day]”; see Maḥzor Vitry, vol. 1, 130, 155, 266; and cf. Siddur Rashi, ed. Buber, Solomon (Berlin: Mekiẓe Nirdamim, 1912)Google Scholar, §216. By the fifteenth century, Leket yosher (vol. 1, 56) still refers to the Kaddish katan (“children's Kaddish”), though it is clear that he has the Mourner's Kaddish in mind. Less clear is the view of R. Natan b. Yehudah, who refers rather vaguely to the Kaddish shel katan throughout the Sefer ha-mahkim, ed. Freimann, Yaakov (Krakow: n. p., 1909)Google Scholar.

11. Among the solutions proffered: giving communal residents priority over visiting guests; giving the recently bereaved priority over those whose relative died longer ago; and simply drawing lots to randomly decide which mourner would take precedence.

12. Molin, She'elot u-teshuvot Maharil ha-ḥadashot, §28.

13. Isserlein's view is recorded in Leket yosher, 56.

14. Molin, She'elot u-teshuvot Maharil ha-ḥadashot, §28.

15. Tyrnau, Sefer ha-minhagim.

16. See for example: B. Berakhot 57a; B. Shabbat 119b; B. Sotah 49a; B. Berakhot 3a; ’Otiyot de-Rabbi ’Akiba in Batei midrashot, ed. Wertheimer, S. A. (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1953), 367–69Google Scholar; Seder ’Eliyahu Zuta 20, and Yalkut Shim‘oni Isaiah 247.429. The most thorough discussion of the early history of the Kaddish is Lehnardt, Qaddish.

17. Indeed, commentaries on the meaning of the Kaddish prayer, often focused on its underlying eschatological resonance, were a mainstay of high medieval halakhic and liturgical works. See for example: Siddur Rashi §11; Sefer ha-pardes, ed. Ehrenreich, H. L. (Bnei Brak: Yahadut, 1980)Google Scholar, §5; Siddur Rabbeinu Shlomo b. Shimshon mi-Germayza ve-siddur ḥasidei ’Ashkenaz, ed. Herschler, Moshe (Jerusalem: Ḥemed, 1971), 76–82Google Scholar; Tosafot, B. Berakhot 3a, s.v. ve-‘onin; R. Avraham b. Natan ha-Yarḥi, Sefer ha-manhig, ed. Rafa'el, Yiẓḥak (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1978), 56–57Google Scholar. See also Kanarfogel, Ephraim, Peering through the Lattices: Mystical, Magical, and Pietistic Dimensions in the Tosafist Period (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000), 142Google Scholar, 153, 189; Goldschmidt, Aryeh, “Perush ha-Kaddish le-ba‘al Maḥzor Vitry,” Yeshurun 3 (1997): 5–14Google Scholar; Sperber, Daniel, “Yehe shmeh rabbah,” in Minhagei Yisra'el: Mekorot ve-toledot, vol. 1 (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1990), 71–77Google Scholar; Pedaya, Ḥavivah, Ha-shem ve-ha-mikdash be-mishnat R. Yiẓḥak Sagi Nahor (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2001)Google Scholar.

18. A representative example is Avenary, Hanoch, “Kaddish,” Encyclopedia Judaica, 2nd ed., vol. 11 (Detroit: Macmillan, 2007), 696Google Scholar. For a survey of earlier scholars who adopted this approach, see Lehnardt, Qaddish, 279–80. More recent adherents of this view include Marcus, Ivan, “A Jewish-Christian Symbiosis: The Culture of Early Ashkenaz,” in Cultures of the Jews: A New History, ed. Biale, David, vol. 2 (New York: Schocken, 2002), 163Google Scholar; Marcus, , The Jewish Life Cycle: Rites of Passage from Biblical to Modern Times (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), 241Google Scholar; Wieseltier, Kaddish, 81; Kushelevsky, Rella, “Ha-tanna ve-ha-met ha-noded: ha-’omnam ’aggadah lo yehudit?,” Bikoret u-farshanut 30 (1994): 53Google Scholar (though cf. Kushelevsky, , Sigufim u-fituyim: ha-sippur ha-‘ivri be-’Ashkenaz ‘al pi ketav yad Parma 2295 (De Rossi 563) [Jerusalem: Magnes, 2010], 260–61Google Scholar). For other approaches, see for example Avraham Naftali Tsvi Roth, “‘Azkarah ve-haftarah ve-kaddish yatom,” Talpiyot 7 (1961): 369–81Google Scholar, who argues that Ashkenazic discomfort with minors receiving ‘aliyot in synagogue led to a shift from Torah reading to Kaddish as the intercessory prayer par excellence; Ta-Shma, (Minhag ’Ashkenaz ha-kadmon, 299--310) has argued that the place of the Mourner's Kaddish derived from the preexisting link between Kaddish and Barkhu; Lehnardt, Qaddish, suggests that the eschatological meaning of Kaddish itself made it an appropriate choice for recitation by mourners.

