To Tell Their Children: Jewish Communal Memory in Early Modern Prague 9780804788816

Citation preview

To Tell Their Children

Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture edited by

Aron Rodrigue and Steven J. Zipperstein

To Tell Their Children Jewish Communal Memory in Early Modern Prague Rachel L. Greenblatt

stanford university press stanford, california

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2014 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archivalquality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Greenblatt, Rachel L., 1968 – author.   To tell their children : Jewish communal memory in early modern Prague / Rachel L. Greenblatt.    pages cm—(Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture)   Includes bibliographical references and index.   isbn 978-0-8047-8602-7 (cloth : alk. paper)   1.  Jews— Czech Republic—Prague—Historiography.  2.  Collective memory— Czech Republic—Prague.  3.  Prague (Czech Republic)—Historiography.  I.  Title.  II.  Series: Stanford studies in Jewish history and culture.   ds135.c96p65 2013   943.71′2004924 — dc23 2013021462 Typeset by Newgen in 10.5/14 Galliard

In memory of Robert Lee Greenblatt Who is the man who is eager for life, loving its days, that he may see good.—Psalms 34:13 and David Applebaum ‫ ד‬″‫ הי‬and Naava Applebaum ‫ ד‬″‫הי‬ Who will ascend the mountain of the Lord? Who may stand in His holy place? One who is clean of hands and pure of heart.—Psalms 24:3-4

Contents

Illustrations Note on Transliterations and Names Acknowledgments 1 2 3 4 5 6

Introduction That Children “Will Rise Up to Tell Their Children” “Metropolis of Jews’ Streets” Shapes of Prague Memory in Jewish Town and Jewish Time

ix xi xiii

1 11

“Death Entered into Our Window” Living and Dead in Cemetery and Synagogue

47

“A Remembrance for Me and My Descendants” Autobiographical Writing and Familial Commemoration

83

“Established the Day” Authorship, Communal Authority, and Local Traditions

117

“That a Future Generation Will Know” Narrating History in Book, Tale, and Song

136

“In the Language People Understand” Print and Manuscript; Vernacular and Sacred; Women and Men

168

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Contents



Conclusion “No Need to Name It All”: Toward a History of Forgetting Notes Selected Bibliography Index

187 203 265 289

Illustrations

Figure 1.1 Antonín Langweil, cardboard model of nineteenthcentury Prague Figure 1.2 The autonomous towns of Prague Figure 1.3 H ̣  amisha H ̣  umshei Torah, Megillot, Haftarot. Prague: Gershom ben Solomon Kohen with sons Mordecai and Solomon, 1530 Figure 1.4 Zaks parokhet, 1602 Figure 1.5 Gravestone of H ̣  anokh (Heni) ben Judah Leib Gedalyes Figure 1.6 Glass commissioned for the Prague burial society, 1786/87 Figure 1.7 The same glass, viewed from a different angle, 1786/87 Figure 1.8 Months in the Hebrew calendar with Gregorian equivalents Figure 2.1 Gravestone of Avigdor Kara, d. 1439 Figure 2.2 Gravestone of Hendl, daughter of Evril Gronim and wife of Jacob Bassevi, d. 1628 Figure 2.3 Page from the Altneuschul Memorbuch, ca. 1500 Figure 2.4 Page from the Altneuschul Memorbuch for Gadil ben Azriel Shamash, d. 1707 Figure 2.5 Gravestone of Neḥ ama, wife of Shalom Uri, d. 1576 Figure 2.6 From a hazkarah for H ̣  anokh (Heni) ben Judah Leib Gedalyes Figure 2.7 Parokhet donated by Mori Bischitz in memory of his wife, Reizl bat Moses Plohn Figure 2.8 Gravestone of Rebekah bat Meir Tikotin, d. 1605

12 13

19 30 34 35 35 38 48 49 50 51 57 63 67 69

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Illustrations

Figure 2.9 Gravestone of Jonah ben Meir Puria Pfefferkorn, d. 1536 Figure 2.10 Prague Castle, All Saints’ Chapel, entrance to Vladislav Hall Figure 2.11 Gravestone of Zalman ben Moses H ̣  ayyat, d. 1628 Figure 2.12 Torah curtain from Kriegshaber, Bavaria, 1723/24 Figure 3.1 Joseph Tein, Megillat hakela′im (copied 1840) Figure 3.2 Family megillah of the Yampels-Segal family, 1721, showing how the family megillah was rolled like other sacred parchment scrolls Figure 5.1 Prague Castle from the east, across the Vltava River Figure 5.2 View of Prague, looking south from the Letná. 1591 engraving by Joris Hoefnagel and Franz Hogenberg Figure 5.3 Marian column, in the center of Prague’s Old Town Square, ca. early twentieth century Figure 6.1 Title page of Sefer be′er sheva Figure 7.1 Pinkas hazkarat neshamot of the Maisel Synagogue, nineteenth century, showing the needle used by the cantor to mark where he finished his weekly recitation of the hazkarot, so that the following week’s cantor would know where to begin

70 71 72 81 85

86 150 150 158 182

188

Note on Transliterations and Names

In translating Hebrew and Yiddish words into Latin characters, I have sought, for the most part, to follow the guidelines outlined in the Encyclopaedia Judaica. Hebrew words are transliterated according to contemporary Israeli Hebrew pronunciation, surely not that used by Jewish residents of early modern Prague, but most familiar to contemporary readers. In other contexts, I have sought to reproduce Yiddish pronunciations. For that reason, a single word, such as the plural or construct form of megillah might be transliterated in different ways depending on the language of the text from which it is taken, for example, “Megillat eivah” for a Hebrew text and “Megillas eivah” for a Yiddish version of the same basic text. Places and families in Prague often had different names in Hebrew, Yiddish, Czech, and German, and orthography was not consistent even within a single language. I have tried to use the most familiar forms of names where possible. Jews in early modern Prague were often known by multiple variations of their names, in Hebrew, Yiddish, and/or German, Czech, Latin versions. All had a patronymic: men known as “son of,” rendered here as the Hebrew ben, as in “Solomon ben David,” and women as “daughter of,” bat, as “Dinah bat Jacob.” This Hebrew version of the name has generally been preferred throughout the book, although various sources also use less formal Yiddish variants, or European ­versions.

xi

Acknowledgments

If it takes a village to raise a child, this book has required its own virtual “bustling town,” a far-flung network of friends and colleagues near and far. It started, in a sense, on the unimpressive banks of the Grasse River in Massena, New York, where my immediate paternal ancestors are interred in a small Jewish cemetery, fenced in at the back of a slightly larger Catholic burial ground, trees blocking the river just ahead. Here, on the outskirts of a village where some twenty or so immigrant Jewish families once lived differently indeed from the Jews of early modern Prague, my father, grandfather, and great-uncle took me from grave to grave, explaining who was who and telling their stories, planting in me the notion that a cemetery is a site of memory, long before I had any concrete notion that such a thing as a “site of memory” existed in any scholarly sense. My debts to Richard I. Cohen cannot be adequately put in words; I can, I think, aspire only to provide students, colleagues, and friends even a small portion of what he has shared with me. Israel J. Yuval read closely and asked important questions. Hillel J. Kieval and Chava Turniansky likewise contributed immeasurable time and expertise. Michael Heyd helped frame key issues early on. A deep, genuine, warm commitment to undergraduate teaching among the members of the History Department at Cornell University in the late 1980s, and particularly the support and encouragement of Walter LaFeber, paved my way in innumerable and fundamental ways, as did teachers and friends at the Pardes Institute, and Matan—the Sadie Rennert Women’s Institute for Torah Study, both in Jerusalem. This book has profited greatly from conversations and exchanges, references, and corrections received from additional

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Acknowledgments

teachers, formal and informal, colleagues, and friends, including (but not, by any means, limited to) Elisheva Baumgarten, Ann Blair, Robert Bonfil, Chava Buchwalter, Elisheva Carlebach, Joseph M. Davis, Yaacov Deutsch, Maria Diemling, Yacov Guggenheim, Louise Hecht, Elliott Horowitz, Yosef Kaplan, Otto Dov Kulka, Robert Liberles of blessed memory, Howard Louthan, Pawel Maciejko, Vivian B. Mann, Michael Miller, Gabriel Motzkin, Lucia Raspe, Elchanan Reiner, Moshe Rosman, Jirˇina Šedinová, Bernard Septimus, Ruth Simpson, Pavel Sládek, Moshe Sluhovsky, Joshua Teplitsky, Magda Teter, Vladimir Urbánek, Scott Ury, Rebekka Voß, and Ruth Wisse. I am grateful to reading groups that pushed me at key moments: to Menahem Ben-Sasson, Israel Bartal, and to members of forums at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem that each led for several years; to Gregg Gardner, Jane Kanarek, Yehuda Kurzer, and Claire Sufrin; and to students in Harvard seminars who read chapters of this book in manuscript. Alexandr Putík and Olga Sixtová of the Jewish Museum in Prague provided assistance essential to my research. My deepest gratitude to them as to their colleagues Vlastimila Hamacˇková, Daniel Polakovicˇ, Arno Parˇik, and others, who gave unstintingly of their time and expertise, providing materials, references, and explanations. I owe a special debt of gratitude to the librarians of the Judaica Reading Room of what was, at the time, the Jewish National and University Library, now the National Library of Israel, at Givat Ram, Jerusalem—Elona Avinezer, Alisa Allon, Zipora Ben Abou, and Ruth Flint—who, alongside their consistently kind, cheerful, and wise assistants, adjusted their own work space and habits to accommodate this working, nursing mother. Nehama Ze ′ev, Margalit Zarum, and Shoshana Fital made it possible for me to be in the reading room day in and day out, confident my children’s lives were enriched in my absence. I thank the many colleagues with whom I shared ideas, work hours, and coffee breaks and am especially grateful to Dena Ordan, instrumental in fostering a cooperative environment in the reading room through innumerable acts of thoughtful kindness. Thanks as well to all the staff in the library, to Abraham David and Yael Okun of the Institute for Microfilmed Manuscripts, Hadassah Assouline at the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, and, at Harvard University,

Acknowledgments

Charles Berlin and staff of the Judaica Division, Houghton Library curators including Caroline Duroselle-Melish, and research librarians. I am grateful as well for financial support, over many years, from the American Jewish League for Israel, the Leo Baeck Institute, the Mandel Institute for Jewish Studies of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and that university’s Erich Kulka and Bernard and Naomi Pridan Prizes, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, and, in addition, its Ephraim Urbach Post-Doctoral Fellowship, the National Foundation for Jewish Culture (now the Foundation for Jewish Culture), the Prof. Drs. Margarita and Moshe Pazi Prize for Study of Czech Jewry, the Posen Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities for an NEH Summer Stipend, and Harvard University funds for research, publications, and faculty leave. For insights and prodding in the process of rewriting, I am grateful to the late Jeannette Hopkins, to her niece Carol Gray, and to an anonymous reader for Stanford University Press. I am grateful to Norris Pope, formerly of Stanford University Press, for his early enthusiasm and to his colleagues, including Emma Harper, Stacy Wagner, Judith Hibbard, and Fran Andersen, for consistent attention to detail and open communication. I would also like to thank Olga Ungar for assistance in the arduous task of assembling illustrations and am especially grateful for the efforts exerted in providing images by Katerˇina Krylová of the City of Prague Museum and Jakub Hauser of the Jewish Museum in Prague, and by their colleagues, and for the support of the latter’s director, Leo Pavlát. Thanks as well to Mary Davis and Michael Van Zandt Collins for preparation of the bibliography and to Eva Gurevich for editorial assistance. Within my bustling virtual town, family of course has a special place. I thank my parents, Samuel and Judith Shapiro Greenblatt, for whom family, education, love of history, and preservation of traditions have always been of central importance. The values and lessons instilled in their home have—to the extent I have succeeded in what I have set out to do—formed this book’s very foundation stones. My parents taught respect for the dead and their memory, but never at the expense of the living; an allegiance to memories always subservient to the need

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Acknowledgments

to live our lives in the present and to move forward into the future. My gratitude as well to my brother and sister, Daniel Greenblatt and Miriam Greenblatt Weidberg, and their families. Members of the next generation, Gabriel and Michal, assumed that a binder labeled “To Tell the Children” (as they read it) must be about them, and indeed, it is, in more ways, I imagine, than they will be able to understand for some time to come. To them and to James B. Appelbaum, my partner and peerless proofreader, thank you. Decades after trailing family members around a tiny burial plot in a remote corner of world Jewry, and in the midst of research for this book, I stood on Har Hamenuḥ ot, contemporary Jerusalem’s main Jewish cemetery. A trembling rendition of “el malei raḥ amim,” a traditional prayer for the dead, pierced the air on this, the anniversary of a terrorist attack on a coffee shop that had torn away the lives being commemorated that day. I was drawn into the words, fleetingly believing that the dead would, in fact, find rest under wings of the Divine Presence, if we just prayed hard enough—and was then suddenly outside the scene, thinking of how these very words were those used by Jews of early modern Prague to remember their dead, in circumstances so different, and so similar. Continuity and change, the bread and butter of the historian, but brought into sharp, living relief. Indeed, several lives cut short before their time, during the years I worked on this project, were linked with mine in a variety of ways, from deep connections to fleeting but significant moments. With its completion I remember those to whom it is dedicated as well as Karen Levine, Malka Korman, Ellen Appelbaum Trauben, Liora Elias Bar-Levav, Rivká Matitya, and Robert Liberles. May their memories be as blessings and may their many merits in this world lend support in some fashion to their orphaned children. In dedicating this book to the memory of three whose deaths, from cruel violence or wretched disease, yanked me from my ivory cocoon at the very heights—and depths— of research and writing, reminding me, viscerally, of the real, living, human pain felt hundreds of years ago by those Prague Jews whose surviving words I sought to understand, I gesture, so I hope, toward the ongoing search for appropriate modes of remembrance.

To Tell Their Children



Introduction



That Children “Will Rise Up to Tell Their Children” I myself have written and published [this chronicle] “so that future generations will know, until the last generation, children will be born and rise up to tell their children” (Psalms 78:6), inhabitants of the holy community of Prague, in the country of Bohemia, that we had enemies with cunning plots. . . . And the children of Israel raised up their eyes and cried out to the Lord of their fathers . . . and our Lord did not forsake us, and granted us grace before our lord, His majesty, and [granted grace] to all Israel in all the places they inhabit. . . .1

Judah Leib ben (son of ) Joshua, secretary to Prague’s chief rabbi, Aaron Simon Spira-Wedeles, wrote these lines after surviving, during the summer of 1648, a Swedish siege on his native Prague, one of the final stand-offs of the Thirty Years’ War. They are part of his introduction to Milḥ ama beshalom (War for Peace), a chronicle recording those dramatic events. Judah Leib expressed wonder at his own existence and strove to ensure that future generations would appreciate their past. The emphasis the Prague functionary placed on gratitude to God and public recognition of His wonders is central to many early modern explanations of why one would record or remember a particular event. History ultimately mattered, in part, because—and when—it gave evidence of God’s continued providence over Jews and Jewish communities. The ability to transmit complex memories—and thus to bridge the chasm of death— distinguishes humans from other members of the animal kingdom. Grandparents tell young children about life when they were young; archaeologists use carbon dating to determine details about civilizations gone for thousands of years. The world’s three major monotheistic religions are historical in nature, their foundational narratives based on particular developments in human time. Indeed, Christian history so dominates western ways of understanding our place in time that every other event deemed worthy of remembrance is

1

2

Introduction

accorded a place on a historical spectrum since, or before, the birth of Jesus, even by those who hold no stock in the notion of salvation by his death. To varying degrees, adherents of these belief systems interweave deep concern with their own local histories with this fundamental, historical understanding of their place in the universe. In times of conflict and transition, as the Protestant Reformation and English Civil War, the calendar itself, with its mix of religious, political, and legal commemorations, has been mightily contested.2 For traditional Jews, an ahistorical connection with biblical past and messianic future helped shape an identity distinct from majority cultures. Especially in the Torah-centered intellectual realm, a man could be in direct dialogue with sages of earlier ages (for a woman, this process was more difficult and generally less direct); words on a page of rabbinic exegesis or biblical text were in conversation with their readers’ discussion of a legal point and also served to shape responses to contemporary events. The destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem became a personally remembered event, equated with the exodus from Egypt: “Moses sang a song that would never be forgotten—when I left Egypt / Jeremiah mourned and cried out in grief—when I left Jerusalem,” a current that could, in theory, run counter to a Jew’s distinguishing current circumstances from past realities.3 A line of reasoning in modern scholarship holding that Jews did not, in fact, engage historical memory on such a wide variety of levels, that no room remained for more particular, postbiblical historical concerns is based in part on the path-breaking work of sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1877–1945). For him, direct transmission of recollections from generation to generation helped form a society’s or a family’s “collective memory” (a term opposed, in its own time, to self-focused Freudian memory), which was the polar opposite of historical writing, a later reconstruction of lost memories.4 Pierre Nora, in his editor’s introduction to Realms of Memory, a monumental anthology covering the history of French collective memory, likewise envisioned a lost golden age of organically transmitted, unself-conscious memories wholly opposed to historical writing.5 Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi brought Halbwachs’s categories to Jewish history, where the deep concern with history of the biblical period gave

Introduction

way, in his view, to distinct apathy toward postbiblical Jewish history.6 Yerushalmi closely examined Jewish historical writing, especially of the sixteenth century, but laid only bare outlines of additional modes for transmission of collective memory that, to his view, superseded historical writing and represented distinctly ahistorical ways of viewing the past.7 At the same time, others called into question Halbwachs’s complete polarity between collective memory and historical writing, suggesting complex interactions between the two, rather than absolute opposition. And, several studies of particular instances of Jewish historical writing and collective memory demonstrated limitations in Yerushalmi’s similar characterization of Jewish historical thinking.8 Standing on the shoulders of these latter scholars, To Tell Their Children presents a case study of Jewish memory in early modern Prague, a concrete model of premodern Jewish memory in a single locale, showing precisely how memories were shaped and recorded, how ideas took on physical and literary forms. For historian Amos Funkenstein, the prevalence of sentiments like those expressed by Judah Leib ben Joshua among premodern Jewish writers, which Funkenstein referred to as “an incessant astonishment at one’s own existence,” constitutes one of the central themes of “Jewish historical reasoning” over the course of centuries. “Put differently,” he wrote, “Jewish culture never took itself for granted.”9 Some modern scholarship has failed to take account of early modern Jews’ concern with their local historical circumstances precisely because the forms the preservation of such local history took, the way God’s immediate providence was recorded, varied greatly and often did not look like “history” to a contemporary viewer. Yet the particular forms in which the Jews of early modern Prague (ca. 1580 –1730) recorded their own history depended a great deal on changing circumstances that had little to do with historical reasoning, including material comfort, fashion in architecture and textiles, and the presence or absence of intellectual circles and scientific activity on a wider scale. Milḥ ama beshalom is but one example of an early modern Jew recording and disseminating information about recent events, for the historical record, in a form—a short chronicle focused on a single set of events—that has not been widely considered in discussions of pre-Enlightenment

3

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Introduction

Jewish historical writing. Prague’s Jews also used even less known formats, like Yiddish historical songs and familial rescue tales, to preserve their own histories. They also perpetuated the memory of their dead on gravestones, in synagogue liturgy, and on ritual objects. In Prague, as throughout Christendom, the affirmation of God’s continued providence over the Jews always carried also an implicit refutation of the Christian claim that God had rejected the Jews as his chosen Israel, as made clear by their forsaken state. Jewish life in medieval Europe had been characterized by ongoing polemic with the Christians among whom they lived, who viewed themselves as having already, in ancient times, superseded the Jews as God’s chosen Israel, while any remaining Jews were simply blind to God’s true revelation. Judah Leib’s statement that “God did not forsake us before our lord,” means “God showed our earthly ruler, Emperor Ferdinand II (known as ardent in his Catholicism), that He still protects us, the Jews.” About a century earlier, Elijah Capsali (ca. 1490 – ca. 1555), a rabbi and historian from Candia, Crete, a Venetian possession, had written in his historical work, Seder Eliyahu zuta: But my reasons for this composition and the benefits that accrue from it are twofold. . . . The first is to teach man wisdom and understanding in hearing the stories of the kings . . . The second is that all the people of the earth might know that the Lord is God, and that God judges on earth. For when he who looks fears, and glancing over my stories . . . accepts the yoke of the kingdom of heaven, then [shall he] know that the eyes of the Lord scan the whole earth, beholding evil and good . . . He looks over the gentiles as well, to raise this nation up and to cast that one down . . .10

Judah Leib thus echoed a theme expressed earlier by the more famous Capsali, and others, in viewing history as vindicating the Jews and demonstrating God’s protection of them. In defining “historical writing,” modern scholars sometimes seek impartiality, and such religious sensibilities as Capsali and Judah Leib expressed may seem to negate the possibility of the objectivity a historian should have. But that view is anachronistic. Alongside gratitude at their own continued existence coupled with celebration of God’s providence, grief and mourning also drove

Introduction

Prague’s Jews to commemorate the recent past for future generations. Mourning might be expressed on a gravestone for an individual who died of natural causes or in liturgical laments for tragic loss of life, as in fire, war, or anti-Jewish rioting. Communal leaders could also be moved by political pragmatism, usually joined with genuine gratitude, to construct commemorative liturgies celebrating the protection of the local ruler against physical danger and expressing loyalty to him and his regime. A paterfamilias might likewise record a narrative that defended the family name against accusations or denunciations. Whatever the impetus, when moved to pass a story or memory on to future generations, a Prague Jew, like any author, needed to find an appropriate form in which to record it. Today, if a person feels the story of her own life is worth telling, or might reap profits, she is well aware of the genre of autobiography and the kinds of stories readers might expect to find there. But what would such a person do had she never read an autobiography? The shapes the memories of Prague Jews took on depended greatly on the literary and artistic genres that were known to them and those that developed over time in Prague and elsewhere in its environs. Cultural and material conditions, gender, socioeconomic status, and the still-evolving role of print technology all played roles as well. A twenty-first-century author is much more likely to write and publish an autobiography if he has a rags-to-riches, or addiction-to-sobriety, story to tell than if he worked diligently in his middle-class suburban high school and competitive college to eventually become a successful lawyer or banker. The literary forms that are common and familiar help shape what kinds of memories will be preserved. Likewise, in early modern Prague, the literary and artistic genres available for the preservation of memories, and the ways those genres developed over time, helped shape which memories would be preserved and how. To Tell Their Children is an investigation of these manifold ways in which Prague’s early modern Jews recorded their own past. In its most intimate, perhaps most instinctual form, memory can serve as a bridge between the living and the dead, a way to maintain ties with those who are no more. (In Prague, as in many premodern communities, the dead continued to perform important functions in society.)11

5

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Introduction

Gravestones, ritual objects, and a weekly liturgy for the dead helped to create this bridge and to keep the dead actively involved in the daily activities of the living. As aesthetic sensibilities changed, beginning toward the end of the sixteenth century, gravestones and other memorials became more elaborate, placing more emphasis on the many qualities and achievements of the dead and somewhat obfuscating the interactions between them and the living. As individuals’ life stories came to occupy a greater place in commemorations of them, families also sought to preserve and perpetuate stories of living members, especially patriarchs. These stories found their way into the introductions to published books and also appeared as freestanding, handwritten tales of deliverance that established a familial “Purim” day, based on the biblical Purim. In addition to celebrating rescue, these tales justified the author-protagonist’s actions and defended his family name. Communal officials acted similarly at times, creating liturgies for local annual commemorations for the community as a whole that celebrated rescue from existential threat, real or perceived, while at the same time promoting a specific political line. The particular ways in which such liturgies were written depended in part on both local traditions and the existence, or lack thereof, of a reasonably functional communal authority. When the financial pressures of a state at war, or the social stress of a regime eagerly promoting Catholic renewal—together with the internal bickering both situations could exacerbate—mounted too large, local commemorations became less original and less self-confident. The recording of historical events outside the ceremonial context followed a similar path. Just one major Hebrew historical chronicle was published in early modern Prague, David Gans’s Ẓ emaḥ David (Sprout of David / Branch of David), in 1592.12 Later events were recorded in the introductions to some of the special liturgies and in more specialized historical writing like Milḥ ama beshalom. Another genre also appeared, the Yiddish historical song, a report of recent events meant primarily to spread news among surrounding Jewish communities. These changes developed hand in hand with gradual transformations in gender roles and in the relationships between print and manuscript publication, between writing in the sacred and vernacular tongues. By the turn of the eighteenth century,

Introduction

Prague’s Jewish community had changed enormously, and the ways in which its members recorded their history had evolved as well. All this took place within a community firmly entrenched in a set of traditions and way of life that saw itself as continuous over the past centuries and more, a community governed internally by a legal system that had developed over thousands of years. In diet, calendar, language, and dress, Prague’s Jews, several thousand in number by the end of the sixteenth century, set themselves apart from local cultures and identified with Jews worldwide, while simultaneously adopting and adapting local norms.13 The local commemorative liturgies they composed, like the fixed aspects of liturgy shared with Jews worldwide, emphasized their identity with that dispersed people, as with their shared biblical past and messianic future. At the same time, Prague Jews’ integration of their own recent past with the larger picture of Jewish history, be it in liturgical commemoration or historical writing, showed how confidently they viewed their own existence as equally valuable members of that ancient tradition, whose lives were likewise equally meaningful. Their own stories were woven into it. They understood that their own additions were particular to this community—that itself was widely accepted in other realms where local custom dictated variations in liturgy or other practice—but at the same time these variations were always part of a larger whole. Gans’s historical writing likewise confidently viewed the history of Prague’s Jews as the natural continuation of the history of all Jews. By the turn of the eighteenth century, Prague’s population had grown to approximately forty thousand, of whom about a quarter were Jews, while the diversity of its religious life had constricted radically, at least in public, to Catholics and Jews only. The political cohesion of its always fractious Jewish community had been broken down even further. Yet, at the same time, the uses and varieties of print continued to increase—including its expansion in the vernacular Yiddish—as growing participation of women and different socioeconomic classes of men in reading and writing helped reshape their places in the Jewish world. In addition, throughout Jewish Europe—perhaps first among the descendants of Iberian Jews now living in Amsterdam and elsewhere in western Europe—sacral affairs and religious authority became more

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Introduction

decidedly concentrated within the synagogue and in the ritual realm, while other aspects of Jewish life pulled themselves loose, gradually and unevenly, from religious authority.14 The Jews of Prague produced literature of smaller scale and often of lesser quality, and at the same time history became more specialized. Later historians, in their search for predecessors, have not always looked into all the corners of early modern life where historical memory once expressed itself. An important center for European Jewry throughout the seventeenth century, by the early eighteenth, Prague was home to one of the most populous Jewish communities in Europe, a fitting site for the present case study of early modern memory.15 An examination of one particular Jewish community can make no claim to Jewish Prague’s unique or, to the contrary, representative nature as regards communal memory; by constructing a single community’s portrait, I intend to raise questions about others. The study’s period of focus opens around 1583, when Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1576 –1611) moved his capital to Prague from Vienna, and the city and its Jewish community flourished. In order to concentrate on a traditional Jewish community, one seeing itself as beholden to the framework of normative rabbinic law, it closes on the brink of eighteenth-century Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), with the tenure as chief rabbi of David Oppenheim (1703 –1736), an avid bibliophile and collector of rare manuscripts and ephemera alike. Thanks to Oppenheim’s collecting activities, rare exemplars of printed booklets have been preserved, his collection now housed in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. In the mid-nineteenth century, more scholars in Prague began to collect objects and documents important to the community’s history, spurred on decades later by implementation of a radical plan for urban sanitization and revitalization during which, starting in 1896, most of the Jewish Quarter was leveled and entirely rebuilt, just six of the original synagogues left standing.16 Today’s surviving historical record has much to do with decisions made in those years, including the 1906 opening, thanks in large part to the efforts of Salomon Hugo Lieben, of the city’s Jewish museum, among the earliest of a wave of such institutions in Europe.17 Under the German occupation of World War II, a collaboration of sorts between museum workers and Nazi authorities created

Introduction

a “Central Jewish Museum” under continued Jewish operation that successfully preserved the museum’s holdings and added to them additional collections of Jewish art and ritual objects from throughout Bohemia and Moravia, even as deportations of workers continued.18 In 1950, the holdings and buildings were nationalized and became the State Jewish Museum. Returned to the Jewish community in 1994, the Jewish Museum in Prague is still the central address for study of the community’s history and now houses a rich collection of manuscripts, printed material, ritual objects, and additional materials. Ongoing publications of its exhibition catalogs are among the most important new resources for the study of early modern Prague Jewry.19 Lieben and fellow scholars also engaged, from the late nineteenth century until 1938, in research regarding the history of Prague’s Jews, including studies of Hebrew and Yiddish texts in which the Jews of premodern Prague recorded their own history, a line of inquiry continued decades later by Prague literary scholar Jirˇina Šedinová, and most recently by some of her students.20 Lieben’s and Šedinová’s works, together with those of Otto Muneles and Milada Vilímková on the Old Jewish Cemetery and Jewish Quarter in Prague, and additional publications of the museum’s collections, form important building blocks for the current study.21 Likewise, prewar historians, foremost among them Tobias Jakobovits, who along with Josef Polák was one of the last surviving professional staff of the prewar Jewish Museum, laid the foundations for an understanding of the community’s political and institutional history, relying primarily on archival records in Czech, German, and Latin.22 Jakobovits delved into the political intrigue that plagued Bohemian Jewry, particularly in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.23 During the communist years, Jan Herˇman published some additional studies of the political structure of Prague Jewry, and Jakobovits’s work has been most directly continued today by Alexandr Putík, of the Jewish Museum in Prague. Several younger scholars, from Prague and elsewhere, are now reaching more deeply into archival records, their works complementing this book’s primary focus on Jewish Prague’s literary records.24 All told, Prague’s Jewish community of the late sixteenth through the early eighteenth centuries, which inhabited a cosmopolitan and

9

10

Introduction

storied city on the border between central and eastern Europe and left behind a rich material and documentary record, provides an excellent setting for a closer investigation of this early modern Jewish memory. Its most basic forms of communal memory were inscribed in the very shapes of the synagogues, streets, and homes of the Jewish Town and the rhythms of its calendar.

One

“Metropolis of Jews’ Streets”



S hapes of Prague Memory in Jewish Town and Jewish Time

To recover the shapes and rhythms of the urban enclave into which communal memories of Prague’s Jewish population were inscribed requires a leap of carefully informed imagination, a look beyond the twentieth-century caesurae of Holocaust, mass emigration, and Communist regime, and past the radical alteration of the built landscape undertaken as part of the turn-of-the-century renewal project. Most buildings were leveled, the layouts of streets changed beyond recognition.1 Documents and objects collected in the Jewish Museum inspired by the reconstruction for the sake of twentieth-century memory also provide tools for uncovering earlier generations of Prague Jews’ memories of their own, still more distant past. Through such texts we seek to recreate, as much as possible by listening to their own words, how Prague’s Jewish Town looked to those who inhabited it in previous centuries, particularly when that appearance matters to understanding how they remembered their local past (Figure 1.1). Jews lived, as did most such early modern European urban communities, in a distinct neighborhood known as the Jewish Street, Jewish Town, or, at the pen of historian David Gans in his 1592 Hebrew chronicle Ẓ  emaḥ David, a “metropolis” of multiple streets (kiryat ḥ uẓ  ot hayehudim).2 As opposed to other cities, however, Prague was not a single municipal entity but was made up of three—and later, four—separate towns, autonomous until their 1784 unification, spanning a bend in the Vltava River (Moldau): the Old Town (Staré Meˇsto, Altstadt), the New Town (Nové Meˇsto, Neustadt) on the river’s right bank, the Little Side (Malá Strana, Kleinseite), and, finally, the additional Castle District (Hradcˇany, Burg), surrounding the famous Prague Castle

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Prague Memory in Jewish Town and Jewish Time

Figure 1.1 Antonín Langweil, cardboard model of nineteenth-century Prague, view from south of the Old Town Square, with the Jewish Quarter in the background in the upper left (and continuing off map). To the immediate east (right, in the photo) of the square is the Týn Church, to the west (left), the Old Town Hall. The Marian column arising from the center of the square was erected in 1650 and destroyed in 1918. Courtesy of the City of Prague Museum.

(Pražský Hrad)—begun in the ninth century, its St. Vitus Cathedral, its spires completed in the twentieth— on its left (Figure 1.2). The heart of Jewish life, from the late twelfth century on, was centered in the approximate area of today’s Jewish Town, also known as Josefov, wholly subsumed, geographically and politically, by the Old Town surrounding it.3 Sometimes referred to as “Fifth Town,” the Jewish settlement was at once a part of the Old Town and separate from it, at times almost on a footing with Prague’s other separate towns, and yet never quite so.4 Prague’s Jewish Town was an integral part of the European Jewish settlement concentrated in the Rhine Valley and northern France in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the cradle of a region that came to be known by the biblical name, Ashkenaz. Political regimes that

Prague Memory in Jewish Town and Jewish Time Prague Castle and Castle District (Pražský Hrad and Hradcany/ Prager Burg and Hradschin)

Approximate location of the Tandel Market (near the Church of St. Gall, in today’s Havelská Street)

Jewish Town

1

Old Town (Staré Mesto/Altstadt) Little Side (Malá Strana/Kleinseite)

2

4

3

6

New Town (Nové Mesto/Neustadt)

6

1 St. Vitus Cathedral 2 Old Town Square with Town Hall 3 Týn Church 4 Charles Bridge 5 Vyšehrad Castle

5

6 Vltava River (Moldau)

0

500 m

Figure  1.2 The autonomous towns of Prague, circa 1650. Period maps may be found through the Czech-language website of the Prague City Archives at www.ahmp .cz/katalog/, under the heading “Sbírka map a plánu˚.” (Individual maps can be viewed by clicking on the thumbnail, then on the box, “Zobrazit digitální kopie.”) The “collection of maps and plans” can also be reached through the “search the catalogue” function on the English version of the site, but at the time of this writing, the map pages themselves include Czech only.

governed Czech Jews from the fifteenth through the early eighteenth centuries included pre-Lutheran non-Catholic Christians, the curious polymath Emperor Rudolf II, and later Habsburg representatives of fervent Catholic renewal, striving for absolute rule. This single Jewish

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community and its memory stood at these many crossroads, each imparting aesthetic sensibilities, social structures, religious assumptions, and spiritual insights. Understanding their development requires a chronological context as well.

“The Eyes of God Are upon It, for Memory and Protection”: Pogrom to Politics in Prague’s Early Synagogues In 997 CE, Prague Jews, according to an account in early Latin, Czech, and German chronicles, repeated by Gans in Ẓ  emaḥ David, successfully came to the aid of Duke Boleslav II in a battle against opponents of Christianization, and, as a result, “were famous and glorified in all the land, and they were given permission and assistance to build a synagogue in the Little Side (Malá Strana) in Prague . . .” likely home, in fact, to the city’s oldest Jewish settlement.5 Although the report’s precise details have not been corroborated, a Malá Strana synagogue certainly existed, for it burned to the ground in 1142.6 Across the river and two miles to the south, another early Jewish settlement grew up in the area of today’s New Town, probably along a road leading to a second castle, the Vyšehrad, or High Castle. The scanty memories these two settlements left include a few gravestones, later moved, and the account on which Gans relied. Jewish merchants mentioned by a tenth-century travel writer, Ibrahim ibn Ya′aqub of Tortosa, who was in Prague around 965 CE, may have been travelers themselves, but if they were permanent residents of Prague, they would have lived in the Malá Strana or New Town (Nové Meˇsto). So, too, would those Jews killed in Prague during rioting throughout central Europe that accompanied the First Crusade in 1096.7 Hebrew-language memorial lists of casualties of these massacres organized by locale include Prague’s dead among them. The 1096 massacres marked the first significant setback for these oldest Ashkenazi communities and brought about the beginnings of memorial rituals that would become central to their liturgy.8 Nevertheless, the city flourished. In 1160, according to Gans, King Vladislav “brought with him from Italy artists, masons, and built for

Prague Memory in Jewish Town and Jewish Time

majesty and glory for the joyfully bustling city of Prague the great, beautiful bridge over the River Moldau, to which none can compare in length, width, height, strength and beauty in all the area of Ashkenaz. . . .”9 This stone bridge helped advance economic development that contributed to Prague’s Jews moving toward the new market center emerging in what is today known as the Old Town (Staré Me˘sto). The first group of Jews to settle there came in the wake of the 1142 fire—history does not relate whether the older synagogue was rebuilt, or whether this settlement may have dispersed entirely at that point—and settled around a synagogue later known as the Altschul (Old Synagogue), on the site of today’s Spanish Synagogue.10 A few blocks to the west, separated from the Altschul since 1346 by the Church of the Holy Spirit, another settlement emerged around a new synagogue. Centuries later, when a third synagogue was built, this one came to be known as the old New Synagogue, the famous Altneuschul (Old New Synagogue).11 Despite medieval Prague Jews’ royal privileges and generally peaceful relations with their Christian neighbors, violence broke out periodically. The deadliest massacre of medieval Prague Jews broke out on the last day of Passover in 1389, which was also Easter Sunday: “All of the suffering that has found us” (Numbers 20:14). So Avigdor Kara, expert in rabbinic law and wisdom from non-Jewish sources, began his elegy to the victims, continuing rhetorically: “Can one tell all that has happened to us?” The lament, Et kol hatela′ah (All of the Suffering), entered Prague’s liturgy for an extant minor fast day (17 Tammuz), and later for Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), along with a second composition by Kara and a third drawn from an earlier corpus. Remaining for centuries in the local liturgy, this massacre was thus Jewish Prague’s earliest strong communal memory. It was also commemorated annually elsewhere; in Worms, among the most venerable of the Ashkenazi communities, a list of its victims was read aloud on the day after the massacre’s anniversary, presumably to avoid mourning on the joyous last day of Passover. Kara’s elegy explains that Jews who ran inside the Old Synagogue (Altschul) for protection were engulfed by fire and destroyed along with the synagogue. The rioters, he wrote, “broke into the Old and New Synagogues,” the Altschul and the then Neuschul, spiritual and geographic centers of the Jewish Quarter, continuing:

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Prague Memory in Jewish Town and Jewish Time

Bitterly I call out in weakened voice of suffering For they degraded, burned, tore the holy books The Torah commanded to us by Moses.12

Et kol hatela′ah goes on to describe looting, desecration of corpses, and even uncovering of long-buried bones in the cemetery. The Altschul itself was rebuilt, and parts repaired yet again after a fire in 1689. In 1867, it was completely dismantled, and the new Spanish Synagogue built in its place.13 Records of the Altschul’s appearance, foundations, and furnishings were not kept, so while Kara’s lament, recited annually, provided later Prague Jews with a memory of the Altschul and the atrocities experienced there, very little survives to tell what memorials might once have existed within its walls. One exception involves events of centuries later; Judah Leib’s Milḥ ama beshalom states that during the Swedish siege in 1648: “They fired [artillery] also onto the roof of the Altschul, from all directions, and the weight [of the munitions] was more than 40 ‘liters,’ and the Jews left the depressions they made to preserve as a memory on the sanctuary of the Lord.”14 Memory was, in this case, literally pounded into the outside walls. Legend regarding the New Synagogue (today’s Altneuschul) held that blood spattered on its walls during the 1389 massacre remained there as a memorial, the synagogue building a venerable witness to its own history.15 This tradition associating memory of the medieval pogrom with one synagogue in particular is probably linked to its later importance. By the late sixteenth century, the former New Synagogue, then known as the Great Synagogue, had surpassed the Old Synagogue (Altschul) as the center of local Jewish life.16 The ground where broad, boutique-lined Parˇížská Street now stands was then crowded with buildings, a few narrow alleys running between them. The Altneuschul dominated its surroundings, one of a few freestanding buildings in the Jewish Quarter; a small courtyard abutted its eastern façade. This relative isolation and its stone construction allowed it to survive catastrophic fires that destroyed much else.17 Its physical endurance and central role in communal affairs lent weight and staying power to memories it embodied. Kara was also associated, in a short early fifteenth-century Hebrew chronicle, “Gilgul bnei H ̣  usim” (Hussite Cycle), with the Bohemian

Prague Memory in Jewish Town and Jewish Time

Christian reform movement whose founder, Jan Hus, is still today a symbol of Czech nationality and independence (a statue of him occupies a prominent place in Prague’s Old Town Square).18 Hus was a priest and reformer in late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century Prague, opposing indulgences and icons and supporting translation of the Bible into the vernacular Czech.19 Various Hussite denominations that flourished after his death at the stake as a heretic in 1415 were vigorously opposed by Catholic crusading armies sent from neighboring countries. Among charges against the Hussites was that of “Judaizing,” adopting customs similar to or inspired by Jewish theology or practice.20 The Hebrew chronicle gave this accusation a Jewish twist, claiming that Kara had taught Judaism to Czech King Wenceslaus IV (1378 –1419), from whom Hus learned its tenets. While the direct association of Kara with Hussite theology is most likely imaginary, Jews may have seen the internal Christian attack on Catholic practice as grounds for hope of mass Hussite conversion to Judaism, a yearning reflected, according to one scholar, in another of Kara’s songs, “Eḥ ad yaḥ id umeyuḥ ad” (One, Unique, and Distinct).21 Although later generations, while continuing to sing the song, generally forgot its connection to Hus and Hussitism, and the chronicle, originally appended to a widely read book of customs, also dropped out of circulation, the popular belief of Kara’s link to Hus remained strong.22 Moreover, Prague’s Jews were among the first in Christian Europe to live in a setting of multiple Christianities, rather than as a single minority as against a unified Church. Escalating violence against Jews to the west, in German lands, combined with welcoming conditions in Poland, led to eastward Jewish migration, increasing Prague’s geographic centrality to European Jewry and, with it, its cultural role. Jews brought their own dialect of Old High German to Poland with them, and in its meeting with Slavic languages, Yiddish, referred to by contemporaries writing in the language as taytsh or leshon ashkenaz (language of German lands), was on the path to its modern form, superseding, along the way, the Old Czech earlier spoken by Prague’s Jews.23 Yiddish print would become significant to Prague’s cultural prominence even as Hebrew, referred to as leshon hakodesh (the sacred language), remained, as elsewhere, the language of Jewish ritual, of intellectual discourse, and of printing of

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Prague Memory in Jewish Town and Jewish Time

learned books and liturgical works. In 1512, a book of prayers, the first Hebrew book known to have been printed north of the Alps, came off a Prague press, with several more, including a famous illuminated Passover Haggadah (1526), following.24 Gershom ben Solomon Kohen and his family, known in later scholarship as “Gersonides,” became the leading printer, his house soon recognized as a monopoly. The distinctive look of Gersonides press books, with the printer’s seal including Prague symbols, added yet another dimension to the Jews’ local traditions (Figure 1.3). Thus, the printed book, too, became a site for local pride and memory. Around the same time, Aaron Meshulam Horowitz (1470 –1545), also known as Zalman Munk, rebuilt his family’s private synagogue, known as the Pinkas Synagogue, at the western edge of the Jewish Quarter, along the cemetery’s southern wall.25 A plaque installed on the building’s western façade states: And a man arose in the house of Levi and his name was Aaron Meshulam—and he mounted on the ladder of the bountiful spirit— he walked in the steps of his fathers, princes and leaders, and he built this synagogue, the splendor of buildings, together with his wife, daughter of Rabbi Menaḥ em of blessed memory, Mrs. Neḥ ama, who is to him a helpmate and a companion. In the year [5]295 (1535) the work was begun and was finished to the honor of God most high and to the honor of the Torah, here in the holy community of Prague, crowned—the eyes of God are upon it—for memory and protection. Aaron Meshulam, son of Rabbi Isaiah Levi of blessed memory, called Zalman Horowitz.26

