In her study of the Leipzig Maḥzor, a festival prayer book, art historian Katrin Kogman-Appel conveys the awe inspired by the medieval Jewish book by having her readers imagine the ceremonial procession that was key to the experience around it. She leads the reader from the book's home in the private residence of the wealthy patron who commissioned it in the fourteenth century to the synagogue where it was part of the communal service during the holiday season. At the opening of nearly every chapter, she recreates aspects of the maḥzor's role in the service from the point of view of both the prayer-leader and the congregation. She summarizes the community's development in the two centuries preceding the maḥzor's creation, in order to enrich her reconstruction of the community that produced and used this two-volume folio edition for over three centuries (c. 1310 to c. 1615). Bringing the story of this book into the present, she discusses the considerable ceremony that remains even today, around the holding, viewing, and reading of the maḥzor at the Leipzig Universitätsbibliothek.
Kogman-Appel's treatment of issues of attribution, modification, later additions, restoration, and rebinding bring nuance to the analysis, with the author drawing lessons from each of these stages of the book's long life in ways that greatly illuminate its origins, use, and subsequent legacy. Her book is neither a conventional literary analysis nor a traditional art historical analysis (of symbol, image, and iconography). She offers an interpretation of the book in the context of Jewish print culture, evaluating the relationship between word and image, the relationship between ceremonial objects and their representation, the transmission of law and tradition, and reception of the book.
This interdisciplinary approach leads to further revision of the work of the late scholar Bezalel Narkiss, who established Jewish art as an independent academic discipline in Israel. Kogman-Appel rejects the stylistic sourcing and analyses that led Narkiss to support Karl Voller's attribution of the Leipzig Maḥzor to artists from the Upper-Rhine region. Her approach gives the maḥzor's decorative program meaning in a way that obviates the need for definitive answers to questions about style and artistic attribution, and leads her to the conclusion that the prayer book was in fact created by patrons and congregants of the Worms community in the Middle Rhine region. The initially confusing title, A Mahzor from Worms, given to a book devoted to the so-called “Leipzig Maḥzor,” is thus clarified.
Kogman-Appel's contributions include not only her interpretations of the maḥzor images, but also her suggested resolutions to long-standing academic issues, whether corroborating or modifying what scholars have concluded from textual sources. She deals, for example, with the difference of opinion between Ephraim Kanarfogel and Haym Soloveichik about the scope of the Pietist movement in medieval Ashkenaz. By excavating imagery in the maḥzor that expresses and celebrates Pietist culture (the prominence of particular customs in the liturgical context, the penitential attitude, and the mystical themes), Kogman-Appel argues that whether or not the Pietist movement was limited to a few quirky radicals, the wider community of Worms embraced elements of its teachings—if not in practice, then in outlook.
Kogman-Appel's portrait of Worms in Chapter Two offers an accessible synthesis of scholarship on this medieval community. Worms is known as the place of Rashi's student years, and as “the cradle of the Tosafist approach” (54) in the eleventh century. It suffered scholarly decline in the twelfth century, and reclaimed prominence with Eleazar ben Judah (d. 1232) and his Pietist teachings in the thirteenth century.
The author focuses on the scholar Eleazar, who contributed much to the Worms prayer rite. (His heartrending elegy for his wife and daughters, murdered before his eyes by crusaders, continues to capture the hearts and minds of readers.) She shows that the maḥzor shaped ethical guidelines for a community in crisis, offering appropriate Pietist responses to persecution that relied heavily on values of personal penitence rather than active, collective martyrdom. In her reading, the Leipzig maḥzor replaces the customary image of Abraham actively sacrificing his son Isaac—one that traditionally adorned the Yom Kippur piyyut “The Steadfast Believer”—with an image of Abraham passively facing death by fire in the ovens of Nimrod. To be sure, Abraham remains “a role model for martyrdom” (142), but in a way that evades action (e.g., child slaughter, collective suicide) and instead prescribes steadfast faith and acceptance of God's will in the face of death. This reading of passive martyrdom in the maḥzor reveals a paradigm that contradicts Simcha Goldin's and Soloveitchik's view of active martyrdom as the dominant ideal in medieval Ashkenaz.
Kogman-Appel identifies the recitation of piyyutim as one of the defining features of the Worms Jewish community, to which the Leipzig Maḥzor “is such a lavish witness” (54). In her view, the maḥzor gives visual expression to key texts composed by Eleazar. She devotes a short chapter to Eleazar's famous sermon delivered on the sabbath before Passover which, when read along with the seemingly incongruous images in the liturgical service, reveals a coherent program “designed as a series of visual anchors meant to recall the major foci of Eleazar's sermon” (59). By demonstrating that this sermon provided the material for the iconographic peculiarities in a communal prayer book nearly a century after the death of Eleazar, Kogman-Appel speaks to the long legacy of one of the rishonim (at least in his hometown). Her approach, by which she crafts her argument around the strong correlation between imagery and text, thus evading the issue of artist identification, is of particular value for art historical methodology. She does not address Narkiss' thesis that most illumination in Jewish manuscripts was the work of non-Jewish artists. Even if Narkiss was right and the art was executed by a non-Jew, the decisions about the content of the images were made by the patrons who commissioned the work, the scholars who ruled on the liturgical rite and conceived the overall decorative program, and, more indirectly, by the congregants who used the book.
In addition to analyzing the maḥzor's imagery, and Eleazar's influence on it, Kogman-Appel examines the maḥzor as a ritual object that aided the Worms congregation to follow and find meaning in a set of rituals. She attempts to reconcile a seeming lack of consistency in the decorative program (which Narkiss explained with a theory of multiple artists) with a characterization of the book as a communal portrait. The maḥzor's “diversity in both subject matter and the use of various visual idioms is not a symptom of a lack of focus, but rather that the program seems to reflect the multilayered concerns of the community and the worldview of its members” (38).
At times, the argumentation is strained. Kogman-Appel's justification for viewing the Leipzig Maḥzor as a major source for the study of Ashkenazi Jewry, rather than simply as a rare example of the art and text of the thirteenth-century festival prayer book, is not entirely convincing. It is not clear that any one book can serve as a reliable guide to “the mentality of the people” (1), or to the life of an entire community of which we otherwise know very little. In fact, Kogman-Appel's reconstruction of the intrigue around the production and preservation of this prayer book suggests that we cannot responsibly rely on one manuscript to generalize about others. Overall, though, the painstaking research of Kogman-Appel offers a novel glimpse of the milieu of the Leipzig Maḥzor's patrons, artists, scribes, and reading community, something we do not have for other commissioned manuscripts in the Rhineland.