19. Urbach, Ephraim E., Sefer ‘arugat ha-bosem, vol. 4 (Jerusalem: Mekiẓe Nirdamim, 1963)Google Scholar, 49. See also Kanarfogel, Ephraim, “‘Al nusḥah u-mekorah shel tefillat ’av ha-raḥamim,” Yeshurun 27 (2012): 871–78Google Scholar, who has argued that the prayer might have originated in response to later (thirteenth-century?) episodes of persecution.

20. A sampling of relevant piyyutim can be found in Habermann, Avraham, Gezerot ’Ashkenaz ve-Ẓarfat (Jerusalem: Tarshish, 1946), 61–71Google Scholar, 89–92, and see Einbinder, Susan, Beautiul Death: Jewish Poetry and Martyrdom in Medieval France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For additional prayers that have been linked to the martyrological climate of medieval Ashkenaz, see also Hoffman, Jeffrey, “‘Akdamut: History, Folklore, Meaning,” Jewish Quarterly Review 99, no. 2 (2009): 161–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Marcus, Ivan G., “Kiddush ha-shem bi-’Ashkenaz ve-sippur R. ’Amnon mi-Magenẓa,” in Kedushat he-ḥayim ve-ḥiruf ha-nafesh, ed. Gafni, Isaiah M. and Ravitzky, Aviezer (Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar, 1992), 131–147Google Scholar. The Yizkor prayer has often been linked to the 1096 martyrs as well; see for example Lévi, Israel, “La commémoration des âmes dans le Judaïsme,” Revue des études juives 29 (1894): 43–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Freehof, Solomon, “Hazkarath Neshamoth,” HUCA 36 (1965): 179–90Google Scholar. This linkage was convincingly refuted by Yehuda Galinsky in a lecture at the 16th World Congress of Jewish Studies in 2013 (“‘Al ha-ẓedakah bein kotlei beit ha-knesset ha-’Ashkenazi bi-yeme ha-benayim”).

21. See the discussion below.

22. See for example Soloveitchik, Haym, “Religious Law and Change: The Medieval Ashkenazic Example,” AJS Review 12, no. 2 (1987): 205–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar: “The Franco-German community was permeated by a profound sense of its own religiosity, of the rightness of its traditions, and could not imagine any sharp difference between its practices and the law that its members studied and observed with such devotion.”

23. See for example Shepkaru, Shmuel, “From after Death to Afterlife,” AJS Review 24, no. 1 (1999): 1–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shepkaru, , “To Die for God: Martyr's Heaven in Hebrew and Latin Crusade Chronicles,” Speculum 77 (2002): 311–341CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24. In She’elot u-teshuvot Maharil §99, Jacob Molin is asked whether Kaddish must be recited on behalf of martyrs, and his interlocutor attributes to the thirteenth-century R. Meir of Rothenburg the opinion that Kaddish should not be said. Molin maintains that Kaddish should indeed be recited, but the exchange illustrates that the question was still unsettled by the fifteenth century. Indeed, Molin reports in the course of his response that the Jews of Prague had not wanted to mourn the martyrs of that city's 1389 massacre, lending credence to the presumption that Kaddish might not be necessary. Other contemporaneous discussions of the propriety of mourning for martyrs can be found in She’elot u-teshuvot Maharah ’or zaru‘a (Leipzig: K. W. Vollrath, 1860)Google Scholar, §14; She’elot u-teshuvot Mahari Weil (Jerusalem: Makhon Yerushalayim, 2001)Google Scholar, §114; Hilkhot u-minhagei Rabbenu Shalom mi-Neustadt §401.