Placing the plaque on an outside wall, a monument to his family’s power and communal leadership, signified Aaron Meshulam (Zalman) Horowitz’s desire to be remembered not only within that congregation but in the wider community also. Building a private synagogue required special privileges, and those that Horowitz obtained also ensured his family’s continued service in official capacity as the leaders of the Jewish community. As intellectual, spiritual, and political centers of power within Ashkenaz shifted eastward toward sixteenth-century Polish communities, emergent families challenged those who had held the reins of

Prague Memory in Jewish Town and Jewish Time

Figure 1.3 H ̣  amisha H ̣  umshei Torah, Megillot, Haftarot. Prague: Gershom ben Solomon Kohen with sons Mordecai and Solomon, 1530. Around the edges of the printer’s mark showing three towers, symbol of Prague: “Blessed is He who gives strength to the tired and great force to the powerless.” Along the bottom, the names of Gershom and his sons. Jewish Museum in Prague sg. 2.361. Courtesy of the Jewish Museum in Prague: Jewish Museum in Prague Photo Archive.

power in medieval Ashkenaz for social supremacy and communal leadership.27 In Prague, too, the ascendant Horowitz family, who had migrated from the Bohemian town of Horˇovice and become its wealthiest Jewish family, came into conflict with its established Jewish leadership.28 On several occasions during the 1530s, when conflicting parties could not resolve discord within the community, municipal and royal authorities were called on to intervene. At the same time, political authority in Prague and the Czech kingdom was itself in a state of flux. The ruling royal line had died out in 1526, and the Bohemian estates’ choice of the Habsburg Ferdinand as the country’s new king brought the overwhelmingly Protestant Czech lands (Hus-inspired

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denominations by now joined by Lutheran and Calvinist streams) within the Catholic Habsburg realm. De facto religious tolerance reigned, even as Ferdinand took steps to strengthen local Catholicism.29 Prague Jews’ intracommunal battles became entwined with power struggles among the new king, the Bohemian estates, and the Prague municipal magistrates.30 Against this backdrop, Horowitz, attempting to establish his family’s complete dominance in local Jewish affairs, sought alliances with both Ferdinand and municipal authorities. Called to Prague to mediate in 1534, Jossel of Rosheim, a recognized leader of German Jewry, negotiated measures to settle the conflict by promulgating new regulations for the Jewish community. Several hundred communal leaders signed, but the Horowitz family resisted and had Jossel arrested. He barely escaped with his life.31 While these struggles raged, the Pinkas Synagogue acquired items rarely found in Jewish houses of worship: relics. In Catholic churches, relics were pieces of the body or clothing of a saint whose display could also have political connotations, by virtue of their direct connection to holiness.32 Although, for the most part, relics have no direct parallel in synagogues, the Pinkas Synagogue housed a robe, prayer shawl, and flag that had belonged to Solomon Molkho.33 Born in Portugal to Jews forcibly converted to Christianity, Molkho had converted to Judaism and become a follower of a messianic pretender named David Reubeni (ca. 1490 –1540). At the 1530 Imperial Diet in Regensburg, the two sought an audience with Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, with whom they hoped to forge a political alliance. In response, Jossel of Rosheim, the Horowitz family’s foe, in Regensburg as official representative of the Jews to the diet, left the city and publicly distanced himself from the pair. The emperor granted an audience but then dispatched both to Italy, where Molkho found martyrdom, burned at the stake as a heretic in 1532. Pieces of his belongings somehow made their way to Prague. Decades later, Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller (1578 –1654), later known as the Tosafot Yom-Tov after the name of his most famous work, who had arrived in the city as a young man, served more than twenty years as a rabbinic judge there, and married a member of the Horowitz family, reported:34

Prague Memory in Jewish Town and Jewish Time

Here in the holy congregation of Prague, in the Pinkas Synagogue, there is an arbah kanfot [ritual fringed garment] made of yellow silk the color of egg yolk, and the fringes on it are also of yellow silk the color of egg yolk. It was brought here from Regensburg, and it belonged to the holy Rabbi Solomon Molkho of blessed memory. There are, furthermore, two flags of his as well as his mantle, called a “kittel.”35

Heller’s note and later folklore suggest that the Molkho relics functioned much as Christian relics did; pieces of the martyred individual, charismatic in his lifetime and considered holy in death, were kept as a mystic connection to holiness and simultaneous display of political power. Historian Matt Goldish has demonstrated that the Horowitz family’s acquisition of these items and placement of them in their synagogue in Prague related, on one level, to “politics of power.”36 Molkho was seen as the foe of Jossel of Rosheim, who failed to stand by his side in Regensburg, and likewise had not supported Aaron Meshulam Horowitz in the internecine battles in Prague. On another level, the veneration of Molkho’s relics was an act of symbolic resistance to the older order of German-Jewish leadership that Jossel epitomized, its superiority threatened by the rise of Polish Jewry. Specifically, it testified to the expulsion of the Jews from the city of Regensburg, one of the venerable old communities of medieval Ashkenaz, and the destruction of their synagogue just a decade earlier, in 1519. Horowitz, Goldish suggests, sought to make Prague, under his leadership, the new Regensburg, as the cultural center of Ashkenaz moved eastward. Although Prague had, in fact, been part of medieval Ashkenaz, located mostly to its west, Horowitz, by this reading, sought to make it a center of the new order rising to its east, with himself as its head. He even had the new Pinkas Synagogue building designed according to plans of the destroyed building in Regensburg.37 Memories of Regensburg served Prague political interests. Taking Goldish’s logic one step further, the renovated Pinkas Synagogue would replace— so Horowitz may have hoped—the old leadership’s Altneuschul as Prague’s Jewish center. Indeed, from the 1530s on, this synagogue, semiprivate domain of a wealthy clan, formed, along with the Altschul and Great Synagogue (the later Altneuschul), a third nexus of religious

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life in the Jewish Quarter, competing for primacy with these representatives of the older order.38 A Pinkas Synagogue record book begun in 1601, including inventories of hundreds of ritual objects listed by the donors’ names, demonstrates the Horowitz family’s continued dominance and also shows that, by the seventeenth century, leadership of the synagogue included both male and female boards, although what exactly the women’s responsibilities were is not clear.39 Partisans of the Altneuschul might also have used symbolic materials to press their competing claim of continued primacy. By 1490, when Prague’s Jews celebrated the coronation of Vladislav II, king of Bohemia since 1471, as king of Hungary as well, they possessed a communal banner, carried in processions, including royal entries and similar public celebrations, a unique right.40 Housed in the Altneuschul, it was refurbished around this time. After fifty years or so, the banner might well have needed repair. At the same time, special attention to this material evidence of the Altneuschul’s centrality to the community could also have come in response to counterclaims from the Pinkas Synagogue. Each synagogue relied on a different tradition about local or regional past in asserting its position. Simultaneously, a legend that first appeared in print during this period, in a Czech chronicle by Václav Hájek (d. 1553), linking this banner, actually dating from approximately the mid-fifteenth century, to Emperor and Czech King Charles IV (1346 –1378) gradually made its way into local Jewish traditions and even onto the text of the banner itself.41 The reign of Charles  IV, developer of the New Town and founder of Charles University, was considered a golden age in Prague and Czech history, explaining why Jews would want to associate their banner with him. It is far less clear why Hájek, most of whose references to Jews were quite negative, would also have included the story or what its original source might have been.42 Such uses of history, pronouncements of ancient traditions of Jewish belonging, can come to the fore during periods of increased anti-Jewish pressures.43 Indeed, in 1541 and again in 1559, Emperor Ferdinand, bowing to pressure from burghers, ordered expulsions of the Jews from Prague. In each case, a few wealthy families were allowed to remain in the city, and neither expulsion lasted long. Still,

Prague Memory in Jewish Town and Jewish Time

the disruptions hampered development of the Jewish community, as too, one supposes, did the split between the Horowitz family and their allies and other leading Prague families. Political parties grew up within Prague’s Jewish community, based at least in part on these divisions, and within the Horowitz family, descendants quarreled with each other.44

“Free Liberty of All Religions Being Permitted”: Imperial Castle, Jewish Town, and Patronage in Rudolfine Prague With the ascent of Ferdinand’s son Maximilian II to the Czech throne in 1562, his reign as emperor (1564 –1576), and that of his son Rudolf II (1576 –1612), who moved his capital from Vienna to Prague in 1583, the state of Prague’s Jewish community improved. Maximilian and Rudolf themselves were known as religious doubters; while never espousing Protestantism or refuting Catholicism (though Rudolf II reportedly refused last rites), they were not the enthusiastic backers of the Roman Catholic Church that many of their successors would be. Rudolf brought with him to Prague artists, scholars, magicians, and mystics and fostered an active scientific, literary, and artistic life at court whose impact was felt strongly throughout the city.45 As did their burgher neighbors, Jews absorbed aesthetic and literary sensibilities originating at court through a number of channels.46 Christians, be they residents or travelers, could enter the Jewish Quarter and interact with its inhabitants. Court painters Roelandt Savery and Paulus van Vianen drew sketches of Prague Jews.47 An English traveler, Fynes Moryson, wrote of a visit in 1592: When I passed through Bohemia I founde at Prage the foresaid little Citty inclosed, and having gates to be shut up, allowed to the Jewes for habitation, where free liberty of all Religions being permitted, I had opportunity . . . not only to beholde the divers Ceremonyes, of the Hussites, the Lutherans, the Papists, and the singular Jesuites, but also to have free speech with the Jewes, and to enter their Synogoges at the tyme of divine service.48

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This era of multiconfessionalism and relative tolerance, coinciding with Prague’s “golden age,” has given birth to countless legends, many embellishing a scantily documented meeting between Rudolf and Rabbi Judah Loew ben Beẓ  alel, also known as the Maharal of Prague (an acronym for Moreinu Harav Rabbi Loew [our teacher the master Rabbi Loew]). Chief rabbi of Nikolsburg (Mikulov), in Moravia, from 1553 to 1573, then leader of an academy (kloyz) in Prague, Maharal, from 1584, was back and forth between Prague and Posen, serving as Prague’s chief rabbi from 1597 until his death in 1609. An original thinker with ideas for revolutionizing the educational system of Ashkenazi Jewry, he wrote several books and participated in sharp polemics. Scholars associated with Maharal’s circles during his own lifetime included the astronomer and historian David Gans and YomTov Lipmann Heller.49 In later legend and folklore (probably beginning in the eighteenth century), the image of Maharal grew beyond human proportions, with him saving Prague’s Jewish community by creating a golem, an artificial being that warded off danger, now, allegedly, deactivated and stored in the attic of the Altneuschul.50 A statue of Maharal, who has become a symbol not only of Jewish Prague but also of the city’s illustrious—and mystic—history, stands in a corner of today’s New Town Hall (built in 1912, located in the Old Town, and home of the current municipal administration), designed by the same artist who carved the Hus statue in the Old Town Square, Ladislav Šaloun. More germane to seventeenth-century memory, tradition held that a particular house, a stone lion its emblem (Löwe means lion), had been his home.51 Though their topic of conversation was never revealed, Gans’s description of Maharal’s meeting with the emperor reveals a mental map of Jewish memory in Prague that expanded beyond the Jewish Town to the Castle District. When Rudolf refurbished the graves of his ancestors in the St. Vitus Cathedral on the grounds of Prague Castle, three Jewish leaders, according to Gans, were among the official witnesses of the disinterment of these Bohemian kings, whose “bodies were whole and nothing was missing from them, and many notables felt them and took their hands in theirs and saw them.”52 Under Rudolf, Jews were also allowed to take up some trades often forbidden to them in Europe,

Prague Memory in Jewish Town and Jewish Time

as, for example, embroiderers, shoemakers, and other crafts related to textiles, and as musicians, some of whom even played at court.53 A gold amulet from Rudolf ’s collection, with a Hebrew inscription to Rudolf, menorah, and gems symbolizing the twelve tribes—apparently a gift from the Jewish community—involved interaction of Jewish artists or patrons with court life and epitomizes the close relationship of at least some Jews to it.54 Also during this period, Rivkah Tiktiner (or Tikotin), the first woman who is known to have published Hebrew works in Prague, moved to the area.55 But the major link between Castle and Jewish Quarter was embodied in the person of Mordecai Maisel, the amulet’s likely patron and donor, a financier who rose to financial and political leadership of the Jewish community, surpassing the Horowitz family’s precedence. He succeeded, as well, with a largely hidden hand, in helping shape the way Jewish memories of himself and his period would be preserved. Maisel’s great wealth came primarily from financial dealings with Rudolf, his family, and court. His extensive patronage in the Jewish Quarter, according to Gans, included paving its streets with cobblestone and renovating the Jewish Town Hall. Standing alongside the Altneuschul, at the nucleus of the Jewish Town, the presence of a dedicated structure for secular Jewish administration was apparently unique to Prague and suggests that the Jewish “Town” was, in fact, viewed in some sense as parallel to Prague’s other autonomous towns: the Old Town, New Town, and Little Side (Malá Strana) (the Castle District would gain autonomy only later). Despite its immediate proximity to the Altneuschul, Maisel, Gans reported, added a synagogue to the Town Hall structure, accessible only through its upper floor, thus called the High Synagogue. (A separate entrance was built in 1883.) The limited access has led scholars to presume that the synagogue was used primarily by communal officials as an on-site location for thrice-daily prayer.56 Maisel also financed a three-building complex, including, according to tradition, a synagogue, a ritual bath, and a hall known as the Kloyz, where Maharal taught his students. (The Klausen Synagogue replaced them in 1694.)57 He also donated to Jewish communities outside Prague and to the local St. Salvator Church, an alliance-seeking neighborly act not as unusual as it might sound.

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In Ẓ  emaḥ  David, one of the main sources for these patronage activities, Gans praised Maisel floridly, at great length, in contrast to his generally laconic reports on even Prague’s most esteemed figures. Maisel’s patronage extended, in all likelihood, to Gans’s writing of Ẓ  emaḥ  David.58 If so, Maisel paid to ensure that the buildings he built and roads he paved in the Jewish Quarter would indeed perpetuate his own memory in the physical environment where Prague’s Jews lived their daily lives. At the same time, works like Ẓ  emaḥ  David and the gold amulet required much more than finances and will; the artistic knowledge and cultural climate of Rudolfine Prague shaped these memories in important ways.59 Maisel continued to stamp his memory in Prague’s streets after Ẓ  emaḥ  David was completed, building his own “private” synagogue, still known today as the Maisel Synagogue. A manuscript of an inscription provided by the Italian Jewish poet Jacob Segré for the building’s foundation stone suggests Maisel intended the synagogue to perpetuate his own memory, in place of the progeny he lacked, who should have fulfilled that function. Its introduction begins: “A fittingly lovely song to affix in the very honorable synagogue that the great wealthy man, of no seed, is making in his own house in the holy community of Prague,” and goes on to mention the precise sum spent on the project.60 Whether Segré’s verse actually appeared in the Maisel Synagogue is not known, but its western wall featured a dedicatory stone with a different poem, its upper portion destroyed in the 1689 fire, the remainder consisting of short, rhyming lines whose substance echoes the language from Ẓ  emaḥ  David: For he built the High Synagogue And a ritual bath for purification And in it a bath for washing And pavement for the street . . .61

Maisel thus directed much of what was written about his charitable activities, seeking to shape the way he would be remembered, and his building projects fit in with that effort. He also obtained imperial permission to have a “banner of King David” specially sewn and used freely in his synagogue. Patterned on the official community banner

Prague Memory in Jewish Town and Jewish Time

hanging in the Altneuschul, the central space of the Jewish Town’s central synagogue, and, along with ceremonial objects from the various synagogues’ rich stores, it was removed on rare occasions and carried in processions honoring the monarch.62 Like Horowitz’s use of a dedicatory plaque and holy relics generations earlier, Maisel’s hanging a copy of the community’s official banner within his own synagogue was meant to emphasize and memorialize his identity with the official community through his leadership of it. Along the southern border of the Jewish Quarter, the construction of another “private” synagogue, the Wechsler, also known as the New Synagogue, apparently marked the point at which the Altneuschul acquired its own current name. (The New Synagogue was demolished in 1897.) To the Altneuschul’s north, in an entangled warren of narrow alleys, shops, and houses that occupied the space of today’s Parˇížská Street, stood two more private synagogues, the Great Court and Cikán. Solomon Cikán built his synagogue, known in German as the Zigeuner, in 1613. Also destroyed in the ghetto clearance, this synagogue is most famous today as the site of Franz Kafka’s bar mitzvah. The Great Court (Velkodvorská) was built by Jacob Bassevi (1570 –1634; his family known also as Schmieles), a court Jew to General Albrecht von Wallenstein, the Jewish Town’s wealthiest resident in the decades after Maisel’s death, and its leader from 1616. His synagogue was perhaps the grandest in Prague when it was built in 1627 and is said to have housed his diploma of nobility; Bassevi was granted the title “von Treuenberg” and used a coat of arms, though the specific legal status of his ennoblement is not clear.63 In the political structure of Prague’s Jewish community, Bassevi controlled one faction, considered the representative of the wealthiest families; the marriage of his grandson Samuel to Doberish, daughter of Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller, reflected a close alliance between the two families.64

“Packed Together”: Aesthetic Environment of Home and Synagogue “At Prage,” Moryson wrote, “many Familyes of the Jewes lived packed together in one little house, which makes not only their howses but

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their streets to be very filthy, and theire Citty to be like a Dunghill.”65 Indeed, in 1595, 150 houses, most of them multifamily units, housed a Jewish population of about 3000 in a space not much bigger than onetenth of a square kilometer.66 Amidst the crowding, some lived more privileged lifestyles than others. Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller boasted that he devoted a large portion of his house to his students; there were “many large rooms, in each specially-designated room study partners sat, and day and night their mouths never left off from learning.”67 The size of the Jewish Quarter, and the number of houses available for purchase by Jews, expanded considerably as a direct result of outside political developments. When Ferdinand II became emperor in 1619 (after the death of Matthias, who had become emperor after the death of his brother Rudolf ), his strident Catholicism and quest for absolute political control placed him on a collision course with Bohemia’s traditionally Protestant and proudly independent noble and burgher classes. In response, the Bohemian estates defiantly chose a different king, the Calvinist Frederick of the Palatinate, nicknamed “the Winter King,” for he was driven out of town after just more than a year’s reign at the Battle of White Mountain, a turning point indelibly inscribed in Czech national memory and in local Jewish liturgy that also set off events later referred to as the Thirty Years’ War.68 Ferdinand’s measures to punish the rebels and assert control included expulsions of Protestants, beginning with nobles.69 In an arrangement negotiated by Jacob Bassevi and Prince Karl of Liechtenstein, vice-regent for the Czech Kingdom, thirty-nine previously Christian houses could now be purchased by Jews.70 These houses came to be known as the Liechtenstein Houses, the neighborhood of expanded Jewish domestic space they comprised bearing the memory of benefit at Protestant (anti-Habsburg) expense. But not long afterward, the monarchy’s expectation that much higher taxes would be collected from the Jews to support its war effort, in return for this favorable treatment, exacerbated internal strife among the Jews. By 1631, the tensions cost Heller, Bassevi’s ally, his job as Prague’s chief rabbi.71 The city’s official synagogues (as opposed to smaller gatherings for prayer, tolerated but not legal) provided larger spaces and, one would imagine, visual relief to worshippers accustomed to cramped

Prague Memory in Jewish Town and Jewish Time

living quarters. Once inside, recent visitors to Prague’s surviving synagogues may be accustomed to dark and dreary spaces, inspiring perhaps for their history and aura of spirituality but not particularly noted for colorful, vibrant, aesthetically pleasing interiors.72 Material remains tell a different story. Throughout the early modern period, vibrant colors and rich textures filled the interior spaces of Prague’s synagogues, as Renaissance architecture framed many of their exteriors. Inside the Altneuschul, the walls were colorfully painted, until 1618, when they were whitewashed.73 Synagogues possessed extensive collections of expensive ritual objects, used according to elaborately arranged rotations.74 For example, on the Zaks parokhet—a curtain for the ark (which contained the Torah scrolls)— donated to the Altneuschul, three light blue-green carp lie one crossed over the other, outlined in fine silver and set in a bejeweled silk field surrounded by a silver-, gold-, and deep-red-encircled medallion, atop the dedicatory inscription (Figure 1.4).75 Such objects perpetuated the memory of their donors in this public space, implicitly early on, and later with inscriptions stating their memorial function. Particular designs were associated with Prague over a long time period. Around 1720, a young Jew named Avraham Halevie wrote in his Yiddish travelogue: “In these synagogues, one sees beautiful marble decorations, engraved woodwork, and the most beautiful bordered works one has seen in all his days, especially on the Torah curtains. . . Here one embroiders the Torah mantles with pearls and borders them with other costly stones, which make a pretty decoration.”76 Synagogues themselves were also remembered for silver and gold that hung from the ceilings and decorated the Torah scrolls.77 A Yiddish song lamenting a devastating fire of 1689 mentions of the Maisel Synagogue: Mordecai Maisel, your pure soul above Your synagogue burned like an oven Your stone and brass lamps and all of your ornament All burned together with your old banner78

After the same fire destroyed the original Klausen Synagogue, its rebuilt sanctuary featured a striking Baroque ark for Torah scrolls, donated

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Figure 1.4 Zaks parokhet, 1602 (basis for the cover art of this book, where it can be seen in color). JMP inv. no. 27.391. Courtesy of the Jewish Museum in Prague: Jewish Museum in Prague Photo Archive.

by the German court Jew Samuel Oppenheimer, the wealthiest and most influential central European Jew of his time. Installed in 1696, it represents the close connections and networks of patronage linking Prague Jewry to communities throughout the German lands. Synagogue seats for both men and women were bought, sold, and bequeathed.79 Women sat in separate, specially dedicated areas,

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the men’s space the focus of the public service. The Altneuschul’s original architecture provided no space for women, who sat, instead, in a gallery formed from an external addition to the building. A few women’s gravestones note that the women memorialized went early and late to synagogue daily.80 Their prayer, at least at times, was led by a knowledgeable woman, who perhaps followed the men’s prayers. In the medieval Altneuschul, she could have done so only through small windows in the thick stone walls. Synagogues built in the late sixteenth century, in contrast, had large balconies for women, which, while potentially rattling to some twenty-first-century sensibilities, placed early modern women in the same open space as the men, a new level of visual and aural access to the happenings below.81 In the early seventeenth century, greater access to the meaning of the prayers for persons of less Hebrew education, mostly women but also many men, was provided after Jacob ben Elijah of Teplitz published bilingual Hebrew-Yiddish prayer books, including the traditional Ashkenazi liturgy and some prayers of local Prague custom.82 The language of the home and the street remained the taytsh that had already served there for centuries. Neither Moryson, Heller, nor anyone else, of course, reveals how familial traditions and memories were passed down orally within these homes. Families’ experiences also extended beyond the Jewish Quarter, often including, in particular, an area known as the Tandel Market (a flea market on the site of today’s Havelská Street), several hundred meters away, on the opposite side of the Old Town Square. Here many Jews had stalls, a point of constant contact—and not infrequent conflict—between Jews and Christians.83 Both mixed market and Jewish Town were, like Jewish quarters throughout Europe, surrounded and also literally overshadowed by Christian surroundings. Prominent churches were scattered throughout, even within the Jewish settlement. In the summer of 1650, a Marian column was raised on the Old Town Square; towering sixteen meters above the ground, it dominated Prague’s cultural and political heart and could be seen from within the Jewish Quarter.84 In coming decades, the built urban environment continued to convey Catholic triumphalism and also specific polemics against the Jewish

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community. Inside the Ty´n Church, whose façade faced the Marian column in the Old Town Square, a memorial stone was mounted in the wall in 1694 to commemorate the brief life of Simon Abeles, a twelve-year-old Jewish boy who had tried to convert to Christianity, was returned by his family to the Jewish Quarter, and died shortly thereafter. Christian officials accused the boy’s father of killing him to prevent his conversion and declared him a martyr.85 In 1696, two Jews, charged with blasphemous behavior, were compelled to finance the crowning of a bronze crucifix, one of the earliest statues adorning the side of the bridge spanning the Vltava River, with the words kadosh kadosh kadosh (holy holy holy).86 Perhaps countering these  attacks on them in built space, Jews could occasionally demonstrate their belonging by marching in public processions or welcoming the birth of a new emperor, for example. In such instances, Jews displayed their ritual objects and synagogue banners, displays occasionally recorded by Christian observers and distributed in the form of prints and broadsheets.87

“This Stone Is a Witness between Us”: The Old Jewish Cemetery From a bird’s-eye view, unbuilt areas squeezed from among the crowded buildings at the western edge of the Jewish Quarter would draw the eye most forcefully. Here, in the storied burying ground known as the Old Jewish Cemetery, memories of individual Jews were inscribed in stone with more specific attention to the act of remembering than anywhere else, and, from this collection of particulars, broader trends in the community’s history emerge. Within the city walls, immediately adjacent to the Jewish Quarter, this cemetery stands in contrast to most Jewish cemeteries, located outside city walls, at some distance from the inhabited area. Older Jewish cemeteries had existed in Prague, one, most likely, in the Malá Strana and another, known as the Jewish Garden, in the New Town near today’s Vladislavova Street; the only physical remembrances of these earliest burial grounds are bones and stones that had been moved to the current Old Jewish Cemetery

Prague Memory in Jewish Town and Jewish Time

in the early eighteenth century.88 The Jewish Garden and Old Jewish Cemetery operated simultaneously for some time, the “Old” cemetery established during the Hussite Wars in the early fifteenth century—the earliest known gravestone is that of Avigdor Kara, dating from 1439 — when travel outside the city walls, to the Jewish Garden, may have been dangerous. The inscription for its last interment, in 1787, records the closing chapter of the cemetery’s history as it memorializes its subject using customary terms of praise: Here is buried a good and honest man, from the burial society He was the last who was buried here by order of the Kingdom, His Esteemed Highness. The revered officer the honorable Moses BT son of the honorable Rabbi Lipmann Beck, may his memory be a blessing Morning and evening he [went to synagogue] and prayed with [good] intent He was faithful in business89

Emperor Joseph II’s order to close the Old Jewish Cemetery, along with church yards and all burial places within city boundaries, was part of a continent-wide movement toward extra-urban burial that came about in response to Enlightenment ideas about hygiene and health and population growth that surpassed traditional burials grounds’ capacities.90 Indeed, the extraordinary number of eleven thousand to twelve thousand graves in Prague’s Old Jewish Cemetery was achieved by layering interred bodies one on top of the other, the stone raised each time to a higher level, packed tightly to its neighbor.91 Little is known about the material conditions or financial arrangements surrounding the engraving and placing of stones. At least some, and perhaps most, were carved by Christian masons.92 The epitaphs preserve different kinds of history by providing insights into the qualities early modern Prague Jews idealized in their dead and, on rare occasion, suggest connections to major historical events. Just beyond a former gate, for example, stands the gravestone of a “bridegroom,” Heni ben Judah Leib Gedalyes, who, according to the stone, died a martyr’s death in 1648 (Figure 1.5). A passerby might presume that the violent events of the closing period of the Thirty

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Figure 1.5 Gravestone of H ̣ anokh (Heni) ben Judah Leib Gedalyes. Archives of the JMP, gravestone in area A12, no. 1. Courtesy of the Jewish Museum in Prague: Jewish Museum in Prague Photo Archive.

Years’ War may have had some relation to Heni’s premature demise. Over the summer of 1648, as negotiations for a peace treaty to end the war proceeded in Westphalia, in Germany, a Protestant Swedish army laid siege to Prague. Eventually turned back, the Swedes nevertheless took civilian lives, including Heni’s, as other sources reveal.93 The cemetery was used for quarantine in time of plague, for escape in time of fire, but, most frequently, as a site of funerals and mourning: ceremonial processions throughout the year and individuals at the graves of family members.94 From 1564 on, affairs within the cemetery came under control of a newly established burial society.95 With local rabbis, the burial society’s leadership sought to uphold separation of men and women in the cemetery. A group of ornate beakers from Prague and throughout Bohemia, commissioned for annual burial

Prague Memory in Jewish Town and Jewish Time

Figure 1.6 Glass commissioned for the Prague burial society, 1786/87 (189 –192 mm high; 138 –140 mm upper diameter). JMP inv. no. 63619. Courtesy of the Jewish Museum in Prague: Jewish Museum in Prague Photo Archive.

Figure 1.7 The same glass, viewed from a different angle, 1786/87 (189 –192 mm high; 138 –140 mm upper diameter). JMP inv. no. 63619. Courtesy of the Jewish Museum in Prague: Jewish Museum in Prague Photo Archive.

society banquets, display idealized images of society members at work in the cemeteries, separate groupings of men and women (Figures 1.6 and 1.7).96 In a similar vein, the Brantspigel, an ethical work (sefer musar) by a Prague Jew, Moses ben H ̣  anokh Altschul, and the protocols of the Prague, Nikolsburg, and Triesch burial societies (among others) warned against the mixing of men and women during funeral processions and legislated measures to discourage such behavior.97 But the need to repeatedly legislate separation demonstrates a lack of compliance; gender separation was mandated but not consistently maintained. Moreover, female officials responsible for women’s behavior in the cemetery even had male “assistants of the week.” Strict physical separation of the sexes was usually a characteristic of sacred space, like the synagogue, rather than domestic or other private spaces. Along with the Hebrew used on the gravestones, the ideal of gender separation in the cemetery suggests it too was viewed as at least partially sacred

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rather than wholly secular space. The physical layout of the cemetery provided no natural boundaries between male and female, and perhaps also its visitors did not view the space according to the ideal of sanctity that some of their leaders did. The cemetery became part and parcel of familial memories that had both personal and sacred aspects, the latter tied to the larger ark of Jewish history.

Moments of Memory: Hazkarat Neshamot in the Jewish Week, Local Days in the Liturgical Year The Jewish week, anchored by the Sabbath, from sundown Friday until nightfall Saturday, dictated the most basic elements of daily life.98 On the day of rest, when no ordinary work was done, men and many women went to synagogue, and households shared festive meals. On Mondays and Thursdays, Sabbath days, and festivals, one, two, or, on rare occasion, three Torah scrolls, sheathed in velvet and brocade and ornamented in silver, were taken from their arks, placed on a table on a raised platform in the center of the sanctuary, and, as throughout the Jewish world, a portion was read publicly. In medieval and early modern Ashkenaz, on most Sabbath days after the reading, the prayer leader took to hand a book kept nearby, the synagogue’s own kuntres, a notebook of localized prayers, and recited special memorial prayers from it. These notebooks have been called memorbücher (singular: memorbuch), their importance as objects of memory kept in the synagogue noted by scholars.99 More significant, however, was their role as liturgical works, aids to the cantor in reciting local prayers they contained. During the ritual of reading from these notebooks, also called hazkarat neshamot (literally: recalling the souls) after their main prayers, several entries, hazkarot (singular: hazkarah), were read, most recalling an individual, some a couple or a group. The following week, that day’s cantor began where the previous week’s cantor had left off, until the entire book was completed, ideally in one calendar year. Entries were not automatically composed for every dead congregant; they had to be purchased by bequest or by a family member of the deceased. Only martyrs “earned” their places without a monetary transaction, though money was often

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donated in those cases as well; donation of a ritual object could also be included. Originally, the hazkarot were either for martyrs or for founders of the synagogue, later broadened to its benefactors.100 The donor could be children for their parents, parents for their children, a spouse of the deceased, or occasionally siblings for one another. In one case, guardians gave for the memory of a deceased orphaned charge.101 Usually the donor, whether male or female, is mentioned using both his or her first name and that of his or her father. Most hazkarot are for individuals; in some cases, a married couple or other pair or group are joined in a single entry. Maharal and his wife, Pearl, for example, share both a side-by-side double gravestone and a double hazkarah, possibly constructed that way because they died within the relatively short span of just under eight months of one another.102 There was, originally, no connection between the week when an individual hazkarah happened to be read and the date of death. Only later did the local synagogues keep notebooks arranged according to the calendar dates of death, so that a person was recalled in the week he or she had died. (Confusingly, this ritual was separate from another Ashkenazi memorial rite, sometimes known by the same name, today usually called yizkor, in which individuals recall their own family members during synagogue worship on certain festival days.) The weekly recitation of hazkarot meant that memory of the dead was integrally woven into the sacred time of the weekly Sabbath. Each of Prague’s synagogues kept its own notebook of hazkarat neshamot. Such manuscripts were in everyday use, with entries continually added; when they wore out, they were copied over, and the older version discarded.103 Of the many manuscripts that once existed, only two survive from the seventeenth century, from the Altneuschul and High Synagogue.104 The similarity of entries in the two suggests that the High Synagogue’s hazkarot may have been copied from the Altneuschul’s.105 In ordering the weeks and their Sabbaths into months and years, Prague’s Jews marked time, in part, by the Gregorian calendar used in the city after January 1584 (Figure 1.8). Much of their livelihood depended, after all, on dealings with Christians, and their movements outside the Jewish Quarter were restricted on Sundays and Christian festivals. But they simultaneously lived the rhythms of the adjusted

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Gregorian Equivalent

Tishrei H .  eshvan Kislev Tevet Shevat Adar Adar II Nisan Iyar Sivan Tammuz Av Elul

September–October October–November November–December December–January January–February February–March March–April March–April April–May May–June June–July July–August August–September

Figure 1.8 Months in the Hebrew calendar with Gregorian equivalents.

lunar, or “lunisolar,” Hebrew calendar, shared by Jews worldwide, its 29- or 30-day months beginning with the first sliver of a new moon and ending with its disappearance. While the wholly lunar Islamic calendar’s festivals can, because of the shorter lunar month (about 29.5 days, astronomically), occur at different times throughout the solar year, the Hebrew calendar’s complex leap year system ensures that months and festivals always occur at the same approximate (solar) season. Thus, the month of Tishrei, whose first two days are the festival of Rosh Hashanah, the New Year, always overlaps with September, usually ending in October. Leap years, occurring seven times in nineteen years, have an extra month, a second Adar (Adar II). The biblical annual cycle includes the New Year (Rosh Hashanah), the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur), and three annual pilgrimage festivals (Passover, Sukkot, and Shavuot), the principal occasions, in the biblical tradition, on which Jews of ancient Israel traveled to the Temple in Jerusalem to offer sacrifices. The Bible itself lays out only a bare framework of Jewish law; traditions for festival observance were codified by the scholars known as rabbis who interpreted and explicated that law from Second Temple times through approximately 500 CE, mostly in the written collections of oral law known as the

Prague Memory in Jewish Town and Jewish Time

Mishnah and Talmud. Some commemorative days not found in the Bible were added by ancient rabbis, among them fast days in memory of events leading to the destruction of the Temples in Jerusalem and exile from the Land of Israel; some communities later created such observances for events of local or regional, not solely universal, Jewish significance.106 In medieval Ashkenaz, a tradition of commemorating tragedy through composition and recitation of liturgical poems, known as piyyutim, arose, at first in response to the massacres of Jewish communities in 1096. Later, a type of piyyutim called seliḥ ot, “elegies, penitentiary prayers, confessions of sin, and lamentations, together with the petitions and expressions of hope attached to them,” were added on fast days declared in the event of calamity, and on commemorative days of such disasters, particularly when those days were marked by fasting.107 These seliḥ ot came to include historical kernels of the events commemorated. Prague’s Jews likewise inserted annual observances marking key local events into this multilayered calendar, perceived by those who lived it, of course, first and foremost as an annual cycle, rather than, as from a historical point of view, a gradual accretion of holidays.108 For a Jewish worshipper, such local commemorative days fit, organically, in and among dates of the Hebrew calendar shared by Jews worldwide. Beginning a survey of this community’s liturgical year with the month of Adar (by one accounting, the last month), Prague’s Jews, like others worldwide, marked the first day of every month, the new moon, with supplements to the daily liturgy. But in Prague alone, beginning around 1612, the very next day, 2 Adar, had its own special liturgy, commemorating this date in 1611, when, as tensions between Emperor Rudolf and the Bohemian Diet increased, the emperor’s cousin Leopold, nominal bishop of Passau, invaded the city, possibly in coordination with Matthias, the emperor’s younger brother and heir apparent. In the midst of that chaos and rioting, the Jews, whose experience in Europe had taught that violence of this sort was usually accompanied by attacks on them, were spared. In thanksgiving and commemoration, an annual observance of a half-day fast was established, with seliḥ ot by the chief rabbi Ephraim Luntschitz, followed by celebration.109

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The commemoration of the 1611 invasion echoed the next holiday on the Hebrew calendar, the biblical festival of Purim, falling on the fourteenth and fifteenth of Adar, when, as recounted in the Book of Esther, the Jews of Shushan, in Persia, had escaped mortal danger. Haman, top advisor to the king, had been offended by a Jew named Mordecai’s refusal to bow down to him, and obtained the king’s authorization to kill all the Jews in his 127 lands. Haman’s planned revenge was subverted by the Jewish queen, Esther, foster daughter and close kinswoman to Mordecai, who arranged permission for the Jews to take up arms in self-defense on the day specified for their destruction. In celebration and thanksgiving, Esther and Mordecai declared an annual festival, Purim, preceded by a day of fasting. At nightfall, the story of the festival’s origins was read from Megillat Esther (the biblical Book of Esther), followed by a day of feasting and celebration.110 Its canonization in the Hebrew scriptures codified the status of Purim, which, in essence, celebrates a regional deliverance, as a national holiday for all Jews. Probably in large part as the prototype of danger and redemption facing a Jewish community of the diaspora—so different from most of biblical text’s focus on the Jews’ relationship to the Land of Israel—the Book of Esther and its festival of Purim became paradigms for other local celebrations of the deliverance of Jewish communities from existential threats. The coincidental occurrence of some such events during the month of Adar, as in the case of Prague’s Passau invasion, may have heightened the sense of comparability and contributed the development of this practice.111 In Prague, celebration of the biblical Purim two weeks after the Passau invasion commemoration was also colored by local tradition. In the Book of Esther, Purim was celebrated for two days; most of the empire’s 127 lands celebrated on the fourteenth of Adar, while in the capital, Shushan, the celebration continued onto the fifteenth. In later tradition, most cities likewise celebrated on the fourteenth, while Jews in walled cities (defined, for obscure reasons, according to their status at the time of the biblical hero Joshua ben Nun) were to celebrate on the fifteenth, like Shushan. In practice, some Jewish communities, including, according to at least one later source, Prague, celebrated both days, doubting whether their local walls were quite that old but confident in their fundamental antiquity.112

Prague Memory in Jewish Town and Jewish Time

One month later was Passover, a week-long festival beginning on the fifteenth of Nisan (March–April) and commemorating the exodus from Egypt, the paradigmatic Jewish salvation. During the Passover Seder, celebrated in homes on the holiday’s first two nights, participants were to read the Haggadah, a home-based liturgy, and to view themselves “as if [they] had come out of Egypt.” In conducting the Seder, a few wealthy Prague Jews may have used a copy of the important early printed Haggadah produced locally by Gershom Kohen’s press in 1526.113 Passover’s proximity to Easter sometimes led to anti-Jewish violence, including attacks associated with the blood libel, an accusation that Jews used Christian children’s blood to bake the matzah (unleavened bread) eaten on Passover. In Prague (which, as far as the record relates, never experienced a blood libel), a charge of host desecration set off the massacre of Jews on the last day of Passover in 1389, commemorated by Avigdor Kara in his Et kol hatela′ah. In late antiquity, the seven-week period between Passover and the next pilgrimage festival, Shavuot (the Festival of Weeks), came to be viewed as a period of semimourning, entailing such prohibitions as cutting hair and conducting weddings, in memory of students of Rabbi Akiba who died in a horrible plague at that time of year. As Moryson wrote, “At my being at Prage the Jewes had no Maryages, abstaining from them for seven weeks in which they Celebrated the memorye of a great Rabby dead of old, and after abstaining from them for another feast in memory of the law given to Moses.”114 This fiftieth day mentioned by Moryson, Shavuot, a celebration of receiving the law (Torah), falls on the sixth day of the next month, Sivan (May–June).115 Throughout Ashkenaz, the Sabbath before Shavuot was observed as the first of two days each year when prayers were recited for lists of victims of the 1096 massacres.116 In Prague, during at least parts of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the day immediately after Shavuot was also the occasion for elections for officers of the burial society (ḥ evra kadisha), a confraternity whose members cared for the dying, buried the dead, and formed a socially elite institution, its pride evident in beakers and eighteenth-century paintings illustrating its activities (Figures 1.6 and 1.7).117 Liturgical traditions could apply to individual synagogues as well; on the day after the festival, the liturgy

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for Prague’s Altschul also included a day in commemoration of the Pauker Decree, whose origins are lost.118 During the next month, on the third of Tammuz (June–July), Prague’s Jews commemorated the 1689 destruction by fire of the Jewish Quarter by reciting a special memorial prayer.119 The seventeenth of Tammuz, a rabbinically ordained fast day on which, in 70 CE, attacking Roman forces broke through the walls of Jerusalem, opened another three-week long period of mourning for Jews worldwide, when weddings were not held, nor music played, and when, for the last nine days, Jews refrained from eating meat and drinking wine. For some time, Avigdor Kara’s Et kol hatela′ah, in memory of those killed in 1389, was recited on this day as well. The last Sabbath of this period, known as Shabbat sheḥ orah (Black Sabbath), was the second day on which, beginning in medieval Ashkenaz, names of martyrs were recited. The Ninth of Av (Tisha b′Av) (July–August), the next month, was observed as a major day of mourning through fasting and recitation of the Book of Lamentations in commemoration of the Temples of Jerusalem, both held to have been destroyed on that day, and of other calamitous events, most notably the expulsion of the Jews from Spain on the same day in 1492. The bridegroom Heni’s death on the tenth of Av, the first day on which weddings were again permitted, suggests that perhaps he was married, or to be married, on that very day. Early modern Ashkenazi Jews went to the cemetery, too, on Tisha b′Av, prostrating themselves on graves there, as Judah Leib ben Joshua wrote amidst Milḥ ama beshalom’s descriptions of specific events during the Swedish invasion of 1648 and the vast un-ordinariness of life under siege: “And so too,” he reports after several paragraphs describing the frightening living conditions in the Jewish Quarter, “we were not able to go to the cemetery on Tisha b′Av or on Erev Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Also we could not bury the dead as before because the cemetery is opposite the fortifications and the rampart, and we had to bury the dead by the opening to the cemetery, directly beyond the entrance,” precisely the place where Heni’s grave is indeed located.120 As Judah Leib indicated, graves were visited again toward the end of the next month, Elul (August–September), a month focused on preparations for the coming period of introspection and atonement

Prague Memory in Jewish Town and Jewish Time

that characterized the biblically mandated festivals of the following month, Tishrei (September–October): Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) and Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement). Throughout the month of Elul, the ram’s horn (shofar) was blown following the morning service, and, toward the end of the month, an additional liturgy of nonhistorical seliḥ ot was added before dawn each day.121 Tishrei (September–October) opened with the festival of Rosh Hashanah, followed on the tenth of the month by Yom Kippur. Between the two days, a period known as the Ten Days of Repentance, men visited graves of their family members and teachers. Mordecai Jaffe (ca. 1535 –1612), a Prague native who had studied in Poland and served as rabbi in Italy, Prague, and Poland, opposed praying to the dead or pleading for their assistance, explaining the visits, which he understood as mandatory on certain occasions, as requests for God’s mercy thanks to the merit of the righteous dead, not any action on their part, and as a reminder of one’s own mortality. For the Tisha b ′Av specifically, he suggested that visiting the graves would “arouse mourning.”122 Isaiah Horowitz (1565 –1630), scion of the Prague Horowitz family, agreed with Jaffe on the benefits of visiting graves but also held that at the season of Rosh Hashanah: “Another reason that we prostrate ourselves on the graves of the dead is so that the dead will request compassion for us.”123 Women too visited the cemetery during this period. In a ritual described by historian Chava Weissler and performed on various occasions, Ashkenazi women surrounded a cemetery or individual grave with cord, while reciting memorial supplications, and then used that string to make wicks for candles. Such candles had particular significance in lighting the synagogue for the long and unfamiliar Yom Kippur prayers, which began at nightfall and concluded after dark the following night, the lighting of new candles forbidden all the while, the candles begun by women in the cemetery symbolically bringing the dead into the synagogue on this holy day.124 Ceremonial objects adorning the service also served as memorials to the local dead. The Zaks parokhet, for example, was hung in the Altneuschul during the afternoon service, one of five rotated during the day.125 To the liturgy of Yom Kippur itself, Prague synagogues began, by later in the early modern period, to add Kara’s Et kol hatela′ah.

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Throughout Ashkenaz, in the yizkor ceremony, individuals recalled the dead of their own families, and pledged charity on behalf of their souls. Limited to Yom Kippur in German lands, in the Polish rite followed in eastern Europe, including Bohemia, it was added to the liturgy for the three pilgrimage festivals as well.126 Five days after Yom Kippur came Sukkot, the biblical Festival of Booths. In the diaspora, the last day of the festival, Shemini Aẓ  eret, was augmented by a rabbinically established second day of celebration, Simḥ at Torah (Rejoicing of the Law), which celebrated the completion and re-beginning of the annual cycle of reading the Torah. Rivkah Tiktiner (d. 1605), a Jewish woman who lived most of her life in Poland and died in Prague, wrote a song for this festival.127 In the Pinkas Synagogue, the Solomon Molkho relics were removed from their storage place and displayed on Simḥ at Torah, as a song about the catastrophic fire of 1689 reported of their apparent loss: Shlomo Molkho, your clothing and tallis in the Pinkas Synagogue That brought great joy there on Simḥ as Torah How one hung them up on Simḥ as Torah!128

Whatever the song’s author presumed, Molkho’s robe and flag are, in actuality, still in the Jewish Museum in Prague today. Three weeks after Simḥ at Torah, on the fourteenth of H ̣  eshvan (October–November), the Jews of Prague celebrated a day that came to be known as Prager Purim, commemorating the victory of Habsburg forces at White Mountain in 1620 and the safe passage of the Jewish community through those events. A half day of fasting, marked by the recitation of seliḥ ot by Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller, was followed by a half festival day. Thus, 14 H ̣  eshvan, as observed in Prague, was the only holiday celebrated in this normally festival-less month, referred to in the general Jewish calendar as Marḥ eshvan (bitter H ̣  eshvan), precisely because it lacks celebrations. From the twenty-fifth of the next month, Kislev (November– December), until the second or third of Tevet (December–January), as winter reached its darkest days, Jews worldwide celebrated the rabbinic festival of Hanukkah, like Purim, a historically based holiday, celebrating victory over a Greek force that, during the 160s BCE, controlled

Prague Memory in Jewish Town and Jewish Time

the Land of Israel and the Jewish holy places, and the Greeks’ Jewish allies. Hanukkah is not included in the Jewish bible (the story appears in the apocryphal Books of the Maccabees) and appears first in canonical Jewish literature in the Babylonian Talmud. Its sages focused not on the military victory but on the miracle of a one-day supply of ritually pure oil that lasted eight days, the time needed to acquire more, when the Temple in Jerusalem was reconquered from the Greeks and rededicated. The exchange of presents is a much later custom. In a burial society procession at the end of the month of Tevet, on the eve of the new moon of Shevat, members circled graves, asking forgiveness of the dead, and a sermon was delivered in the cemetery; speechmaking continued, by the early eighteenth century, inside the Klausen Synagogue as well. As a printed sermon by Rabbi Baruch Austerlitz and a beaker made for him, both in 1713, testify, being chosen to deliver this sermon was considered a great honor.129 Annual banquets, processions, and celebrations were common for burial societies throughout Ashkenaz; a common date was 7 Adar, traditionally considered the date of the death of Moses. Evidence is contradictory about whether the Prague society held a banquet the same day as the procession in the cemetery or on the first day of Adar or Tammuz. Different dates may have been used at different points in the early modern period. Next, the fifteenth of Shevat (January–February) is one of four New Years proposed by the Mishnah, the New Year for trees, according to its law. Additional spiritual meanings for this day were disseminated in the sixteenth century by mystic circles centered in Safed, in Israel’s north. When and to what degree related customs reached Prague and central Europe is unclear. Two weeks later, Adar began again. Prague’s liturgical corpus also includes a seliḥ ah called Ana elohei Avraham by Abraham ben Avigdor (not Avigdor Kara’s son), written in commemoration of the 1541 expulsion of Jews from the city, but whether and how it was used annually is also not clear.130 Within this Prague Jewish calendar, families added their own commemorations of prayers in synagogue and cemetery marking the anniversaries of the death of a parent, sibling, spouse, or child. A few families added days of annual thanksgiving, family Purim days resembling Prague’s local Purim days, though on a smaller scale, to commemorate

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a rescue of the pater familias from a mortal threat. Local and familial memories and history were, then, confidently woven into the broader picture of Jewish communal memory. Local individuals remembered their dead during biblically mandated festivals observed by Jews worldwide, integrating personal with communal. Those memorials provided light for the synagogue with candles made by women in the cemetery, they provided ceremonial objects protecting the Torah scrolls, and they brought to mind events like the massacre of 1389 and expulsion of 1541. The seamless, ahistorical integration of local memories into the city’s Jewish space and its calendar year suggests a keen appreciation for the place of this community in the arc of Jewish history. The ways that concern for history, and for posterity, were expressed were shaped in large part by contemporary concerns and even aesthetic fashions, even with regard to the most intimate, famially based memorials to deceased individuals, in cemetery or synagogue.

Two

“Death Entered into Our Window”



Living and Dead in Cemetery and Synagogue

In the spring of 1439, Rabbi Avigdor Kara, one of the most revered citizens of Prague’s Jewish quarter, died and was interred in the community’s then newly opened burial grounds (Figure 2.1).1 The stone marking his grave embodies the traditional design characterizing this cemetery’s gravestones from its founding until the mid-sixteenth century. Its simple square frame, which may once have supported a gently gabled crest, encloses a text singing the scholar’s praises.2 The text is somewhat longer than others of the period but does not differ essentially from them. Nearly two centuries later, in July 1628, Hendl, daughter of Evril Gronim, wife of Jacob Bassevi von Treuenberg, Prague’s wealthiest Jew, died and was buried in the same cemetery (Figure 2.2).3 Hendl’s status, though attained for different reasons, would also have entitled her to one of the stonemaker’s finest offerings. Her privileged position in the community and her surviving husband’s wealth provide a unique view of what may well have been the community’s ideal in gravestone art and architecture, an ideal financially out of reach of most. Hendl’s is one of a small group of stones of prominent personalities whose form departed radically from those marking the burial places of most of the city’s Jews, a single flat square, like Kara’s, or a rectangular slab. Hers was a sepulchral-shaped monument, with six slabs, each covered with writing and framed by intricate ornamentation, with text more extensive than the more common gravestones of the time. The stone’s shape and design represent an even greater, qualitative difference. Even more common gravestones of this later period frequently display figures and ornamentation differing significantly from

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Figure 2.1 Gravestone of Avigdor Kara, d. 1439. Courtesy of the Jewish Museum in d. Prague: Jewish Museum in Prague Photo Archive.

the stones of Avigdor Kara’s time. While such changes began to occur in the mid-sixteenth century, their real flowering occurred during the fifty years or so prior to Hendl’s death. Texts of individual memorial entries (hazkarot) in the memorial book from the Altneuschul reveal a similar evolution. A fifteenth-century page of hazkarot includes seven relatively uniform supplications citing the name of the deceased and the contribution made for inclusion in the book: “May God remember the soul of so-and-so because s/he gave money for the remembrance of her/his soul . . .” By the early seventeenth century, perhaps two hazkarot, if they were for prominent personalities, would fit on a single page. Their text, while quite long,

Living and Dead in Cemetery and Synagogue

Figure 2.2 Gravestone of Hendl, daughter of Evril Gronim and wife of Jacob Bassevi, d. 1628. Courtesy of the Jewish Museum in Prague: Jewish Museum in Prague Photo Archive.

was basically formulaic, but differed according to status and position. The only original Altneuschul hazkarot that survive from the early eighteenth century are two, for synagogue officials, inserted into the front of the manuscript, each an entire page of small print (Figures 2.3 and 2.4). By the final decades of the sixteenth century, when these new forms of gravestones and hazkarot began to appear, Prague’s ceremonial

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Figure 2.3 Page from the Altneuschul Memorbuch, ca. 1500. This page includes several different entries. Ms. JMP 113, 7b. Courtesy of the Jewish Museum in Prague: Jewish Museum in Prague Photo Archive.

objects, particularly curtains for the ark containing the Torah scrolls (singular = parokhet; plural = parokhot), had a well-developed twocolumn motif. Because no synagogue textiles from Prague from earlier periods have survived, it is impossible to know whether an aesthetic evolution like the one that had occurred on gravestones and in the writing of hazkarot also took place in parokhet design. The three oldest extant Torah curtains from Prague, 1590, 1592, and 1602, display a local form and iconography, with some elements common to many from

Living and Dead in Cemetery and Synagogue

Figure 2.4 Page from the Altneuschul Memorbuch for Gadil ben Azriel Shamash, d. 1707. Here an entire page is devoted to its subject. Ms. JMP 113, 2a. Courtesy of the Jewish Museum in Prague: Jewish Museum in Prague Photo Archive.

throughout central and eastern Europe (e.g., Figure 1.4).4 Art historian Vivian Mann writes that the Torah mantles and curtains known today may have emerged as independent objects in the mid-sixteenth century, which would be the same period when the gravestones and hazkarot were beginning to evolve artistically.5 The developing forms of gravestones, ceremonial objects, and rituals for the dead in Jewish Prague from the mid-sixteenth through the seventeenth centuries were shaped by art, aesthetics, and fashion and

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also by the occupations and financial circumstances of donors.6 At the same time, these memorials’ texts remained true to traditional themes, gravestone inscriptions describing the deceased through commemoration or, more rarely, through mourning, and also mentioning the place of the dead in the world to come. This aesthetic transformation, occurring while both stone and liturgical memorials’ textual messages remained consistent thematically, helped bring about a change in the way Prague’s living Jews related to their dead.

“A Pure, Modest, Proper Woman”: Ideal Qualities Commemorated for Women and for Men In commemorating idealized good qualities of the dead, Hendl’s epitaph includes the lines: Where is the pious one, where is she who typified humility: In piety, in modesty, in holiness, and in purity: Her exit [from this world] did not differ from her entry: She ran to [perform] a lesser commandment as to a weighty one: And she became the foundation stone: To the afternoon service as to the morning she hastened: And her heart was [directed] faithfully to God: In fear, in awe, in clear language: Following the order and the law according to Rabbi Hamnuna: To the candle of commandment [miẓ  vah] and the Torah of light: She stretched out her arm and held tightly with her right [hand]:7

Hendl was pious, modest, and holy; she performed commandments; she was diligent in her prayers. She held firmly to Torah, the spiritual and intellectual focus of Jewish life, according to this portrait. Whatever the reality of her life had been, Hendl’s inscription reflects values accepted as ideals by the community as a whole. Thus, it praises not only her charity and modesty but also her attendance at daily prayer services in the synagogue—and notes that she “hastened” to get there. The inscription explains at length that she fed and clothed the poor, supported scholars, welcomed guests to her home, and also that she “understood and examined books.”8 Modesty and supportive,

Living and Dead in Cemetery and Synagogue

“enabling” roles like providing for the destitute and supporting learning were widely regarded as among ideal characteristics of an early modern Jewish woman. Perhaps less expected, a number of women’s stones in Prague refer to synagogue prayer as well.9 While the language of Hendl’s epitaph is extraordinarily flowery, similar themes praised centuries of Jewish women in Prague. The inscription of Sarah Yutl bat Moses (d. 1581) portrays, “A pure, modest, proper woman: She said her prayers with [good] intent: And all her deeds were in [good] faith.”10 She was “modest” (ẓ  enuah), “pure” (tehorah), devoted to prayer, and faithful.11 Other frequent terms for women include, “proper” (hagunah) and “respectable / of good standing” (ḥ ashuvah). Their roles in the family and in the community— such as leadership in preparing female bodies for burial—are seldom mentioned, other than as daughter and wife, relationships appearing as part of their names in the headings. Rather, general characteristics are emphasized: respectability, propriety, modesty, and attendance in local synagogues, qualities considered a woman’s appropriate behavior in the public arena. If there was a place in Jewish Prague for family memories, for recording a woman’s special relationships with her husband, children, parents, and close friends, her fostering a warm atmosphere in the home or loving preparation of Sabbath and festival meals, the cemetery’s documentation in stone was not that place. It was, instead, the place for a parallel realm of religious values appropriate to the public space, related to how a woman should conduct herself outside the home: fairly, including in the conduct of business, and piously, including attendance in the synagogue. Similar terms appear on the gravestones of men, the ideal pictures alike in some respect across gender, in other ways, different. Men are referred to, for instance, as “pious” (ḥ asid), “honest” (yashar), and “faithful” (ne′eman). Kaufmann Eidlitz (d. 1580) was like Sarah Yutl: “. . . A faithful man: (ish ne′eman). All his deeds were in [good] faith: He said his prayers with [good] intent.”12 For women, “intent” or “faith” were coupled with prayers or deeds. As with women’s, the lengthier men’s inscriptions include good faith in business practices, regular attendance in synagogue, housing of orphans, donations of ritual objects, and other acts of charity. Modesty and purity, however,

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seldom appear for men, and the feminine equivalent of the adjective for “faithful,” for men, “ne′emanah,” does not appear for women. Women’s inscriptions tend to emphasize charity much more than do the men’s. The study of Torah was promoted as an ideal for men and, occasionally, for women.13 One shared gravestone of a married couple shows how ideal qualities could differ according to gender. The right-hand side for Michal (d. 1589), and the left-hand side for her husband, Yishai (d. 1586), are essentially parallel: date of death, “here is buried” (the name of the deceased), then a short list of good qualities, followed by, “therefore,” the soul will be bound in the bond of life. For Michal: “She was an honest woman: Who took care [in observing] all the commandments.” For Yishai: “He was thoroughly versed in all the books: And head of the speakers among all the men.”14 For Michal, the qualities meriting eternal life are honesty and care in performing commandments; for Yishai, broad-based knowledge and what appears to be skill in rhetoric. He was, “head of the speakers,” perhaps referring to teaching, skill in business, or the activity of an intercessor. The point is clearly made that both wife and husband merit eternal life because of what they did in life, and that those actions are, apparently, gender based. Qualities featured in the hazkarat neshamot ritual were similar. Both the Altneuschul’s and the High Synagogue’s memorial notebooks recall Abraham ben Avigdor (d. 1542), the chief of the rabbinic court (av beit din) in Prague and author of Talmudic commentaries and of a liturgical commemoration of the 1541 expulsion of the Jews from Prague, as a man of learning, so much so that this may be, unusually, the reason no other payment was made: May God remember the soul of the great eagle, his is wisdom, the great one, behold he was an uprooter of mountains and of Sinai [i.e., very learned and sharp in sacred subjects], who was learned in the seven sciences [secular subjects], our teacher Rabbi Abraham, may his memory be for a blessing, son of our teacher Rabbi Avigdor may his memory be for a blessing, because he was chief of the rabbinic court here in Prague more than 20 years; he was as our eyes and led

Living and Dead in Cemetery and Synagogue

his people compassionately, teaching us to go in the proper path. By this merit may his soul be bound in the bond of life with the souls of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Moses and Aaron, David and Solomon, and with the rest of the holy, pure, righteous men and women who are in the Garden of Eden, and let us say, “Amen.” . . .15

Avigdor Kara’s gravestone inscription names similar qualities and notes familiarity with “books of wisdom,” meaning wide knowledge in general areas, outside Jewish law, an uncommon quality in the gravestones and hazkarot and one valued by his descendants.16 As the length of the hazkarot of the community’s most prominent members grew throughout the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the memorials filled with elaborate descriptions, for men, of learning and leadership; for women, for donating to charity. Just a few stones, beyond naming qualities of the deceased, actually told very compact stories about them, on rare occasion referring also to historical events. A double stone for publisher Gershom Kohen’s son Mordecai Ẓ emaḥ  Kohen and his son Beẓ alel tells of Mordecai’s successful intercession on behalf of the Jews before the pope in Rome, an incident also reported in a gloss inserted by Solomon, another of Gershom’s sons, in Gans’s Ẓ emaḥ David.17 Hazkarot could memorialize anti-Jewish persecutions, particularly when groups of martyrs killed together were recalled in a single entry (hazkarah). One group martyred in the southern Bohemian town Strakonice, for instance, appears in at least three manuscripts from at least three different synagogues, as do similar instances.18 Gender roles in gravestone inscriptions and hazkarah texts of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Prague are not always precisely what some have presumed. Like men, women are recalled as consistent worshippers in public prayer and even particularly so in donating objects necessary to that prayer. Their trades and honesty in business relations are also recalled. Still, certain attributes are much more characteristic of men than women; many more, for example, are remembered as learned, as teachers, or leaders of prayer. Virtues more central to memorials of women, like modesty and charity, are mentioned much less frequently for men.

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“I Raise My Voice in Weeping”: Mourning Stones Cry Out A significant minority of the cemetery’s gravestones focus primarily not on commemorating the dead but, rather, on the emotions of the living. On Hendl’s inscription, her widower, Prague’s wealthiest Jew, mourns his wife’s death. After a brief heading listing Hendl’s date of death (in the cartouche just below the lion’s feet) and her name (in two single lines below the cartouche and above the decorated arch), the text provides a biblical analogy to Jacob Bassevi, who—like the patriarch Jacob for his beloved second wife, Rachel— erects a monument over the burial place:19 Jacob erected a monument in bitterness And all the people wailed a lament For the respected gentlewoman Who is buried and concealed here Gone is her splendor, gone is her glory The voice of the multitudes in the faithful city Let us search and examine our ways20

From personal mourning, the account moves to encompass a wider chorus of grief: “all the people” sang a song of lament; Hendl’s death has left a noticeable gap in the glory of the city as a whole.21 The theme of mourning appeared from the time of Avigdor Kara through the cemetery’s closing in the late eighteenth century.22 Five years after Kara’s death, the voice of a mother cries out from her son’s grave: “I shall call out in mourning / And awaken laments / For gone from me / Is R. Yoshia my son . . .”23 The gravestone for Neḥ ama, wife of Shalom Uri (d. 1576), declared (Figure 2.5): Neḥ ama wife of Shalom Uri Buried on Sunday, the 11th of Tevet 5337 This stone is a witness between us That death has climbed up into our window And eclipsed the light of our eyes Our mother the crown of our head A woman who fears God, she will be praised

Living and Dead in Cemetery and Synagogue

Figure 2.5 Gravestone of Neh· ama, wife of Shalom Uri, d. 1576. Courtesy of the Jewish Museum in Prague: Jewish Museum in Prague Photo Archive.

It is impossible to complete the telling of all her praises:24 The angels of mercy went out to greet her: Her soul is bound in the bond of life: In the G[arden of ] E[den] Amen25

Neḥ ama’s children, too, express their grief; their eyes have been dimmed, they have been “eclipsed,” a dark shade drawn between them and the light; “the crown of our head” has fallen. Neḥ ama’s good qualities are described only within the context of loss. The stone for Meir ben Joseph Brandeis likewise records: “I raise my voice in crying

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and weeping, and wail / Day and night I shed tears like a river / For the crown, glory of our heads, that has fallen.”26 The first line of Neḥ ama’s epitaph reads, “This stone is a witness between us”; it preserves the voices of the living in the ears of the dead. That attempt to continue to speak to the dead is seen even more clearly on the stone erected by the former chief rabbi of Prague, Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller, on the grave of his daughters and granddaughters who died in a plague that struck Prague in 1639: “He lamented over the daughters of his daughters and over the sons of his sons all of his days and all of his nights / The tears of his eyes flowed / My daughter my daughter the pious Reyzl my daughter my daughter the pious Nisl.”27 Heller cries out to his daughters: “My daughter, my daughter,” he wails in stone. Calling out to the dead in mourning differs sharply from remembering their good qualities, its meaning in this context not entirely clear. Krzysztof Pomian’s study of collecting and collections in early modern Paris and Venice suggests a way to make sense of these various types of gravestone inscriptions by providing a model that can be used to view the gravestones as collected objects, which, for Pomian, supply meaning to their creators by allowing them a channel of communication with the dead.28 Pomian seeks to explain why a person, a collector, would remove an object from economic circulation. An object, he suggests, may represent the visible world in the world of the invisible, as with everyday objects buried with an Egyptian pharaoh to ease his entry into the world beyond. Alternatively, it may represent the invisible world to the inhabitants of the visible, as with many religious paintings and icons that depict gods or angels or embody the possessions of saints. Thus, the dead have not ceased to exist but have merely moved from the realm of the visible to the more powerful realm of the invisible. Though invisible, they continue to function in the visible world of the living, forming, in the words of historian Patrick Geary, an additional “age group” in medieval European society.29 Gravestones may, in this manner, be perceived as channels of communication across the chasm of death. Similarly, art historian Bracha Yaniv has pointed out that Torah curtains’ two-columned, gatelike motif clearly suggests communication.

Living and Dead in Cemetery and Synagogue

As in Psalms 118:19, “Open to me the gates of righteousness; I will enter into them, I will give thanks unto the Lord,” a phrase that often appeared on the textiles themselves, Yaniv describes curtains as gateways between worshippers and God. Thus, the curtain-gates allow a deceased donor to continue to perform a ritual function in the synagogue. At the same time, the living, in recalling that gift before God during the ritual of hazkarat neshamot, reach out to the invisible world to try to influence the fate of the dead.

“Bound in the Bond of Life”: Places in the World to Come Following the Book of Lamentations, the mourning lines of Hendl’s inscription conclude, “Let us search and examine our ways,” the implicit message that Hendl, who was all goodness, died for the sins of others, less good.30 Introspection and, especially, requests for forgiveness are traditional responses to disaster, and themes of atonement and sacrifice appear in even more direct forms elsewhere in the cemetery. The mutual aid of the living and the dead in attaining the atonement considered a precondition for eternal salvation represents perhaps the most complex and least understood text in the gravestone inscriptions. This phrase from Hendl’s stone, and the concluding lines of Neḥ ama’s, “The angels of mercy went out to greet her / Her soul is bound in the bond of life / In the G[arden of ] E[den] Amen,” describe or express hopes and prayers about where the deceased is now. They frequently appear in combination with lines of mourning and commemoration. In expressing eschatological beliefs, the stones may function as channels for communication in either direction, attempts on the part of the living to reach into, and even to influence, the invisible world of the dead or expressions of belief that the dead died for the sake of the living—as atonement— or that the dead person’s merits will stand for the sake of the living, representing the continued, if invisible, action of the dead in the world of the living. The most ubiquitous of these expressions is the formula “M[ay his/her] S[oul be] B[ound] I[n the bond of ] L[ife],” along with a handful of variations

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of this phrase, in Neḥ ama’s case written out rather than abbreviated as an acrostic.31 The tombstone of Rebekah bat Meir Tikotin (d. 1605), author of a song for the festival of Simḥ at Torah, deals in an exceptionally dramatic fashion with the notion of death as atonement, the first letter of each line forming an anagram spelling Rebekah’s name. It reads in part: [R] Many women have acted virtuously but you surpass them all [B] We relied on her as Abigail [who] in her life came to [our] defense by means of her own merit [K] A perfect sacrifice,32 like a ram, she was given in death for atonement [H] She used to preach day and night to the women in every faithful city The eyes of every passer-by streamed with tears when she was buried and covered.33

Rebekah is viewed, in death, as a sacrifice whose merits will benefit the living, aiding in cleansing their sins. The living continue to succumb to mortal foibles; the dead continue to act on their behalf, protecting them by obtaining atonement for their sins. Gravestones of this type serve as a physical incarnation of bi-directional communication. Rebekah’s actions on behalf of others during her lifetime are equated here with similar actions she continues to perform in death. In life, she acted like the biblical Abigail in defending her people by taking on their sins; so, too, in death.34 The dead, by virtue of their merits, can aid not only themselves but also others still living. They are already in a world that is closer to God, according to nineteenth-century Judaica scholar Leopold Zunz, “seeing God in death.”35 The act of dying itself contains an expiatory element that, while usually seen as effective in cleansing the sins of the person who has died, is also sometimes viewed—as here on the gravestone inscriptions—as capable of aiding in the atonement of the living.36 The concept that the death of a righteous person effects atonement for others appears in the Talmud as well, where it is said of Miriam and her brother Aaron that “the death of the righteous atones.”37 At times, this sentiment is expressed by the gravestones not in the dramatic language of sacrifice but in simpler expressions of the wish that “his merit will stand for us,” in other words, that, in the

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divine accounting, the dead’s good deeds and positive attributes will be attributed to the favor of the living.38 On the other hand, the living, unlike the dead, can still learn Torah, perform commandments, and do good deeds; dedicating actions and speech to the memory of the dead, they can mitigate their punishment, especially during the first year after death. So, too, the death of a kadosh, or martyr, was considered a kind of sacrifice that brought about atonement. A stone for Meir Brandeis (d. 1600) that combined the themes of mourning and sacrifice, stated in part: “Therefore were my loins filled with trembling / Over his death, which is equivalent to the burning of the House of the Lord / And our joy and happiness was turned / To grief, mourning and dismay.”39 Indeed, art historian Erwin Panofsky saw much of the history of Western gravestone inscriptions from ancient times through the Renaissance as revolving around the tension between the classical “retrospective” or “commemorative” epitaphs and “prospective” or “anticipatory” inscriptions, reflecting a Christian focus on the afterlife.40 Philippe Ariès, the historian who pioneered the study of death in Western culture, adopted similar categories; his renaming the anticipatory function “eschatological” hinted at a more active, salvation-­ seeking role for the gravestone itself. Until the eighteenth century, Ariès maintained, there was no difference between a living person’s working for salvation of the soul of the deceased and working for perpetuation of that person’s memory.41 This conflation of memory and prayers for salvation highlights the notion that “remembering” the dead was not always simply an act of recall but an active relationship between the living and the dead.42 In medieval Christendom, too, the prayers of the living helped the dead attain salvation, and the dead themselves could intervene in the heavenly court on behalf of the living. So, too, the dead could provide material benefits, such as a bequest, or an endowment or donation of real estate. Thus memorial prayers would be said in convents, chapter houses, or parishes, usually at annual intervals. In areas that came to be dominated by Protestant movements denying the ability of the dead to act on behalf of the living, some of these relationships evolved considerably.43 Among Prague’s Jews, intensive interaction between the living and the dead likewise took place in the context of hazkarat neshamot.

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Because inclusion of a hazkarah in one of the synagogue’s books of memorials required its purchase by surviving family members or by bequest, the dead or their representatives actually paid money so that the living would pray that, “God remember the soul of so-and-so son/ daughter of so and so,” and that the soul “be bound in the bond of life.” A typical hazkarah from approximately the first decade of the sixteenth century read, for example: “May God remember the soul of Rabbi H ̣  anokh ben (son of ) R. Benjamin, who has passed on, because his wife Mrs. Judith gave charity for the remembrance of his soul so that it should be remembered for all eternity. In reward for this may his soul be bound in bond of life with the souls of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah, and with all the righteous men and women in the Garden of Eden and let us say ‘Amen.’”44 The living invoked memory as prayer for salvation; the dead remained present in the synagogue ritual. About once a year, in the High Synagogue (and likely also in the Altneuschul), the cantor recited a hazkarah, a memorial in ritual time, for the same Heni ben Judah Leib Gedalyes whose gravestone indicated he had died as a martyr in the summer of 1648 (Figure 2.6):45 May God remember the soul of the pure martyr [kadosh], of the martyrs who were killed when the enemy grew mighty under the rod of His wrath, the martyr, the bridegroom, the ḥ aver, R. H ̣  anokh son of the ḥ aver R.[. . .]46 Judah, who sanctified the unique name, and he is a sin offering for the community, together with the rest of the martyrs, and atoned on behalf of this holy community of Prague, because he walked in the straight path and acted righteously, and because his father the ḥ aver R. Judah gave charity for the remembrance of his name, that it be remembered eternally with the rest of the righteous men and women, the holy martyrs who are in the Garden of Eden and let us say Amen.47

Heni’s stone employed his colloquial Yiddish name. Here, he appears as H ̣  anokh, the Hebrew variant of that name, his formal name by which he would have been called to the Torah in the synagogue.48 The text of this memorial, though longer than the gravestone inscription, teaches little more about the circumstances of Heni’s death. The congregation would be informed in this case—as a visitor in the

Living and Dead in Cemetery and Synagogue

Figure 2.6 From a hazkarah for H ·  anokh (Heni) ben Judah Leib Gedalyes. Ms. JMP 89, 22a. Courtesy of the Jewish Museum in Prague: Jewish Museum in Prague Photo Archive.

cemetery would not—that H ̣  anokh did not die alone but with a group of martyrs, whose story could be told elsewhere. As on the gravestone, the details are blurry, but the values clear. The two memorials may have had the same author, perhaps the father, as each invokes similar imagery, “he walked in the straight path and acted righteously,” in the hazkarah; he “walked in a straight path all his days,” on the gravestone. This biblical phrase is not original or creative, but it is but one choice among many ways such characteristics could be praised in a memorial. H ̣  anokh’s hazkarah also mentions that his father paid to have his entry included in the High Synagogue kuntres.

“Her Request She Made While Living”: Donations as Self-Memorials Thus, when read together, Heni’s gravestone and the hazkarah for him grant new insights. Gravestones could also directly invoke other kinds of memorials.49 Kressl bat Gershon Shamash (d. 1585): “. . . gave charity [performed acts of righteousness] secretly, with [good] intent / Donated for the Torah scroll its proper dress . . .”50 The wide stone

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marking Kressl’s burial place is divided into two epitaphs, one for her and another for her husband, Moses ben Jacob, who died in the same year. Moses’s inscription makes no mention of a donation of this type, thus emphasizing the object as a gift of Kressl herself. As a woman, Kressl had never been directly involved in the synagogue’s Torah service. Yet the Torah mantle she donated, most likely bearing her name, created a link between her and that ritual.51 While gravestones seem to have been erected in equal numbers for women and men, the limited documentation of the hazkarat neshamot ritual shows that entries for men outnumber those for women by about two-to-one, and women are mentioned as members of a couple about twice as often as are men. Yet in memorials that mention donation of a ritual object, women far outnumber those for men. In the Altneuschul memorbuch, which includes only six instances in which credit is attributed to the gift of a ritual object, four of the six were given by women, two by men. The High Synagogue notebook has fifty-six hazkarot. Thirteen of them mention a gift of a ritual object; of those, seven are listed as having been given by women.52 Some women with the financial means thus placed objects, often bearing their names, memorials to themselves, in the synagogues’ central sacred, distinctly male ritual space. Gravestones show how such donations could have special meaning, too, for men directly involved with ritual objects on a daily basis. The epitaph for Saul ben Azriel, a functionary in the Altschul, lists extensive gifts to that synagogue, and continues, “He was the gabbai [ritual functionary] in the Altschul for a number of years / And also dedicated a Torah scroll with its sacred ornaments / To read from on Sabbath and the New Moon. He also made for that synagogue a Torah Crown from his own silver / And also made a holy ark from his own wealth.”53 Saul would continue participating in the synagogue’s ritual affairs even after his death by means of his gifts.54 Ritual objects like Kressl’s, especially expensive objects like parokhot and mantles, whether or not donated primarily as memorials, were viewed by donors, fellow worshippers, and generations to follow as items that would outlive their donors and uphold their presence in the synagogue even after their deaths. A few hazkarot directly mentioned ceremonial objects located in the very same sanctuary where they were being recited. On the Sabbath

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morning when the cantor reciting the hazkarat neshamot reached the entry purchased for Karpel Zaks, whose colorful, carp-embossed silk Torah curtain occasionally adorned the ark in the Altneuschul (Figure 1.4), he chanted: May God remember the soul of the leader . . . of our holy community here in Prague, who dedicated most of his days on the earth to the needs of the public . . . It is he who with honor and glory brought to the house of our Lord a Torah scroll with rods of silver, a parokhet and the rest of the holy accoutrements, costing several hundred, and sanctified them . . . The honorable Rabbi Nathan son of Issachar z ″l [may his memory be a blessing] called Karpel Zaks z ″l. And because his son-in-law the Rabbi Avinadav [sic] David gave charity for the eternal memory of his soul . . .”55

The embroidered inscription on the parokhet included only the donors’ names and the date of the donation: “Nathan son of Issachar called Karpel Zaks / Hadasi daughter of Rabbi Moses, the year 5302 (1602).” It makes no mention of any memorial function. Karpel Zaks’s hazkarah does not state that the parokhet was the direct means of payment for the hazkarah; his son-in-law’s payment is named for that purpose. It makes clear, however, that the curtain could be viewed, at least in part, as a memorial to its donor. The gift of a Torah curtain was a significant financial undertaking. Even the community’s wealthiest individuals generally left just one piece of this type.56 Chances are very high that the parokhet referred to here, in the Altneuschul hazkarah, is indeed the Zaks parokhet. And, if for no other reason than the prevalence of this type of remembrance, Karpel would have been aware of his gift’s potential functioning for this purpose when he gave it, relatively late in his lifetime. In fact, Karpel died two years after the date mentioned on the parokhet. Likewise, commemorative inscriptions on gravestones, by recalling the positive attributes of the deceased, allowed the dead to remain present in the visible world of the living, through an idealized textual portrait of the dead. The practice of bequeathing a ritual object after one’s own death took on a very personal dimension in the case of Reizl bat Moses Plohn, as attested in the notebook of hazkarot from the High Synagogue. Reizl donated a Torah curtain as a self-memorial, but her entry, unlike

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most others, provides specific instructions accompanying her gift, requesting that God remember her soul, “. . . because she instructed her husband, Mori Bischitz, before her death that he should make a parokhet before the holy ark from one of her dresses. And her husband upheld her words and [also] spent a great deal of his own money for her soul. And he [had] made a holy parokhet, using one of her dresses, with six silver bells. . . .”57 Indeed, the Jewish Museum in Prague possesses a Torah curtain donated by Mori Bischitz in memory of his late wife, Reizl (Figure 2.7). Its embroidered inscription states that the curtain was donated by Mori, “for the soul of his modest wife Mrs. Reizl, daughter of the esteemed Rabbi Moses Plohn may his memory be for a blessing: her request that she made while living for the fulfillment of God.”58 The bells are now missing (almost no synagogue silver from this period survives), but the curtain and matching memorial entry show how the dead wife and living husband worked together to perpetuate her memory in this very direct way, arranging for her to be present in the synagogue whenever the curtain was used. While Reizl presents an extreme example, the practice of making sacred objects from personal clothing was well known during the early modern period, its appropriateness debated among rabbis, and was widespread in the Ottoman Empire.59 Using a dress of expensive silk to make a parokhet was also logical. Given the great expense of silk and the large amount of material used on each dress, only the wealthiest European women wore silk dresses, and those who considered themselves fashionable may have kept a silk dress for no more than a few years (although according to recent scholarship, even the wealthiest may have reused the material from those dresses for other purposes).60 Assuming that Reizl was not among that wealthiest strata of European women who replaced their silks frequently, her careful choice of a post-mortem gift becomes all the more remarkable. The donation of a parokhet of personal clothing would have resulted, for Reizl, in a personal presence in the synagogue space—by her own dictate—when this curtain was hung. In that sense, it created a channel through which the invisible, dead Reizl appeared in the world of the living worshippers. The cantor further emphasized this connection when he recited the hazkarah describing Reizl’s gift.

Figure 2.7 Gold-colored parokhet donated by Mori Bischitz in memory of his wife, Reizl bat Moses Plohn. JMP inv. no. 16.650. Courtesy of the Jewish Museum in Prague: Jewish Museum in Prague Photo Archive.

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Columns, Gates, Small Houses of Stone: Elaboration of Form in Text and Art Graphically, Rebekah Tikotin’s stone features a two-column motif whose overall development and presence on a plethora of Jewish ritual objects is insufficiently understood (Figure 2.8); one of the earliest examples in the Prague cemetery is that of Jonah ben Meir Puria Pfefferkorn (d. 1586) (Figure 2.9). Although this motif was not new in Jewish design and architecture, the classical ionic columns on these stones also resemble, quite closely, those on the doorways to Vladislav Hall and others built on the premises of Prague Castle early in the reign of Rudolf II.61 For example, the inner portion of the entrance from All Saints’ Chapel to Vladislav Hall (dated by Rudolfine architecture expert Ivan Muchka as circa 1580) and Jonah’s gravestone both feature ionic columns supporting an arch or an arch’s beginnings (Figure 2.10).62 Some elements of the outer portion of the entrance to Vladislav Hall more closely resemble Rebekah’s stone. Adoption of this classical motif for the gravestones was tied to its use on a multitude of Jewish objects— especially Torah curtains and the title pages of printed books—and also appears to parallel the timing of non-Jewish adoption of various late Renaissance– early Baroque forms, particularly from the Italian peninsula, in Prague and its environs.63 Simpler graphic representations began to appear on the stones of the less well-known, and presumably less wealthy, Jews of Prague as well. Numerous stones feature symbols of trades and guilds, like the stone marking the burial place of Zalman H ̣  ayyat (d. 1628). Zalman’s marker features a simple inscription lettered in relief and topped by scissors, the symbol of tailors (Figure 2.11), showing that new aesthetic sensibilities for gravestone art extended at least to the artisan classes.64 On Zalman’s stone, the letters are less regularly shaped than some other examples presented here; the bottom corners have not been carved out to match the rest of the surface between the letters but left as is; the triangular top of the monument is slightly asymmetrical. In other words, this gravestone appears to be less expensive than others more elaborately ornamented. Nevertheless, the form uses graphic and written representation and differs significantly from the forms of a few generations earlier.

Figure 2.8 Gravestone of Rebekah bat Meir Tikotin, d. 1605. Courtesy of the Jewish Museum in Prague: Jewish Museum in Prague Photo Archive.

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Figure 2.9 Gravestone of Jonah ben Meir Puria Pfefferkorn, d. 1536. Courtesy of the Jewish Museum in Prague: Jewish Museum in Prague Photo Archive.

While Rebekah Tikotin’s epitaph explores notions of atonement more fully than Hendl’s, the overall elaboration, rhetorical flourish, and poetic structure of Hendl’s text represent a clear departure from the earlier literary forms, following contemporary Hebrew poetry studied by Jirˇina Šedinová.65 Traditional Hebrew literary use of rhyme, acrostics, and interweaving of biblical and rabbinic texts are prominent, employed in both the epitaphs and the period’s Hebrew poetry written in Bohemia. At the same time, the Hebrew texts Šedinová examines are undergoing what she calls “the beginning of Baroquization,” artistic forms building on one another.66 Moreover, use of biblical paraphrases and references to ancient events characterize Bohemian poetry of the Renaissance and Baroque in other languages as well. The literary forms of rhyme and acrostics, too, while deeply rooted in traditional Hebrew poetry, reflect contemporary trends.

Living and Dead in Cemetery and Synagogue

Figure 2.10 Prague Castle, All Saints’ Chapel, entrance to Vladislav Hall. Museum of the City of Prague inv. no. H 011 619.068. Courtesy of the Museum of the City of Prague.

The design of Hendl’s stone, even more so than of its text, displays striking new forms emerging from graphic themes that had begun to develop in the Old Jewish Cemetery, the front (eastern) slab of stone combining some of the elements from those of Jonah and Rebekah resembling the portal of Vladislav Hall even more closely than do those earlier stones. Here, the columns at the text’s side have taken the shape of roaring lions. Earlier columns, too, had become animals on at least one quite different design of a sarcophagus in the castle complex’s St. Vitus Cathedral.67 On Hendl’s stone, where a keystone

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Figure 2.11 Gravestone of Zalman ben Moses H · ayyat, d. 1628. Courtesy of the Jewish Museum in Prague: Jewish Museum in Prague Photo Archive.

should pin the top of the arch above the main body of text, a cherub’s face looks out, much like the angels’ faces decorating the spandrels of the St. Vitus Chapel entrance.68 In the castle doorway, a cartouche located above prominently displays the two-tailed lion that is the symbol of Bohemia; on Hendl’s monument, the Bassevi lion proudly holds a shield that once displayed the Bassevi coat of arms, the family’s privilege granted as part of Jacob’s ennoblement.69 Most strikingly to a passer-by, the confluence of increasing graphic and textual elaboration reaches its peak in the monuments’ sepulchral

Living and Dead in Cemetery and Synagogue

shape, which first appeared in the cemetery in the early seventeenth century.70 Resembling a small house, it is called heizlich (small house) in the Yiddish terminology of the Jewish Quarter, often referred to in Hebrew sources as an ohel (tent).71 Of the dozens of monuments of this type in the cemetery, Hendl’s is the only one of this period solely for a woman. Most are for rabbis who were official communal leaders. As the differences increased between the monuments for the ordinary dead and those for the most prominent, so, too, did the differences between the genders. From the erection of Hendl’s monument and throughout the remainder of the seventeenth century, and until the closing of the cemetery in 1787, these forms—both written and graphic—would follow basically the same models, with some texts growing ever longer and more elaborate but not changing in essence in any fundamental way.72 Likewise, in the Altneuschul manuscript, the earliest hazkarot that began to digress from a simple, short formula started to appear in the mid-sixteenth century. They include terms of praise like “honest,” “modest” (especially for women), and “pious,” and positions like gabai ẓ edakah (the treasurer for charitable donations).73 Some (especially for the men) attribute the right to a memorial to official positions in the community or great levels of Torah learning, in addition to a payment by the family. Scholars and leaders are mentioned, but, by the seventeenth century, such status was usually insufficient to merit a hazkarah; donations were required to attain a place in the liturgy. The joint hazkarah for the famed Rabbi Judah Loew ben Beẓ alel, known as the Maharal, and his wife, Pearl, for example, mentions many qualities common to earlier rabbis, as, for example, Abraham ben Avigdor. May God remember the pure soul of the great light who enlightened confused of heart by the thousands and hundreds of thousands, by the light of Torah in [various modes of Torah study called] pilpul, mishna, gemara, tosafot and poskim. And wrote many books. Like sparks of lightning. The esteemed chief of the rabbinic court, the wise one of our generation, wondrous elder and Rabbi our teacher, who led his people like Moses. A foundation stone in wisdom and understanding.