25. She'elot u-teshuvot Maharil §99.

26. Most famously in B. Berakhot 104a: “A son confers merit upon his father.”

27. The discussion of the Mourner's Kaddish appears in only one manuscript of Maḥzor Vitry—MS London - British Library Add. 27200-27201, which was the basis of Shimon Horowitz's first printed edition [Maḥzor Vitry le-Rabbenu Simḥah (Nuremburg: Mekiẓe Nirdamim, 1923)Google Scholar]. The London manuscript contains copious additions to the text, which are attributed to R. Abraham b. Natan ha-Yarḥi (d. 1204) and to R. Isaac b. Dorbelo (twelfth century). Because Abraham b. Natan never mentions the Mourner's Kaddish in his own Sefer ha-manhig, it seems likely that Isaac b. Dorbelo added the section on the Mourner's Kaddish. On the latter, see Taylor, Charles, Appendix to Sayings of the Jewish Fathers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1900), 12–24Google Scholar; and Nahon, Gerard, “Isaac b. Dorbelo et le ‘Mahzor Vitry,’” in Ibrahim ibn Ya'qub at-Turtushi: Christianity, Islam and Judaism Meet in East-Central Europe, c.800–1300 A.D., ed. Charvát, Petr and Prosecky, Jirí (Prague: Oriental Institute, 1996), 191–206Google Scholar. On the dating and authorship of Maḥzor Vitry, and a survey of the various manuscript recensions, see Ta-Shma, Israel, Ha-tefillah ha-'Ashkenazit ha-kedumah (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2003), 15–29Google Scholar; Aryeh Goldschmidt, ed., Maḥzor Vitry, 19–56; Emanuel, Simḥah, “Le-‘inyano shel Maḥzor Vitry,” ‘Alei sefer 12 (1986): 129–30Google Scholar.

28. This tale has been the subject of a tremendous amount of scholarship, though rarely in direct connection to the Mourner's Kaddish. For discussions of particular attestations of the tale, see for example: Ginzburg, Louis, Ginze Schechter: Keta‘ei midrash ve-haggadah min ha-genizah she-bi-Miẓrayim (Jerusalem: Hermon Press, 1969), 235–37Google Scholar; R. Nisim b. Ya‘akov mi-Kairowan, Ḥibbur yafeh mi-ha-yeshu‘ah, ed. Hirschberg, Ḥayim Ze’ev (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1954), 55Google Scholar; Ish-Shalom, Meir, ed., Nisfaḥim li-seder ’Eliyahu Zuta (Jerusalem: Wahrman, 1969), 23–25Google Scholar; Higger, Michael, “Hakdamah,” in Masekhtot Kallah (New York: Moinester, 1936), 71Google Scholar; Lieberman, Shaul, “‘Al ḥata’im ve-‘onsham,” in Sefer ha-yovel li-khvod Levi Ginzburg, ed. Lieberman, Shaul et al. (New York: AAJR, 1946), 249–70Google Scholar; Weiss, Yehudit, “Shtei girsa’ot ha-Zohar le-’aggadat ‘ha-tanna ve-ha-met,’” Tarbiz 78, no. 4 (2009): 521–54Google Scholar. A number of studies approach the tale from a comparative perspective, attempting to philologically reconstruct a purported urtext on the basis of later witnesses; the most comprehensive example is Lerner, M. B., “Ma‘aseh ha-tanna ve-ha-met: gilgulav ha-sifruti’im ve-ha-hilkhati’im,” ’Asufot 2 (1988): 29–68Google Scholar. Other studies employ methodologies ranging from folkloric and thematological to psychoanalytic; see for example: Landa, Louis, “Ha-met ha-noded ve-ha-me’uyam,” Sadan: Meḥkarim bi-sifrut ‘ivrit 6 (2007): 157–72Google Scholar; Kushelevsky, Rella, “Ha-tanna ve-ha-met ha-noded,” in ’Enẓiklopediah shel ha-sippur ha-Yehudi, ed. Elstein, Yoav, Lipsker, Avidov, and Kushelevsky, Rella, vo1. 1 (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2004), 281–96Google Scholar; Kushelevsky, “ha-’omnam ’aggadah lo yehudit?,” 41–63. The most recent treatment of the tale, which focuses on its reception in medieval Ashkenaz in particular, is Kushelevsky, Sigufim u-fituyim, 253–71. Kushelevsky's methodology, which focuses on reception history, mirrors my own, though our conclusions vary considerably, as I shall explain below.