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His name reaches from one end of the world to the other. Therefore, may He remember the soul of our teacher Rabbi Judah Leib, may the memory of the righteous be for a blessing, son of the esteemed Beẓ alel may his memory be for a blessing. And the pure soul of his wife Mrs. Pearl daughter of the leader the esteemed Samuel may his memory be for a blessing. Whose good name has gone out in every land. Who gave many gifts to every poor man and woman . . .74

In contrast to others with similar themes, this hazkarah, like that of the couple’s son Beẓ alel that follows it, fills half a page or more with wordy praises and descriptions of the subjects’ learning and merits. Despite being long, the entries continued to be highly formulaic. They displayed more variability than one hundred years previous, though less than gravestone inscriptions. One hazkarah from the High Synagogue combines such formulaic language with additional original statements as to become truly a miniature biography, much more so than the stone for Mordecai Ẓ emaḥ  Kohen. This entry commemorates Isaiah Horowitz (ca. 1555 – ca. 1630), known as the Shelah, after the initials of his best-known work Shenei luḥ ot habrit, a former chief rabbi of Prague and scion the prominent local Horowitz family: May God remember the pure soul of the great light who enlightened confused of heart by the thousands and hundreds of thousands in by the light of Torah in [various modes of Torah study called:] pilpul, mishna, gemara, tosefta and poskim. And besides that many books like sparks of lightning. The kabbalist, the esteemed chief of the rabbinic court, the wise one of our generation, wondrous elder and Rabbi our teacher, who led his people like Moses. A foundation stone in wisdom and understanding. His good name reaches from one end of the world to the other among all the diaspora of Israel. Therefore may his name be remembered before God, may his merit and the merit of his fathers stand for us as an intercessor [meliẓ  yosher] before the Lord our God. The ga′on our teacher Rabbi Isaiah son of our teacher Rabbi Abraham sg ″l [segan levi′im / of the Levite caste] of the Horowitz family. He was head of the rabbinic court and of the yeshiva [academy for advanced Talmudic study] here, and in the end of his days, when his first wife, the pious Mrs. H ̣  aya daughter of our teacher Rabbi

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Abraham Maul died—she is buried here in Prague—he lifted up his feet and went to the Land of Israel. There he was received as Prince in all parts of the Land of Israel, and he wrote there many many books according to the kabbalah. And in the end of his days the Sultan who is in Jerusalem told a libelous tale about him, and he went from there to the city of Tiberias, and there he died. He and his wife Mrs. H ̣  ava daughter of our teacher Rabbi Eliezer may his memory be for a blessing, with her young daughter, are buried next to the grave of Rabbi Akiba and his students. Therefore may his name be remembered for good, and because his son the great, wondrous preacher [darshan], our brilliant teacher Rabbi Sheftel, may God keep and bless him, head of the rabbinic court in the holy community of Fürth vowed [to make a contribution] for the remembrance of his name and their souls to remember them eternally with the rest of the righteous who are in the Garden of Eden and with the souls of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah and with the pure, holy souls that are in the Garden of Eden and let us say “Amen.”75

The first part of this hazkarah was a precise copy of those for other rabbis of similar standing, like the Maharal, with the addition of the word “kabbalist” and of the supplication—fitting with the kabbalistic note—that he serve as an intercessor for the living. In the middle, however, it takes a uniquely biographical turn, providing extensive detail about Horowitz’s later life. While it is much more explicit about the interactions between dead and living, which its recitation is supposed to aid, the text also regards Horowitz more as a man with a biography to be remembered by other men and women, and not only before God, than do the other entries in this notebook. The human aspect of commemoration comes to the fore not only in the extensive biographical details but also in the wording. More than once the prayer here is “may he be remembered before God,” in addition to “may God remember him,” a subtle difference, but one that shifts the act of memory from the divine to the human. Also quite human is the justification of Horowitz’s move from Jerusalem to Tiberias after his imprisonment by the non-Jewish leadership of Jerusalem. Surely God would understand where truth and justice lay; others might need reminding.

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From “Between Us” to “Announce a Great Man”: Memory of the Dead from Communication to Commemoration The Horowitz hazkarah’s biographical expansiveness, while exceptional in its length and specificity, represents a general trend toward more and more elaborate memorial supplications for the most prominent dead, its very detail detracting from the direct communication between living and dead of the earlier hazkarot. So, too, the large gravestones, looking like small buildings dotting the cemetery grounds, stand out so forcefully that the degree to which they allow the living to simply speak to the dead, or the dead to speak to the living, is overshadowed by their simultaneous role as public monuments making permanent social statements about the place of the dead in history. The various memorials, of course, were always visible, or audible, to all—not just to the family seeking to maintain contact with its departed members. And they always performed social functions for the families, marking their respectability, importance, and interconnections.76 Yet as long as the gravestones and hazkarot remained basically simple and similar to one another, they could be seen as functioning primarily as modes of communication—between the visible world and the invisible, of an individual family or, for a more prominent citizen, of the community as a whole. When the memorials of the prominent became ever more monumental, elaborate, and diverse, this communication was dwarfed, to a degree, by the statement of greatness of the dead. In 1576, the inscription for Neḥ ama, wife of Shalom Uri, had mourned her using a few biblical lines; Hendl’s widower Jacob was compared to the biblical Jacob as he led the whole community, almost Greek-chorus fashion, in mourning his late wife. Where Sarah Yutl had said her prayers with good intent, Hendl recited them at least twice daily and ran to perform commandments great and small. The simple framed rectangles of Neḥ ama’s, Sarah Yutl’s, and Mordecai’s stones gave way to the two-pillared gateways of Jonah Pfefferkorn’s and Rebekah bat Meir Tikotin’s gravestones, Hendl’s gravestone reflected the indulgent ornamentation of an eye-catching, three-dimensional monument reserved for the community’s most prominent—and in

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all other cases, male—personalities. Moreover, while Neḥ ama’s stone declared, “This stone is a witness between us,” by 1634, the inscription for Eliezer ben Mordecai instead stated, “And the stone is great upon the mouth of the hole / To announce that here is buried a distinguished man.”77 Similarly, in the hazkarot, Avigdor ben Abraham had been recalled in a few lines as a leader and scholar; Isaiah Horowitz’s hazkarah had included a narrative of travel, resettlement, and intrigue, a full literary profile of a distinguished man. The increasing use of graphic representations on stones for people from a variety of socioeconomic classes and both genders and the choice of two-column motifs on many of them, along with expansion in verbosity in the hazkarot, growing more and more marked as the seventeenth century progressed, coincided with the historical development of aesthetic sensibilities of Prague. Exciting developments in art and literature emanated from the court of Emperor Rudolf II (1576 – 1612) and his immediate Habsburg predecessors and were adopted and adapted by other nobles and burghers in Prague. Later, the Baroque style that characterized Catholic Renewal (Counter-Reformation) in Prague during and following the Thirty Years’ War captured changing tastes and circumstances. To some degree, the aesthetic forms created by the probably unconscious bending to contemporary style and taste dictated the memory contained and transmitted in local gravestones and hazkarot neshamot. So, too, the singling out of the Jewish Quarter’s most prominent dead occurred at a time of growing integration of late Renaissance notions of art and rhetoric within the imperial court at Prague. Art historian Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann has identified rhetoric as a unifying thread for the vast variety of paintings in seemingly discordant genres by the artists at Rudolf ’s court in Prague, which he assembled from across Europe under his patronage.78 At one end of the spectrum, the works created included masterful still-lifes and observations of nature by Hans Hoffman, Joris Hoefnagel, and Roelandt Savery, among others. On the other end, the Italian-born Giuseppe Arcimboldo created fantastic-looking allegorical portraits of Rudolf and representations of the seasons composed of flora, fruits, and vegetables; and Bartholomäus Spranger, from the Low Countries but also trained in

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Italy, painted elaborate allegorical themes from classic mythology. For Kaufmann, this vast array has its place in the larger rhetorical ideal according to which loftier subjects merit treatment by loftier genres. A simple scene from nature is painted simply; the idea of wisdom or the emperor himself require more complex modes of expression. Visual artists, Kaufmann states, seem to have worked according to “the ideal of eloquence,” entailing “not only that there should be a copious variety of ornamental figures—hence the visual equivalents of rhetorical tropes—but also that the form of expression would vary with its content.”79 Such a notion can also serve to explain the growing specialization and elaboration of the gravestones and synagogue memorials of a prominent few. In contrast to the gravestone of Avigdor Kara, the most important, learned, and eminent citizens now required commemoration using verbal and graphic language more impressive and more elevated than that for ordinary citizens. The socioeconomic elite of Jewish Prague— closely linked, as in other Jewish communities throughout Ashkenaz, to its religious leadership— came to use elaborate tombstones to mark their fundamental difference from ordinary residents of the Jewish Quarter, to emphasize the honor and respect due their families. The religious values promoted on these families’ gravestones do not differ qualitatively from those advanced on the simpler inscriptions, but their very grandeur promoted an additional ideal, of wealth and aesthetic sophistication. Living Jews used the inclusion of their dead family members in the life of the community as a means of promoting their own interests. Drawing on Kaufmann’s analysis of court culture is not intended to imply that artwork and intellectual discussions inside Prague Castle were the direct source of new forms in the Jewish cemetery, though such a possibility cannot be entirely discarded.80 From without the castle walls Prague’s Jews, like all the city’s residents, may have been exposed to images and ideas originating from the castle and its artistintellectuals.81 Likewise, Jewish printed material bearing two-columned title pages and many other images were reaching Prague from Italy and Poland, and from Prague to those countries and other areas of Jewish settlement. Whatever the exact means of transmission, the Jews

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of Prague clearly incorporated elements from these new graphic and verbal languages to mark the burial places of their dead. Changes in the way people thought about the dead and their place among the living were neither rapid nor absolute. Only toward the end of the seventeenth century did inscriptions on ritual textiles begin commonly to refer to donation of an object in memory of one who had died, rather than as a legacy from the deceased.82 In this sense, too, the object dedicated, in part, to a memorial of the dead served more to commemorate that person than to keep open a channel of communication. In the earlier memorials, the emphasis on identity with past historical models did not preclude a simultaneous concern with historical development and with marking the dead as unique; and in the later period, an increasing emphasis on marking the “greats” among the dead as special did not preclude a wish to identify them with past models. Similarly, the memorials’ function as a channel of communication in the earlier period did not preclude a concern with marking the social and historical import of the most venerable dead; nor did growing obsession with glorifying the most venerable dead preclude their simultaneous functioning as a channel of communication. These various phenomena worked hand in hand. Changing aesthetic sensibilities played at least some part in this shift in emphasis and had certain visual precedents in Jewish objects. The relationship between history and memory, as the gravestones demonstrate, does not rest solely on the way people think but also on the physical forms, influenced by changing aesthetic sensibilities, in which they express that thinking, which then help shape modes of memory. Material factors, like the occupations of Prague’s Jews, their proximity to and affection for luxurious textiles, also played roles in shaping the forms of memorial objects. Archival work by Alexandr Putík allows us to know something about the economic status of the donors of extant parokhot.83 Using tax assessment records, Putík showed that of the extant parokhot donated between 1673 and 1702, about 95 percent of the donors belonged to the wealthiest tax category, who comprised in total 19 percent of the taxpayers, with a great degree of economic diversity even among the wealthiest group, from a few extraordinarily affluent families to the more widespread very well-to-do. It is fair to

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assume that Mori and Reizl’s families, like other parokhet donors a few years earlier, were among the better off. In the perdon tax (on transactions) from 1686 to 1687, all the donors Putík discovered were involved in either finance or large-scale business enterprises; none were craftsmen or drew their sole income as teachers or religious functionaries. At least fifteen of twenty-three donors he identified in this group traded in textiles, haberdashery, or ready-made clothing, six in luxury fabrics like brocade, velvet, silk, and lace. In a 1729 census, 74 percent of donors identified were likewise in business, with the largest group, again, directly involved in textiles. Among those dealing in fabrics and clothing, some two decades or so after the death of Reizl bat Moses Plohn, were her (remarried) husband, Mori Bischitz, and his son Zelig.84 Thus, Mori Bischitz, and perhaps also his late first wife, had a very direct relationship with textiles, possibly with fine textiles. At the same time the parokhet Mori had donated, like the Zaks parokhet, exemplifies a particular style of Torah curtain developed in Prague, one that allowed for special emphasis on the large piece of expensive fabric placed in the object’s center. The involvement of many of the community’s wealthier members in various aspects of the textile trade may well have played a role in forming the distinctive Prague style of the Torah curtains. Some contemporaneous parokhot from elsewhere feature, instead, elaborate embroidered designs in the center panel, showing, for example, a menorah or tablets of the law. For example, another Torah curtain, from early eighteenth-century Bavaria, is closely related to the Prague parokhot, and, like them, it used silk, velvet, and silver and gilt-silver-thread embroidery (Figure 2.12). Yet in contrast to the similar Zaks parokhet (Figure 1.4), and related two-columned examples that leave the center panel “empty,” emphasizing first and foremost the luxurious fabric (later replaced in the case of the Zaks curtain), the Bavarian curtain, embroidered by a Jewish artisan, emphasized fine handiwork first and materials second. The parokhet for Reizl Plohn likewise emphasizes the expensive silk and lace, with only a hint of the two-column motif. The deep involvement of Prague’s wealthier Jews in the textile trade and in precious textiles, in particular, may have had a direct bearing on the development of a particular artistic form of the parokhet as it evolved in Prague. The way

Living and Dead in Cemetery and Synagogue

Figure 2.12 Torah curtain from Kriegshaber, Bavaria, 1723/24. Israel Museum, Jerusalem, B03.0774, 152/294. Gift of the Moldovan Family, New York. Courtesy of the Israel Museum.

Prague’s Jews remembered their dead was influenced by the way they earned their livings. Neither was, of course, unique to Prague. Many Jews throughout Europe and beyond dealt in textiles and used luxurious samples in the ritual objects they made and donated. Nevertheless, the particular combination of the occupations of Prague’s wealthier Jews and the artistic developments of these textile forms in the immediate region led to the evolution of local tradition that fit in a wider framework of classic Jewish themes. Gravestones, hazkarot, and ritual objects made and used in Prague each have their own history as artistic and literary genres. Their creators’ intentions in consciously forming the ways they would memorialize their dead loved ones were important to the ways those memories were eventually concertized. Yet, these consciously preserved and

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transmitted values were not simply neutrally transferred into stone and sewn into velvet. Surrounding culture, tastes, occupations, available materials, the community’s storehouse of iconographic and literary themes, and their developments during this period all played important parts also. In a similar manner, Jewish and European literary traditions also helped shape the ways stories by and about living members of this community were written and preserved.

Three

 A Remembrance for Me “ and My Descendants”



 utobiographical Writing and Familial A Commemoration

In the winter of 1621–1622, against a background of violent political struggles, two Jewish men from Prague, Joseph Tein and H ̣  anokh Altschul, recorded for their respective families stories of events each had experienced from a slightly different perspective.1 A year and a half earlier, in November 1620, Catholic Habsburg forces had defeated mostly Protestant Bohemians at the Battle of White Mountain, the early skirmish, decisive for securing Habsburg rule in Bohemia, in what would later come to be known as the Thirty Years’ War. The following June, twenty-one leaders of the defeated “rebellious” Bohemians had been executed in the Old Town Square. With the Habsburgs’ local military and administrative leader, Prince Karl von Liechtenstein, ill and removed to Vienna, the soon-to-be-notorious Albrecht von Wallenstein was left in charge. Inflation was rampant, accompanied by currency debasement, as financier Jacob Bassevi, Prague’s wealthiest Jew and an associate of Wallenstein, reaped profit as a member of a currency-minting consortium that included Liechtenstein, Wallenstein, the nobleman Pavel Michna, and Hans de Witte, a Dutch merchant.2 In December 1621, in the Hebrew month of Tevet, silk curtains were stolen from Prince Liechtenstein’s palace. Wallenstein ordered the theft “announced” in all the local synagogues, a common practice, as Jews were known to play active roles in the trade of goods of dubious origins. Usually, if a stolen item was turned over to the synagogue’s beadle (shamash), he would facilitate its return while shielding the guilty party. Following this procedure, Joseph Tein handed over the curtains to the shamash H ̣  anokh Altschul, son of Moses ben H ̣  anokh Altschul.3 Altschul gave them to a Jewish community leader, who

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brought them to Wallenstein, “a man quick in judgment, who would issue a decree of death in the blink of an eye.”4 But Wallenstein, departing from customary practice, was not satisfied with this step and demanded that the person who had purchased the stolen curtains be brought before him. In an attempt to protect Tein, Altschul was sent instead, pleading the case for anonymity as a way of ensuring future returns of stolen property, and calling on earlier precedents from Prague. The plea was in vain. Wallenstein ordered a gallows built for Altschul’s execution, whereupon the shamash disclosed Tein’s name. Altschul was jailed, chained hand and foot, and released only when Tein was captured. Altschul recorded his tale, later called “Megillat hakela′im” (The Curtains Megillah), in Hebrew, and that text served his family as the basis for an annual commemoration of his rescue, a family Purim day, on 22 Tevet, the day of his release. After Tein was condemned to be hanged, intense negotiations began for his release, and local officials eventually agreed with the Jewish community that he would be freed for a payment of 10,000 talers. After much additional wrangling, including disputes about the currency to be used for payment, Wallenstein’s consulting with theologians, and a humiliating exercise in which ten Jewish elders had to haul the coins, on their shoulders, in sacks of 1000 talers each to the Town Hall, Tein was released and returned triumphantly to the Jewish Quarter as the Sabbath was falling. He recorded his story in Yiddish, in a scroll his family then read annually on the anniversary of this day, 26 Tevet (Figure 3.1).

“To Rejoice in Eating and Drinking”: Making a Family Purim Day As did contemporary Christians, Prague’s early modern Jews, like Altschul and Tein, used different forms of autobiographical writing to preserve and transmit stories of significant events in their lives to future generations.5 In doing so, Prague’s Jewish families, particularly prominent families, sought to preserve and protect their family names, for contemporary society and for posterity. While the term

Autobiographical Writing and Familial Commemoration

Figure 3.1 Joseph Tein, Megillat hakela′im (copied 1840), beginning with the word, vayehi (and it came to pass) that opens the biblical Book of Esther. Ms. JMP 263. Courtesy of the Jewish Museum in Prague: Jewish Museum in Prague Photo Archive.

“autobiography” implies monograph-length, life-spanning narratives, “autobiographical writing” refers here to any comments an author records about his or her own life, whatever their genre, nature, length, or place in the overall text concerned. Publication of autobiographical passages—whether in print or in manuscript, as freestanding works or parts of larger compositions, in the sacred Hebrew or vernacular Yiddish—was often part of a careful strategy. By countering denunciations against a family’s patriarch or affirming his scholarly identity as an author of a rabbinic work, such publications stood at the nexus of the author’s family (their immediate audience) and the wider communities to which such families were connected. And, as with the gravestones and hazkarot, the conventions and developments of genre played vital roles in shaping familial memories based on autobiographical writings of Prague Jews, forming new ways of constructing familial memory. Such family memories were recorded primarily in autobiographical introductions to book-length works and in megillot, deliverance tales establishing family Purim days, two forms of writing that emerged from medieval genres.6 While both developed in the context of early modern European autobiographical writing, sharing its general focus on the

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place of families in a wider social structure, the Purim days and their deliverance tales, in particular, also represented a strong connection to the traditional Jewish megillah genre.7 They were written in manuscript, often on parchment, in square letters, a wholly ritual format; many even opened with the phrase, vayehi (and it came to pass), the beginning of the Book of Esther, understood by later commentaries as a phrase that always foreshadows trouble, a holding specifically echoed in some of the megillot texts as well (Figures 3.1 and 3.2). As with other vessels of memory, the determination of which types of familial stories would be preserved was shaped, in part, by the existence of appropriate literary genres. Thus, Jews in Prague, and elsewhere in early modern Europe, often framed their stories in the outer shell of a biblical deliverance tale or in introductions to largely unrelated printed or manuscript books they composed. Stories that did not fit these two genres have reached us in far smaller numbers. When Altschul’s tale was first printed, in 1887, the editor, a descendant of the author, based his publication on a manuscript in his own possession and explained, “And

Figure 3.2 Family megillah of the Yampels-Segal family, 1721, showing how the family megillah was rolled like other sacred parchment scrolls. Ms. JMP 251. Courtesy of the Jewish Museum in Prague: Jewish Museum in Prague Photo Archive.

Autobiographical Writing and Familial Commemoration

now, I too have come to publicize [lehafiẓ  berabim] . . . the megillah of one family, which has been read in my family these two hundred sixty-five years, on the night of the 22nd of Tevet.”8 The text did not stand alone but was designed for a familial ritual. The manuscript in which Tein’s tale is preserved likewise concludes with a colophon by its scribe: “And I the insignificant Wolf son of David Altschul, because I also am descended from this family and celebrate this Purim every year on the 26th of Tevet, so have I assiduously written this megillah on parchment for an eternal memory . . .”9 The specific Jewish genre of autobiographical local megillot to which Altschul’s and Tein’s narratives belong was originally used to record and preserve communal, not familial or individual, memories.10 Megillah (plural: megillot), literally, “scroll,” refers to five books of the Hebrew Bible: the Songs of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, and Esther. Primary reference here is, as in common usage, to the Book of Esther, which tells the story of the Jews of Shushan, in Persia, who were saved from the evil plots of the royal advisor Haman by Esther and her kinsman and guardian Mordecai.11 The authors used this proto­ typical tale of redemption and celebration for a Jewish community in the diaspora to frame their own, rather personal stories, primarily for their families.12 The earliest evidence of local Purim days emerges from scattered medieval sources, but beginning in the sixteenth century, it became a distinct phenomenon initially in Jewish communities in the Middle East and Mediterranean basin, then spreading through Italy and later into Jewish settlements in central and eastern Europe. The first well-documented local Purim day north of the Alps is known as the Vinẓ  Hans Purim or the Frankfurter Purim. Its bilingual (HebrewYiddish) Megillat Vinẓ  (Megillas Vinẓ  in Yiddish usage) describes the expulsion of Jews from Frankfurt during the Fettmilch uprising (1612 –1616), and their return to the city two years later.13 In Prague, similar days were established in commemoration of the Passau invasion of 1611 and of events, including the coronation of Frederick as king, culminating in the Battle of White Mountain in November 1620. These days were observed in Prague’s synagogues, as recalled in Chapter 1, with a half-day of fasting preceding a celebration until at least the mid-eighteenth century, perhaps longer. The liturgical texts written

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for these commemorations were read during the fasting rather than the festive part of the day, and accordingly took the form of penitential laments (seliḥot) rather than megillot. By the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the model of a local Purim day had evolved in some instances into a familial, rather than a communal celebration. In these cases, a head of household who had been placed in mortal danger and then emerged safely declared a Purim day for his family and descendants. Some of these author-protagonists also cited as a source for their actions an individual’s requirement under Jewish law to say a blessing of thanksgiving on seeing a place where a miracle had been performed on that person’s behalf, a requirement relating to place rather than time.14 Personal and familial days of this type appear in isolated medieval records, including a day of fasting observed by the philosopher and rabbinic authority Moses Maimonides (1135 –1204), who did not combine it with any celebration. Another is a vague reference to “my Purim,” written in the margin of a halakhic compendium by Jacob ben Asher; it mentions briefly a 1507 incident in Fulda, about sixty kilometers northeast of Frankfurt.15 In 1589, when community-wide local Purim days were already widespread in the Mediterranean basin, the Carmi family of Cremona established its own annual celebration for its deliverance from disaster, when the roof collapsed on the dining table, just as the family had been delayed in sitting down to dinner, the earliest known familial Purim day from the early modern era.16 A 1613 story from Prague may have been a precursor of sorts to the local family megillot. Handwritten into the cover of a prayer book, it tells of a group of fifteen merchants arrested on their way from Prague to the fair in Leipzig, on a charge of illegally exporting local currency, a common accusation against Jews in the lands of the Habsburg Monarchy.17 Through negotiations, the group was released in exchange for a large payment made by Jacob Bassevi. The narrative establishes no particular date for commemoration, but the rescue tale resembles tropes that later appeared in the megillot, including the theme of vengeance through poetic justice, an emphasis on the month of Adar, and occasionally employs language reminiscent of the Book of Esther. The earliest known familial Purim days with a documented megillah are the two from Prague about the stolen curtains, written by Altschul

Autobiographical Writing and Familial Commemoration

and Tein. Another Prague family megillah, written by Joshua Edeles in 1646 but lost and rewritten by a descendant in 1833, demonstrates that family’s persistence in celebrating the day over nearly two hundred years.18 Edeles had hired a builder to add two stories to his house, then clashed with him over the quality of the work, and chided him about a goblet engraved with a figure of Jesus from which he was drinking. When the builder drank, Edeles pointed out, “your God bows down to me, and how do you believe in him and seek your salvation from him?”19 On the advice of another Jew, a former employee of Edeles’s, the builder reported the blasphemy to civic authorities. Edeles was arrested, then released on a promise to pay a large sum in four weeks’ time. When the time came and he still had no money, Edeles was rearrested as he lunched with friends on legumes and salted fish. An influential Jew took up his cause, negotiating on his behalf, and Edeles was freed dramatically, in the middle of the night, just before a warrant for his execution was to be delivered to the jail. In the final lines of the manuscript, the nineteenth-century scribe conveyed Edeles’s command to his descendants for all generations to commemorate the seventh of Tevet, the day of his arrest, with a lunch of legumes and salted fish, and on the day of his release, to “make a Purim” by giving gifts to the poor and telling his story. Two early eighteenth-century narratives portray conflicts in the Tandel Market, several hundred yards outside the Jewish Quarter, where Jews had stalls and Jewish-Christian contact was constant. In one, the author, Hirsch ben Selig Yampels, and a friend, Jacob ben Mendel Rofe, were arrested after purchasing garments from a pair of Christian merchants, accused of dealing in stolen goods20 (Figure 3.2). When they were sentenced to death, Rofe’s mother and Yampels’s wife, Miriam, went to Vienna to negotiate at the imperial court—Miriam hiring a wet nurse and leaving her infant child in Prague. After extensive negotiation, the death sentence was commuted to three years’ hard labor, and Yampels declared an annual day of fasting, to be followed by a night of feasting and joy, for himself and his descendants. A decade later, in 1732, a cobbler with a stall in the Tandel Market, Judah Leib ben David Hoschmann H ̣  ayyat, warned a customer that a man next to him was about to pick his pocket.21 In the general tumult that ensued,

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the cobbler was accused of striking the Christian. He, too, was released after protracted negotiations, with the aid of Jewish community leadership. Both these megillot may reflect increased Jewish-Christian tensions during this period.22 Another Prague megillah, Megillas Shmuel, der primus fun prag (the megillah of Samuel the primas of Prague) differs greatly from the others, written not by its protagonist, Samuel, but most likely by a nephew, H ̣  ayyim Tausk.23 About twenty pages long in the single extant manuscript (twenty-eight pages in the printed version), it tells of two enemies of this communal leader who succeed in a plot to frame Tausk as a French agent at a time when the French were at war with the Habsburg Monarchy. Because of Tausk’s role in the public affairs of Prague’s Jewish community and the detail of this narrative, it belongs as much to the community’s historical memory as to the Tausk family’s. The end of the megillah reports that Tausk established a fast day on 21 Shevat to be followed that night, the anniversary of his release, by a Purim day of joy, feasting, and drinking, with praises over a cup of wine, to be observed by his family and others who are close to him for all eternity.24 In contrast to every other megillah under discussion, the text of this one also states that it is as “a report for the world, a number of good copies to be publicly printed,” in order to give thanks to the emperor.25 If this was done (prior to an 1899 edition), no copies of it survive. In each of these narratives, the protagonist writes of the existential danger he faced, his miraculous rescue, and his establishment of a familial Purim to be celebrated in memory of his deliverance.

Denunciation, Defense, and Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller The best known of these familial megillot, and the only one to appear regularly on lists of premodern Jewish autobiography, is Megillat eivah, by Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller, chief rabbi of Prague, later of Cracow. Heller was born in 1578 in Wallerstein, in Swabia, shortly after the death of his father and raised by his grandfather, a leader of the local Jewish community.26 His wife, Rachel, was the daughter of a wealthy Prague merchant, Moses Aaron Munk, and, on her mother’s side, a member

Autobiographical Writing and Familial Commemoration

of the locally powerful Horowitz family. The couple lived in Prague, where Heller— often referred to, according to prevalent custom, by his father-in-law’s name, “Munk”—assumed posts of increasing responsibility as a rabbinic judge. In 1627, after tenures as chief rabbi in Nikolsburg (Mikulov), the most important Jewish center in Moravia, and in Vienna, he was called to be chief rabbi of Prague. By 1645, when Megillat eivah was completed, Heller was rabbi of Cracow, with Prague one of the most important Jewish centers of central and eastern Europe. He is well known today in traditional Jewish circles, particularly for his now canonical commentary to the Mishnah—the central portion of the oral law codified around 200 CE—known as Tosafot Yom-Tov (literally: Yom-Tov’s additions), first published between 1614 and 1617. He wrote his autobiographical narrative over the course of fifteen years, from 1629 to 1644. It exists in both Hebrew and Yiddish editions, both probably originally composed by Heller himself.27 Megillat eivah opens with a description of Heller’s rise to the chief rabbinate of Prague and the great honor he was accorded there, the scholarly books he composed, and the important positions he had held. He then sets up his imminent downfall with careful foreshadowing followed by a description of the political context of events, including Bohemian-Habsburg struggles and their exacerbation of internecine rivalries within the Jewish community, which he attributes to the tax burden placed on the Jewish community for state expenditures following the defeat of Frederick V’s armies at White Mountain: And he [King Frederick] did not complete a single year of his reign, when Ferdinand battled against him, sending chariots and 90,000 cavalry, and he pitched his camp on the White Mountain, which is next to the great city of Prague, and expelled him from the face of [this] land . . . and they returned to conquer the lands and the metropolis which is Prague . . . and because of this means of livelihood collapsed and expenditures for taxes of various sorts multiplied, and because of this the members of the [Jewish] community, may God protect and keep it, were forced to borrow with profits [for the lender], and when the time came to repay, division increased in the matter of the sum. Hearts were torn apart and [individuals] became distant [from each other].28

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The apportionment of taxes among the members of Prague’s Jewish community (assessed as an aggregate figure to be divided internally) was a continual point of contention and political friction within the community. As chief rabbi of Prague, Heller influenced the scheme of distribution for heavy new taxes. The heart of the matter seems to have been his role, or perceived role, in favoring some groups over others in tax assessment and in allowing some to charge interest to others for loans granted in these difficult circumstances. Differing approaches to taxation—the wealthier preferring a flat rate and the less wealthy a more progressive one—were at the heart of the differences among the political parties that fought each other for power in the local Jewish self-governing bodies.29 Heller was closely associated with Jacob Bassevi, the primas (akin to being mayor of the Jewish Town) and head of the faction representing the wealthiest strata of Prague Jewry and more ordinary resident Jews aligned with those families. Late one afternoon in the summer of 1629, Megillat eivah continues, the Old Town’s Kaiserrichter, the Habsburg official responsible for overseeing administration in Bohemian localities, came to Heller and had him arrested on charges of supposed anti-imperial and antiChristian sentiments in his rabbinic writings.30 These charges came about as a result of enemies from within the local Jewish communities who had “informed” on him. Those who denounced Heller, alleging that his Hebrew writings included blasphemous statements against Christianity, were probably Jews who, believing he had assessed their taxes too highly, sought to remove him from office. It is hard to know to what degree more personally based animosities may also have played a role.31 Heller took care to demonstrate that, despite placing him under arrest, in public the official treated him with great respect. The Kaiserrichter came to Heller’s home, where the rabbi had gathered friends and community elders around him, having been tipped off that he was sought after: “He [the Kaiserrichter] came and stretched out his hand to each one of us, with a fine countenance. I had already prepared two chairs, and he seated me to his right, and he sat to my left, and stayed in my home, speaking of various matters, one here, one there. After that, he told me that he had something to tell me

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privately, and went with me to an inner room, which was my own special study.”32 Honor preserved by his preferential seating and the discretion with which the official divulged his business, Heller then describes the misery of his transfer to Vienna, incarceration there, and the threat of a death sentence for blasphemy. Forty days of negotiations led to an agreement for Heller’s release in exchange for 12,000 Reichstalers. Bassevi, who had close ties with Albrecht Wallenstein, provided the first payment of 2000 Reichstalers, and the rabbi was set free. According to the prevalent model of communal and familial megillot and related tales reporting danger, rescue, and thanksgiving, this point in Heller’s story—his safe release and return to Prague—should have provided his narrative’s successful climax. But the reader has reached only about halfway through Megillat eivah. Heller still owed a cripplingly large debt and, more important from his point of view, was forbidden to serve in any rabbinic post within the Habsburg Monarchy. Unwilling to celebrate his rescue from danger, he established an annual familial fast day on the fifth of Tammuz, the day of his transfer from Prague to Vienna, but deferred the establishment of a celebratory commemoration. In the second half of Megillat eivah, Heller describes his temporary return to Prague, his successful efforts to raise money to pay the rest of the fine still owed the government, and his departure from the city: And on the second day of the month of Tammuz in the year 5391 [July 2, 1631], I paid off all the 10,000 Reichsthalers with the true help of God. And the next day I set off, I and my wife, and my youngest son, the intelligent young man Abraham, who had already found the spirit of wisdom, thanks to God, to his wedding in the holy community of Lublin, to marry the honorable young woman Esther daughter of the leader our teacher Rabbi Yeḥiel, son of the expert doctor, the wise man, the honorable Rabbi Solomon Luria, may the memory of the righteous be a blessing.33

With the crisis passed, the author-hero, weak and depressed, had left town to rebuild his career outside the borders of the Habsburg Monarchy. One would have expected, perhaps, for him to be ready, now, to establish a day of thanksgiving or to provide details of his first new rabbinic post. Instead, the reader encounters the account of this

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wedding, then an outline of his movements from one rabbinic post to another throughout Poland and Ukraine, each post slightly larger and more important than the last. Finally, in 1644, he was called to Cracow. Only then, fifteen years after the beginning of his tale, did Heller establish a Purim day for his family and descendants. On the final page of his composition, he writes: “I now establish a day of feasting and joy, the first day of the month of Adar . . . for all of your generations for all time—for myself, my sons and my daughters, and for my sons-in-law and daughters-in-law. For on this day the crown returned to its [glory] of old.”34 He had reached the chief rabbinate of one of the very few European Jewish communities on par with Prague in population and intellectual activity and finally declared the familial Purim day that is the raison d’être of most family megillot. Heller’s carefully constructed narrative suggests that his point of greatest despair was not the arrest and the threat of execution, but rather his removal from the chief rabbinate of Prague. Rather than a story of physical danger and rescue, it is, principally, a story of the sudden professional decline of a scholar who had reached great heights while very young and his gradual re-ascent. The cycle of descent and re-ascent could be closed only when Heller reached a position of respect and honor equivalent to that which he enjoyed in Prague. The passage effecting this transition from a report of arrest and release to a narrative rebuilding a professional career is Heller’s account of his son’s marriage immediately upon his departure from Prague. This may, indeed, have been what happened next, but until the account of his son’s marriage, he had never before, in the narrative, mentioned his family. Even when referring to his home in Prague, he wrote of the students who studied in a room dedicated to that purpose without mentioning the wife and children who must also have lived there. The incongruity of this sudden entry of domestic detail calls for interpretation. Possibly, it is related to stages in which he wrote Megillat eivah, over nearly a decade and a half. After the initial crisis had passed, Heller instituted a fast day for his family. It is entirely possible that he wrote the first part of his work at that point and the rest after becoming chief rabbi of Cracow. In that case, it is, perhaps, not so surprising that the second half of the writing would have a different tone and

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focus than the first. The report on his son’s wedding, then, introduces a different kind of narrative than that of the first half of the work, a narrative that will include more prosaic details of family life. There is, however, an alternative explanation. Heller’s report of his youngest son’s marriage is not a random detail that has slipped into a narrative previously unified around a specific central theme. Rather, at the very moment that he had left Prague, stripped of his status as rabbi, teacher, judge, and before he had arrived to take up a less prestigious rabbinic position elsewhere, Heller reported that he married his son to the granddaughter of Rabbi Solomon Luria, the physician, a cousin of Rabbi Solomon Luria, “Maharshal,” one of the most prominent rabbinic authorities of sixteenth-century Poland and patriarch of one of its most prominent rabbinic families. In other words, although Heller had been stripped of official titles, and despite whatever other charges, unpreserved by history, may have been circulated about him by his enemies in Prague, Heller emphasized that other rabbinic families of his status still viewed him as an equal and were ready to tie their families’ fortunes to his. This is by no means a marginal point but rather is central to Heller’s purpose throughout the megillah, and in his very writing of it: to defend his family name against the detractors who had him jailed and stripped of his rabbinic seat in the first place. Scholarship, wealth, and social standing were closely interrelated among the Ashkenazi elite of this period, and preserving the memories Heller recorded for future generations would have been particularly important, as the suspicions related to marriageability could stick to a family over the course of generations.35 The entire megillah acts as a tool against Heller’s denouncers. First, enemies had used the denunciation to the Habsburgs as a tool to attack Heller, and, presumably, his allies, and—most likely with this specific intent—to remove him from his leadership position in Prague. Heller, in response, used this supposedly familial document to rebuff the denunciation. He sought to portray events so as to benefit his image but also his family’s social status. In a short rhymed preface, Heller referred to his own family, but also to other, undefined readers, perhaps his students, as his targeted audience: “thus will this megillah inform and remind my descendants [literally: my seed] and all who read it.”36 Family and students, for

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example, could have used it to confirm their own understanding of the innocence and righteousness of their pater familias. Patriotic national histories, after all, are directed primarily at the citizens of their own nations. When Heller’s downfall occurred, the genre of family megillot had just started to take hold. Upon declaring a day of fasting in memory of his struggles, he writes, “I was uncertain as to whether I would also establish for them [members of his immediate family, including inlaws, and direct descendants] a day of feast and celebration on the 28th of Menaḥem Av, the day I was freed, for many of our people who were saved from decrees of death establish a day of feast and celebration on that date.”37 Heller confirms that celebratory familial Purim days were a recognized phenomenon at the time, but a need to explain what they are might reflect his awareness of the novelty of such days. In using a relatively newly established Jewish genre of family megillot to fashion and express his claims, Heller transformed the genre itself into an instrument for self-justification and social positioning. While extant family megillot and known familial Purim days that preceded his own had similar implications, their authors had not developed them as fully as Heller. Not all later examples from Prague are as totally absorbed by these questions as is Megillat eivah, but it characterizes most of them to some degree. Megillas Shmuel, about the primas of Prague, does so in a somewhat similar way, focusing on a leader of the Prague Jewish community, though as a civil rather than rabbinic leader. Like Heller, Samuel (Shmuel) Tausk was denounced for political reasons, his arrest and self-defense intricately tied up with local political affairs.38 Megillot were not the only site for such defense of local leaders; the family of Chief Rabbi Aaron Simon Spira-Wedeles used an engraved illustration on his gravestone to defend him against denunciations aired during his lifetime.39 And, on the other hand, the Tandel Market cases of the early eighteenth century, concerned with accusations of stolen goods and pickpockets, appear to involve Christian denunciations against Jews, and therefore a different dynamic, though certainly also concerned with their authors’ reputations. In the 1621–1622 case of Joseph Tein and H ̣  anokh Altschul’s returned curtains, the theme of denunciation is not mentioned, but a third,

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non-Jewish source reveals an additional angle to the story that the megillah authors concealed. The 10,000 gulden payment made in return for Tein’s release was specifically earmarked to endow a fund for the training of Jewish youth who had decided to convert to Christianity, a fund officially established, in the presence of Prague officials and Jewish elders, on January 7, 1622. The Jewish elders’ humiliation in carrying money on their shoulders to the city hall of the Old Town, which would administer the endowment, was intended, at least in part, to emphasize the linkage between the Jewish money and its intended purpose. The Jewish memories as constructed by the megillah authors conflict directly with another version, envisioned by Wallenstein, the Habsburg official administering Prague, who founded the institution: “Out of his special grace and generosity, as well as fervor for Catholic religious upbringing and its multiplication and for the eternal memory of his immortal name, that of his descendants and their future, as well as that of his Lord’s entire family of Wallenstein.”40 A document from 1663 attests to how few Jewish students made use of this money, but the endowment continued to function until the reign of Joseph II in the late eighteenth century. Tein and Altschul did, in fact, need to defend their names in the face of their families and contemporaries. As a whole, these documents of memory and genuine gratitude also positioned their authors as upstanding members of the society in which their families lived, worked, and married off their children. It is difficult to determine the degree to which internal strife brought on by warring political factions within the Prague community, as in the cases of the Heller and Tausk megillot, masked conflict between the Jewish community as a whole and the larger political power under whose discretion the Jews lived. Heller himself was so successful in using the genre of the family megillah to frame his story to his own advantage that history does not relate the name of his denouncer. Folklore passed down orally in Prague and put in writing in the early eighteenth century preserved more information about a possible rivalry between Heller and his patron Jacob Bassevi, on the one hand, and at least one other Prague rabbi on the other. In the midst of a genealogical introduction to his autobiographical Yesh manḥ ilin, Pinḥ as Katzenellenbogen (1691– ca. 1760), scion of a prominent Ashkenazi rabbinic family and himself

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rabbi in Boskovice, Moravia, and elsewhere, relates a story: Moses Mendels ben Isaiah Menaḥ em (d. 1641) was chief rabbi of Prague from about 1621, when Heller’s predecessor as chief rabbi, Isaiah Horowitz, set off to travel to the Land of Israel, until 1623, five years prior to Heller’s taking up the seat. Katzenellenbogen reported having heard the story when, as a young man, he was studying in a yeshiva in Prague: And there was a man who was called R. Jacob Schmieles [Bassevi], and because he was related by marriage to the ga′on, Tosfos Yom Tov zẓ  ″l [may the memory of the righteous be a blessing], he acted to remove the crown from the ga′on R. Moses [son of ] R. Mendels, so that he would no longer be the head of the rabbinic court in Prague. And he worked through the emperor, who was resident at that time in Prague, to have him expelled from Prague within 24 days. And that very day was erev Shabbat [Sabbath’s eve, Friday], and he [Mendels] went to the Altneuschul . . . and when he reached Psalm 109 [in the recitation of the Sabbath evening prayers] he [silently] directed that his recitation of that psalm be as a curse against that leader [Schmieles] and his entourage, and he [Mendels] went in a single leap from Prague and came to Posen on that same day, and was received as the head of the rabbinic court there, and there he rests in peace.41

According to the story, Bassevi used his influence with the authorities to remove Moses Mendels forcibly from office so that Heller, his choice, could become chief rabbi in his stead. (Heller’s daughter Doberish did marry Bassevi’s grandson Samuel, but after Moses Mendels had left Prague.)42 Mendels left Prague in great haste in 1623, but it is not known whether he was actually forced to go or perhaps left for family reasons. One twentieth-century scholar claims: “It is told that his reason for leaving so hurriedly lay in the fact that he had been denounced to the authorities for a forgery in his passport.”43 Mendels did not become head of the rabbinic court in Posen until approximately 1635, and Heller was not named chief rabbi in Prague until 1628. If, as the story alleges, Mendels was removed to make room for Heller, a five-year delay occurred before Heller’s appointment to the position. Although the facts are not clear, the story passed down orally sought to preserve the anti-Heller/Bassevi position in whatever

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intrigue, fighting, battle of denunciations took place in Prague’s Jewish community during the 1620s. According to this tale, Mendels’s curse against Bassevi eventually had the desired effect: “And his adversaries had a downfall, and the heart of the emperor turned on the leader Jacob Schmieles, who was so close to the regime that he was literally a counselor to the emperor, and he was arrested and held in iron chains and died. And no name or relative, grandchild or greatgrandchild was left to him there in Prague, other than one deaf old woman, who did not speak and did not hear.”44 Bassevi did indeed die in 1634, disgraced and relatively impoverished in semiexile in Mladá Boleslav (Jungbunzlau) in northeastern Bohemia, just months after the assassination of his patron Albrecht von Wallenstein. The narrator is justified in celebrating the decline of Bassevi’s memory in Prague but wrong to think that the opposite party, the Mendels faction, won the battle for memory and preservation of the family name. Ultimately, the oral tradition proved no match for Heller’s megillah, which circulated widely in manuscript. He had succeeded in using the text to protect his family’s name and status.