29. See the list provided by Kushelevsky in the ’Enẓiklopediah shel ha-sippur ha-Yehudi, 284ff.

30. R. Yoḥanan b. Zakkai is the protagonist in the versions of the tale found in Ish-Shalom, Seder ’Eliyahu Zuta, 22, and in a Genizah fragment (T-S C.2. fol. 144 c–d) published in Mann, Jacob, The Bible as Read and Preached in the Old Synagogue, vol. 1 (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1966), 128Google Scholar.

31. On this apparent conflation between Kaddish and Barkhu, see Ta-Shma, Minhag ’Ashkenaz ha-kadmon, 304–306.

32. Maḥzor Vitry, ed. Goldschmidt, 223.

33. Kallah Rabati, ed. Higger, Michael (New York: Moinester, 1936), 2:9Google Scholar.

34. B. Rosh ha-Shanah 17a.

35. Hildesheimer, Azriel, “Bishop ha-Yehudim,” Sinai 105 (1990): 159–61Google Scholar.

36. For the fiduciary responsibilities of parnasim in medieval Ashkenaz, see for example Marcus, Ivan, “Ha-dinamikah ha-politit shel ha-kehillah ha-Yehudit be-Germaniyah bi-yeme ha-benayim,” in Kahal Yisra'el: ha-shilton ha-‘aẓmi ha-Yehudi le-dorotav, ed. Grossman, Avraham and Kaplan, Yosef, vol. 2 (Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar, 2004), 101–14Google Scholar.

37. On the office of the parnas in medieval Germany, and its close links to the position of gabba'i, see Reiner, Avraham (Rami), “‘Even she-katuv ‘alehah: to'arei ha-niftarim ‘al maẓevot bet ha-‘almin be-Wurzburg 1147–1346,” Tarbiz 78, no. 1 (2009): 137–40Google Scholar. Interestingly, the link between taxation and charitable giving would become even tighter by the end of the thirteenth century, when charitable tithes were increasingly collected and administered by the communal leadership as direct taxation; see Galinsky, Judah, “Custom, Ordinance or Commandment? The Evolution of the Medieval Monetary-Tithe in Ashkenaz,” Journal of Jewish Studies 62 (2011): 203–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38. See for example Isaac b. Moshe, ’Or zaru‘a, hilkhot ẓedakah, §3, Mordekhai to B. Bava Batra 8b; She'elot u-teshuvot Maharaḥ ’or zaru‘a §226. The notion that the duties of parnasim and gabba'im were identical seems to have been so self-evident that by the fourteenth century, Menachem ha-Me'iri explicitly describes a gabbai ẓedakah who performs his role improperly as “a parnas who instills excessive fear in the community” (Me'iri, Beit ha-beḥirah to B. Bava Batra 8b).

39. SHP §1343, 1346 (and c.f. §33); SHB §606.

40. SHB §145. On the section of the Bologna recension of Sefer Ḥasidim in which this passage appears, see Soloveitchik, Haym, “Piety, Pietism, and German Pietism: Sefer Hasidim I and the Influence of Hasidei Ashkenaz,” Jewish Quarterly Review 92, nos. 3–4 (2002): 455–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41. SHB §61, citing Vayikra Rabbah §30.1; and see Reiner, “‘Even she-katuv ‘alehah,” 139.

42. Indeed, in a later version of this tale found in the Zohar (Zohar ḥadash, ’Aḥarei mot, 49a–b), the sinner is also accused of not wearing phylacteries, in language that draws on the same sugya in Rosh ha-Shanah—confirming that the sugya was understood to be intertextually linked to the story by subsequent medieval narrators.

43. Matthew 27:31–33, Mark 15:20–22, Luke 23:26–32, John 19:16–18.

44. Matthew 27:29, Mark 15:17, John 19:2, 5.

45. Shinan, Avigdor, 'Oto ha-’ish: Yehudim mesaprim ‘al Yeshu (Tel Aviv: Yedi‘ot ’Aḥaronot, 1999)Google Scholar.

46. B. Berakhot 61b.

47. Cohen, Gerson D., “Esau as Symbol in Early Medieval Thought,” in Jewish Medieval and Renaissance Studies, ed. Altmann, Alexander (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 19–48Google Scholar; and cf. Yuval, Yisra'el Y., Shnei goyyim be-vitnekh: Yehudim ve-noẓrim, dimuyim hadadiyim (Tel Aviv: ‘Am ‘Oved, 2002)Google Scholar, who examines the functioning of this symbolism in medieval Ashkenaz in particular.

48. Rella Kushelevsky (Sigufin u-fituyim, 262–68), has also compared the medieval Ashkenazic version of the Akiva story with its earlier attestations, and has noted the introduction of Christological symbolism into the tale. (Indeed, she has gone further, linking other elements of the story—Rabbi Akiva's fasting, the role of a tax collector, etc.—to details of the life of Jesus and his disciples as recorded in the Gospels.) Kushelevsky argues that the attention to Jesus's crown of thorns and general suffering reflects the twelfth-century progression “from judgment to passion”—the increased attention to the gory details of Jesus's Passion, and the devotional meaning that was increasingly attributed to it. Whether or not Kushelevsky's reading of the story is compelling as far as it goes, it never accounts for the fact that the Jesus-figure in the tale is eventually redeemed—which is the crux of the internal logic of the story. The lack of attention to this element may be related to Kushelevsky's broader approach to the Mourner's Kaddish, and hence the Akiva story—namely that in the twelfth century the prayer and accompanying tale were geared not toward intercession, but toward ẓidduk ha-din, the public acceptance of God's judgment in the aftermath of tragedy; see ibid., 260, and Kushelevsky “ha-’omnam ’aggadah lo yehudit?” 54. This message would have been particularly resonant, she suggests, in the aftermath of the 1096 attacks.

49. B. Gittin 56b–57a. See for example the discussion in Schäfer, Peter, Jesus in the Talmud (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 82–94Google Scholar, and Ram Ben-Shalom and Yuval, Israel J., “‘There is no Hatred in Polemics—And Liberty is Granted,’” Conflict and Religious Conversations in Latin Christendom: Studies in Honor of Ora Limor, ed. Yuval, Israel J. and Ben-Shalom, Ram (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 16 n. 35.

50. See the discussion in Zlotnik, Yehudah Leib, “Mi-’aggadot ha-shabbat u-minhagehah,” Sinai 25 (1949): 276–87Google Scholar, and 26 (1950): 75–89.

51. See the discussion in Cohen, Shaye J. D., Why Aren't Jewish Women Circumcised? Gender and Covenant in Judaism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 40–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Rami Reiner treated this subject comprehensively, and called attention to additional sources, in a lecture at the 16th World Congress of Jewish Studies (“Milat nefalim: Bein halakhah le-’aggadah u-vein minhag le-’emunah ‘amamit.”)

52. See for example Cohn-Sherbok, Daniel, “The Jewish Doctrine of Hell,” Religion 8 (1978): 196–209CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and cf. Schäfer, Peter, “Die Lehre von den zwei Welten im 4. Buch Esra und in der tannaitischen Literatur,” in Studien zur Geschichte und Teologie des rabbinischen Judenthums (Leiden: Brill, 1978), 244–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53. Lieberman, Saul, “Some Aspects of the After Life in Early Rabbinic Literature,” in Harry Austryn Wolfson Jubilee Volume, ed. Lieberman, Saul, vol. 2 (Jerusalem: American Academy for Jewish Research, 1965) 495–506Google Scholar; Milikowsky, Chaim, “Gehinom ve-poshe‘i Yisra'el ‘al pi ‘Seder ‘Olam,’” Tarbiz 55, no. 3 (1986): 311–43Google Scholar; Milikowsky, , “Which Gehenna? Retribution and Eschatology in the Synoptic Gospels and in Early Jewish Texts,” New Testament Studies 34 (1988): 238–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

54. See for example B. Rosh ha-Shanah 16b–17a; B. Shabbat 152b–153a; B. Bava Meẓi‘a 58b.

55. See for example B. Eruvin 19a and cf. M. Sanhedrin 10:1.

56. Brown, Peter, “The Decline of the Empire of God: Amnesty, Penance, and the Afterlife from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages,” in Last Things: Death and the Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, ed. Bynum, Caroline Walker and Freedman, Paul (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 44–45Google Scholar.

57. Many of these texts are treated in Himmelfarb, Martha, Tours of Hell: An Apocalyptic Form in Jewish and Christian Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; the best recent treatment, which contains crucial updates to Himmelfarb's work, is Perry, Micha, Masoret ve-shinui: Mesirat yeda‘ bi-kerev Yehude ma‘arav ’Europah bi-yeme ha-benayim (Tel Aviv: Ha-kibbutz Ha-me'uḥad, 2010), 195–254Google Scholar. The Ashkenazic reception of some of these exempla is also treated by Kushelevsky, Sigufin u-fituyin, 25–77, and additional sources are presented by Yassif, Eli, The Hebrew Folktale: History, Genre, Meaning (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 358–61Google Scholar.