Early Modern Jewish Autobiographical Discourse The megillot constitute a unique Jewish genre within the wider context of autobiographical writing in early modern Europe. Much scholarship about the historical development of such writing—including Jewish autobiography—has taken as its principal focus the investigation of the self and the author’s relationship to his or, less frequently, her individuality.45 As recent scholarship shows, however, questioning the degree of a “self ” that may or may not be “revealed” in the course of Megillat eivah or investigating its veracity as a source for historical events will yield little in the way of understanding Heller’s purpose in undertaking his autobiographical endeavor. Nor would answers to those questions contribute to understanding how contemporaries and close descendants read Heller’s work. Heller’s explication of his life’s wanderings, of the reasons behind his departure from Prague, and his acceptance of relatively minor rabbinic positions elsewhere,

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not befitting his social or intellectual status, were designed to justify his life’s course in order to position himself and his family socially. Megillat eivah is not a full-scale autobiography but a first-person narration of a segment of the author’s life written neither to reveal his soul nor to reckon his place in this world and the next, but with particular, worldly purposes in mind. In this sense, Megillat eivah perfectly demonstrates characteristics that have led scholars to employ the terms “egodocuments” and “Selbstzeugnisse” to refer to any comments authors record about their own lives, whatever their genre, nature, length, or place in the overall text concerned. This scholarship, much of it specifically about early modern Europe, seeks to understand what it was that more immediately drove the writers. Rather than “autobiography” as a fully developed, booklength literary genre reflecting on an entire life span, such scholarship generally employs these more encompassing terms to describe a wide variety of modes in which individuals wrote, generally in the first person, texts recording aspects of their lives, whether in business ledgers, travel journals, confessional narratives of spiritual discovery or conversion, or family chronicles.46 Autobiographers’ concerns were often focused primarily on where they fit in society, not on revelations of individuality.47 The evolution of a genre of Jewish community-wide historical writing, the local megillah, into a first-person family-focused genre converges chronologically with the growing significance of autobiographical writing in European history at large.48 In early seventeenthcentury Prague and Vienna, at the heart of Habsburg court culture, and in the more outlying areas of its sphere of influence, prominent figures like the astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) and Emperor Matthias’s top advisor, Melchior Khlesl (1552 –1630), wrote autobiographies, and Bohemian nobles composed autobiographical travel accounts.49 Whether or not Heller read or was even aware of these works, he was born, educated, and pursued his rabbinic career in the same general, Habsburg-dominated geographical and cultural realm as these men. Nor was he the only Jewish man in central Europe at this time to compose an autobiographical work.50 One might expect that others with similar or related aims—who perhaps had not experienced such a dramatic, encapsulateable moment

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of deliverance—would have used other types of autobiographical writing for similar purposes of self-justification. Jews did write in many of the same types of autobiographical writing Christian contemporaries employed, such as travel writing, ethical wills, and confessional tracts (though these mostly when they converted to Christianity).51 Yet, besides the megillot, the one that Prague Jews composed most frequently was in authors’ introductions to their published or manuscript books. Introductions to rabbinic works emerged late in the geonic period (ca. 700 –1000 CE) and were firmly established by medieval times. Among the most famous including significant autobiographical excurses are  the fourteenth-century Ẓ eidah laderekh by Menaḥ em ben Zeraḥ  and the fifteenth-century biblical commentary by Don Isaac Abarbanel (1437–1508), a courtier, financier, and biblical exegete. But although many scholars have drawn on information in these passages, little if any scholarship addresses the texts as a distinct genre.52 Common to Ben Zeraḥ ’s and Abarbanel’s introductions, as to others, is a central motif of displacement caused by a pivotal event—in these two cases expulsion— of an ideal world lost, of attempts, never quite successful, to recapture that lost glory.53 Reading the introductions independent of the books to which they are attached most likely defies their authors’ original intent but allows a side-by-side comparison of the substantive similarities with the seemingly unrelated genre of ­family megillot. The close relationship of these two literary forms is highlighted by the way Heller’s work drew on and was later drawn upon by other Jewish authors with related aims writing in very different genres.54 A  century and a half before Heller wrote, Abarbanel had begun his introduction to his commentary on the Book of Joshua with these words:55 I was living serenely in my home among my riches, an inheritance from my fathers, a home full of the blessing of the Lord, in Lisbon, a glorious city in Israel, in the kingdom of Portugal, there God commanded blessing before me, with stores of wealth and honor and the delights of mortal men, I built myself homes and spacious upper chambers, my home was a meeting place for sages, for there were seats of judgment, where books departed from my mouth and from the mouths of authors of good taste, knowledge, and fear of God, in my

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home and within my walls there was great wealth and righteousness, a monument and a name, Torah and greatness, as the greatest men who ever were. And I was flourishing in the palace of the King Don Alfonso, king, great warrior and ruler of a great kingdom, who ruled from sea to sea, and succeeded in all he did.56

Heller’s Megillat eivah opens: I was living serenely in my home, flourishing in my palace, the holy community of Prague, these twenty-eight odd years, during which time it was their custom to select me, year after year, to serve as their leader, a judge of the type “dayyan moreh,” who are the heroes of the war for Torah, for every difficult case is subject to their ruling. Besides that, from the day I attained adulthood, there was constant study of Torah around my table, and I designated a special room in my house, where groups studied in shifts, day and night they did not cease from study, and I was their head, and their eyes . . .57

The circumstances in which Heller and Abarbanel wrote were quite different: by the time Abarbanel wrote this passage, he had fled from political intrigue in Portugal to Castile. Then, when the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, he had left there for the Italian peninsula. Heller, nevertheless, drew on Abarbanel’s trope in writing an autobiographical narrative of a crisis of betrayal and expulsion. Beyond that, he adopted terminology directly from his Sephardi predecessor, beginning with a paraphrase of Daniel 4:1: “I was living serenely in my home” (shalev hayiti beveiti). Like earlier autobiographical introductions, Heller painted images of an ideal world lost. However, while Ben Zeraḥ  and Abarbanel suffered at the hands of non-Jewish rulers, Heller blamed treacherous fellow Jews and divisions within the community for his difficulties. As Heller had drawn on earlier Hebrew autobiographical writing in framing his own narrative, so, too, would a later author, another Prague rabbi, Uri Shraga Feibush H ̣  alfan (1640 –1707), draw on Heller’s text. H ̣  alfan was a teacher and rabbinic judge in Prague, though never the city’s chief rabbi. He appears to have been a fierce rival of Benjamin Wolf Spira-Wedeles, son of Aaron Simon Spira-Wedeles, chief rabbi from 1640 until his death in 1679, and a member of the opposing

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political party. By 1694, H ̣  alfan had left Prague, though he returned at some point and was buried there in 1707.58 Like Heller, he painted a picture of an ideal world lost through intracommunal divisions and the treachery of fellow Jews. In a passage that echoes Abarbanel’s and Heller’s openings, H ̣  alfan wrote in the introduction to Sefer dat eish, a book of his responsa: My regular income was in the faithful city, great unto God, the holy community of Prague, a city that has everything, full of wisdom and understanding. And there I taught Torah to many students, who harkened to me, to my mighty voice, which brought hidden mysteries to light. And I would sit in my tent [i.e., sit and study] and was not afraid to design new remedies, here to permit, and here to forbid, as it is well known that I was there in the holy community of Prague twenty years straight, one of the special leaders, head of the rabbinic court of those known as “moreh shaveh.” These are the special and superior among the courts to which all the difficult cases are brought and to whose ruling they are subject.59

Like his predecessors, H ̣  alfan opened with a scene of his own wise leadership and teaching against a tranquil, almost rosy backdrop, setting up the fall that is soon to come. H ̣  alfan also mentions, as did Heller, a specialized category of rabbinic judgeship in which he served. Although Megillat eivah was not printed until the nineteenth century, it circulated widely in manuscript. Its reach beyond Heller’s immediate family and continued role in “autobiographical discourse” is evident from this passage.60 By 1694, H ̣  alfan had left Prague, in his own view chased out of town in the wake of a devastating fire that leveled the Jewish Quarter in 1689. Of more than three hundred buildings that stood in the ghetto before the fire, each home to as many as ten families, fewer than ten survived. H ̣  alfan’s property, including his own writings in manuscript, was almost completely destroyed. In the ruins, he found “melted silver and the like” and used this material (presumably, sold it) to support himself. Even before the fire, H ̣  alfan writes in his introduction, jealous enemies had opposed him, feeding on his learning and success. Now, he charged that these adversaries had arranged for him to be assessed especially high taxes, such that he was forced

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to leave the city, and moved to serve as rabbi in a smaller Bohemian community. H ̣  alfan and Heller employ similar language in describing what each views as a poisonous atmosphere that led each to his fall. Heller describes the days preceding his arrest: Hearts were torn apart and [individuals] became distant [from each other], conspiracies were forged secretly and even in the open. I worked tirelessly to draw [people] closer and not to distance them, once gently and another time harshly, and none of this was effective. As King Solomon said, “A clever man conceals his humiliation” [Proverbs 12:16]. Therefore, I will not record in this book the names of the sinners who transgressed against me, and God, may He be blessed, will forgive all. May His name be blessed for now and all time, amen amen. And I did not believe when they told me and warned me saying: they have hatched a conspiracy, and not solely against the [lay] leaders but also against you. For I knew with certainty that I had not exploited [anyone] nor done evil, and I had perpetrated no injustice.61

And H ̣  alfan wrote of the atmosphere in Prague preceding the fire: And because of this my enemies multiplied, many rising up against me, these notorious warriors. They who went out to war against me with a warrior’s sharpened arrows, their tongue is a sharpened arrow. And their tongues reached out to great length to fill their mouths, their sin extended up to the heavens. And they assaulted me with their jealousy. Despite all this, I paid no heed to the evil measures that they gathered against me; I received all with love and affection and I said, “God will annihilate them through their own wickedness” [Psalms 94:23]. With every wave that came against me I turned my head to them and spoke to the words of appeasement and placation in order to placate them. Nevertheless, they did not withdraw from their anger and rage. And their hatred for me increased.62

Each author emphasized that he spared no effort to reach a settlement with his enemies, but that all such efforts were in vain. The passage of time teaches that these two authors were correct in their decisions not to record in print the names of their enemies, since their names, unlike those of Heller and H ̣  alfan, are virtually unknown today.63 The enemies Heller railed against presumably belonged to the anti-Bassevian

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faction in Prague Jewish politics, H ̣  alfan’s enemies probably members 64 of the ruling Catena Party. Both authors use the language of “going out clean” from something as an expression for total loss.65 Both complain of the groundless attacks continuing after they left Prague, each experiencing a new threat to a new rabbinic post.66 The similarity ends there. Heller went on to rehabilitate his rabbinic career; H ̣  alfan never quite managed to do so. He described being called to the community of Bumsla (the name in Jewish sources of the same town where Bassevi had died, Mladá Boleslav in Czech, Jungbunzlau in German), a respectable Jewish community of medieval origins in northern Bohemia, but a great deal smaller and less important than Prague.67 Of primary importance here is H ̣  alfan’s construction of his own short autobiographical narrative, in which the move is regarded as a step that was forced upon the author, not one that was made from a desire to branch out professionally. In Bumsla, with unbelievably bad luck, H ̣  alfan was struck by yet another devastating fire. Most of the remainder of his introduction dwells on rabbinic exposition of the notion of consolation through fire, its focus the destruction of Jerusalem.68 The texts by H ̣  alfan and Heller bear a striking resemblance to each other, despite their quite different endings. Each describes a sudden descent from an honorable position as rabbinic judge and teacher in Prague and the author’s exile from the city— exile in practical terms if not legal. Each seeks to justify his professional path. Each emphasizes that this narrative of self-justification should be heard not only by contemporaries but also by generations to come. To this end, Heller established annual commemorations that legally obligated his unborn descendants. In Sefer dat eish, a son acted to publish his father’s book, a widespread practice for eternalizing a father’s memory. More crucially, certain passages of Heller’s megillah echo so strongly through H ̣  alfan’s introduction that it is only logical to suppose that H ̣  alfan had read Megillat eivah and consciously relied on it as a model. On the one hand, Megillat eivah took its inspiration from both the Book of Esther (Megillat Esther) and from the Book of Lamentations (Megillat eikhah), and also echoed Abarbanel; on the other, it served as inspiration to a later scholar.

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Like the megillot, some autobiographical passages in introductions to books served as refutation of charges against the family name, made through attack on its patriarch. Tales of deliverance that simultaneously gave thanks and served for self-justification appeared in both genres. In 1708, Moses Meir Perles (generally known as Meir Perles), rescued from a violent winter storm, declined to write his own megillah, composing instead his Megillat sefer, a commentary to the canonical Book of Esther.69 Perles, a community scribe and burial society official, was a Prague native. He had studied under Rabbi Abraham Gombiner (known as the Magen Avraham) in Kalisz, in Poland, had traveled through Germany and Holland, and had served the court Jew Rabbi Samson Wertheimer in Vienna, all before returning to settle in his home city. In the introduction to Megillat sefer, Perles recounts that, overwhelmed in Prague, he had departed in search of peace and quiet, finding both, along with much honor and respect, in Amsterdam. Acquaintances in Amsterdam pleaded for him to publish his books there (where he would not be subject to the censorship of Habsburg authorities), but he decided against it. He returned to Prague, then set out for Vienna to seek assistance—apparently for publication of his books—from Wertheimer. On the way, at the village of Nussdorf, a winter storm prevented his continuing on, and he observed Purim and the Sabbath preceding it (Shabbat zakhor) in Nussdorf with several other stranded Jewish travelers: And when I came close to the city of Vienna, several times I encountered deep waters and the river’s current gushed over me, for the waters reached over the height of a person. Many tribulations came on me in those difficult and strange times, in the fierce cold, for even the elders do not remember a winter like that of 5469 [1708/1709]. And after all the miracles which God performed for me, to save me, the snow and awesome ice began to melt, until it became impossible to [cross] the Danube River close to Vienna. And on the eve of the Holy Sabbath we crossed the river, and we nearly died, thanks to God who saved us, and we came to the village of Nussdorf.70

Perles vowed that if he arrived home safely, he would write a commentary to the Book of Esther as an act of thanksgiving and require his children to read from it annually at this time of year:

Autobiographical Writing and Familial Commemoration

I swore an oath to God that if I returned to my home in peace, then I would write a commentary of this megillah [the Book of Esther] to be as a remembrance for me and for my descendants after me for all time . . . I decreed that my children and my descendants after me forever [must] every year at this time read some of this commentary of mine as an eternal memorial before God . . .71

Perles sent letters ahead to Wertheimer to try to arrange permission for him to enter the city after the danger had passed but was unsuccessful and turned back.72

“To Write Endless Books”: Introductions, Authorship, and Rabbinic Identity On one level, Perles presented a rescue tale echoing those of the family megillot but attached to the “real” Megillat Esther rather than as the basis for an independent tale. As in Heller’s megillah, the physical deliverance from the winter storm is not the literary climax; the climax came, once again, as self-justification. Yet, here, personal denunciations were not at the heart of the problem. When, earlier in his narrative, Perles described—in terms sometimes reminiscent of Heller’s—the great honor with which he was received in Amsterdam, the luxurious lodgings in which he was hosted and the positive reception of his preaching, he also wrote: And they pleaded with me a great deal to print one of the books that I had with me, and I did not listen to them. For I said: the people of the country of Holland are divided in their faith with the people of these [Habsburg] countries. And lest, God forbid, something should be printed that is not acceptable to the people in these countries and their nobles, for the proofreaders there do not monitor so much. They will say that because I printed outside this country, the land of my birth, where I live, so that I would be able to print whatever my heart desired with no oversight, even if it is something that contradicts and is opposed to their faith, which is something that I did not say and did not command and did not, God forbid, even occur to me. For it is my custom always to pray for the wellbeing of the kingdom and the nobles and all the appointed officers, each according to his work. Even

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the dog catcher [reish gargutni]73 who is appointed by his majesty the king, may you God attain their wellbeing and multiply it, because their peace and wellbeing is peace and wellbeing for us and in what is good for them, is what is good for us. . . . Therefore, even though Amsterdam’s [Hebrew] printing house is praiseworthy and elegant, and the officers [keẓ inim] wanted to give me great aid and assistance, despite all that I would not listen to their words and their advice. And we agreed that I would not print anything from my books until I obtained the permission of his Majesty for each book individually.74

The agreement that Perles would obtain permission from the Habsburg censors before publishing his books, even outside the lands of the Habsburg Monarchy, led to his departure from Amsterdam, first to Prague and then to Vienna, presumably in order to obtain that permission.75 What is less clearly stated is that the assistance for which he traveled to Vienna, to visit Samson Wertheimer, was for lobbying for permission from the Habsburg censors to publish his books. It was in the course of trying to fulfill this mission that he was detained in Nussdorf and vowed to write his commentary if he returned home safely. This passage, then, is central to the development of Perles’s autobiographical narrative because it offers an explanation as to why he had not yet published any of his books. A first reading of Megillat sefer highlighted a crisis whose immediate cause was the harsh winter and ensuing flooding, exacerbated by enemies who prevented delivery of a crucial letter to Vienna. A second reading shows that the very reason for the trip was Perles’s attempt to publish his books in a manner he thought fitting. The scholarly and social standing Perles sought, toward the top of the Jewish male “secondary intelligentsia,” required the publication of one or more books. Members of this group included learned men not considered the leading stars of their generation, not serving as heads of yeshivot and rabbinic courts in major Jewish centers, men who sometimes held no communal office at all, and at other times functioned as scribes, cantors, ritual slaughterers, and the like or held the top rabbinic positions in more remote Jewish communities.76 Historian Elchanan Reiner has shown (based, in part, on an example from Prague) that individuals of this class were responsible for expanding the uses of print, especially in the early seventeenth

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century.77 In contrast to a traditional reticence of some rabbis to the very notion of writing a book, not to speak of printing one, authorship of a book—whether of halakhah (Jewish law) or biblical or liturgical commentary—became a mark of self-worth and even of identity, as many gravestones and introductions listing the deceased’s compositions demonstrate.78 At the same time, a book introduction was a logical place to frame one’s life story in a positive light. French theorist Gérard Genette has viewed authors’ prefaces to written works as a space of mediation between an author’s work and its readers, providing, for example, instructions as to how the author wishes his own work to be read.79 Following that logic, when an author is as closely identified with his text as rabbinic authors were, then the introduction instructed the reader not only how to read the book, but also how to read the author himself. Abraham Groti was, like Perles, of the social elite and “secondary intelligentsia,” married into one of Prague’s leading families, distinguished by its lineage and in political position, and loosely connected with the circles surrounding the Oppenheim and Wertheimer families of Vienna. Groti was son of a rabbi, conversant with rabbinic literature, but not secure financially. In the brief, two-page introduction to his Sefer be′er Avraham, a commentary on the Passover Haggadah (liturgy for home use on the night of the Passover Seder), Groti provides just a few details about his life, most in a highly stylized form. Then, about halfway through the narrative, the reader comes to the revelation that the author had been in jail. At that moment, Groti had vowed to write his commentary to the Passover Haggadah: “And I vowed at the time of my distress that I would write a small work and commentary on the Passover Haggadah according to what is needed at this time, small in quantity but of great quality, with fair reasons and sweet explanations concisely written so that it would be studied. . . . And I called it Be′er Avraham [well of Abraham] because I dug down and drew water from a deep well when I was in prison where there are few books, for there can be no artist without an instrument.”80 The crisis of imprisonment is the central element around which Groti’s narrative—and his representation of himself in this context—is constructed, though he does not explain

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the grounds for his arrest. Only the approbation written for the book by Rabbi Abraham Broda (d. 1717), head of the yeshiva in Prague and Landesrabbiner of Bohemia, reveals that Groti was imprisoned for accumulation of debts.81 “All this notwithstanding,” Groti wrote, “I did not abrogate the Tamid [the twice daily offering in the Temple, literally meaning “always” or “perpetual”], and I studied Torah from the midst of the duress.”82 An exegetical passage of several lines makes the point that one should not accept payment for teaching the oral law, though remuneration is permitted for teaching the written law.83 He thus seems to justify his lack of funds as resulting from his refusal to take money for duties involving teaching and explication of the oral law. Groti did not refer in his narrative to his release from jail. The writing of his book functions as the narrative redemptive force. Toward the end of his introduction, Groti entreated God: “May He complete [my mission] on my behalf so that I may merit to print my work, ‘H ̣  esed l′Avraham’ [another book he has written, still in manuscript]. And may He be as my helper to learn and to teach the Torah of truth. May [it] not depart from my mouth and from the mouths of my descendants. And to write endless books, without obstacles.”84 Groti’s list of wishes for himself draws attention to the significance of the act of authorship—and publication— of rabbinic-type works in this individual’s conception of his own self-worth. Writing “endless” books is intimately bound up here with the study of Torah. What is more, its close juxtaposition with the notion that Groti’s descendants should never cease from learning Torah links his authorship to future generations, a theme taken up more explicitly by other authors, and, at times, by authors’ children. Groti, like Perles, seeks to explain not only his book but himself, and to justify his membership in the scholarly class. His self-justification, like those of the family megillot, is framed as a familial legacy—the obligation of his children and descendants to read from his work annually. So, too, Perles described the process of composing a book of commentary for publication, beginning with writing glosses in the margins of the text to be explicated: “I wrote in the margins as I said, as a sentry for me and for my descendants after me.”85 He hoped the process would indeed lead to publication, but even if it did not, that his

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descendants’ use of the manuscript itself would serve as a memorial to himself: And if many years remain for me on the face of the earth, perhaps I will merit to build this splendid, delightful house from the cedars of Lebanon that I will plant, where birds will build their nests and fill this house with light, and I will merit to carry out [its publication]. And if, God forbid, I shall not merit [this], then behold my sons and my descendants after me will see every word that is written on the sheet, and they will repeat the saying in my name, “that I might dwell in Your tent forever, take refuge in Your protecting wings, Selah” [Psalms 61:5], for this is all that a person is. Man was created only for this.86

Perles’s children and grandchildren will remember him through this work, and by remembering him aid in his salvation. Such introductions, published in print, place family legacy in a clearly public context, and thus position it socially. Even when lacking autobiographical introductions, published books were frequently conceived of as memorials, particularly children’s to their parents, almost always sons’ to their fathers.87 David Oppenheim memorialized his mother in his introduction to his Tehila ledavid, which remains, still, in manuscript.88 More often than writing books in memory of their parents, sons—and also, occasionally, daughters— arranged for the publication of deceased fathers’ manuscripts. In seventeenth-century Prague, three generations of the Horowitz family undertook a back-and-forth process of writing and rewriting the ethical will Yesh noḥ alin. Written by Abraham Horowitz in the late sixteenth century, it was emended and printed by his son Jacob in Prague in 1615 and reprinted, with the addition of an ethical will, by his grandson Shabbetai Sheftel in Amsterdam in 1701. Shabbetai Sheftel also wrote an entire work, Vavei amudim, in the form of an introduction to his father Isaiah’s already famous Shenei luḥ ot habrit.89 In another family, H ̣  ayyim ben Issachar Baer Eilenburg reported his father’s careful plan for him to finish his work and thus preserve his memory. Issachar, who was born in Posen and studied under Mordecai Jaffe and Maharal, had written a supercommentary on Rashi’s commentary to the Torah, called Ẓ eidah laderekh. H ̣  ayyim published the work in Prague in 1623, with a short foreword in which he quoted his father as saying to him:

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Behold, I die, for the time of death has fallen upon me. What man will live and not see his death? Therefore, I command my son after me to preserve and to execute my will, and I assign you one portion more than to your brothers, my youngest son, exceeding in rank and exceeding in honor, new commentaries that I have written with the help of heaven on Rashi, the great light, on the five books of Torah, whose waters we drink and from whose mouth we live. And the work is the work of heaven hidden in my hand. You are to complete the work I did, this will be to you, my great son, as a double portion, to bring it to publication in a printing house, so that many may merit by it, and the merit of many will be attached to you, and he will choose life [H ̣  ayyim].90

The motif of a published work serving as a memorial to one’s parent could, then, take on different forms: publishing a father’s unpublished work, by specific instruction or by one’s own initiative; or by composing one’s own work and dedicating it, in the introduction, to the memory of a parent.

“For Seven Children Who Died” Authorship, in the sense described here, was a fundamentally male notion, but in one exceptional case from Prague, a woman and her husband composed a book to perpetuate the memory not of a parent but of their seven dead children. Beila Perlhefter wrote the introduction to the work, Sefer be′er sheva, an ethical treatise in Yiddish, composed—at her urging, according to that introduction—by her husband, Issachar Baer Perlhefter (Samuel Issachar Baer ben Judah Leib Eibschutz).91 Baer had been a teacher to Christian Hebraist Johann Christoph Wagenseil at Altdorf in the mid-1670s, and correspondence from that period, between him and Beila (in Yiddish), and between Beila and Wagenseil himself (in Hebrew), survives.92 From there the couple went to Mantua, Italy, leaving suddenly in March 1682. Perlhefter was known to be a Sabbatean, a follower of Shabbetai Ẓ evi, the selfdeclared Messiah who had converted to Islam in 1666 and died a decade later and whose adherents still anxiously awaited his return. At one time, Baer, as others of his Prague circles, also supported Mordecai of Eisenstadt (1650 –1729), a self-declared successor to Shabbetai Ẓ evi,

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though in 1681 he declared Mordecai mad and began to speak and write against him.93 Sefer be′er sheva was never printed, but at least nine manuscripts survive, copied throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, some with elaborately drawn title pages whose designs resembled those of printed works94 (Figure 6.1). In her introduction, Beila relates that her husband had consoled her in grief over her children with various proofs from stories and rabbinic sources. She had therefore pleaded with him to record these tales and explanations in a book, for the benefit of those who experienced similar losses. Beila credits her husband with the decision to dedicate the work to the memory of their seven children; she quotes him as saying he will write the book in seven parts, each named for one of the children, first the four sons and then the three daughters.95 Beila’s introduction opens with an exposition of the beginning of the Book of Ecclesiastes in which the biblical exegesis is intertwined with sharp social criticism. King Solomon, she informs her readers, sought to explain that families and their fortunes appear and disappear, as the sun is sometimes exposed and sometimes concealed, always present but not always visible. Quoting from the Book of Ecclesiastes (1:5), she explains: “King Solomon, may he rest in peace, said that the sun shines early in the morning, and in the evening it goes back under, and into the gates that it steals into during the evening. And its light shines inside of them. He wants to say that even though the sun goes away, nevertheless its light does not go out, but rather it turns from the world and shines in a different [land].”96 She links the sun’s going and coming with the going and coming of particular families, quoting, “One generation goes, another comes, but the earth remains the same forever” (Ecclesiastes 1:4).97 Material fortune itself does not signify God’s good will; quite the contrary, generally the poor are the righteous and the wealthy evil.98 The impoverished and those “punished by God” should not despair, for their happiness, like the sun, is only temporarily hidden. After several pages, and rather abruptly, she ties this lesson to her own fate, informing the reader that she herself has gone through tumultuous and unlucky times: “And the luck [glick] and happiness that I had with my children was overthrown, so that I endure their deaths daily, and suffer pain. Four boys and three girls

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who were born to me were lost again in the deathly time. Sadness has overtaken me so that I cannot tell up from down.”99 (Glick can be translated as luck, but Beila uses it interchangeably with the Hebrew, mazal, which can refer to an astronomical sign, and there is some internal evidence that that may be her intention here.) It is the fortune of Beila’s own family that has been—temporarily— eclipsed. She justifies that eclipse through an extended explanation of the arbitrariness of God’s ways and the lack of relationship between good deeds and good fortune in this world: For sins do not cause the death of children, as our sages indicate in the Talmud in Tractate Mo′ed katan, when they state [quoted in the original Aramaic]: “children, life, and food are dependent not on merit but on luck [mazal].” That means, in taytsh: “the birth of children, or their continued life, long life, and the earning of one’s sustenance are not dependent on piety or mere malevolence, but rather each comes to one according to his luck [glick].” He may be a pious or an evil man, but have no luck [glick] for these three things that we have named above. It happens often that a man is evil, but lucky in these three things: with the birth of children, life, and wealth.100

Fortunes, like families, come and go. Beila’s introduction protests her righteousness and her husband’s, as if to proclaim, “We are not guilty in the deaths of our children!” One can only imagine what rumors may have circulated— quietly or not—among Prague’s women and men when this couple of known Sabbateans was smitten with the loss of seven children, even though other families had lost multiple children in the plague of 1679 –1680, and such tragedies were not limited to Prague. (One may speculate that plague took her children as well, but Beila does not relate the cause of their deaths.) Jacob Emden, in his eighteenth-century autobiographical work, also called Megillat sefer, reports the deaths of many of his children during his lifetime.101 But with the Perlhefter family, it would have been all too easy, and psychologically understandable, to associate such terrible fortune with the couple’s perceived sins. Though Beila’s introduction includes only minimal autobiographical remarks, it shares with contemporaneous writings about the self a concern with justifying her own life path.

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Beila’s reference to the sun that seems to disappear while, in fact, its light merely shines in a different place may refer not only to the fortunes of her own family but also Shabbetai Ẓ evi himself. Her memorial is interwoven in a text of social, and to a lesser extent religious, criticism, aimed at haughty rich people who consider themselves courtly and disdain to so much as greet poor neighbors in the street, satirically attacking those who equate wealth with importance, perhaps more accurately understood as standing in the community.102 Her opinions in these matters echo earlier preaching and written works by some Prague rabbis, and ideas about the superiority of the poor over the rich featured in the particular stream of Sabbateanism espoused, at least at times, by Baer Perlhefter and Mordecai of Eisenstadt.103 Beila’s defense of her own—and, by association, her husband’s— character and proclamation of their innocence in their children’s deaths is, therefore, inextricably intertwined with social criticism and an affirmation and Yiddish restatement of one particular, social element of her husband’s Sabbatean teachings. Beila used a book, whose composition she, in essence, commissioned—according to her own testimony—as a memorial. Like the other books described here, her introduction explained both how the book was to be read and how she and her husband are to be “read.” She also created a strong linkage between the religious and spiritual beliefs held by her husband and herself as a memorial to her children. The opening of Beila’s introduction, emphasizing the coming and going of families, together with its ending, in which the book’s seven parts are named for her seven children, combine to emphasize the concern that the loss of children marks the erasure of her family from memory. Barren rather than bereaved, monumentally wealthy, childless Mordecai Maisel had sought to have a synagogue carry his name forward; if Beila was not to have descendants to carry on her beliefs, perhaps this book would act in their stead. This is true whether or not specifically Sabbatean messages were intended. Overall, it is not clear whether the antiwealth, antiestablishment strain of Beila’s introduction had its roots, at least in part, in some aspect of her womanhood, or whether it reflects the particular brand of Sabbatean messianism with which her husband was so closely identified. Whatever the case,

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her decision that a book by her husband would be a proper memorial to their children, and her employment of that book’s introduction to exegetically demonstrate their innocence in that tragedy, form a very different trope in the attempt to construct memory than any other that has come to light from early modern Prague. The ways family megillot and autobiographical introductions developed during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries affected the familial memories of European Jews. Any particular familial tale was more likely to be remembered when a genre that could easily encapsulate it was well known. Especially in a period when no similar form existed, for example, to describe an individual’s experience of education or birth of a first child, few such tales were written down, and fewer survive.104 What is more, the familial rescue tales’ incorporation of autobiographical incidents into families’ own domestic ritual years, tightly interwoven with the Jewish liturgical year, helped ensure survival of the memory. Even Maimonides, perhaps the best known Jew between the end of the biblical period and modern times, lacked a megillah for his annual day of fasting, which suffered almost complete oblivion, surviving in a single obscure source. Heller, a prominent personality in his own time, but of a stature that can hardly compete with Maimonides, had a megillah and designated Purim day that survive even today, continually reprinted and still celebrated by some survivors. Once the megillot existed, the familial commemorations were more likely to survive. Like other autobiographical writing of the period, they justify their authors’ actions and should be seen first and foremost as thus positioning the authors and their families in broader social networks. The ritual creativity of these writings in early modern Prague demonstrates the considerable self-confidence of their authors, who believed their own experiences no less worthy of the creation of a new festival, for the family circle alone, than any other Jew’s, including past heroes. Each fit into the larger Prague Jewish calendar, but rather than revealing a lack of concern for history, each demonstrated quite the opposite. A parallel phenomenon developed on a communal level as well.

Four

“Established the Day”



 uthorship, Communal Authority, A and Local Traditions

On May 23, 1618, members of the mostly Protestant Bohemian Diet marched from their meeting place in the Old Town, across the bridge spanning the Vltava River, up to Prague Castle, and tossed three Catholic Habsburg officials (two regents and a secretary) out the window. Catholic forces attributed their survival to the intervention of the Virgin Mary; others suggested they had landed in an enormous pile of dung. In August of the following year, the Bohemian estates elected the Calvinist elector Frederick V of the Palatine as king, contesting the accession of Emperor Matthias’s appointed Habsburg successor, the ardent Counter-Reformer Ferdinand II.1 The Jews in Prague had been aligned with the royal House of Habsburg as their protectors, their presence in Prague stridently opposed, at times, by burghers and by certain guilds.2 The ascent of Frederick V as king, and therefore, as far as Bohemian authorities were concerned, the highest authority in the land, put Jews in an untenable position. Thus, as sovereign, he was the address to which the Jews should, according to experience, have turned for protections. He also represented Bohemian national and religious aspirations. At the same time, in addition to their natural reluctance to support the townspeople’s ally over their own traditional protector, Frederick was not universally recognized as king beyond Bohemia’s borders. On October 31, 1619, Frederick entered Prague with his wife, Elizabeth, daughter of King James of England. The day after his coronation, representatives of the city’s Jewish community bestowed lavish gifts in an audience with the king.3 It is hard to say to what degree their gifts to Frederick on the occasion of his coronation were presented of

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necessity—motivated solely by proper protocol and the need to seek the protection of the new king—and to what degree more complex feelings could have stood behind them, at least on the part of some of the community’s members. At the very least they would have tried to bet on both horses at once, as it were, as best they could, protecting themselves for any eventuality. The few written records reflecting the response of Prague’s Jews to the stormy events reveal palpable fear. A few weeks after the coronation, one man wrote to his lonely wife in Vienna that she could not join him in Prague: “One is in a greater danger here than ever; may God have mercy on us and all Israel, for we need the compassion of heaven.”4 Another wrote: “Regarding the situation of the community, thanks to God all is still good . . . may God just make the end good also. . . .”5 In recent years, a few scholars have pointed to possible religious affinities between the Jews and some Bohemian and Moravian Protestant sects, but the political implications of such religious leanings are unclear.6 Opinion may not have been united within the confines of the Jewish Quarter, where internecine political contests on other issues were as common as they were fierce. Within the decade, tensions in the Jewish community accelerated, with higher taxes and the financial fallout of war, and Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller was arrested and eventually exiled from the city. A year after his coronation, as Imperial forces neared Prague, and the young King Frederick’s brief reign was threatened, Jews were drafted to build fortifications against the coming Habsburg onslaught. Emperor Ferdinand’s Catholic armies defeated Frederick’s forces at the Battle of White Mountain, just outside Prague, and by the following morning, Frederick had slipped quietly from the city. In one fell swoop, the political and religious balance of power into which the Jewish community had to make itself fit had changed radically. “We were in great distress,” Heller wrote in retrospect.7 Habsburg forces pillaged the city. Still, Ferdinand himself had sent word that the Jewish Quarter, as well as homes of loyal Catholics, should be protected, and life, limb, and property were spared, “and houses full of all good were as pillage and booty for an entire month, but they did not put a hand on the Jews.”8 Jewish communal officials left a record clearly showing how its leadership wished events in Prague to be viewed. Prague’s Jews instituted

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an annual commemoration with recitation of a special liturgy in local synagogues on 14 H ̣  eshvan, the day, according to the Hebrew calendar, on which Imperial troops entered Prague’s Old Town. Quoting the Book of Esther 9:27, the Jewish Town’s leadership took it upon themselves (kiyemu vekiblu aleihem), and implicitly upon their descendants, to continue to observe it.9 In so doing, they acted in a manner roughly similar to that of patriarchs of families, like H ̣  anokh ben Moses Altschul and Joseph Tein, would, a year later, in establishing familial Purim days. Indeed, the idea for their familial Purim days may have occurred to Altschul and Tein because of the commemorations established by the Prague community on this and at least one previous occasion. The liturgy for 14 H ̣  eshvan consisted of two seliḥ ot (penitential prayers) composed for the purpose and an earlier pizmon (a rhymed poem with repeating chorus). In the first half of the day, a fast was to be observed; then, after the afternoon prayers, mourning was to turn to celebration, an expression of thanksgiving for the Jewish community’s safe passage through menacing events. In a similar vein, Ferdinand II established an annual commemoration of his own in memory of turning back Protestant troops after a long and nearly successful siege of Vienna in 1619.10 The institution of the local Jewish days (for Prague’s Jewish population of about three thousand) required coordinated action of a relatively united and effective rabbinic and lay communal leadership. Leaders of Prague’s Jewish community joined ritual creativity—including composition of a new liturgy based on historical precedents and relying on local traditions—to political pragmatism, the new liturgy promoting a political message. All three of these conditions—the reliance on local tradition, political pragmatism, and effective and relatively unified leadership bodies—had to be in place for the celebration of 14 H ̣  eshvan and other special days in Prague to occur in the way that they did. By the latter part of the seventeenth century, the weakening of the Jewish community’s leadership bodies would lead to changes in ways historical events were commemorated and in the purposes of such commemorations. The decline of central authority and of communal cohesiveness occurred more or less simultaneously with increasing centralization and exercise of authority by the Habsburg emperors over their Bohemian dominions into the early eighteenth century.

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The Habsburg rulers’ ever tighter grip on the affairs of the Jewish communities, as their own position strengthened, may have played a significant role in the weakening of Jewish institutions and in some aspects of Jewish culture.

“All the Trouble That Has Found Us”: Local Liturgical Tradition At least two possible models of ritual were available to the rabbinic and lay leadership of Prague Jewry to mark what had happened in 1618 and in 1620: the second of Adar, established in Prague after events of that date a decade earlier, and another, even more recent, from nearby Frankfurt. In Prague, in the 1611 Passau invasion, local Jews had also faced potential physical danger from the invading armies of Bishop Leopold of Passau and then from mobs of locals who rioted in protest.11 The community leadership had established a commemorative day, whose remembrance of surviving the ordeal unharmed centered around the recitation of three liturgical poems composed by Chief Rabbi Ephraim Luntschitz, two seliḥ ot and a pizmon.12 This model of the three special compositions was, in turn, based on the earlier model of mourning for Jews killed the 1389 massacre of Prague Jews, anchored on Avigdor Kara’s Et kol hatela′ah, recalling the last day of Passover that year. A young priest walking through Prague’s Jewish Quarter, carrying a sanctified host to a dying parishioner, was met, so one account said, by a barrage of stones hurled by Jewish youth.13 At first, local authorities protected the Jews from angry mobs seeking retaliation, but Catholic clerics spread word of the host desecration, and a massacre of Jews ensued. Avigdor Kara, a young eyewitness, wrote both Et kol hatela′ah, which opens by turning to God in the face of multiple hardships, based on a quotation from Exodus 18:8, and a pizmon (a hymn with a repeating refrain), beginning “El nekamot hofi′ah” (God of vengeance: appear), with the refrain: “For the memory of the children of Israel before God.”14 The first elegy, Et kol hatela′ah, identifies Prague as the site of the tragedy, names the date, emphasizing the innocence of the victim, “the

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righteous fell before the wicked,” and goes on to describe the gathering of armed mobs, singing as they spilled Jewish blood.15 The poem echoes a prominent theme from the Hebrew chronicles of the massacres of 1096, which report Jewish parents killing their children rather than allowing them to fall to the enemy, but whether this reflects the events in Prague or simply the use of the established literary form is not clear. The final stanza of Et kol hatela′ah turns to a call for revenge and the expectation of the gathering of the exiles, the coming of redemption, and, once again, the righteousness of the Jews of Prague.16 While its content suggests the genre of kinnah (a liturgical elegy), this work and the one that follows it appear in seventeenth-century prayer books for Yom Kippur under the heading, “seliḥ ot.”17 Kara’s second composition appearing here, the pizmon “El nekamot hofi′ah,” would, on its own, lack historical anchor. The universal themes of revenge and sacrifice take over, tightly linked to the biblical themes, especially as they appear in the psalm of the same name (Psalms 94:1), as it calls for vengeance in memory of the victims—this time, unnamed victims of unnamed disasters, with the victims of 1389 implicitly suggested.18 A third composition associated with the liturgical unit commemorating the 1389 pogrom, not written specifically for this purpose, was the twelfth-century “Elohim al dami ledami” (God: be not silent regarding my blood) about violent death as sacrifice, culled from the seliḥ ot recited on Yom Kippur in various Ashkenazi rites. Recited either just before or just after the two seliḥ ot written in memory of 1389, the earlier seliḥ ah took on new meanings when recited in this context.19 All three compositions, two by Avigdor Kara, and the older text reappropriated for a new purpose, formed a ritual remembrance and tied the memory events to a more general call for divine vengeance. While victims of the 1389 massacre were recalled on the anniversary of the tragedy in other cities as well, the recitation of Kara’s compositions appears to have been unique to the community in Prague.20 In 1609, under pressure from the estates of Moravia, Emperor Rudolf II granted limited religious freedoms in his realms, even as his younger brother Matthias, next in line for the throne, sought to seize power. Then, in February 1611, the emperor’s cousin Leopold, nominal bishop of Passau, led his Catholic troops into Prague, ostensibly invited

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to help defend against the threat from Matthias. Contemporary residents of Prague did not know which story to believe, whether Matthias came to defend Rudolf or to attack him, who was aligned with whom. Entering Bohemia from the south in early January, Leopold’s Passau army plundered several cities, and Leopold ignored an order from Rudolf to halt. On Sunday, February 13 (30 Shevat 5373), his troops gathered just to the west of Prague and, the following day, entered Prague’s Malá Strana (Little Side). Many residents defended the city, while, at the same time, according to some reports, white flags of surrender were spotted on the homes of some Catholics and Italians. A two-day battle ensued. By the morning of February 15 (2 Adar), the “Passauers,” as they are referred to in many sources, had taken all of the Castle District (Hradcˇany) and Malá Strana below it. A single path led to the eastern half of Prague, the Old Town—including the Jewish Quarter—and the New Town: over the Charles Bridge. In fierce fighting, local nobles and burghers held off the Passauers on the bridge. At the same time, according to a contemporary German report, “a shot rang from the top of the Jesuit College onto residents of the Old City, and the common man built it up in his head that a murder spree was about to take place whose purpose was to stamp out his [Protestant] religion.”21 Mobs invaded five Catholic institutions, beat and murdered monks, and carted away religious treasures. Noting precisely which religious institutions were attacked and which left unharmed, historian James Palmitessa suggests that the uprising represented a “popular revolt against Catholic renewal.”22 Almost two centuries earlier, Hussite forces had wrested control of Catholic Church– owned properties; now they feared Catholic forces had been sent to limit their local autonomy at best, to “reclaim” these properties at worst. “On that day,” a Prague Jew later wrote, “there was a great war between them [the Passauers and the residents of Prague], and there was great tumult among the people, and there was mighty terror among the [children of ] Israel, and God saved them in His mercy.”23 A Hebrew chronicler credited the emperor with ordering the Jewish street protected, for after destroying the monasteries, “it had been their plan to harm the Jews in the same manner, God forbid, to kill and destroy all the Jews, to rob and plunder all their money, Heaven

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forbid!—if it had not been for the mercy of the Lord of Hosts.”24 To remember the events and mark their gratitude, Prague’s Jews adapted the three-seliḥ ot model of the Yom Kippur liturgy to mourn the massacre of 1389, establishing three new seliḥ ot to be recited during the morning prayers on the second of Adar, when a communal fast would be observed until afternoon prayers. Two years after the events, the three were printed as a separate booklet, the style of print that of a liturgical publication, its short form resembling Czech and German flugblätter that spread news of the events. The title page included an introduction, probably written by the printer or publisher, beginning, “It came to pass, in the sixth millennium, in the year 5371 since the creation of the world, on the second day of the month of Adar, a Tuesday, there was here in Prague a great tumult . . .” Therefore, all the residents of the holy community of Prague and its environs “established and accepted upon themselves” [Esther 9:27] to remember God’s loving kindness every year on this day, as a memory in the sanctuary of God, of all his recompense that He has bestowed in these times, and to say these three seliḥ ot during the shemoneh esreh prayer, and to fast on this day until noontime, and to plead before God on behalf of his people, that He should send us a positive sign in every generation. Amen and so may it be His will.