58. The most fleshed out treatment is in Tosafot, B. Bava Meẓi‘a 58b s.v. ḥuẓ; cf. Tosafot, B. Eruvin 19a, s.v. poshe‘i, and B. Rosh ha-Shanah 17a, s.v. ki.

59. Sefer ketav tamim, in ’Oẓar neḥmad, ed. Blumfeld, Ignaz (Vienna: J. Knöpflmacher, 1860)Google Scholar, esp. 92ff.

60. As cited in Avraham b. ‘Azriel, Sefer ‘arugat ha-bosem, ed. Urbach, Ephraim E., vol. 2 (Jerusalem: Mekiẓe Nirdamim, 1947)Google Scholar, 259 (and see esp. n. 19); see also Urbach, , “Ḥelkam shel ḥakhmei ’Ashkenaz ve-Ẓarfat be-pulmus ‘al ha-Rambam ve-‘al sefarav,” Zion 12 (1947): 149–59Google Scholar. The first disputes over Maimonides's views concerning resurrection, which took place during the latter's own lifetime, should not be confused with the clashes of the 1230s, which also involved Ashkenazic interlocutors (e.g. Shatzmiller, Joseph, “Les tossafistes et le première controverse maïmonidienne: le témoignage du rabbin Asher ben Gershom,” in Rashi et la culture juive en France du Nord au moyen âge, ed. Dahan, G. (Paris: E. Peeters, 1997), 55–82Google Scholar). On the instability of the “numbering” of the Maimonidean controversies, see Visi, Tamas, “Ibn Ezra, a Maimonidean Authority: The Evidence of Early Ibn Ezra Supercommentaries,” in The Cultures of Maimonideanism: New Approaches to the History of Jewish Thought, ed. Robinson, James T. (Leiden: Brill, 2009)Google Scholar, 93 n. 8.

61. On Ashkenazic conceptions of the messianic era in particular, see Kanarfogel, Ephraim, “Ḥishuvei ha-keẓ shel ḥakhmei ’Ashkenaz: mi-Rashi u-vene doro ve-‘ad li-tekufat ba‘alei ha-tosafot,” in Rashi: Demuto ve-yeẓirato, ed. Grossman, Avraham and Yafet, Sarah, vol. 2 (Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar, 2009), 381–401Google Scholar; Kanarfogel, , “Medieval Rabbinic Conceptions of the Messianic Era: The View of the Tosafists,” in Me'ah She‘arim: Studies in Medieval Jewish Spiritual Life in Memory of Isadore Twersky, ed. Fleischer, Ezra, et al. (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2001), 147–169Google Scholar. On changing terms for and views of heaven, see Reiner, Avraham (Rami), “Mi-gan ’eden ve-‘ad ẓror ha-ḥayim: Birkot ha-metim bi-maẓevot mi-’Ashkenaz bi-yeme ha-benayim,” Zion 76 (2011): 5–28Google Scholar. Shmuel Shepkaru has recently argued that the significance of the belief in the resurrection of the dead waned in medieval Ashkenaz; see his “Christian Resurrection and Jewish Immortality during the First Crusade,” Speculum 89, no. 1 (2014): 1–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

62. Paris: Gallimard, 1981. Trans. by Goldhammer, Arthur as The Birth of Purgatory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

63. Such exempla have also been influentially treated by Schmitt, Jean-Claude, Les revenants: Les vivants et les morts dans la société médiévale (Paris: Gallimard, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; trans. by Goldhammer, Arthur as Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

64. See for example Gurevich, Aron, “Popular and Scholarly Medieval Cultural Traditions: Notes in the Margins of Jacques Le Goff's Book,” Journal of Medieval History 9 (1983): 71–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Edwards, Graham Robert, “Purgatory: Birth or Evolution,” in Journal of Ecclesiastical History 36, no. 4 (1985) 634–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar, both of whom argue that the scholastic recognition of purgatory was the final, not the first step in the doctrine's development. For studies of “proto-purgatories” in earlier periods, see for example Brown, “Decline of the Empire of God”; Rebillard, Éric, The Care of the Dead in Late Antiquity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; and Moreira, Isabel, Heaven's Purge: Purgatory in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

65. Le Goff, Birth of Purgatory, 154 ff.

66. Le Goff, Birth of Purgatory, 46. See also Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages, 65–67, 75. Notably, the seventh day, the thirtieth day, and the twelfth month after death were seen as significant milestones for the endowment of memorial masses—as was the case in Jewish mourning rituals as well. See Binski, Paul, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 115–16Google Scholar, 121; Paxton, Frederick, Christianizing Death: The Creation of a Ritual Process in Early Medieval Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 134–38Google Scholar.

67. Berger, David, ed., The Jewish-Christian Debate in the High Middle Ages: A Critical Edition of the Niẓẓaḥon Vetus (Philadelphia: JPS, 1979), 195–97Google Scholar.

68. Berger, ed. Jewish-Christian Debate, 197. The parable in question appears in Luke 16.

69. Berger, ed. Jewish-Christian Debate, 196.

70. MS Oxford Bodleian Library 2289, fol. 30a–31a, 36a, 44a. This text, whose German provenance is attested to by its copious use of German lo‘azim, survives in a manuscript from no earlier than the fifteenth century, but may well have been written centuries earlier. A much briefer extract from the text survives in MS Paris BN Heb. 1408, which was published by Rosenthal, Judah in his Meḥkarim u-mekorot, vol. 1 (Jerusalem: Reuven Mass, 1967), 368–72Google Scholar. For a brief discussion of the text, including the assertion that portions of its contents are linked to the Ḥasidei ’Ashkenaz, see Shoham-Steiner, Ephraim, “Jews and Healing at Medieval Saints' Shrines: Participation, Polemics, and Shared Cultures,” Harvard Theological Review 103, no. 1 (2010): 124 n. 33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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73. Hadar zekenim (Livorno: Moshe Yeshuah, 1840)Google Scholar, 17b, and Moshav zekenim (London: S. D. Sassoon, 1959)Google Scholar, 73.

74. Pa‘aneaḥ raza to Gen. 37:35 (Warsaw: I. M. Alter, 1932)Google Scholar (citing the Sefer ha-gan of Aaron b. Joseph ha-Kohen).

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79. J. P. Migne, Patrologia Latina 189, 631a–633a.

80. Trans. in Peter the Venerable, Against the Inveterate Obduracy of the Jews, trans. Resnick, Irven M. (Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2013), 264Google Scholar. See the discussion of this passage in Perry, Masoret ve-shinui, 195–254; on Peter's Tractatus adversus Judaeorum inveteratam duritiem, see Cohen, Jeremy, Living Letters of the Law: Ideas of the Jew in Medieval Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 254–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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84. Teshuvah le-minim, in Bodleian MS 2289, fol. 34b–35a:

אמשול לך משל. למה הדבר דומה? למלך בשר ודם שכתב חרוזה בכותלי היכלו הוו תמים ולא תחטאו. והנה אמר בלבו יש המון עם ונשים וקטנים שאינם יודעים לקרות הכתב, והניח לצייר תחת החרוזה מת מונח על כליבה ואש שורף תחתיו. בציור הזה יבינו כולם החרוזה ושהחרוזה מורה שלא יחטא האדם שלא יהא נידון בגיהנם כמראה בציור הזה. כך הקב"ה כתב בעשרת הדברות לא תעשה לך פסל וכל תמונה ונתן הלוחות בארון. אמר יש נשים וקטנים ועבדים שלא יוכלו לקרות הכתב לא תעשה לך פסל. מה עשה? צוה לעשות ציור על הארון והם הכרובים ראו כזה שצויתי שלא לעשות בפרצופים אילו אם כן הציור והכרובים הם מונעים שעות (צ"ל עשות) עבודה זרה ואינן נחשבים ע"ז.

85. Wieseltier, , Kaddish, 194Google Scholar.

86. Greenblatt, Stephen (Hamlet in Purgatory [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001], 9)Google Scholar has disputed Wieseltier's conclusions somewhat more vigorously: “‘Yet this is, as I say, a coincidence’ … It is not my intention to dispute this flat claim, nor do I have the scholarship to do so, but if it were a coincidence, it would be an almost miraculous one, since many of the texts that Wieseltier cites bear a startling resemblance to the exempla and scholastic arguments of the medieval and early-modern Christians among whom the Jews were dwelling. I suspect, rather, that the long, twisting path that leads back from my father and forefathers passes through the Christianity that seemed to them the embodiment of otherness.” Cf. Raanan Boustan's review of Lehnardt, Qaddish, in Jewish Quarterly Review 97 (2007): 68Google Scholar: “One might have wished that Lehnardt had more explicitly addressed the significance of his study for larger problems in the history of Jewish liturgy. For example, Lehnardt's exclusive emphasis on inner-Jewish cultural processes seems to preclude comparative historical analysis. Might the ambient Christian culture of central Europe—especially the doctrine of purgatory and its attendant practices—account, at least in part, for the cultivation of the Mourner's Kaddish in Ashkenaz? And how might we determine the nature and extent of such influences?”