While the contents of the new liturgy, its three seliḥ ot, grew out of the model established in memory of 1389, their recitation was placed in a new context to form an annual commemoration, characterized, in addition to their recitation, by the half-day fast. The coincidence of this day’s occurring in the month of Adar, the very month of the rescue of the Jews of biblical Shushan described in the Book of Esther, allowed their author, Ephraim Luntschitz, to mention God’s greatness, “in this month, in which misery was turned to joy,” a leitmotif of the liturgy of Purim. That coincidence may also have led to Prague Jews’ viewing this day in the context of a local Purim.25 The half-day of fasting resembles the Fast of Esther, which precedes the redemption of the biblical Purim. With the exception of a brief mention of “my Purim” in conjunction with unclear and otherwise unknown events in Fulda, in 1507, referred to in a handwritten note on a legal compendium, the second of Adar, commemorating

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the Passau invasion of 1611, while not fully a local Purim, is the earliest known such local celebratory commemoration north of the Alps.26 Within the context of biblical language and praises to God, the first seliḥ ah by Luntschitz, “Ele ezkerah” (These I will remember), relates, in highly poetic form, the basic details of the events of February 1611, setting up a framework for an annual recitation, using a line familiar to Prague worshippers from another Yom Kippur seliḥ ah: “These I will remember and pour out my soul within me / As I remember all the sufferings [tela′ot] that have overwhelmed me.”27 The word used for “suffering” or “troubles” is tela′ot, the plural of the tela′ah in Avigdor Kara’s Et kol hatela′ah. The Hebrew language suffers from no lack of words expressing suffering. The choice of the word tela′ot in this context would instantly have linked this seliḥ ah to Kara’s in the minds of worshippers in Prague. The text then establishes the historical setting by giving the precise date on which this community, according to its own probably hyperbolic claim, came near to being decimated. The second stanza expands on the notion of an annual commemoration.28 Beginning in the fourth stanza, Luntschitz turns to a description of the events as they occurred: From afar came a nation, as the eagle flies They were called the Passauer Army and came by way of the bridge They paved themselves a path there to conquer the city with skill Army was drawn up against army, with no resolution [in sight].

The Jews are consistently described as frightened neutrals in the struggle between outside forces: A trap and a pit, a storm whirling Anguish and distress from every side on the day they threw down ramparts We went about gloomily, due to the terrifying thunderous noises, elderly and also nursing babes and youngsters Trembling took hold in us, anguish like a woman in childbirth, at the one who led the councilmen in plundering29

Equal distaste is shown for the invading armies and for anti-Catholic mobs who, in the sixth stanza, “Performed abhorrent acts, destroying and cutting down the priests in utter wildness.”30 The Jews had sought

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refuge in the synagogues and declared a day of fasting and prayer according to the practices of Yom Kippur, steps also taken in 1389, as related in Kara’s Et kol hatela′ah.31 The composition ends with a prayer that God’s ultimate redemption come speedily.32 The second composition in the unit, “Tola′at ya′akov” (Worm of Jacob; Isaiah 41:14), once again recalls Avigdor Kara’s Et kol hatela′ah, by means of a play between the similarly sounding words tola′at and tela′ah, thus making a conscious choice to imitate the local model. Both seliḥ ot together form the day’s historical anchor, the first explaining the day’s raison d’être, the second going over its formal establishment. Its sixth stanza states: Therefore, we accepted upon ourselves for all generations and for our descendants Who will be here in the holy community of Prague . . . Every year to tell of God’s loving kindnesses that he did for us . . .33

“This day will be a memorial for the children of Israel for all generations,” the seventh stanza announces. The third special composition in this unit, “Lekha adonay haẓ  edakah” (Yours Lord is righteousness), labeled a pizmon, compares the steps taken by the Jewish community to ward off the danger posed by the Passau army to others’ actions.34 While the local Christians took up arms to defend the city, the Jews took to praying. The song’s details fit all the worshipper has learned in the two previous seliḥ ot, but, on its own, this piece would not have provided enough information to identify the events. The printed leaflet also includes instructions for singing the pizmon, to the tune of another well-known pizmon, “Hineinu adonay hineinu” (Here we are Lord, here we are). With gratitude for a happy ending, Prague’s Jews chose to base their memorial on a local model of hundreds of years earlier, originally designed as a commemoration of tragedy and memorial to victims. The model of three seliḥ ot—a historical overview followed by two poems emphasizing more general themes—was reinterpreted to relive the fear and then to express joy and thanksgiving for deliverance from it. The 1611 poems’ contents were also slightly recast, from a focus exclusively on the fate of the Jews to a contextual understanding of the danger Jews

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faced as part of a larger phenomenon. The Passau invasion was not, as opposed to earlier incidents, in any sense aimed specifically against the Jews, and the local community understood that distinction. They pragmatically protested their neutral stance, opposing neither Rudolf nor his Prague subjects. A few years after the Passau invasion, the Jewish community in Frankfurt had chosen a different approach to commemoration in establishing a local Purim following its 1614 expulsion from that city during the Fettmilch uprising and its 1616 return. A group of burghers led by a baker named Vincenz Fettmilch had challenged the legitimacy of the city’s government—for a time overtaking it entirely—and attacked the Jewish Quarter, then expelled its inhabitants.35 In commemoration of their triumphant return to Frankfurt and the execution of Vincenz Fettmilch, the Jews established three commemorative days: a fast day on 27 Elul, in memory of the expulsion, a second on 19 Adar I, followed on 20 Adar I by a celebration called Purim Vinẓ  (also known as Vinẓ  Hans Purim or Frankfurter Purim).36 The principal text for this celebration, Megillas Vinẓ  , is a poem of more than one hundred stanzas, each appearing first in Hebrew and, immediately following, in Yiddish.37 It focuses on the impact of the Fettmilch uprising on the Jewish community and compares Fettmilch to Haman, the villain of the Book of Esther. The two fast days featured the recitation of seliḥ ot, but, as far as I have been able to determine, those used were not written for the occasion as were most of the Prague seliḥ ot, but, like the pizmon in the Prague collection for 14 H ̣  eshvan, they were culled from the large corpus of medieval seliḥ ot known through their inclusion in liturgical collections recited on various days throughout the year.38

Political Pragmatism: Heller’s Seliḥ ot For commemorating the events surrounding the outbreak in Prague of what came to be known as the Thirty Years’ War, Frankfurt’s Megillas Vinẓ   might have been a more appropriate model than the series of seliḥ ot written for the Passau invasion.39 There were some differences: in 1620, Prague’s Jews had not, in the end, been victims of any

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particular anti-Jewish action, and there was no villain who could play the role of Haman assigned to Vincenz Fettmilch. Nevertheless, the longer format of a local megillah would have allowed for more historical detail, and, more importantly, it was a format more fitting to the happy outcome. Still, Prague’s Jews chose their own local model. In the early 1620s, a pamphlet was printed that included three seliḥ ot, the first two written for 14 H ̣  eshvan by Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller, then a local rabbinic judge, most likely a year or two after the Battle of White Mountain, the third, a pizmon.40 This composition, “Ele barekhev” (Those by chariots; cf. Psalms 20:8), by Simon ben Isaac (b. ca. 950), drew from the established liturgy of local seliḥ ot collections.41 Both stylistically and thematically, it closely resembles the pizmon composed by Luntschitz for 2 Adar. Beyond simply redirecting biblical passages to give thanks for rescue (or redemption) from danger, the community leadership, through Heller as its official mouthpiece, represented itself and all the Jews of Prague as wholeheartedly pro-Habsburg, in part seeking to solidify support for the Habsburgs among the surely bedraggled, perhaps befuddled Jewish population, both for contemporaries and for posterity. They had publicly supported Frederick; now they needed to support his enemy. At the time when the seliḥ ot were written, the Habsburgs were still working to consolidate their hold on Prague. Members of the Jewish community numbered among those who took advantage of the volatile situation for financial gain, some helping Bohemian “rebels” to conceal their goods in the Jewish Quarter to avoid anticipated confiscations by the Habsburgs.42 Various others were involved in schemes from unknown individuals’ minor dealing in stolen goods to complex transactions conducted by the community’s wealthiest member, Jacob Bassevi. The currency-minting consortium of which he was part helped bring collapse to the entire Bohemian economy in the course of a single year.43 The original published pamphlet with the seliḥ ot for 14 H ̣  eshvan begins with a historical introduction that paves the way for the work’s pro-Habsburg stance. Drawing on biblical language, it narrates the 1618 defenestration and subsequent political and military crisis while clearly siding with the emperor as against the Bohemian rebels, portrayed as rising up against Emperor Matthias’s officers in Prague Castle

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and “weaving a conspiracy” against him.44 The Bohemian rebels are tacitly compared to sinners referred to in nearly identical language in the Book of Isaiah.45 The main point of the introduction is the need to give thanks to God for ensuring that Emperor Ferdinand, to whom gratitude is also expressed, would make sure his soldiers protected the Jewish residents during urban combat and plundering of Prague by imperial troops that followed the battle. It also describes the establishment of the commemorative day to be celebrated annually.46 Heller’s first seliḥ ah, “Anusah le′ezrah adekha” (I run for aid), looks back three or four years from the time it was written to describe the defenestration of 1618 and continues the theme of the pamphlet’s introduction by siding with the Habsburg party, and writing out any support, however pro forma, the Jewish community may once have demonstrated for Frederick’s government. The first several stanzas praise God generally, and, beginning in the sixth stanza, the text turns to Emperor Matthias and continues chronologically. It then turns the notion of a struggle for Bohemian independence on its head by implicitly accusing the leadership of the Protestant rebellion of being tyrants who misled fellow countrymen who took up arms to support their cause, portraying these Bohemian soldiers as blindly following the rebels, just as the Israelites who preferred slavery to freedom and said, “for it is better for us to serve the Egyptians [than to die in the wilderness].”47 The seliḥ ah describes the Jews’ reaction to the defenestration as having been one of fear and trembling, expressed by their wailing and lamentations.48 In its conclusion, this seliḥ ah describes Frederick’s coronation in terms that hardly betray any support the Jews might once have accorded him: They crowned him [Frederick] with the wreath of kingship and anointed him as King, [that is] to say, God will comfort me The enemies of the Jews in their trickery plotted [against our] lives to consume me49

The crowning of Frederick as king is viewed here as closely related to a plot against the Jews, which may or may not have been true. In Frankfurt, just a few years earlier, after all, the popular, pro-burgher Fettmilch, who had, like the Bohemians, replaced the governing

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authority viewed as legitimate, had indeed expelled the Jews. In the context of early modern urban politics in central Europe, the Jews in Prague certainly had reason to fear that victory of the burgher and noble Bohemian rebels over the centralized Habsburg authority could pose a serious threat to their own safety. Heller’s second seliḥ ah, “Arkhu hayamim utela′ah ravtah” (The days grew long and the suffering increased), again using the word tela′ah, brings a similar point of view to the second installment of this saga, the events surrounding the Battle of White Mountain, two and a half years following the defenestration and just a year after Frederick’s coronation. The first poem emphasized the illegitimacy of the Bohemian estates’ actions against the imperial rulers, the second the good grace shown by Emperor Ferdinand in preserving the Jewish community from pillaging.50 Like the 1611 seliḥ ot for 2 Adar, it describes the establishment of the annual commemoration at some length and ends with a wish for the ultimate return to Zion. Like the first poem in this set, it concerns itself with portraying the Jews as expressing the “proper” feelings in the face of events, offering a particular interpretation of the facts that must have been known to all. Thus the Jews’ assistance in helping to build the ramparts before the approaching Habsburg forces: My vigour dried up like a shard, my taste has not remained, my fragrance is spoiled I have heard a decree of destruction and my flesh creeps from fear:51 “Go labor and make fortifications and ramparts to defend against the approaching enemy!”52

Heller has given a pro-Habsburg “spin” to the community’s highly visible, patently anti-Habsburg action. The third seliḥ ah, the eleventhcentury “Ele barekhev” (Those by chariot), contrasts “we” Jews who fight the enemy by spiritual means with “those” non-Jews, who employ physical force. The implication is that the Jews, too, made a unique and substantial contribution to the Habsburg war effort. This liturgical addition written for the synagogues of Prague annually emphasized the unjust rebelliousness of the Bohemian estates in their struggle against the Habsburgs, their election of a new king, and the distaste with which the Jews had helped to prepare the ramparts

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to defend against the returning Habsburgs a year later. It expressed genuine thanks to the emperor Ferdinand for having saved the Jews and their property in language that was distinctly Jewish, but in a context that revealed full consciousness of the novelty of current circumstances. The annual recitation of the liturgy worked in tandem with other tools employed by the Jewish community’s leadership to keep members of the community in line with the official policy of loyalty to, and cooperation with, the Habsburg administration. (Others included announcements by beadles [shamash] in the local synagogues, like the one calling for the return of stolen curtains in December 1622.)53 By this conscious construction of community memory, the Jewish community leadership sought to cope with the volatile local political landscape, officially portraying recent history in a way that would serve its own needs. Fourteen H ̣  eshvan even came to be known as the Prager Purim.54 The leadership of Jewish Prague, however, did not commission a Purim-like megillah but repeated the local model, choosing instead a new series of seliḥ ot accompanied by an appropriate pizmon. Whether this model originated in Prague or was adapted by Prague Jewry from an earlier tradition, perhaps with roots in the Rhine Valley during the Crusader period, is not clear. Scholarly attention to the poetry of events of that period, as to other Ashkenazi liturgical works, has focused on individual compositions and told us very little about the ritual setting and combinations in which they were recited.

“By the Rabbi, with the Assent of the Elders”: Local Jewish Leadership Like the familial megillot written by heads of family for a familial Purim, the liturgies of communal leaders served a pragmatic purpose, seeking to shape the community’s image in its members’ minds. For that to happen, an effective communal leadership needed to be in place, an individual or group who could act on a community-wide level as a familial patriarch would in his own household. The establishment of local annual commemorations on 2 Adar and 14 H ̣  eshvan involved

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both rabbinic and lay authorities. On the title page of the seliḥ ot for 2 Adar, the publisher explains: These seliḥ ot were written by the great, glorious prince in Israel, chief spokesman in every place, head of the academy [reish metivta] of the holy community of Prague, our teacher Rabbi Solomon Ephraim, may God protect him, son of our teacher Rabbi Aaron, may the memory of the righteous be as a blessing [zẓ   ″l], with the assent of the officers [keẓ  inim], the elders [rashim], community elders [tovim], and the leaders of the community and with the consent of the judges of the religious courts [batei dinim] of the holy community of Prague.55

The head of the local academy (yeshiva in Hebrew; metiva in Aramaic) was the individual recognized as the community’s chief rabbi. Ordinarily, he simultaneously held the position of av beit din, head of the rabbinic court. The reish metivta at the time of the Passau invasion, Solomon Ephraim ben Aaron, known as Ephraim Luntschitz, and the other governing bodies of the Jewish Town had each assented to a decision to commemorate the community’s survival of the Passau invasion in this form. Luntschitz, a well-known preacher and biblical exegete, also known by the name of his most famous book, a commentary on the Torah called Keli Yakar, composed the new liturgy, according to this introduction with “the assent” of the community’s secular leadership, the officeholders comprising Prague “selfgoverning” bodies. The top layer of this leadership consisted of the elders (rashim) and community elders (tovim), selected by the Jewish town’s property owners, with the wealthiest receiving the most votes. The text also mentions lower elected officials (manhigei hakehillah) and religious court judges (ha′alufim habatei dinim). The entire leadership apparatus, known together by the general term “officers” (keẓ  inim), established this day.56 The chief rabbi acted in his capacity as religious head in composing the seliḥ ot, but creating a new holiday also required the cooperation of the other authorities. At the time of the defeat of Czech forces at White Mountain and the return of the Habsburgs to power in 1620, local rabbinic leadership was in a period of transition. Chief Rabbi Isaiah Horowitz had departed for the Land of Israel, and a replacement had not yet been appointed. Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller, at the time an up-and-coming

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young rabbinic judge, composed the special seliḥ ot. The historical introduction to an edition of these compositions is much longer than the one on the 1611 brochure, taking up an entire page of small print, describing events in detail. Because the Jews were saved from harm, the introduction explains: The scholars, heads and leaders of Prague established and took upon themselves, with the agreement of the head of the rabbinic court [av beit din], our teacher the Rabbi Isaiah sg  ″l [Horowitz], who has travelled to the Holy Land, to make the fourteenth day of the month of H ̣  eshvan a day of remembrance for the wonders of the Blessed One, they recall them in prayer and thanksgiving, and to give [charity for the redemption of captives], each according to his generosity . . . and we will fast until the afternoon prayers,57 all who have begun to fast, men and women, “for they were also in the same miracle,” and at the afternoon prayers we will get up from our fast and rejoice and be glad in His salvation . . .58

The author of this introduction has made clear, as in 1611, that an annual commemoration had been established by combined efforts of the different branches of legitimate authority of Prague Jewry, including the chief rabbi, now far from the city and thus fulfilling his position in name only. No explicit mention is made in this edition of the seliḥ ot of the need to find an alternative author because of Horowitz’s absence. Heller, who may have been viewed as a potential candidate for the post, did not receive it until 1628, after having left Prague to serve as chief rabbi first in Nikolsburg, in Moravia, and then in Vienna. The Purim-like nature of the day was alluded to by the inclusion of the Talmudic injunction associated with the festivals of Purim and Passover, that women, too, must participate in the special rituals for those days, “because they too were in the same miracle.”59 The author of a fourth poem, a pizmon called “Moshel ba′elyonim” (Reigns on high), appended, in this edition, to the three for 14 H ̣  eshvan, was Moses ben Isaiah Menaḥ em, the Moses Mendels who was to become the next chief rabbi of Prague, and who was, according to surviving folklore, Heller’s rival. Perhaps Mendels and Heller were recognized, at the time the seliḥ ot were published, as the leading candidates for the open position. Perhaps Heller’s authorship called for a

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gesture to Mendels, whose work was also then included in the booklet. The heading to Moses Mendels’s poem suggests that it be recited, “to avoid death caused by sin”; elsewhere it is recommended that it be recited against plague and childhood diseases.60 Once legitimate local authorities had acted to establish these additional semiholy days, observance of the day was to be incumbent on all Prague Jews and even on their descendants.61 Each year, they were to give thanks and to reflect an official image of the community’s actions and loyalties.

“By a Young Man”: Anonymous Authorship in the Late Seventeenth Century On June 21, 1689 (3 Tammuz 5449), at two o’clock in the afternoon, a fire broke out in Prague’s Old Town, in the house at Black Eagle in the Karpfengasse, today’s Kaprová Street.62 Within hours, the Jewish Quarter had burned to the ground, leaving hundreds dead and thousands homeless. Of the more than three hundred houses in the Jewish Quarter, barely ten remained. Collections of ritual objects were devastated; the stores held by today’s Jewish Museum in Prague are vast but represent a mere fraction of what had existed.63 This trauma left a well-documented mark on a generation of Prague Jewry.64 The reactions of contemporaries included a Yiddish historical song, Sreyfe lid fun prag and rabbinical responsa on related issues.65 Yet, in contrast to the statements of authorship and authority in the introductions to the printed seliḥ ot for 2 Adar and 14 H ̣  eshvan, a few introductory lines from a late seventeenth-century hazkarat neshamot manuscript, introducing a memorial prayer to be recited annually in memory of the lives lost in the fire, explain: This el malei raḥ amim was written by a young man who did not want to record his name alongside those of the great and the wise. [It is] about the burning of our community of Prague, a great city among the wise and among the nations. May God receive [our prayer] and may [He] hear the voice of the blood of our burned brothers, screaming and howling. May the savior be sent speedily by their merit. Amen.66

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The author does not even identify himself. Outside Prague, on the anniversary of fires that devastated the Jewish community in cities like Frankfurt and Posen in the early eighteenth century, local liturgies included annual seliḥ ot to commemorate the tragedy in a manner akin to that for deliverance of Prague’s Jews in events associated with the Thirty Years’ War.67 Yet no seliḥ ot have survived from the fire that struck Prague in 1689. The extended version of the el malei raḥ amim (God full of mercy), a memorial prayer usually recited at funerals and during the memorial rite known as Yizkor that took place in the synagogues on certain festivals, was chosen for this role instead, introduced by the lines quoted above. What is more, even this el malei raḥ amim for the tragedy survives only in manuscript, in the notebooks of hazkarat neshamot kept by synagogues in Prague, a genre usually employed for remembering the individual dead rather than community-wide events. They did not appear in print, as had Prague-specific liturgies established in the earlier part of the seventeenth century.68 The anonymous author of this 1689 memorial was well aware of local precedents for commemoration and of differing from them. He, and the author of the introductory lines appearing in the hazkarat neshamot notebook—perhaps the scribe who entered it there— engaged in direct dialogue with earlier introductions to printed leaflets of seliḥ ot by chief rabbis Luntschitz and Heller. Those two giants, along with Avigdor Kara, were “the great and the wise” alongside whom this anonymous author refused to place his name. His stated explanation relates to the deficiency of the author’s personal stature, but more than an individual’s humility is at stake. At the time of the fire, the community apparently lacked the ability to legislate official liturgical innovations. No body of communal self-government is mentioned. At the time, the community had no permanently appointed, agreed-upon av beit din or reish metivta, though Benjamin Wolf Spira-Wedeles, son of the last chief rabbi, Simon Spira-Wedeles (d. 1679) functioned in a manner analogous to that of an “acting” chief rabbi and expected to be appointed to the top position.69 In 1648, Habsburg Prague had turned back a final Protestant onslaught, a Swedish attack that lasted most of the summer, and the Peace of Westphalia had cemented Catholic Habsburg rule throughout

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the Czech lands. This mid-century marker has, until recently, been viewed by many historians as signaling the success—and, therefore, effectively the end— of the Counter-Reformation in Bohemia. Historian Howard Louthan has recently shown, however, that the work of Catholic renewal was, at that point, just picking up steam.70 Efforts to strengthen the Catholic Church in Bohemia continued through art, music, preaching, and by encouragement of many forms of popular piety. A century earlier, Prague’s Jews had lived in a multilingual, multi­ confessional environment, with Catholics and dozens of Protestant denominations competing for converts and resources. Now, they were the only legally tolerated non-Catholic group. In the last decades of the seventeenth century, at the same time that the Catholic Church displayed, as Louthan describes, an increasing sense of triumphalism, local political authorities in Prague repeatedly called for reforms in the self-governing institutions of the Jewish community.71 It seems very likely that heavy external pressure, politically and socially, contributed to the Jewish community’s internal struggles. Prague Jewry’s local commemorations came into being when local liturgical tradition was respected and further developed by a relatively unified rabbinic and lay leadership interested in simultaneously expressing gratitude to God and preserving a politically pragmatic stand. The artistic form adopted by that leadership in the first decades of the seventeenth century, and the ways in which it was adapted by Luntschitz and Heller, fostered a historically based local consciousness among the Jews of early modern Prague, reinforced by annual recitation of liturgical commemorations. Prague’s Jews were grateful for their continued existence, fearful of the precariousness of their own community, and aware of its place in Jewish history. A few of them developed that consciousness in still different ways, sometimes by simply writing history.

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“That a Future Generation Will Know”



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Not long after an anonymous representative of Prague’s rabbinic establishment penned a memorial prayer to the victims of the 1689 fire, Rachel Rausnitz and Beila Horowitz, women from established local families, were “bringers to press”—a well-documented but little understood role in early modern Hebrew letter publishing— of an anonymous Yiddish tale of the Jewish community’s origins, printed in a small, eight-page booklet, entitled simply “A fine tale” (Ayn sheyn mayseh).1 The tale, whose first half is quoted here in paraphrase, begins where all good stories start:

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In the beginning, “before Jews lived in Prague,” there were just four merchants in the whole city.2 Three of the merchants obtained their wares by traveling to the fair in Frankfurt am Main, while the fourth remained at home in Prague and obtained his “by commission,” from the other three. The fourth was the wealthiest of them all, and well-connected at the imperial court. The other three devised a plot to lure him along with them to Frankfurt, reasoning, “then he will bring a great amount [of wares and/or money] with him, and we will see how we will get the money.”3 When at last they succeeded in bringing the wealthy merchant along, he hid his gold currency in a wine jug, from which he did not drink during the entire journey, arousing the suspicion of the others as to its true contents. So, in coordination with the innkeeper with whom they regularly lodged, the three merchants replaced the gold with wine, and shared the profits. The wealthy merchant remained in Frankfurt where he tried, but failed, to prove the others had stolen his gold. Some time later, the emperor was passing through the Frankfurt Judengasse. A counselor in his entourage overheard three young men

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conversing with one another about the case of the wealthy merchant whose golden ducats had been replaced by wine. One of the young men suggested a two-step solution for the case. First, he would put the four merchants and the innkeeper in jail together; perhaps they would reveal the plot in discussions among themselves. If not, he would have the wine jug broken in two. If it had been filled with gold, some would have rubbed off on the inside, and would still be visible. The emperor’s counselor, who had “heard everything and understood [it] well,” approached the emperor and, without fully explaining himself, arranged for the Jew’s suggestion to be carried out. The five were summoned to court and jailed, and, when they failed to reach a resolution, the wine jug was brought and broken in two. Gold dust covered its insides. The four culprits were hanged, and the wealthy merchant returned to Prague triumphant. Asked by the emperor how he had devised his solution to the crime, the counselor explained he had heard the idea from a Jew. The emperor responded, “If the Jews are so wise, why should I not have any in Prague? I want to settle Jews in Prague also. Let it be known to the Jews that this is to be done.”4 The counselor ordered all the Jews to appear the following day in an open square in the city, and thus identified the young man, who soon identified himself to the emperor as “Gumpricht.” The emperor ordered that splendid clothes be made for Gumpricht, and that he be sent to Prague, but Gumpricht objected: “What will I do alone in Prague? No Jews live there.” He was allowed to bring whomever he pleased, and took his entire family. The emperor was very fond of Gumpricht, and could hardly get along a day without him.5

In a second subplot, Gumpricht requested and was granted a wish to find a suitable Jewish woman to marry and bring to Prague, the establishment of a family transforming Gumpricht’s individual Jewish presence to the seed of a future community.6 A century earlier, in the very different historical circumstances of Rudolfine Prague, David Gans, historian, astronomer, and mathematician, who had lived most of his adult life in the city, had written his two-part Hebrew chronicle of world and Jewish history, published as Ẓ emaḥ David (1592), widely considered the single work of true “Jewish historiography” published north of the Alps during a brief flowering

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of such literature, mostly of Sephardi origin, in the sixteenth century.7 When Prague Jews first appear in his world chronology, in the year 4957 (997), their presence is assumed rather than explained, but the entry nevertheless provides an origin tale of the institutionalization of Prague’s Jewish community. Describing a period in Bohemian history when the country was first being converted to Christianity, Gans wrote: Some of the inhabitants of Bohemia became agitated against the Christians who were in their land and sought to destroy them, and Bishop Aldabertus fled for his life and escaped to Rome. And the pope censured them, but they were more obstinate than previously and killed the bishop’s brother in a strange and terrible manner. Even after the bishop was restored to his throne, they climbed a mountain close to Prague and robbed and attacked the Christians from there, and [Christian ruler of Bohemia] Duke Boleslav II was not able [to defeat] them.

Into this breach, stepped the local Jews: However, the Jews who were here in the city of Prague at that time outsmarted them with their plots against the bandits and gave advice and assistance to the Christians, until they dealt them [such] a severe blow [that] their leaders and dignitaries fled. And the Jews pursued them and caught them in forests and in the crevices of boulders and killed them. Then the Jews were famous and glorified in all the land, and they were given permission and assistance to build a synagogue in the Little Side [Malá Strana] in Prague, called “Klein Seit” in German, and this was about the year 4757, 997 for the Christians.8

This story, adapted from Czech historiography and folklore by way of a German chronicle, shares with Ayn sheyn mayseh the notion, widespread in Jewish origin tales, that Jewish cleverness, successfully put to the service of the sovereign, earned the Jews the respect of ruling royalty and the right to establish themselves in the city.9 Both use print to transmit locally circulating tales or folk motifs to contemporaries and to future generations of Prague Jews and portray an insistent sense of belonging. Between the publications of these two compositions, no known printed work about the origins of Prague’s Jewish community, or publication specifically devoted to its history, appeared in a Jewish language. Yet it would be a mistake to think that because they did not publish

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history books, Prague’s Jews did not write about their own local past outside of familial or liturgical contexts. Rather, in addition to creating gravestones, ritual objects, commemorations, and liturgical innovations that preserved their concern for local personalities and events, they also expressed their “wonder of existence” by writing about history or particular events in a variety of literary genres. The form and aesthetic qualities of such writing depended on the individual talents and proclivities of its author and on historical circumstances. Just as the aesthetically sophisticated, community-sponsored liturgical innovations of the early seventeenth century gave way to handwritten, anonymous memorials sixty years later, the complex cultural undertaking embodied in Gans’s Ẓ emaḥ David yielded to simpler forms of narrating the past. Historian David Ruderman has highlighted the end of the Rudolfine period in noting the disappearance of what had been, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a modest level of interest in scientific pursuits displayed by Jewish scholars in central and eastern Europe. He points out that the significance of the victory of Habsburg forces in the Thirty Years’ War and ensuing Catholic reform are often neglected in understanding the decline of Ashkenazi engagement with the sciences during the seventeenth century: “While the Maharal and his students had planted the seeds of a new epistemological orientation regarding the sciences and Judaism,” he writes, “the cultural soil of Bohemia and Poland-Lithuania was inhospitable to the full flowering of this new vision, not so much because of Lurianic incursions as because of a general deterioration of cultural life. The seeds would have to germinate elsewhere.”10 Along the same lines, the cultural soil, after mid-century, was inhospitable to the writing of major historical works like Gans’s Ẓ emaḥ  David, but writing about the local past and about current events continued to flourish in other literary genres.

Opportunity for Openness: ca. 1590 –1620: Ẓ  emaḥ  David, Anonymous Chronicle Gans came to Prague in approximately 1564, as the city’s Jewish community rebounded from its expulsion order of several years earlier and

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a small group of rabbis established central Europe’s first Jewish burial society. Two decades later, his adopted city became the capital and main residence of the Habsburg Monarchy. Prague Castle was now inhabited year-round, its cathedral renewed, and symbolism linking the city to its Habsburg rulers enhanced. Jews, too, were witness to this revitalization, as Gans had reported.11 Many artists brought to Prague by Rudolf, as noted in Chapter 1, also executed commissions for churches, nobles, and wealthy burghers in the city, at least two venturing as far as the Jewish Quarter, drawing sketches of Jews at study and prayer and carefully describing their clothing, and a few Jews were active at court.12 Gans’s personal inclinations and apparent training in astronomy and history provided him with the background and motivation to take advantage of the opportunities this environment provided. Born in 1541 in Westphalia, Gans studied in academies (yeshivot) in Bonn and Frankfurt and then in Cracow under Moses Isserles (known as the Rema), one of the major authorities of Ashkenazi Jewry, known for his study of astronomy and philosophy and as a teacher of prominent rabbis like Mordecai Jaffe and Abraham Horowitz.13 Gans wrote mathematical and astronomical treatises that remained unpublished in his lifetime, one appearing in 1743 under the name Neḥ mad vena′im.14 There, he reported that he had, on three separate occasions, spent five days in the observatory of court astronomer Tycho Brahe and had met Brahe’s assistant, Johannes Kepler.15 The multiconfessional atmosphere of Rudolf ’s circle of artists and scholars, individuals of many beliefs interacting freely— despite the dampening of the religious “quest for compromise” between Catholics and Protestant denominations that had characterized Maximilian’s court—also provided an important setting for Gans’s enterprise.16 Ẓ emaḥ  David’s first section, covering Jewish history from creation until the author’s time, is based almost exclusively on Jewish sources, including the Bible and medieval Hebrew histories. History is presented in chronicle form, employing the Jewish reckoning since creation still in use today, although Gans describes other, earlier Jewish systems of dating in a long excursus.17 He drew on both earlier Hebrew world histories and biblical commentaries, including the relatively recent works

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of Isaac Abarbanel (1437–1508) and Azariah de’ Rossi’s Me′or einayim (Mantau, 1573 –1575), a controversial work in its time, censured, among others, by Maharal, in part for its critical view of traditional Jewish chronology.18 Enumerating, in his introduction, several justifications for rewriting material that had already appeared in these trustworthy sources, Gans wrote: “The first [reason] is that no one else from among all those who preceded me counted and preserved the years from the creation of the universe according to their order as I did in this book. . . .”19 Previous literature was, in his opinion, lacking in its chronological precision, Gans’s central concern. Just as astronomers mapped the heavens with utmost precision, so he and contemporary chroniclers sought to map historical time.20 This chronological work was dependent on scientific chronology as epitomized by the treatises of Joseph Scaliger (1540 – 1609), whose De emendatione temporum (1583) reconsidered and attempted to reconcile ancient calendars and chronologies.21 Scaliger’s work was well known at Prague, and he had a long acquaintance and important correspondence with Kepler.22 In Ẓ emaḥ  David’s second section, on world history, Gans followed the same methodology as in the Jewish section, composing a synthetic work according to strict chronological organization. The Gregorian date appears alongside the Hebrew date starting at the beginning of the Common Era.23 Here, Gans relied, openly, on a series of Christian historians in addition to his Jewish sources.24 Events involving Jewish communities specifically also appear in this section, when the sources used are German. Gans considers himself a part of the historiographical tradition practiced by both his Christian and Jewish predecessors, equal to them in every way.25 The nature of his undertaking, a synthetic work organized in chronological style by culling from a variety of extant historical works, confirms the author’s own impression.26 Its two-part format, separating Jewish from “general” history—at one point Gans refers to them as sacred (kodesh) and profane (ḥ ol)—had been utilized, though in the slightly different form of parallel columns rather than separate sections, by Christian chroniclers of his own time and earlier.27 The most prominent theme in the postrabbinic period of the Jewish section is a succession of rabbinic authority, often related under the

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date of a particular rabbi’s death, Prague rabbis among the rest. Avigdor Kara appears in connection with the elegy he wrote for the riot victims of 1389.28 Gans might have used local pinkasei hazkarat neshamot, the lists of the dead kept in the Prague synagogues for liturgical purposes, as a historical source. In cases of controversy, he included both opinions. While marking the date of death of Jacob Pollack (d. 1530), a former head of the yeshiva and rabbinic court in Prague, widely regarded as the inventor of pilpul, a particular mode of Talmudic study for yeshiva students, by praising Pollack’s sharp mind, he also acknowledged that while still commonly practiced in the yeshivot of his time, pilpul was not accepted by all.29 Then, in an entry for the Hebrew year 5323, thirty years later, he also praised Maharal, known for his particularly sharp opposition to pilpul, together with his three brothers, as he noted the death of their uncle, Rabbi Jacob of Warmaisa.30 Gans also devoted substantial attention to events within the memory of living local Jews, including their expulsion from Bohemia in 1541 and expulsion and burning of Jewish books in 1559 –1560.31 The focus on the community in Prague as the natural continuation of Jewish history culminates in the final entries of the first section, which includes four paragraphs about the year 5352 (1592), three of them about figures from Prague: Maharal and Rabbi Mordecai Jaffe, two prominent rabbis who alternated in the post of reish metivta (head of the yeshiva/academy) and av beit din (head of the rabbinic court) during the 1590s, and Mordecai Maisel, leader of Prague Jewry and likely Gans’s patron.32 The chronicle form of historical writing has been said to lack narrative structure precisely because it is an undifferentiated line that simply ends, rather than a plot that draws to a logical conclusion.33 Yet Gans’s added emphasis on contemporary history, expressed in longer narratives for his final entries, creates an impression of three local Jewish leaders as the culmination of over five thousand years of Jewish history. The varied general history section progresses principally along lines of empire and kingship, earthly regimes arranged neatly into the four empires understood in Jewish traditions as prophesied in the Book of Daniel: Babylonia, Persia, Greece, and “Edom,” understood as Rome.34 Like the local Christian population, Gans viewed the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, of which Prague was the capital

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at the time, as the legitimate continuation of the ancient Roman Empire, devoting special attention to its emperors, including reigning Habsburgs, taking great pride in the bounty and cultural achievements of Bohemia in general and Prague in particular and considering bordering kingdoms, like Poland, as subsidiary.35 His telling of the Hussite wars, pivotal in Bohemian history, while abbreviated as compared to German chronicles on which it is based, is much longer and more detailed than any other series of events discussed.36 As in the Jewish section, the overall impression is that contemporary Prague, with Rudolf II as emperor, constituted a central element in the history of civilization. Gans painted a picture of Prague in his day and its Jewish community as having grown organically out of the progression of history from creation in the case of the Jews and from the reign of Julius Caesar in the case of contemporaneous Christians. As Ruderman pointed out, by separating Jewish from Gentile history, especially as defined by the sources used to write it, Gans sought to protect his work, making it palatable to the powers that controlled the flow of authorized information in the traditional Jewish context of his time.37 At the same time, as forcefully as Gans strove to separate Jewish from Gentile history, he made little, if any, formal distinction, in either of his two major sections, between broadly conceived, largescale history of global import, or of significance to Jews around the world, on the one hand and regional or local events on the other. Astonishment at his existence, then, the existence of a more or less ordinary Jew in Prague expressed itself, in Gans’s case, in a fierce desire to understand the place of his own singular, local existence at a particular crossroads of time and space. While Jewish and universal chronologies were carefully separated, within each of these distinct sections, the history of Prague emerged naturally from the larger arc of history. Traditional anti-Jewish sentiments are markedly understated in Gans’s account but persisted in his real surroundings, even in the rarefied and religiously tolerant atmosphere of Rudolfine Prague, where tensions remained between the emperor, traditional protector of the Jews, and the burgher class, usual seat of opposition to their presence.38 Threat of expulsions was recorded by an anonymous contemporary employing a genre resembling Gans’s in that both are chronicles of

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events organized by date, but differing in its far less polished quality and manuscript form. The chronicler reported: The year 5362 [1602] was a time of trial and tribulation for the Jews here in Prague, for [they] were threatened with expulsion. The townspeople, who were the main [instigators], proposed to present the emperor, may he be exalted, with a yearly sum of several thousands [collected] from the merchants and the rest of the local populace.39

In other words, “townspeople,” likely the local merchant class, lobbied for expulsion of the Jews, and organized to compensate the emperor for any financial loss he might suffer as a consequence. These events are not known from other sources. The anonymous author of these passages probably lived, like Gans, in early seventeenth-century Prague. His work survives in a single manuscript, published only in the twentieth century, by Abraham David. The random nature of this manuscript’s preservation suggests that more like it could have existed. Its author tried, like Gans, to present a unified tale linking earlier history of Jews in central Europe to current events in Prague. As opposed to Ẓ  emaḥ  David’s organic presentation, however, the seams are far less skillfully hidden. The chronicle, in its present form, was put together by a scribe—perhaps also the author of its last sections—who copied several older lists of events one after the other, such that there are overlaps of chronology, with one list picking up earlier than the end of the previous. Some portions focus on Prague and Bohemia while others make no mention of this region. The first was a list of medieval decrees; the second, a chronologically overlapping list of Prague decrees; a third list focused on Habsburg lands; a fourth chronicle, in two different hands but apparently the work of a single author, again focusing on Prague history. This last chronicler was a contemporary of Gans but does not cite him.40 The result is a detailed, exciting report of current events tacked onto earlier chronological lists, rather than emanating naturally from them. The anonymous chronicler also related a story about Maharal (Judah Loew ben Beẓ alel) that is not known from any other sources, reporting that two “slanderous talebearers from among our people” had denounced the Jewish leadership to local authorities as responsible

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for the death of a certain Elijah Pollack, as a result of which several men, including Rabbi Loew (Maharal), were arrested and brought to the castle on the hill and the local synagogues sealed. The affair continued for months, during which time one of those arrested died in jail, and another was eventually released but expelled from Prague. The informers were also arrested.41 During the Rudolfine period, the story shows, while Jews flourished relative to what their predecessors in Prague had experienced in the past and to the more virulent antiSemitism that would come to the fore again in the future, there were, nonetheless, many continuities with those earlier and later periods. It also provides an example of a “rescue tale” that, as far as is known, was never written as a megillah, but in this different form instead. Local and familial megillot had not yet appeared in Prague.

Pressures from Without: The Thirty Years’ War In the most vivid, eyewitness-style portion of his manuscript, the anonymous chronicler documented events and continuing tensions that eventually unraveled the Rudolfine world and contributed to the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War. For 1610, he reported that a secret agreement was negotiated between King Matthias and his cousin Leopold, bishop of Passau, an event leading to the Passau invasion of 1611, the same story as is related in a very different form in Ephraim Luntschitz’s seliḥ ot for 2 Adar. Like those laments, the anonymous chronicler emphasizes the Jews’ active participation in the defense of the city, describes their great fear, caught between the two sides, their loyalty to the Habsburgs, and gratitude for surviving the fighting unscathed: 5371 (1611)—there was strife and fierce fighting here in Prague for our sovereign, the emperor, may he be exalted, wanted to have his cousin Leopold, bishop of Passau, rule after his death . . . this [conspiracy] was known only to a few, and everything was done in utmost secrecy, Bishop Leopold gathered a multitude, men of war by the thousands, approximately sixteen thousand men, stationing them in the city of Passau for a year. . . . On Tuesday, the 2nd of Adar (15 February 1611),

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at dawn, the people of Passau, numbering approximately six and a half thousand, came in full force, and broke the outer gate, and hurried to the small [quarter] called Kleinseite [Malá Strana, Little Side], killing the guards and burning our houses. And the people of Prague hurried, rising as one to oppose them. . . . The Bohemians retreated to the Old Town, closing the gate to the bridge, guarding this place so no one could leave or enter the Kleinseite for the Old Town. And the Passauers prepared to attack the outer gate of the Kleinseite. . . . They placed a large cannon, a weapon of destruction, opposite these places, intending to destroy them, especially the Jewish Quarter [literally “the street of the Jews” parallel to the German/Yiddish “Judenstraße”] . . . When this was made known to our sovereign, may he be exalted, he immediately ordered that no harm or injury should be inflicted on the Jews. . . . And the Jews fortified the Jewish Quarter closing all the gates. . . . The streets with synagogues were guarded by the soldiers . . . like any other nation, with weapons and armor purchased at great cost at communal expense, and even the Jews bore weapons, guarding by day and by night. Even on the Sabbath, [the Jews] bore weapons.42

The anonymous chronicle, while providing a significantly longer, more involved narrative than even Ẓ  emaḥ  David does for any single event, also makes much more explicit than the parallel liturgical compositions that the violence was part and parcel of broader underlying tensions.43 Although the author’s copying of earlier lists, adding current accounts to them, was not a very sophisticated or expensive undertaking, it demonstrates his confidence as to the value of contemporary events in the overall scheme of Jewish history in Europe. In much the same way as Ẓ  emaḥ  David, for the anonymous chronicler, the history of Prague Jews was an integral part of a larger picture. Despite the limitations of the liturgical works themselves, this historical understanding also mattered to Prague’s Jewish leadership in the context of ritual memorials. The printed liturgy for 2 Adar included a historical introduction on the title page that is concise in comparison to what would follow in the 1620s but provides a basic outline of events: And it came to pass in the sixth millennium [of the Hebrew calendar] in the year 5371 since the creation, on the second day of the month of

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Adar, on Tuesday, there was here in the holy community of Prague a great fracas between all the lords of the country and the Passauer army that came to conquer the city, and they were not successful.44

Only after offering this historical context does the author of the seliḥ ot’s introduction turn to praise and express gratitude to God for compassionately protecting the Jews from danger and to the establishment of a day to be observed annually, “for a memory in God’s sanctuary.” History was not a realm removed from ritual but integral to it; secular history was invoked in ritual time in the sacred synagogue space.45 Commemorative days were integrated seamlessly into the community’s Jewish calendar, integrating the history of Prague’s Jewish community with larger-scale histories. Chroniclers and poets alike expressed wonder at the course of events and at their own survival and confidence that those tales bore saving and repeating. In the publication of seliḥ ot for 14 H ̣  eshvan following the Battle at White Mountain, the introductory historical narrative took up a full page of small print. Detailing the events from 1618 to 1620, this anonymous author produced a historical narrative of the defenestration in highly stylized biblical language. In 5378 (1618), with Matthias in Vienna: Some of the lords and noblemen of Bohemia rose up and made an alliance, and their hearts were strengthened to raise up a hand, and they ascended to the castle here in Prague, to the seat of the emperor’s councilors, who are first in the kingdom of Bohemia, to seat of judgment. And they [the Bohemian “rebels”] took three of them [the emperor’s men] and threw them out the window into the valley, and they shot at them with arrows, and they ran away, for they did not die.46

The text goes on to summarize the death of Matthias and his succession by Ferdinand II, the Bohemians’ coronation of Frederick of the Palatinate in Ferdinand’s place, and the ensuing conflict through the Battle of White Mountain and escape of Frederick and Elizabeth from the city, all from a Habsburg point of view. While focusing on local events, the author understands their international context, explaining: “When they [the Bohemians] saw that they had become hateful in the eyes of their king the emperor, they appointed for themselves lords,

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nobles and officers and gathered a large force, and they also made alliances with other countries.”47 Far from being satisfied with a vague ritual recollection of danger and salvation, the community officials who established this day saw fit to try to ensure that future generations who used this publication would understand its precise historical context in some detail. The battlefield returned to Prague in autumn 1631, when the city was occupied by Protestant Saxon troops under Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, who remained until Ferdinand and his general, Albrecht von Wallenstein, pushed them out in May 1632.48 If seliḥ ot were recited on these occasions, or for them, no record exists. Just a few years later, in 1639, a devastating plague struck the city, recorded on gravestone inscriptions like one by Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller for his daughters and grandchildren; other narrative accounts, if they were written, have not survived.49 Changes in the ways events were or were not narrated by local Jews were not brought about by apathy but by the community’s internal political situation and place in a larger cultural context. In 1620 –1621, even in the absence of Chief Rabbi Isaiah Horowitz, who had left for the Land of Israel but not yet been replaced, the local rabbinate and lay leadership functioned well enough to enact the commemoration for 14 H ̣  eshvan. In the aftermath of Habsburg victory and expulsion of Protestants in 1620 –1621, Jews had even reaped direct benefits by the increase of the Jewish Quarter.50 But before long, negative effects of the difficult situation began to be felt. As Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller wrote in his Megillat eivah: “because of the war’s impact on Prague, income decreased and expenses increased, and the taxes multiplied, . . . divisions increased among the Jews regarding the amounts due, and hearts were split. . . .”51 The chief rabbinate, occupied briefly by Moses Mendels ben Isaiah Menaḥ em, was empty from 1623 until Heller assumed the position in 1628. After he was forced out in 1629, it again remained unfilled until the appointment of native son Aaron Simon Spira-Wedeles (often referred to simply as Simon SpiraWedeles) in 1640.52 This instability during the generation following Ferdinand’s victory at White Mountain was not only the cause but also a symptom of communal discord; appointing a rabbi required a degree

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of consensus among the Jewish community’s political factions. The internal stresses and lack of a cohesive communal leadership hindered the creation of new liturgies, for there was no authority to ensure their implementation among the entire community. The power vacuum was likewise bound up with cultural decline that made undertakings on the scale of Gans’s Ẓ  emaḥ David far less likely.

Turning Tide: 1648 as a Time of Transition In the summer of 1648, as negotiations aimed at ending the war that had torn apart Europe for the past thirty years continued elsewhere, Protestant Swedish General Hans Christoff Königsmarck (1605 –1663) invaded Bohemia.53 In the early morning hours of July 26 (7 Av), his forces captured Prague’s Malá Strana and Castle District in a surprise attack. The local population, some of whom had been patently antiHabsburg decades earlier during the Passau invasion of 1611, rallied to resist the Protestant attack on that same regime. University students led a legion that mounted a defense on the stone bridge spanning the Vltava, forcing the Swedish to call for reinforcements.54 Batteries were erected, and massive artillery lobbed on the Old and New Towns from strategic positions atop the castle hill. The position of the Jewish Quarter just to the north of the bridge’s eastern edge, directly across the river from the highest Swedish positions, put it directly in the line of fire. Jews also served in the defense of the city, particularly in their traditional roles as fire fighters and in building reinforcements (Figures 5.1 and 5.2). After the attempted conquest, Judah Leib ben Joshua, scribe to Chief Rabbi Simon Spira-Wedeles, composed Milḥ ama beshalom, the short history of the events with which we opened this book, first printed in Prague in approximately 1650.55 And, an anonymous Prague Jew wrote a very different text about the same events, a Yiddish “historical song” called the Shvedish lid.56 Together, these two works, the only two in Jewish languages among a large body of Czech, German, and Latin writings about the Swedish conquest, represent a transitional moment between the way local history had been recorded by Prague’s Jews in the past and different forms similar impulses would take in the future.57

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Figure 5.1 Prague Castle from the east, across the Vltava River. This photo captures the view across the river from approximately the direction of the Old Town, where the Jewish Quarter stands, showing the relative elevation of the castle hill, where Swedish artillery was positioned in 1648. At the time, the only statue on the bridge was a single crucifix. Museum of the City of Prague inv. no. H 141 897-001. Courtesy of the Museum of the City of Prague.

Figure 5.2 View of Prague, looking south from the Letná, today a park area to the north of Prague’s city center. Prague Castle is to the right, the Old Town to the left, across the Vltava River. The Jewish Quarter is to the north of the bridge, close to the river. 1591 engraving by Joris Hoefnagel and Franz Hogenberg, Civitates Orbis Terrarum (Cologne: Georg Braun, 1572 –1618). Museum of the City of Prague inv. no. H 009 994-001. Courtesy of the Museum of the City of Prague.

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Milḥ ama beshalom’s author, while lacking the communal authority of the chief rabbis who had written earlier seliḥ ot, shared none of the humility of the anonymous author of the el malei raḥ amim who would mourn victims of the 1689 fire a generation later. Rather, he declared at the outset: “I, Judah Leib, son of Rabbi Joshua in the service of the esteemed Rabbi Simon Spira, head of the rabbinic court and of the yeshiva of our community, the holy community of Prague, I, the scribe [sofer] wrote this for a memory in a book. . . .”58 This mid-level community official’s historical record of events might have been his own initiative or could equally have been an organized, institutionalized record, completed by a functionary rather than a leader. Milḥ ama beshalom also makes reference to seliḥ ot written by Spira-Wedeles, printed locally in the midst of the events, and said during the siege as a prayer for protection, not as an annual commemoration.59 The practice of the chief rabbi composing occasionspecific liturgy continued, in this limited form, but no marker of the Swedish invasion entered Jewish Prague’s liturgical year. Cohesive local leadership institutions still played a role in framing reactions but in a less authoritative manner than in the Thirty Years’ War commemorations. The anonymous Shvedish lid, a rhymed song of 88 stanzas, belongs to a genre of Yiddish “historical songs” reporting on current events throughout Ashkenaz that began to appear in the early seventeenth century.60 As opposed to “folk songs” in which oral traditions circulate, evolve, and are eventually written down, these songs were consciously composed by an often identifiable author, acting independently, and generally committed immediately to print. The Shvedish lid thus has no official communal aspect. Although called “historical” because of their close resemblance to a German genre, historisches lied, in many senses Yiddish historical songs are not “historical” at all.61 Rather than eternalizing events or recalling the past, they served, according to Yiddish scholar Chone Shmeruk, to spread news to other Jewish communities and to shape local public opinion.62 About fifty such songs of approximately fifty to one hundred stanzas survive, mostly printed in Prague or Amsterdam.63 Many name another song (Hebrew, Yiddish, or German) to whose tune they are meant to be sung.

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Yiddish historical songs describing different types of events take on entirely different personalities, so that it is impossible to say that the genre was seen as appropriate for some particular purpose and not others. Milḥ ama beshalom and the Shvedish lid, for example, could both be called “thrillers” or action stories, in some ways more similar to each other than to other examples of their own genres. When preserved beyond their expected limited lifetimes, the seeds of historical interest that had not found fertile ground for another universal chronology on the scale of Ẓ  emaḥ  David were instead framed as songs of adventure, lament, autobiographical mourning, or polemic, according to the needs of the moment.64 It is not known when Yiddish historical songs were first printed; the earliest extant exemplars appeared in 1648, one as a second edition. The majority of those preserved survive in single copies in the collection of Prague Chief Rabbi David Oppenheim (1664 –1736), now in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University.65 Because he started collecting in the 1680s, the possibility remains that many songs, including earlier ones not preserved at that time, have not survived at all. The Yiddish songs’ lack of pretension to great secular or rabbinic learning, their ostensibly not relying on earlier traditions—as do both Ẓ  emaḥ  David and more traditional rabbinic writings—made them easier for authors of a variety of backgrounds to produce in the absence of firm support for cultural endeavors in both the secular and Jewish worlds.66 Judah Leib was aware of Gans’s work, referring his readers to it for a description of the bridge across the Charles River, which played a prominent role in the battle against the Swedes.67 Taking advantage of rising acceptance of vernacular literature, the songs required relatively little education and financial investment to write; some were written by functionaries like cantors, others by individuals who apparently had less training in literature and music.68 As in other inexpensive Yiddish publications, the title page of the Shvedish lid, used to market the pamphlet, emphasizes its entertainment value:69 Whoever reads it, his heart laughs, About the invasion of the Swedes Therefore you should buy [this booklet]. . . . Thus you will see / What signs and wonders took place in Prague,

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How the capital city was defended without cannon Therefore grab it / For until now they [the signs and wonders] have never been set to print.70

By referring to “signs and wonders,” the author also attributes the city’s salvation to divine intervention. The title page of the Hebrew chronicle, probably written by its publisher or an employee of his publishing house, likewise emphasizes entertainment, but also gratitude: And when a Jew reads this book he will certainly praise He who performed a miracle for us in this place.71 The reader will take pleasure in [the act of hearing] good news from a distant land. All who hear [it] will laugh and give praise and thanks to God who answers and brings relief.72

Author Judah Leib’s own intention differs from his printer’s emphasis on entertainment, focusing instead on the recording of history for posterity. He ties the praise of God who works wonders in history not only to the pleasure and praiseworthiness of contemporaries’ reading the work but also to the act of (future) remembrance, “so that future generations will know, children will be born and rise up to tell their children . . . and our Lord did not forsake us, and granted us grace before our lord, His majesty, and [granted grace] to all Israel in all the places they inhabit . . .”73 Genuinely grateful for the rescue of Prague’s Jewish community from extreme physical threat, Judah Leib’s concern that his record of events be remembered by future generations also echoes positions expressed by the anonymous Prague chronicler and David Gans, a self-conscious aim of preserving the events for posterity that is entirely missing from the text of the Shvedish lid. Milḥ ama beshalom seeks to convey not only a sense of the immediate unfolding of events as experienced by residents of Prague in general and its Jewish Quarter in particular—the main focus of the Yiddish lid—but also to provide some historical background and political context for those events. Whereas the Yiddish song opens in the wee hours of Sunday, July 26, as Swedish forces conquered the Malá Strana, the Hebrew chronicle begins weeks earlier, briefly outlines events two years subsequent to the Swedish withdrawal, and occasionally refers to events outside Prague. At some points, Milḥ ama beshalom provides

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a precise day-by-day chronological account of events, as when Judah Leib describes one of the most harrowing events the residents of the Jewish Quarter experienced. He explains that the Jews, whose neighborhood was just opposite the river from the highly perched Prague Castle held by the Swedes, had to live in the lower floors of their houses, avoiding higher stories and the street because of the regular Swedish bombardments from the castle.74 In this atmosphere, just a few days into the fighting, on the day after Tisha b′Av, naïve Jews experienced their first encounter with a new, unknown instrument of destruction. The Hebrew text conveys their shock: On Wednesday, the tenth of Av, in the evening, at the hour when the House of our Lord [the Temple] was burned, with the setting of the sun, it happened, by reason of God, for our many sins, that the Swedes shot from the Little Side into the Jewish Quarter, with a large barrel of fire called a mörscher [mortar; mörser in modern German] in German, into which one puts an instrument of destruction called feier kugel [cannonball; literally: fireball] in German, and when this destroyer fell to the ground, the Jews did not know the law, the nature, and the essence of this destroyer. They had only heard that it was good to cover it with a piece of leather soaked in water, because it will act to cool it so that it won’t destroy. And the Jews, some ten people, drew near to this instrument of destruction and picked up a little of the leather that covered it. There were also those who said that one man pushed it a bit with his stick and his foot. Then that instrument of destruction burst open, and by itself and from within itself, it sprayed pieces of iron, for those bulbs are hollow, and inside them are put all kinds of destructive materials with gun powder and sulfur and tar . . . And so, when it was burst open the bulb sprayed itself from within itself into pieces of iron and lead on those people that were standing near it. And nine people were killed there, some were injured in their brains, and the brain fell out of the skull, and some had a hand or a foot cut off, and some had their stomach slashed, and some, it was crushed on their bodies, and all their limbs were stricken, and [they] died strange and cruel deaths, may God avenge their blood. And more than ten people’s hands were damaged. And pieces of the instrument of destruction itself that had slashed open landed in the windows and the walls, which was a great innovation and a wonder to see such utter ruin wrought by that instrument of destruction.75

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The Shvedish lid depicts the same gruesome scene: On the 10th of Av, one hour before nightfall The Swedes shot a grenade into the Judengasse In front of kaẓ  in [elected Jewish communal official] R. Shlomo Poryes’ door The grenade rushed forth

Someone delicately threw a piece of wet leather on it The leather lay on it a goodly while No smoke came out; someone lifted it up a little Immediately, a flash in an eye It jumped like a hundred cannon There was a great commotion Many, many people Of those who were wounded lost their lives From the great shock of the blast Many, pity, fell to the ground Men and women wept over that

Generally a more streamlined account than Milḥ ama beshalom, the song includes some details, like the names of specific people and particular houses, absent from the chronicle. There, the reader learned that nine unnamed people died. Here: Pereẓ  ben Pereẓ  one was called Who, pity, fell; no one could recognize him, His face was entirely black Whoever knew him many years ago Said he is no more A bridegroom, R. Leib, R. Gedalya’s son Was a wonder to see, with the appearance of a king His brains spread out on the ground And he lay slaughtered As if a shoḥ et [ritual slaughterer] had done this

The son of Leib ben Gedalya was the same Heni ben Judah Leib Gedalyes whose 1648 stone stands precisely by the only entrance to the cemetery accessible during the siege, calling him, as does his hazkarah, both “bridegroom” and “martyr.”76 From those memorials, one could have

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guessed his death might have had something to do with the Swedish siege of 1648. Here, in a song meant at least in part to spread news, that reference is confirmed and further corroborated by a historical chronicle. Heni’s contemporaries, those who composed the gravestone inscription and hazkarah and those who used them to remember the young man, understood their historical context. Judah Leib, in writing Milḥ ama beshalom, wanted future generations to understand it as well. The next two stanzas of the song each describe the death of another victim, the one after that names four more.77 Altogether, the Shvedish lid describes the covering, uncovering, and explosion of the bomb in briefest terms and names specific victims. Milḥ ama beshalom, in contrast, while dreadfully reconstructing the horror and awe of inexperienced bystanders at the power and utter destructiveness of the explosive device, does not name a single one of the dead. This greater attention of the song to particular, especially local details is typical of the differences between the two works. The chronicle seeks historical context while the song focuses on the specific sequence of events and personalities in the Jewish Quarter. It is not clear why the chronicle, the more “vertically” focused work—that is to say, with a conscious intention of preserving events for future generation—is not also concerned with individuals’ names. Perhaps the chronicler understands the eternalization of individuals as belonging to the liturgical realm, where a wide range of strategies were employed in commemorating the dead, specifically, individually, and by name. It may be that in seeking to tell a more universal historical tale that would stand the test of time, the particular details of individual lives were deemed less interesting. Both works display great confidence and a self-conception of the Jewish community as people of Bohemia and Prague, living alongside, though not as one with, the rest of the local population, of whom those loyal to and fighting for the Habsburgs are referred to as am hakeisar (the emperor’s people/nation). The apologetic aspect of the Jews’ display of loyalty to the Habsburg Monarchy, as reported in both song and chronicle, while present, lacks political bite. Both narrate broadly conceived views of the events that devote special attention to the experiences of the Jewish Quarter (though the song emphasizes this particular aspect more so than does the chronicle), but neither

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makes those experiences the main focus of its reports. Each adds a unique shading to the events in a way that would have been of interest to the local Jewish community and perhaps to Jews elsewhere as well, but the version of events is fundamentally the same as others in other languages. With its more narrow, self-standing focus, tied briefly to the larger picture especially at the beginning and end of the work, Milḥ ama beshalom modifies the older model represented by Ẓ  emaḥ  David. The Shvedish lid, on the other hand, represents a new genre, a more “popular” type of history writing, more accessible to a wider public and easier to produce than the chronicle while sharing similar concerns. As these literary forms evolved, the liturgical memorial forms like Heni’s gravestone and hazkarah remained relatively consistent, their texts and art growing more elaborate while their basic contours remained the same. The same year, 1648, is notorious in Jewish history primarily for the Khmelnytskyi uprising, in which Ukrainian peasants attacked their Polish Catholic overlords and the Jews who served them, murdering thousands and devastating entire communities.78 In central Europe, the Peace of Westphalia marking the end of the Thirty Years’ War left the Habsburgs victorious but the local population decimated. Prague’s Jewish community was also heavily in debt.79 With Bohemia firmly in Catholic hands, the stage was set for continued intensification of Catholic renewal. Jesuits credited the Virgin Mary with the defeat of the Swedes, and, “when peace and stability finally returned, there was a virtual explosion of Marian literature and a swift expansion of her cult,” including a popular trilogy of Marian pilgrimage routes, and the erection of a soaring, 60-meter-high Marian column in the Old Town Square, begun in 1650 —when separate Jewish and Christian commemorations of the victory over the Swedes were held—and dedicated in 1652 (Figure 5.3).80 Milḥ ama beshalom concludes with this commemorative celebration held in Prague on the second anniversary of the Swedish invasion. It included rejoicing, distribution of wine and meat in the city, and a procession in the Jewish Quarter. After that one-time event, the hold the events of 1648 had on the memory of Prague Jewry took different forms. A “Jewish hat” that appears on the official seal of Prague’s Jewish

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Figure 5.3 Marian column, in the center of Prague’s Old Town Square, ca. early twentieth century. Behind are the towers of the Týn Church. Museum of the City of Prague inv. no. H 090 027-001. Courtesy of the Museum of the City of Prague.

Town came to be viewed as a reward for Jews’ service to Ferdinand III during the Swedish invasion. Even though neither Milḥ ama beshalom, the Shvedish lid, nor any other documentation supports this connection, the local population’s impulse to link the two demonstrates how dearly they held the memory of Jewish contribution to the city’s defense in 1648.81

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Local Jews’ need to reiterate their sense of belonging grew increasingly more acute as life literally under the shadow of the new Marian column was shaped in very real ways by the Catholic Habsburg triumphalism it represented. Freed from the fiscal burdens of the Thirty Years’ War and having driven organized Protestantism from Bohemian lands, Catholic authorities could now exert increasing pressure on the Jewish community.82 For nearly thirty more years, Simon SpiraWedeles continued to hold the position of chief rabbi, and the communal structure functioned (perhaps held together by him), but the intracommunal battles were as fierce and nasty as in Heller’s day. SpiraWedeles was denounced and spent time in jail, and the primas Berl Jeiteles was even accused of orchestrating a murder.83 Jews’ traditional burgher competitors in Prague’s Old Town and the Bohemian lands likewise renewed pressures to enforce long-standing prohibitions like those on conducting business on Sundays and holidays and employing Christian servants.84 Hebrew books came under increased censorship, as experienced by Meir Perles when he sought to print his works.85 When Leopold I succeeded his father Ferdinand III in 1658, there was an attempt to scale back Jewish privileges and population, which had grown significantly, efforts that later took the shape a Jewish Reduction Committee (established in 1679).86 In October of that year, Spira-Wedeles fell victim to plague, his name among the first on a list of the Jewish dead from Prague, numbering 2965 over the following winter.87 The chief rabbi’s death symbolically marks the final passing of the generation that had survived the Thirty Years’ War, whose eldest members bore memories of parents’ and grandparents’ stories of the days of Rudolf and Maharal.88 Although the death toll temporarily held at bay the building pressure to reduce the Jewish population by other means, the community’s warring political parties could not agree on a candidate for chief rabbi, and the seat would remain empty and contested for over a decade.

Struggling for Survival: ca. 1680 –1715 Thus, when fire struck the Judengasse on a June afternoon in 1689, no chronicler of David Gans’s temperament or ambitions sought to

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incorporate the events into a larger scheme of Prague’s Jewish history; no rabbinic leader of Heller’s stature composed an official communal response; no functionary like Judah Leib wrote a recollection to be endorsed by a superior. Instead, an anonymous scribe wrote an el malei raḥ amim, inserted into the local synagogue’s kuntrasim (manuscript supplements containing hazkarot neshamot and other local liturgy), to be recited annually on 3 Tevet in memory of the victims. As in 1648, a Yiddish historical song, Sreyfe lid fun prag (Fire Song from Prague), by an otherwise unknown author named Yeḥ iel Michael ben Abraham Zalman, also mourned the loss of life and sent word of the tragedy.89 “El malei raḥ amim,” the song begins in conscious imitation of the ritual lament, “God full of compassion . . . in the midst of bad as in the midst of good we give you praise . . .”90 At noon, the Sreyfe lid reports, all had been fine; by two o’clock, a great commotion prevailed. Starting near the house at Black Eagle, in the Karpfengasse, the fire spread quickly. “People ran from the Tandel Market / Many already found not their houses.”91 People grabbed for their possessions, and, searching in vain for a safe place to secure them, were forced to drop them in the intense heat. Attempts were made to carry the deaf, blind, lame, old and, young to the relative safety of the cemetery—which had no wooden buildings to burn—though eventually the trees burned there as well. Others headed for the river. Efforts to save Torah scrolls by moving them to cellars likewise proved futile, “[they] burned or melted easily as pitch.”92 Of thirteen synagogues, “Pity, no more than two remained.”93 It took days for survivors to locate family members in the ensuing confusion. Proponents of reducing Prague’s Jewish population seized on the opportunity provided by accusations that Jews had set the fire and the destruction of all but a few of their homes to oppose— or at least to try to limit the scale of—plans to rebuild the Jewish Quarter. Some suggested relocation to nearby Libenˇ. In the end, the Quarter was rebuilt, but with modifications.94 In the meantime, Jews found shelter with Christians in other parts of the Old Town, despite vehement opposition from Church authorities. While written for secular use, the Sreyfe lid (like similar Yiddish songs of lament) resonates, as does the 1689 Prague el malei raḥ amim

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and similar literature of lamentation, as a figurative version of a kinnah (plural: kinnot), liturgical elegies recited in synagogues on Tisha b′Av. The song’s chorus, “Woe unto us for we have sinned,” based on a phrase from the Book of Lamentations, draws on an association of sinning with lamentation and mourning, the notion that the Jews’ sins, referred to in the first person plural, brought on this disaster. While long since formulaic in the spoken language of the Jewish Quarter and not necessarily implying strongly held feelings of guilt, this theme was emblematic of the kinnot’s concern with sin as a cause of suffering.95 A 1713 plague left similar Yiddish songs in its wake.96 The immediate effects of this trauma left a well-documented mark on a generation of Prague Jewry; the recovery continued for decades.97 More than ten years later, in the first decade of the eighteenth century, mention is made of synagogues just recently rebuilt.98 Yet it spawned no printed liturgy, no known chronicle, no addition—as had the massacre of 1389 —to the high holiday prayers. The poor state of the community, culturally and in other ways, led to commemoration of this pivotal event in more ephemeral forms, as a manuscript el malei raḥ amim and in a Yiddish song. This last genre, perfect for the circumstances, could imitate elegy, as it did in this case, or take on a form as different as polemic.

Polemic: The Simon Abeles Affair Just a few years later, in 1693, Simon Abeles, a Jewish boy of about eleven or twelve years of age, son of a glove-maker and grandson of Moses Abeles, primas of the Jewish Town, ran away from home with the help of a former Jew and sought shelter and instruction for baptism from Jesuits in Prague’s Clementinum College, closer to the Jewish Town than even the nearby Tandel Market, but socially and culturally a world away.99 Familiarity with the Christian parts of town presumably acquired in the years just after the fire may have made the move a little easier than it would otherwise have been, though what role Simon’s own difficult family circumstances, adolescent rebellion, or genuine spiritual inclination may also have played in his decision

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cannot be known.100 Weeks later, the young boy returned to the Jewish Quarter— or was returned by his family—as yet unbaptized. Not long after, he died and was buried in the Jewish Cemetery. Local authorities held that Simon had been killed by his own father, Lazar Abeles, ex odio fidei, out of hatred for the Christian religion so fierce it brought him to murder his own child rather than allow him to convert. The elder Abeles was arrested, questioned, and then hanged himself, presumably to avoid torture. Conversions of local Jewish teenagers to Christianity occurred with some regularity—though precise numbers are difficult to pinpoint— and similar accusations had been made against Jewish parents of young potential converts in the past. Unlike most such instances, however, this time the case became a cause célèbre, with Simon as unofficial Bohemian saint celebrated in broadsides, songs, and even an oratorio; numerous Christian accounts related the details of the affair and promoted Simon’s cult. A church burial conducted with great pomp and circumstance placed Simon’s body in the spiritual center of the Old Town, at the Týn Church, right on the Old Town Square. Historian Howard Louthan, in detailing abundant literature celebrating Simon, has shown that the development of his cult, while highly localized, also fits in the overall program of Habsburg Catholic saint-making during this period, part of the effort to cement and enliven popular Catholic belief that simultaneously put increasing pressure on Jewish populations.101 A Yiddish historical song, Ayn nay kloglid (a new mourning song), the only surviving Jewish account of these events, functions as polemic, portraying its protagonists in a manner directly opposed to Christian depictions of the same characters and events.102 Confounding expectations, the song does not protest Lazar’s innocence. Rather, after a short preface and instructions that it be sung to a particular tune, its opening stanzas place the story chronologically and geographically, introducing Simon as a bad youngster, well known in Prague, of whom no good came. It relates that after the boy’s “heresy” (kefira), things did not go well for him, and his father arranged for him to be returned home.103 When the boy contemplated returning to “sin” and the Christian outside world, however: “Then his father resolved / To bring the youth to

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death / And to bury him in the cemetery with great distress.”104 It is possible that in this accusation, the author of the Yiddish song simply repeats a charge made in an unknown written source. The motif of a Jewish parent preferring the death of his child to the child’s conversion to Christianity echoes well-known medieval topoi of both Jewish depictions of Jewish martyrdom and Christian accusations of Jewish cruelty.105 Contemporaries were aware of the case of Simon of Trent, an alleged blood libel victim from the late fifteenth century, and made use of this motif by comparing the two Simons as well. Yet, as much as these images suggest themselves as potential keys to the seventeenth-century story, the Yiddish poem itself pays little attention to them or related themes, instead moving quickly through the exhumation and examination of Simon’s body, imprisonment and death of his father Lazar Abeles, and questioning of Leah Abeles, Lazar’s wife and Simon’s stepmother.106 In accord with German and Latin sources, the song then describes the honor bestowed on the dead Simon by local Christian authorities, his red-velvet-lined coffin borne ceremoniously into the Týn Church, and more. About halfway through, the kloglid introduces a new character, Löbl Raudniẓ , also known as Löbl Kurtzhandl, a relative who had lived with the Abeles family and apparently helped care for the children and who, in the wake of Lazar’s death, was accused as an accomplice of the murder. The rest of Ayn nay kloglid is devoted to Löbl and the trials he underwent from the time of his arrest in March 1694 until his death on Saturday, October 16 of that year, including seven full stanzas describing his execution day. Ayn nay kloglid’s construction of Löbl as saint, a figure for Prague’s young Jews to emulate as Simon Abeles was held up as a model to Christian and other young Jewish potential converts, counters the image of him in Christian accounts. The Yiddish song reports that Löbl was beaten, kept in a windowless dungeon, and condemned to die. It describes his appeals process, including the name of an intercessor sent to Vienna when his initial appeal to the local appellations court was denied, and relates the horror of his conditions. He was provided only bread and water to eat; “One could shear the lice from his body.”107 Emphasizing Löbl’s continued faith in the face of his dire circumstances, Ayn nay kloglid relates:

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Day and night the priests went to him For him to convert was [the object of ] their desire But he did not want to look at any of their faces And did not want to break from God, may He be blessed108

Löbl’s faith is, in fact, the crux of the song’s argument. When brought out to be executed, he recited the Shema and appeared “as happy as if he had been saved.”109 He “confessed” to the crime, saving other alleged accomplices, asked forgiveness “of all the world,” as appropriate on one’s death bed. Brought before the instrument of his death—an eighty-pound wheel (as mentioned in other sources)—the executioner dealt him, according to the song, forty-nine blows, and “with that the kadosh [martyr or saint] breathed his last.”110 The most famous and comprehensive Christian account painted an opposite picture. In a ninety-page booklet known as the Processus Inquisitorius, published in Prague in 1696 and republished in 1728, official documents about the legal case are woven into narrative form with the addition of short introductions to each.111 According to the Processus and other contemporary Christian reports, just before Löbl’s death, the Jesuit priest Johann Brandstätter, who had been regularly visiting the condemned man, did so once more, at the wheel, and Löbl relented and accepted conversion to Christianity in return for a quick end to his misery.112 In its final pages, the Processus narrates Löbl’s final minutes, in which the condemned man asks the priest at his side: “Father, what does He promise me through the baptism?” “See, my child,” said the Father, “by God, mercy and eternal life, and that you will die more easily.” Levi Kurtzhandl thought it over but a little, and quickly called in a clear voice, “I will be baptized.”

Kurtzhandl then chose a Christian name, Joannes Joannes; he was sprinkled with holy water, and the executioner dealt the final blow.113 The central conflict between the Christian and Jewish accounts of events thus focuses not on the innocence or guilt of Lazar Abeles—nor even on the innocence or guilt of Löbl Kurtzhandl, though the Jewish version appears to assume that he was—but on the final moments of Kurtzhandl’s life. An illustration from the 1696 Processus also emphasized this theme, echoing the book’s contents.114 At the top, young

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Simon, angelic and saintly, rests on a heavenly bed. In the bottom right corner is Lazar Abeles, Simon’s father, hanging in his cell. At the bottom left, Löbl Kurtzhandl appears, on the wheel. Löbl’s corner is light; Lazar’s is dark. The print illustrates the booklet’s preface, where, as Louthan outlines, Lazar Abeles and Löbl Kurtzhandl are compared to the two thieves who died with Jesus on the cross; one saw the truth, accepted Jesus as Lord, as did Löbl, while the other, like Lazar, refused.115 The Jewish and Christian versions of the Abeles story, though told in very different forms, share a fundamental focus on the figure of Löbl, each viewing him as its own saint, based on opposite interpretations of his final moments. In this polemic mode, the Yiddish song’s veneration of Löbl Kurtzhandl as a saint constituted a practical step to provide a model for Jewish youth. Simon as Christian saint was attractive, or at least meant to be so; the Processus reports: “After this . . . many Jewish children, from this impetus, freely sought the Holy teaching of Christ, Catholic faith, and holy Baptism in great numbers. . . .”116 Löbl, as written by the author of the Yiddish song, was designed to be even more so. Counter, perhaps, to first appearances, God did indeed stand by his people Israel, giving small signs of His providence, even in the darkest times, rebutting Catholic attempts to finally surpass, once and for all, contemporary Jews as the true triumphant Israel.

Old Themes, a New Vessel, and Local Pride: Ayn sheyn mayseh It was during this same period of plague, catastrophic fire, and virulent religious polemic, alongside continuing Catholic triumphalism and pressure to expel Prague’s Jews, that Ayn sheyn mayseh, the origin tale of Jewish wisdom and belonging, appeared in print. While a precise date is not stated, the tale’s form and language suggest it was published around the turn of the eighteenth century.117 Like the Yiddish songs, this short tale was printed cheaply, in a small format and required only minimal education to read, and even to write. Based on widespread folk motifs, it drew on tales, oral and perhaps written, from outside as

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well as inside the Jewish community, but not on sophisticated cultural exchange as had characterized Rudolf ’s court and Ẓ  emaḥ  David. As a folk tale, Ayn sheyn mayseh does not purport to be history “as it really happened,” nor does it include any chain of tradition claiming earlier authority.118 Sheer entertainment by means of inexpensive reading material was part of its raison d’être, but its messages regarding the antiquity, justice, and benefit to the local population as a whole of Prague’s Jewish community are too blatantly stated to have been insignificant. Neither the publishers nor the audience seem to have had any trouble with the notion that a certain kind of truth about a community’s identity could be expressed at least as well by means of a “fictional” story as by other forms of narrative.119 It is, in this sense, a self-conscious foundation myth that subtly demonstrates an awareness of its own construction of meaning. The fable, comprising two different identifiable international folk motifs, belongs to the general category of origin myths. An additional theme, that of an invitation from the emperor to settle the land, also characterizes much earlier Ashkenazi origin tales surrounding the figure of Charlemagne.120 Ayn sheyn mayseh’s first international motif relates to the wealthy merchant’s concealment of his money in a wine jug, its theft, and the uncovering of this plot by the breaking of the jug to find remaining shards or dust of gold, here devised by the clever young man.121 In Arab literature, the honey is replaced by olives, as in The Arabian Nights.122 In Hebrew and Yiddish sources, including in a popular Yiddish collection of stories known as the Mayseh bukh first printed in the early seventeenth century, the concealed wealth takes the form of gold hidden by a widow in a jug of honey, stolen from there, and the honey replaced.123 The widow turned to King Saul, who was unable to help, but a young David, future king, proposed the solution of breaking the jugs.124 Saul then deemed David more worthy of the kingship than himself. In the same manner, the wealthy merchant in Ayn sheyn mayseh first sought redress from the kind ruler, favorably inclined to the petitioner but unable to devise a method for proving his claim. Gumpricht, the previously unknown young man, then proved himself wiser than his elder and thus, in a sense, became the David of Prague Jewry, the founder of a dynasty. He also resembles the biblical Joseph,

Narrating History in Book, Tale, and Song

indispensable to the foreign king, who likewise established a familybased community in a new land. In Ayn sheyn mayseh’s telling, wisdom is the key to the Jews’ historically based belonging in Prague, echoing Ẓ  emaḥ  David’s story of Jews who outsmarted pagans to help Duke Boleslav establish Christianity in Bohemia, the Hebrew verb used there, hitḥ akhmu (outsmarted), coming from the root ḥ -kh-m (basis for the words “wise” and “wisdom”).125 Beila Horowitz and Rachel Rausnitz refashioned and published this oft-told tale, together with another that makes up their booklet’s second half, as a single story, at once romantic and satirical, in the very particular time and place of late seventeenth- to early eighteenthcentury Jewish Prague. In the face of increasing religious pressure and challenges to the Jews’ very presence in the city, the story reiterated both the length of their residency and the service they provided the country’s sovereign. One such direct challenge to the Jews’ historical role in Bohemia appeared, for example, in 1700, when Czech historian Jan Beckovský published his The Messenger of Old Czech Happenings, a chronicle including many recycled, rabidly anti-Jewish tales from Czech history.126 Like the Simon Abeles kloglid and Thirty Years’ War seliḥ ot, the story was meant to shore up internal confidence and selfunderstanding rather than to engage Christian readers directly. The tension continued into the early part of the eighteenth century and was apparent in daily life as well, as reflected in reports of direct conflict between Jewish merchants and Christian customers in the Tandel Market that form the background of the two surviving Prague family megillot from this period.127 The Jewish turn to a historical claim of belonging in the form of a literary genre more concerned with truth (the Jews’ historic right to residency and service to sovereign) than facts (details of the emperor’s invitation; a folk tale was not meant to be understood literally), a genre accessible to writer and reader alike, requiring relatively little investment, financial or otherwise, reflected a continued interest and reliance on the local past, now appearing in forms that differed from those of a hundred years earlier. The women who brought the story to press, enabled by changing historical and cultural circumstances, also helped shape preservation of local Jewish memory in new ways.

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“In the Language People Understand”



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In Ayn sheyn mayseh’s second subplot, Gumpricht approaches the emperor with a request to marry. In paraphrase:

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The emperor declared that Gumpricht could marry any Jewish woman in his realm, and Gumpricht already had somebody in mind. The emperor gave him leave and money to travel to Buntsla [Bumsla in contemporaneous Hebrew usage, Jungbunzlau in German, and Mladá Boleslav in Czech], where the beautiful woman lived with her father. There, Gumpricht spent the Sabbath with the father and learned of the young woman’s ideal qualities. He sat in the family’s home the entire day on Friday, but she did not so much as come out so that he could see her until it was time to light the Sabbath candles. In her father’s words, “there [was] none like her in beauty, virtue, [she knew] how to do various crafts and play all kinds of instruments.”1 The father hypothetically expressed his willingness to arrange her marriage to the famous young man who had won the emperor’s favor through his wisdom—another ideal quality, this one applying to men. At the end of the Sabbath, Gumpricht revealed himself and the match was duly made. Gumpricht then ordered a gift of velvet shoes, one with the initials of each of their first names, for his bride-to-be, and returned to the emperor’s court at Prague. There, Gumpricht sang his fiancée’s praises, speaking of her beauty, her endless skills, and above all her piousness and modesty. He aroused the jealousy of one of the king’s close advisors who challenged Gumpricht to stand before the emperor and wager on his very life that the advisor would not be able to charm the young woman into “lying by [him],” i.e., engaging in sexual relations.2 The emperor

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feared for Gumpricht’s well-being, but trusted that his wisdom would protect him, and the bet was made. The advisor set off for Bumsla with plenty of money. When the bride’s father heard that someone was in town asking about her, he sent her away. Nevertheless, after much advice-seeking, conniving and plotting the advisor was able to bribe the family’s Shabbos goye [a Gentile woman close to the family], who brought him an object belonging to her, the velvet shoes, and reported that she had a mark on her shoulder. He returned to Prague triumphant and used his “proofs” to report on his “victory” to the emperor. Gumpricht was jailed, but convinced the emperor to allow him fourteen days to prove his innocence before being hanged. Gumpricht sent to his future father-in-law, asking him to come to Prague at once (apparently Gumpricht thought the older man would be able to offer advice or prove the younger’s innocence in some way). The older man, however, inexperienced in matters other than the constant study of his holy books, was frightened and sent the messenger back to Gumpricht empty-handed.3 So he sent to his bride, reporting all that had happened and requesting that she herself come to Prague immediately. The reader now hears for the first time that the bride also “was very wise.”4 She took with her the necessary items—fine clothing and lots of money—and set off. Once in Prague, she did not contact her fiancé, but rather immediately petitioned the emperor requesting an audience with his counselors. When the council had assembled, she asked that the wagerer who had “won” the bet be called. When he came in, she greeted him very warmly and asked after his health. The advisor begged her pardon and asked where he knew her from. The bride continued with this game, “reminding” him of their games and dances together, leading, of course, to his growing protestation that he did not know her. When the emperor called the two of them before him, he repeated his vocal denials of their acquaintance. In this way the lie was revealed, the wagerer hanged and the bridegroom released. The emperor expressed his great joy and thanks to God that the truth had come to light, justice had been done, and innocent blood not been shed. As the bride was already in Prague, he ordered an immediate wedding, and all her family came to join them as well, with great revelry and celebration. The emperor granted great privileges for

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Jews settling in Prague and sent money, gold, silver, precious stones and pearls. Several more Jewish householders were settled in Prague, and Gumpricht had a synagogue built and a rabbi hired. The fable ends with a few short lines wishing for the continued prosperity of the community in Prague, until the time of the Messiah.