87. Recent examples include Cohen, Jeremy, Sanctifying the Name of God: Jewish Martyrs and Jewish Memory of the First Crusade (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Marcus, Ivan, Rituals of Childhood: Jewish Acculturation in Medieval Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Marcus, “A Jewish-Christian Symbiosis,” 448–516; Baumgarten, Elisheva, Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Shoham-Steiner, Ephraim, Ḥarigim ba‘al korḥam: Meshuga‘im u-meẓora‘im bi-ḥevrah ha-Yehudit be-’Europah bi-yemei ha-benayim (Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar, 2008)Google Scholar; Fishman, Talya, Becoming the People of the Talmud: Oral Torah as Written Tradition in Medieval Jewish Cultures (Philadelphia: Penn Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Yuval, Shnei goyyim be-vitnekh.

88. Marcus, Rituals of Childhood, 12.

89. Fishman, Talya, “The Penitential System of the Hasidei Ashkenaz and the Problem of Cultural Boundaries,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 8 (1999): 221–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

90. Kushelevsky, Sigufin u-fituyim; Perry, Masoret ve-shinui.

91. This case study may also speak to the relationship that so-called “halakhic” and “aggadic” sources had with one another in the eyes of medieval Jewish authorities. A number of recent scholars have debated the extent to which aggadic precedents played a role in medieval Ashkenazic jurisprudence, focusing their attention on the phenomenon of martyrdom in particular; see the discussion in Soloveitchik, Haym, “Halakhah, Hermeneutics, and Martyrdom in Medieval Ashkenaz,” Jewish Quarterly Review 94 (2004): 77–108CrossRefGoogle Scholar. But recent developments among scholars of rabbinics suggest that the very terms of the debate may need to be revisited. Drawing on the work of such legal theorists as Robert Cover, Ronald Dworkin, and others, a number of rabbinicists have begun to problematize the very distinction between law and narrative, arguing convincingly that the sharp dichotomy was a creation of later periods of Jewish history (particularly the Geonic era), which the rabbis of late antiquity would not themselves have recognized; see for example Lorberbaum, Yair, Ẓelem ’Elohim: Halakhah ve-’aggadah (Jerusalem: Schocken, 2004)Google Scholar; Barry Scott Wimpfheimer, Narrating the Law: A Poetics of Talmudic Legal Stories (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011)Google Scholar; and the articles collected in Dine Israel 24 (2007). A pioneering attempt to extend this line of inquiry into the medieval sources is Lorberbaum, Yair and Shapira, Haim, “Maimonides' Epistle on Martyrdom in the Light of Legal Philosophy,” Dine Israel 25 (2008): 123–169Google Scholar; Soloveitchik's response followed in Dine Israel 28 (2011): 163–72Google Scholar. Given the prevalence of exempla, theological disquisitions, and other characteristically “aggadic” elements in an array of medieval Ashkenazic works on liturgy and custom, it is worth considering whether the Geonic dichotomy was one that medieval Ashkenazic figures embraced unequivocally, or whether the boundaries between law and narrative might have been understood to be permeable. The fact that many of the early references to the Mourner's Kaddish appear in the writings of figures like Judah b. Eleazar of Worms and others associated with the Ḥasidei Ashkenaz—a group whose “work is replete with new religious dictates encoded in Scripture and aggadah” in general (Soloveitchik, “Halakhah, Hermeneutics, and Martyrdom,” 91)—makes it all the more noteworthy that the custom, and its “aggadic” rationale, spread well beyond Pietistic circles. Further analyses of specific Ashkenazic customs must seek to reconstruct the underlying analytic categories inductively, rather than imposing them a priori. Doing so will allow scholars of Jewish history, law, and folklore to shed further light on the undertheorized concept of “custom” more broadly, and on the intersecting roles played by Halakhah and Aggadah in constituting it.