For much of Ayn sheyn mayseh, hero and heroine—bride and groom— had been presented according to ideal types designed to reflect the perfect qualities one would seek in a Jewish male and female. The man was wise, able to learn traditional Jewish texts, as he was doing at the outset, to solve problems creatively, and to act properly at the royal court. The woman was, above all, modest. She was also beautiful, and proficient in both music and other unnamed skills.5 In this second subplot, however, the groom’s wisdom was outweighed by his pride. All he had gained nearly came to naught when he foolishly bet on his life. At this juncture, the woman came to the rescue. She saved the situation by totally subverting the most important “ideal” quality she had demonstrated so far: complete and utter modesty, like that portrayed on women’s gravestones in Prague, but in this case taken to the point of total seclusion in her father’s house. Not only had this modesty been repeatedly emphasized throughout the earlier part of the story, it was also the quality over which the wager between the hero and his jealous competitor was placed. In the end, the bride stood the test Gumpricht put her to by making the wager, but her finest qualities did not, as had been claimed, rest on her seclusion from worldly affairs. Quite to the contrary, her intellectual prowess and especially her suave worldliness, the opposite of purportedly modest isolation, allowed her to save the day—and the groom—and led to the true foundation of the Jewish community in Prague. The groom’s pride put his life at risk; moreover, the father’s bookishness—the prized Jewish intellectualism—made him impotent in the face of danger. The figure of woman as diplomat—specifically, intercessor—had also appeared in the Yampels family megillah’s factual account, when the incarcerated men’s mother and wife went from Prague to Vienna to plead for their family members’ lives, Yampels’s wife, Miriam, leaving her baby behind with a wet nurse.6

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This second subplot’s central motif, involving the man’s wager on his fiancée’s faithfulness, the opposing wagerer’s acquisition of false tokens “proving” her lack thereof, and the subsequent revelation of those tokens’ falsehood, appears in such well-known literature as Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and Boccaccio’s Decameron.7 Yet its context here and juxtaposition to the first subplot create a story that goes beyond the international themes and earlier Jewish iterations of them to promote a multifaceted notion of wisdom, both male and female, intellectual and worldly, as the foundation stone of Prague Jewry.8 The tale’s two women “bringers to press,” their gender made explicit on the work’s title page: “Two women brought the mayseh to print,” first set up the world of male ideals including male wisdom versus female modesty, and then subverted it, a woman’s witty confrontation with a king as necessary to bringing truth and justice to light.9 Rather than compromise feminine modesty, the fiancée’s diplomatic sortie is necessary for the good of the community; men’s pride will lead to the loss of everything. This self-conscious myth provides a stunning example of an “invention of tradition” that is subversive rather than conservative.10 It does not support the ruling order (assuming that the ruling order of the Jewish Quarter was made up of men) but suggests an alternative truth that, in the eyes of its author or authors, lies behind that façade. Czech legend also attributed the founding of Prague itself to a mythical woman, Libuše. In David Gans’s rendering of her story in Ẓ  emaḥ  David, the female wisdom of Libuše and her companions, while necessary to Prague’s origins, also threatened the civil order, at least in the eyes of that society’s men.11 The wisdom of Gumpricht’s bride likewise forms the very basis for the foundation of Prague’s Jewish community, but no such negative connotations attain. The narrative, in other words, reflects a distinctly female voice (whoever may have actually written the words). Women’s involvement in reading, writing, and publishing—roles that had changed substantially since the mid-sixteenth century—mattered to the ways memories and images of the past were formed and recalled. Ayn sheyn mayseh’s publication in print in Prague at this historical juncture is significant not only for

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its protestations of belonging in the face of increasing anti-Jewish pressures but also for what it reveals about changing roles of print and manuscript, sacred and vernacular tongues, and the links between those aspects of written culture and evolving gender roles in Prague and early modern Ashkenaz. The restructuring of written memories, newly encompassing women’s voices, helped reshape the very nature of what was remembered and how. In other words, ongoing expansion of the role of vernacular print in the marketplace of Jewish books and pamphlets led gradually to expanded roles for women in reading, composing, and publishing printed texts like Ayn sheyn mayseh. In turn, this small publication, together with similar works, helped reshape the very nature of Jewish writing and reading. Surviving documents from the sixteenth and earliest part of the seventeenth centuries preserving Prague’s Jewish past are, like their predecessor Avigdor Kara’s Et kol hatela′ah, written in Hebrew. Whether liturgical, meant for ritual spaces and times, like the seliḥ ot for the Passau invasion or the early skirmishes of the Thirty Years’ War, or of a scholarly nature, like Gans’s Ẓ  emaḥ David, they relate local Prague history within a broader context. By the late seventeenth century, more history was recorded in the vernacular, and Yiddish works like Ayn sheyn mayseh and historical songs tended to focus on single events, providing more color but less context. Hebrew writing also underwent gradual transformations, as did the role of manuscript publication.

“A Great Invention”: Print and Manuscript Printed Hebrew books began appearing in Italy in the 1470s, about thirty years after the emergence of the movable-type printing press in Germany. Prague was the site of the first Hebrew-alphabet printing north of the Alps, when, in 1512, a group of printers produced a small liturgical work, grace after meals, for home use. Soon after, Gershom ben Solomon Kohen founded the printing house continued by his sons and grandsons, known as the Gersonides publishers, Prague’s leading Hebrew press for many years to come. Later in the sixteenth century, Hebrew publisher Jacob Bak, whose firm would eventually

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print many Yiddish works, moved from Italy and also opened shop in Prague.12 By 1592, David Gans could elaborately praise the printing press, highlighting its historical significance in his Ẓ  emaḥ  David entry for the year 1440: Book printing was invented in the city of Mainz by a Christian named Johannes Gutenberg from Strasbourg. . . . Blessed is He who with his grace granted us such a great invention as this for the benefit of all inhabitants of the earth, there is none other like it, and nothing of equal value can be found in all the science and technology developed since God created man on the earth.13

He pointed out that print’s great value extended not only to Torah scholars and worldly fields of knowledge but also to the arts, through woodcuts and the like. Gans’s unbridled enthusiasm for the printing of books was not shared by all of his contemporaries; some rabbis feared allowing less learned individuals accessibility to difficult legal texts that print afforded. Maharal understood that, in addition, print could give all opinions an appearance of authority, regardless of their validity, and worried that people would be led to believe wholly mistaken ideas.14 Nevertheless, by the time Gans wrote, print had long since begun to reshape fundamental areas of Ashkenazi cultural and religious life. These included the development and transmission of Jewish law, made more uniform across wide geographic and cultural expanses in particular by the printing of Joseph Karo’s legal code the Shulḥ an arukh with its Ashkenazi gloss by Rabbi Moses Isserles, and the spread of mysticism in the form of Lurianic kabbalah disseminated from the main center of its development in Safed, Israel.15 Print also led to increasing importance of authorship to rabbinic (self )-image, becoming especially significant for reasonably learned men who nevertheless were not part of the highest levels of the rabbinic elite, changing the very nature of religious authority.16 One “agent of culture,” as Elchanan Reiner has called him, a relatively educated religious functionary, spent his student years copying religious, mostly kabbalistic works—previously considered esoteric and reserved for top rabbinic elites—into his own notebook, then published them in Prague years later, vastly increasing

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their accessibility.17 Historian of Polish Jewry Moshe Rosman has likewise described an individual named David ben Menashe Darshan who planned to use his collection of four hundred printed books as a library to allow students to learn without rabbis.18 As use of print expanded, a continuing role was carved out for manuscript. By the early sixteenth century, Et kol hatela′ah, Avigdor Kara’s elegy for the massacre of Jews in 1389, had been incorporated into locally printed books of seliḥ ot for use throughout the year.19 And, the Prague seliḥ ot of the early Thirty Years’ War appeared in largeformat, beautifully printed, freestanding pamphlets. Yet later, similar local liturgical works like the el malei raḥ amim for the 1689 fire remained in manuscript, in the individual notebooks (kuntrasim) kept in each synagogue, whose pages were mostly filled with hazkarot for the individual dead. Likewise, one early family megillah from Cracow, Megillat Rabbi Meir, appeared in print in 1635, written and published a quarter century after the events described took place, while those from Prague remained in manuscript throughout the seventeenth and even into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.20 Megillas Shmuel, in 1704, was the first whose author, according to the text, intended it to be published “in public print” in order to ensure widespread Jewish prayer for the compassionate emperor who saved the megillah’s hero, in particular that he should have progeny and live a long life.21 (Nevertheless, the work first appeared in print, as far as is known, in 1899, nearly two hundred years later.) In other words, over time, after some experimentation (as with the printing of Megillat Rabbi Meir), publishers, authors, and/or readers decided that genres like local liturgies and family megillot were better suited for manuscript than for print. As now seems obvious, works whose main appeal was limited to a particular community or family were most likely to fit into this category. A composition could, however, also be published, that is, circulated widely and intentionally, in manuscript, a form that became wholly conventional for some genres.22 Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller’s Megillat eivah, for example, was passed hand to hand, copied by descendants and students for two hundred years before first appearing in print in 1836, as evidenced by surviving manuscripts and implicit

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references in other works, like Uri Shraga Feibush H ̣  alfan’s echoing of 23 Heller’s language. In contrast to manuscript, in which each new copy of a work involves the same effort and expense as the last, publishing in print involves economy of scale, pushing printers to seek new, larger markets for their products. Early printed editions of foundational texts like the Hebrew Bible and Babylonian Talmud and liturgical works for synagogue and home use earned initial successes, but over the course of centuries, publishers sought out reading audiences for additional works that would also reach beyond the highly educated, male Jews for whom manuscripts had been copied and early printed Jewish legal works disseminated. At the same time, the printing press afforded opportunities to men and occasionally women whose works would never have attained widespread manuscript copying to disseminate ideas and entertainment in the wider world (if they could gather sufficient funds).24 Women, few of whom could understand Hebrew, and many men who also did not represented an enormous untapped market referred to in Yiddish publications as “women and men who are like women.”25 As in other European languages, the market logic of print led gradually to more and more publications in the Jewish vernacular, in a wider variety of genres. The most popular of these, for hundreds of years, was Yaakov ben Yitzḥ ak Ashkenazi’s Ẓ  e′enah ure′enah, a compilation meant to guide readers through the weekly Torah portions.26

Writing a Spoken Tongue: From Leshon hakodesh to Taytsh During the medieval and early modern periods, when Yiddish had been the spoken language among all social classes of Ashkenazi Jews, synagogue liturgy and other intellectual and spiritual pursuits were conducted in leshon hakodesh, Hebrew compositions directed accordingly to a male intellectual elite, their full understanding requiring not only basic language comprehension but familiarity with a vast literature of biblical and rabbinic writings.27 Thus, moving to Yiddish involved

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more than simple translation. Hebrew from the pen of a scholar like Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller drew author and reader directly into a rich, allusive world of biblical and rabbinic text.28 In Heller’s first seliḥ ah for 14 H ̣  eshvan, “Anusah le′ezra,” the last line of each stanza is a direct quotation of a complete biblical line, the rest of the stanza closely based on additional passages. The ninth stanza, for example, describing the defenestration of Emperor Matthias’s officials in Prague, reads: Out the window they threw officials, sitting in judgment The king’s greatest, his commanders, arrows aimed to shoot at their faces Fear and trembling come upon me, I said, who will give me wing to find shelter in the wilderness For “My heart was soured, my guts were numbed.”29

The last line is a direct citation of Psalms 73:2, part of the third from Psalms 55:7, while the first two and half lines were culled from adjacent verses in a single passage, II Kings 9:30 –33, relating the death of Jezebel by defenestration.30 There, the prophet Elisha, through a messenger, has named Jehu king of Israel, replacing the reigning king, Ahab. Jehu was to destroy his predecessor and all his descendants, particularly his ill-regarded daughter Jezebel. As Jehu approached Jezebel’s living quarters, she looked out the window (be′ad haḥ olon) [at him], and Heller uses that phrase to open this stanza about the Prague defenestration.31 Her servants then obeyed Jehu’s orders to throw her out the window. The verse states, “they threw her down”; in Heller’s stanza this becomes, “they threw down” (hishmitu).32 Thus, in Heller’s stanza, the opening phrase is “be′ad haḥ olon hishmitu—” (Out the window they threw—), drawing together the two phrases separated by one sentence in the biblical source. He continues in like manner throughout the stanza and similarly throughout the seliḥ ah. As opposed to the Prague defenestration, which Heller opposed, the biblical text approves of Jezebel’s fall. So while Heller relied heavily on biblical language and saw himself as part of the continuing history of the Jewish people implied by use of that language, his reliance on it did not imply strict identification with the biblical models from which that language was drawn or an inability to see himself as different from the

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biblical characters. The Jezebel story provided him vocabulary; the message was his own. Nevertheless, understanding the Hebrew language of his poem, especially given its obscure topic, defenestration, required not only a basic understanding of Hebrew vocabulary but intimate acquaintance with a text not included in the regular liturgical cycle. Nevertheless, this allusive writing could, and did, encompass wholly secular details. In Heller’s seliḥ ot, printed in an elegant format, inserted into the communal calendar by the chief rabbi and lay authorities, the sacred context of the synagogue was paired with a secular public function. While containing less detail than German and Czech poems about the same events, they included varied historical information that Prague’s communal authorities were fully confident had a rightful place in Jewish history. In “Anusah le′ezra,” “The earth quaked . . . in the days of the emperor Matthias . . . Wednesday, the 28th of [the month of ] Ziv [= Iyar] 5378 [May 23, 1618] . . . many soldiers gathered . . . like a blind person groping in the afternoon, commanders were appointed over all saying, ‘be as our eyes.’”33 The second seliḥ ah, Arkhu hayamim, continued in like vein, “The emperor Ferdinand captured the city . . . his forces will plunder gold and all your precious treasures, for that is their compensation for their service.”34 And the introduction to those liturgical works includes an even more coherent, relatively complete narrative of events. In contrast, the Hebrew manuscript el malei raḥ amim (memorial prayer) for the 1689 fire, likewise written for use in the synagogue, is focused on expressions specifically appropriate to that sacred space. It also incorporates the date of events and mentions, aside from general loss of life, the name of a rabbi and where he died, but emphasizes spiritual dimensions of communal life, including the destruction of study hall, synagogues, and ritual objects. Much more specific information about the fire and its effects on many different aspects of Jewish life in the city is found in the printed Yiddish Sreyfe lid. While it also mentions Torah scrolls and synagogues, it notably bemoans as well the loss of the “beautiful clothing” and “red veils” the women used to wear.35 This contrast between the particular sacred content of the liturgical el malei raḥ amim for the fire of 1689 and the secular featured in the Yiddish historical song, as opposed to the wider range of types of

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detail included in the earlier seliḥ ot and Hebrew works like Milḥ ama beshalom, gently hints at broader changes. At the outset of the early modern period, there had been no clear separation, in synagogue life, between ritual and other realms; synagogues jointly served both ritual and public-official functions. The contrast between the Hebrew prayer and Yiddish songs that had appeared by the late seventeenth century suggests a slight contraction of the sacred, Hebrew, synagogue realm to exclude secular functions it had earlier included. Historian Yosef Kaplan has shown that in the Sephardi community of seventeenthcentury Amsterdam, most of whose members had lived as Christians in Iberia before reverting to Judaism in the Netherlands, fewer and fewer areas of life were regulated by Jewish law, whose application was restricted to the ritual realm. Kaplan views this transformation as one of the central characteristics of Amsterdam Jewry’s relatively early “alternative path to modernity” (“alternative” as opposed to the path leading through the German Haskalah—Jewish Enlightenment).36 In Prague, with its uninterrupted transmission of traditional life, changes were more subtle. The use of Hebrew in printed historical writing constricted somewhat, while ritually oriented memorials like gravestones, ceremonial objects, and hazkarot retained their use of the holy tongue, even as their graphic and literary forms evolved. Simultaneously, print in the Jewish vernacular taytsh increased, although precise numbers are impossible to determine; many early Yiddish printed works are known only from a single collection, indicating the likely loss of many more. Yiddish print, as in the case of Heller’s Bris melakh, a guide to the salting of meat required for a kosher kitchen, first filled a practical, often liturgical or legal need.37 (Heller’s Yiddish oeuvre also included a translation of medieval authority Asher ben Yeḥ iel’s ethical work Orḥ ot ḥ ayyim and private letters.) Prayer books with Yiddish translations of the Hebrew prayers began to appear in Prague around the turn of the seventeenth century.38 While lacking the rich biblical allusions of his Hebrew, Heller’s compositions in Yiddish tended to include a world of day-to-day detail relatively absent from narratives in leshon hakodesh, a relationship typified in the Yiddish version of his autobiographical Megillat eivah. There, the overall arc of the narrative follows the extant Hebrew versions closely but is painted with far more color.39

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In describing his home in Prague, which doubled as his yeshiva students’ school building, Heller’s Hebrew reports: The yeshiva [students studying Torah] did not cease from my house or from my table from the day that I became a man, and I set aside a special area in my house for them [the students]. There they maintained shifts, in pairs, day and night their mouths did not cease from their recitations, and I was as their head, and their eyes.40

An early Yiddish manuscript conveys the same basic information about a special portion of the house set aside for study, but adds detail: Over all this God shared his mercy with me, that I always led a yeshiva in my house, and was adorned with learners of Torah and many foreign students whom I support from my own funds, and for the sake of their uninterrupted study I gave them a large area in my house, many beautiful large rooms, with study pairs sitting in each room, and day and night their mouths did not stop off from study, and I was their rosh [head of ] yeshiva and every day I told them a fresh “addition” [ayn frisch tosefes] and fine distinctions [ḥ alukim] and again lessons with Rabbeinu Asher [a legal compendium].41

This stylistic difference is typical of the two different versions of Heller’s work. It is not obvious that a scholar of Heller’s stature would have written in Yiddish at all, at least for publication. Apologetics in introductions to Yiddish books by rabbis suggest that the impression that a scholar who chose the vernacular was inferior to one who published in Hebrew persisted into the 1670s and later. H ̣  ayyim ben Nathan of Prague, author of a Yiddish translation of the Hebrew Bible, declared: “No man needs to be ashamed to read these books, because it is no shame for him to read German (taytsh), for in former times our sages translated the Gemara [Talmud] and the Mishnah so that they could be understood; for when one knows nothing—then this is a shame . . . an eternal shame. It is equally valid if one studies in the holy language or in German. . . .”42 The mix of Hebrew and Aramaic in the Talmud, H ̣  ayyim, points out, reflects an acceptance of the vernacular of the ancient rabbis. His lengthy argument reveals a perceived need to persuade at least some readers who did not accept writing in taytsh as of equal merit to writing in Hebrew.

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Even in private forms of writing, well-educated individuals sometimes expressed a preference for the caché of Hebrew while resorting to Yiddish as a more efficient choice. H ̣  izkiya ben Asher Segal Horowitz, writing to his father-in-law, Abraham, in 1619, began with an elaborate Hebrew heading concluding: “And hereby I will write in leshon ashkenaz [literally: German language; Hebrew for taytsh] to speed the writer,” switching immediately thereafter to Yiddish.43 It was perhaps with similar considerations in mind that, in 1622, Joseph Tein, dealer in Prince Liechtenstein’s stolen curtains, turned to the shamash H ̣  anokh Altschul for help in writing up his experiences, as related at the end of Altschul’s Hebrew Megillat hakela′im: “And that man [Tein] sent to me and asked that I write a few lines for him, to be as an aid and an assistance to him. I said to send this writing to him. What I did not know of all that which happened to him in the prison, he will tell you.”44 Altschul obliged, writing part of the story, which then became a ceremonial text for his own family, Tein’s urging apparently serving as its original impetus. Altschul could not, however, narrate events experienced only by Tein, and urged him to write his own addendum, which he did, but in Yiddish. It could be, then, that his inability to write in Hebrew was what drove Tein to turn to Altschul in the first place. By the time Megillas Shmuel appeared, eighty years after the Liechtenstein curtains’ theft and fifty years after Heller wrote bilingually, its early eighteenth-century author demonstrated no visible compunction at the choice of Yiddish as the sole language of his composition. There is no mention of forsaking Hebrew, at least not in the body of the work (whose title page, if there was one, is missing). The two additional Prague family megillot from the early eighteenth century likewise make no issue of being written in Yiddish.45 Like Heller’s Yiddish, they have much local color, even while maintaining, at times even more so than Hebrew megillot, certain elements adopted from Megillat Esther.

Women, Men, and Mourning as Memory Growing acceptance of Yiddish writing in a variety of different genres, alongside market needs of print publication, opened worlds of reading

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for women and less educated men, enabling— or perhaps driving— a few to write and publish. What is more, women involved in print production did not always produce the same kinds of writings as men, or focus on the same subjects. Ayn sheyn mayseh is one example. Beila and Baer Perlhefter’s Sefer be′er sheva, with its combined efforts to compose an ethical work as a memorial to seven dead children, also stands precisely at this nexus of Hebrew and Yiddish, manuscript and print, male and female readership and authorship. While the book ultimately remained in manuscript, the carefully designed title page of an early manuscript seems intended for the printing house, or at least to convey the idea that this manuscript was essentially akin to a printed book (Figure 6.1).46 Beila’s description of her desire to bring comfort to other bereaved women also suggests the couple intended the work for wide distribution, probably in print. In her introduction, Beila devoted considerable ink to defending the decision to have Baer write a work in Yiddish. She reported that he told her: “I know that some people will say, ‘This author knew nothing more than to write a taytsh book,’ and some haughty, arrogant people or fools who imagine that they understand something and they do not even know enough to understand themselves, they will disdain this taytsh book of mine. . . .”47 Amidst the continued apologetics, a manuscript book was created by husband and wife, an unlikely occurrence even at this historical juncture, even more so at a different time. Beila’s introduction joins newer ways late seventeenth-century Jewish women read and wrote with a much older, more traditional motif of woman as mourner. A seventeenth-century guide for visiting cemeteries, for example, instructs a widow to call out over her late husband’s grave: “I was left alone, forlorn . . . how have you left me abandoned and forgotten. A woman of saddened spirit will surely cry; her tear is on her cheek. I have no comfort and none turns back my despair. . . .”48 In contrast, the parallel widower’s passage opens by praising the virtues of his late wife, comparing her to the biblical matriarchs, and praying for her salvation.49 At early eighteenth-century funerals in Frankfurt: “the men had a block cloth or hood . . . on their heads. The women wore a black cloth on their heads and engaged in loud crying.”50 Scholar Chava Weissler, who described the wick-laying

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Figure 6.1 Title page of Sefer be′er sheva. The motif of a two-columned gate and other similarities of this title page to those of contemporary printed books demonstrates that its authors and copyist viewed it as such, whether in print or in manuscript. Bodleian Library Opp. 148. Courtesy of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

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ceremony performed by Ashkenazi women on the eve of Yom Kippur, holds that while tkhines (women’s prayers in Yiddish) were generally recited individually, groups of women sometimes recited them together in the cemetery.51 A type of formalized women’s weeping appears to be depicted on a glass made for Prague’s burial society and dated 1783 –1784.52 The bottom portion of the glass shows a group of women, swaying in unison to one side. In comparison to the men, who appear to listen to a speaker, the women weep in unison, perhaps reciting ritual lamentations.53 It is even possible that a woman composed a particularly mournful, anonymous Yiddish historical song, one of three written after an outbreak of plague in Prague in the summer of 1713.54 In sharp contrast to the Shvedish lid and Milḥ ama beshalom, but very much like the Sreyfe lid, none of these songs takes note of events outside the Jewish Quarter. Each describes the horror of mounting numbers of deaths, the difficulty of burying corpses fast enough and inability to attend to all according to traditional ritual, the distress of caring for the sick and poor, of lack of knowledge about the burial places of loved ones, and the pain of having to continue the work even on the Sabbath and festivals. Each provides details corroborating local aspects of the burial ground used during the plague—the dead were not buried in the cemetery adjoining the Jewish Quarter—the mode by which they were conveyed there, and more. At 109 stanzas, plus a list of cures and a daily toll of the dead appended to the back, Moses ben H ̣  ayyim Eisenstadt Katzenellenbogen’s “Eyn nay kloglid benign Prostitser-kdoyshim-lid iber den groysn ershreklekn ipesh . . .” (A new lament to the tune of Prostitser-kdoyshim song, about the great horrific plague . . .) is the longest of the three, and more highly stylized than the others, though its literary form is somewhat inconsistent throughout.55 Another, “Ipesh lid fun Prag benign adir ayom venora” (Plague song from Prague to the tune of “adir ayom venora”), was written by Issachar Ber (Berl) Katz, a member of the Gersonides printing family.56 Characterized by constant pleading with God, it reads almost as if it were a Yiddish prayer. The least learned of the three authors anonymously wrote “Far loyf den ipes” (About the plague), which lacks a consistent format, repeats

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the same phrases, like “crying and howling” (weinen un′brumen), time and again, and generally reads as a less sophisticated artistic work than the other two plague songs.57 Like the introduction to Sefer be′er sheva, this work combines a tone of mourning with understated autobiographical remarks. As the author is not named, and the style would not have demanded formal education, the possibility arises that a woman could have written this song. Its introduction, which appears to have been written by the author, rather than a printer or publisher, sets it apart from other Yiddish historical songs: Now dear God has opened my eyes To write to you of the bitter misery But this caused me to deal with great suffering So that I must write to you for the sake of a remembrance That by this it will remain engraved as a memory (ayn zikaron) for us How we, sorrowfully, were stuck in an evil affair As will shortly be revealed How God performed for us a merciful act and a marvel So that everyone should tell of it And I am also obligated to acknowledge these wondrous things How all of us were stuck in evil suffering And the dear Lord will relieve us of all evil in our suffering And will no more send us such a death58

This author writes as a means of coping, in contrast to the laments of other plague songs and particularly the Sreyfe lid, which more closely resembles an argument with God than a therapeutic memoir. The author gives credit to God for awakening in him or her the understanding that writing down this series of experiences might provide a way to bear the pain. Would that we knew what other local literary influences, in the Jewish or German vernaculars, might also have played a role in that insight. What exactly the author intended by use of the word zikaron (memory) in this context is not entirely clear. Most simply, the word means “memory,” as translated above. It can also be used, often in the plural zikhronot, to indicate a type of historical writing, close to “memoir,” this meaning appearing in both Gans’s Ẓ  emaḥ  David and in Milḥ ama beshalom.59 Near the song’s end, the reader learns the precise nature of

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the author’s grief, the immediate impetus, apparently, for the writing of the song: Therefore no one in the world has anything to say against the dear Lord [regarding] Whom he takes from the world and kills So, you dear people, I understand what, sorrowfully, happened to me That the dear Lord took away my only child Whose name was Hannah, took [her] to Himself, as a sacrifice For that, more than once I cry and howl60

The revelation of the author’s loss of his or her own daughter casts the opening remarks about bearing pain and divine inspiration into sharper focus, giving the reader precise information about a previously general need for consolation, a theme shared with Beila Perlhefter’s introduction to Sefer be′er sheva. Although its scope exponentially exceeds that of these Prague compositions, Glikl of Hameln’s Zikhroynes, a full-length narrative of familial and business history and the most famous Jewish autobiographical work of the period, also by a woman, likewise stems from what could be called an impulse to memoiristic mourning.61 In Beila’s work, as in Glikl’s, the long-standing (self )image of woman as public mourner is wedded to her newer ability to compose and disseminate written material in the vernacular Yiddish. Glikl’s writing, Beila’s work, and, possibly, that of another songwriter from Prague, all represent women’s autobiographical texts that presaged the evolution of Jewish men’s autobiographical writing, whose earliest exemplars focus on a family’s place in society, to encompass emotional dimensions and self-revelations, the broader range of concerns that would come to characterize modern “autobiography.” By the turn of the eighteenth century, transformations in the relationship of sacred to vernacular tongues, closely related to evolving roles of print in book and pamphlet publication, brought women into the republic of Jewish letters in new ways and unprecedented numbers. Still, just a few documentable instances are known in which women were actively involved in publishing works related to Jewish memory in Prague. These encompass at least two themes far less prominent

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in writing wholly by men: female wisdom that subverts male wisdom and an image of a weeping woman. More research, over a wider range of communities, would be necessary to explore this connection more thoroughly and possibly to uncover additional themes that might be connected particularly with women, or other ways their participation in related enterprises shaped local memory. In general, history-related writings from Jewish Prague at the turn of the eighteenth century, by women and by men, were smaller, more specialized pieces than many of their predecessors, less connected to a larger whole, whether that whole be a liturgical cycle—though certainly new days still joined the calendar sometimes— or an outline of history. Together with the gradual contraction of Hebrew to the ritual realm, such changing formats made it harder for later scholars to identify this writing as an expression of historical concern. An even more difficult complicating factor arose when evidence of events or people was obliterated or simply forgotten.



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“ No Need to Name It All”: Toward a History of Forgetting

An 1801 hazkarat neshamot manuscript from the Pinkas Synagogue includes, on a decorative opening page framed by two columns, an introduction explaining the reason the earlier kuntres was being replaced: To notify and inform: Why it was viewed as appropriate to write a new notebook of hazkarot neshamot of the holy of blessed memory who are in the ground, who generously donated ceremonial objects and holy vestments as memorials [lezikaron] in God’s sanctuary. And they explicitly conditioned [their gifts] on the recitation of hazkarot for their souls on Sabbaths and festivals. And, truthfully, in the previous notebook of hazkarot neshamot that was in the Pinkas Synagogue from the year [5]491 [1730/1731] all that they pledged and donated is described in a book. And until now, the cantor recited hazkarot neshamot from that notebook. However, because what they gave was written there at length, and there is no need to name it all because it is all clearly known to heaven, and it is also a nuisance for the praying public [tirḥ a deẓ  ibura], and also, it is impossible to recite more than two or three hazkarot on a single Sabbath, and because of this it was impossible, God forbid, to complete the entire list in a single year. . . . And it was also impossible to make any sign where the cantor finished on each Sabbath. And where is his place to begin on the next Sabbath.1

In this new notebook, hazkarot are neatly divided according to week. Between lettered sections comprising lists of names to be recited on a single Sabbath morning, there is a small paper slot into which

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a needle, tied to the book with a string, can be slipped. When the cantor completed each week’s section, he could insert the needle into the appropriate slot, clearly marking the beginning spot for the following week2 (Figure 7.1). Objects no longer mentioned specifically, their intricate interactions with memorial liturgy were vastly altered. Almost all other specific details were likewise deemed extraneous; in place of long hazkarot featured in seventeenth-century Altneuschul and High Synagogue notebooks, this one has the following entry for a single week: May God remember the soul of the great rabbi our teacher Isaiah Horowitz and the soul of his wife H ̣  ava and the soul of his son the great rabbi our teacher Sheftel and the soul of the great rabbi our teacher Avigdor Kara and the soul of his son the rabbi our teacher Abraham and the soul of the great rabbi our teacher Joseph Klomenks and the soul of the great rabbi our teacher Lipmann the author of the Tosefet Y[om] T[ov] and the soul of the great rabbi our teacher Jonah

Figure 7.1 Pinkas hazkarat neshamot of the Maisel Synagogue, nineteenth century, showing the needle used by the cantor to mark where he finished his weekly recitation of the hazkarot, so that the following week’s cantor would know where to begin. Ms. JMP 73, 23b –24a. Courtesy of the Jewish Museum in Prague: Jewish Museum in Prague Photo Archive.

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Te′omim because they pledged charity, by this merit may their souls be bound in the bond of life with the souls of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob that are in [the] G[arden] of E[den].3

Even in the Horowitz family’s Pinkas Synagogue, Isaiah Horowitz, his wife, his son, and other prominent rabbis—including the Horowitz in-law Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller—are mentioned in rapid succession, Isaiah’s own elaborate minibiography reduced to a name with a few honorifics.4 Like the el malei raḥ amim for the 1689 fire, the modified hazkarot also reflected— or perhaps contributed to—the continued gradual exclusion from the ritual realm of details that were not perceived to have specific sacred meaning. These changes in the hazkarah format stemmed primarily from a new concern with decorum; they sought to ensure orderly, timely conduct of the prayer service. As with earlier changes in gravestone inscriptions and hazkarot texts, now, again, an evolving aesthetic sense, this time of proper prayer, altered the way the dead were remembered, eliminating the association of particular, well-described objects with specific deceased individuals— consciously against the stated intention of those donors. After some two hundred years, the relation of a congregation to a ritual object donated, at least in part as memorial, around 1600 would have been transformed. As medieval hazkarot had also been short and to the point in comparison to the early modern ones, the period of longer memorials from the late sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries stands out for the very public, ritual nature of individuals’ donations to the synagogue. It is one thing to seek to preserve a memory, particularly to do so in a specific form, and quite another for those efforts to succeed. To truly understand the workings of a community’s memory, one must know not only what was preserved but what was forgotten, by neglect or by intent, which strategies proved successful over time and why. By definition, the tracks of such forgetting are difficult to trace, in the case of successful intentional forgetting, impossible. Here, a brief survey of the longevity of some of the memories whose creation has been discussed throughout this book will lead into a few concluding thoughts about Jewish memory in early modern Prague.

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The Prague liturgy for 14 H ̣  eshvan provides a different model of the life span of a memorial than does the ritual of hazkarat neshamot. Though several editions of at least two slightly different versions of these seliḥ ot have survived, they were apparently not printed again after the early 1620s. A printer from Cracow, however, attests to their still being recited in Prague on 14 H ̣  eshvan at least as late as approximately 1650.5 Various later sources are mutually contradictory: one author wrote in the early 1880s that the practice was still alive, while another wrote in 1892 that 14 H ̣  eshvan had not been celebrated within the memory of anyone living in Prague at the time.6 The safe, though somewhat unsatisfying conclusion, therefore, is that the practice continued for at least the span of one generation, into the 1650s, and perhaps as long as a century and a half, until the mid-eighteenth century or longer. This type of memory span can be related, with some reservations, to historian Jan Assmann’s suggestion that “communicative” as opposed to “cultural” memory includes those experiences shared by a group of people, often a generation as its members come of age, and perpetuated more or less equally and informally among them.7 While based on the vagaries of unaided human recall and retelling, and generally dying with the last of their bearers, communicative memories can have a life span of eighty to one hundred years or more, reaching into the lifetimes of their original bearers’ children and grandchildren, who remember hearing stories firsthand. Assmann’s cultural memories, on the other hand, touch on the fundamental origin myths of a society. They are perpetuated by ritual, song, dance, or other means consciously designed by elites of the group concerned for their preservation. Thus they become part of mythic time, freed from the ephemerality of the human life span, and celebrated particularly on festive days set apart from the regular calendar. Cessation of the observance of 14 H ̣  eshvan and other local annual commemorations in the mid- to late seventeenth century, or even in the early part of the eighteenth century, would fit well with Assmann’s notion of communicative memory, as it relates to the life span of a single generation and those who personally knew its members. Yet in all other ways, the day, characterized by particular liturgical ritual written consciously by an elite from within the celebrating group, is closer to his “cultural

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memory.” As opposed to Assmann, I would therefore hold that this mode of formal, artistic commemoration representing a mode for the eternal preservation of mythic-type memories simultaneously answered a need felt even by the original bearers of a particular memory and, perhaps, especially by those groups and individuals. Those who experienced a traumatic or miraculous event felt the strongest need to work its memory into the formal framework of their lives, often on an annual basis. The rituals thus created filled an emotional, psychological need, one supposes, for direct survivors, who also sought to ensure the transmission of this memory to their descendants, indefinitely. As long as offspring and their children heard stories directly from those who experienced events, the rituals commemorating those same events or recalling deceased family members retained their meaning and survived. However, actually endowing future generations, who did not themselves experience an event or hear of it from someone who did, with its concrete memory and a sense of urgency in preserving it proved quite difficult. Nevertheless, in accord with Assmann’s model, local memories that became integrated into daily life, in time (e.g., liturgy) or space (e.g., synagogue, cemetery)—through practices initiated by those first generations—seem to have had a better chance than others of surviving beyond this time period of communicative— or what I would call “generational”—memory.8 In a community bound up in its traditional calendar and way of life, such incorporation into the mundane rhythms of existence often also involved, by its very nature, fitting into larger frames of Jewish memory. Hazkarot were part and parcel of Sabbath observance; gravestones helped define Jewish space. Within these daily, weekly, monthly rhythms, seemingly superfluous material factors could also influence which memories lasted longer. Et kol hatela′ah and El nekamot hofiah, together forming a remembrance of Prague Jews massacred in 1389, found their way, more than a century after their composition, into Prague’s early printed prayer books. That technical canonization endowed them with a longer life span, as actively performed memories, than commemorative liturgies for the Passau invasion of 1611 and early events of the Thirty Years’ War, printed in their own dedicated short publications, thus less fully integrated, materially,

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into the liturgical year, despite being fully part of the lived calendar for at least two generations, probably more.9 Likewise, familial memories loosely tied to the larger Jewish themes of the holiday of Purim and its Book of Esther were, as far as the record reveals, better able to survive than oral traditions with no such anchor (lost family megillot are by definition not known to us). Several outlasted the eighty- to one-hundred-year span. Colophons of megillah manuscripts in which descendants of the author-protagonists describe copying the text because they themselves are members of families that still celebrate the day, as on the Yiddish manuscript of Joseph Tein’s Megillat hakela′im and many copies of Heller’s Megillat eivah, reveal the success of the family Purim strategy in preserving memories of events that might not have survived by oral transmission alone.10 Particularly fascinating in this regard is the 1833 statement of Samuel ben Maharam Edeles that he had just rewritten his family’s 1646 megillah from memory because, after returning home from a forced exile apparently due to a cholera epidemic, the day of the anniversary arrived, and he was unable to find the document, “but the habit had been made nature, generation after generation, known to us according to the generations of our family’s lineage.” Samuel feared, “lest it be forgotten” by his children.11 In this story of simultaneous forgetting and remembering, the family story was, indeed, transmitted—although we obviously cannot know with precisely what degree of accuracy—and thanks to the actions of a single, particularly motivated family member was preserved by future generations as well, until, at some point, coming into the possession of the Jewish Museum in Prague (founded in 1906). The most phenomenally successful use of a family megillah to frame the way a family would not only remember, but be remembered by others was undoubtedly Heller’s Megillat eivah, whose Purim is observed by some descendants until the present day. Heller and his allies were able to obliterate, nearly completely, any memory at all of his rabbinic and political rivals in Prague.12 A sense of impending break with the generation of one’s ancestors could also lead to the refurbishment of ritual objects, particularly ceremonial textiles donated by an ancestor. Thus, a Torah mantle donated by a Lieberman H ̣  alfan and his wife, Sarah, in 1615 now features

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an embroidered inscription on the reverse side stating that it was, “Renewed by their blood relation our teacher the honorable Rabbi Hirsch Liberles, scribe, may God preserve him, 5463 [1702/1703].”13 While the object was probably in genuine need of repair, the inscription also reveals the later donor’s desire to link himself to his predecessors, just at the brink of the time span, eighty to one hundred years, when anyone who might have known them personally would now be gone. In this particular case, other descendants also associated themselves with the same object. In the early 1720s, a descendant of Maharal commissioned Meir Perles, author of Megillat sefer, to write Megillat yuḥ asin, a Hebrew work part genealogy, part hagiography that outlines the family trees of Maharal and his son-in-law Isaac Katz, interweaving tales about them and their families.14 Perles mentioned “our teacher the esteemed Rabbi Isaiah Liberles, may his memory be a blessing, who was primas and judge of the type ‘moreh shaveh’ here in Prague,” and stated that his brother was, “Rabbi Liberman H ̣  alfan may his memory be a blessing, who bequeathed here in Prague in the Altneuschul a wonderful parokhet with pearls, and a Torah scroll with rods gilded in gold above and below, and the mantle [me′il] that is called a ‘mentele,’ with pearls, written on it his name and his wife’s name ‘in the year zekher asah’ [made a memory]. Behold he is our teacher Rabbi Eleazar Liberman who wrote the book Sefer ma′aneh lashon.”15 He did not mention his contemporary Hirsch Liberles. In a similar vein, the author of Megillas Shmuel drew on the image of Rudolfine-era leader of Prague Jewry Mordecai Maisel (not, as far as I am aware, a family member) in fashioning his early eighteenthcentury hero, primas Samuel Tausk. Tausk, as the work explains, had recovered property, including gold, pearl-embroidered ceremonial objects donated by Maisel and held by the authorities following legal disputes that erupted after his death, and had paid to have some of them renovated.16 A century earlier, Maisel had looked after his own image through his patronage projects in the Jewish Quarter, including his apparent support of David Gans’s Ẓ  emaḥ  David, capable of preserving that image for posterity. But little is known of how, or how much, Ẓ  emaḥ  David was actually read in following years. Almost sixty years after

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its publication, Judah Leib ben Joshua mentioned it in his Milḥ ama beshalom; I am not aware of additional references from seventeenthcentury Prague. That Gans’s work did not simply fade into oblivion is clear, however, from its republication, with a continuation, in Frankfurt in 1692, in a Yiddish translation in 1697, and even in a partial Latin translation for Christian Hebraist use.17 Like other Hebrew and Yiddish historical works, it experienced renewed popularity with the onset of the modern period and was published an additional six times in Hebrew up until the end of the eighteenth century, although not in Prague.18 That Ẓ  emaḥ  David survived is likely thanks to its having been printed by the prestigious, high-quality Gersonides printing house. In contrast, no evidence exists that the anonymous chronicler was read or copied, although each of the scribes who took up the work where his predecessor left off testifies to a limited circulation of sorts. Nevertheless, the manuscript’s survival shows that others, equally limited in scope and circulation, could once have existed. Yiddish songs, printed in cheap editions and widely distributed, enjoyed very little readership after their immediate reception. Both monumental history and cheap broadsheet framed their stories in terms of gratitude to God, of the need to preserve events to glorify His name, but with very different chances of bridging the chasm of generational memory.

“To Remember to Blot Out” Another tool in fashioning memory is silence. As opposed to Maisel and his younger contemporary Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller, Maharal, the most prominent rabbi of the Rudolfine era, when forced to speak out to protect his family name and preserve its memory, did so in as vague terms as possible, preferring dampening of the voices of the accusers over raising his own. In response to rumors charging that his ancestors included offspring of illegitimate relations, Maharal angrily attacked the morality and legality of rumor-mongering, rarely naming specific charges and never specific individuals, avoiding mention of his own family’s involvement in the harmful rumors to which he referred.19 On a communal level, in the years after messianic pretender Shabbetai Ẓ  evi garnered much support throughout Ashkenaz (as elsewhere in

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the Jewish world) during the winter of 1665 –1666, then appeared to betray his followers by converting to Islam that spring, regional and local spiritual and political leadership worked to whitewash their earlier involvement with him and his movement. They destroyed records and proclaimed bans against those who continued to be followers (while at the same time often turning a blind eye to groups of such adherents).20 This largely successful collective act of dictating forgetfulness stands out as unique in scale but characteristic in substance in the cultural history of early modern Ashkenaz.21 A similar attempt was made, with some degree of success, in Prague, in response to the troubling Abeles affair. Indeed, the author of Ayn nay kloglid sought to fashion Löbl Kurtzhandl as a counter-saint to Simon, an icon that could attract the attention and foster the faith of Jewish youth, and enough people apparently purchased the printed version of that song that a second edition was released in Amsterdam. But if the Jewish community’s political, intellectual, or rabbinic leadership had embraced the notion of Löbl as saint, he should have appeared elsewhere in their literature or records. I have not, to date, found any other trace of him in any other Hebrew or Yiddish literature of the time. Whatever might have been lost, it seems clear that Löbl Kurtzhandl did not take hold of the imagination of Prague and central European Jewry the way that Simon did in his milieu. Rather, the preferred method of combating the threat posed by the whole affair, as far as the scanty historical record can reveal, seems to have been a proactive silence, an attempt to bury the episode, to cause young Jews to forget about Simon and all that he stood for. Likewise, in the blasphemy case from the same period that resulted in the 1696 addition, at the expense of the Jewish alleged culprits, of a Hebrew inscription to the crucifix on the Charles Bridge, historian Alexandr Putík has found large gaps in the Jewish archival records that also suggest a direct attempt to obliterate the memory of an unpleasant, potentially explosive event.22 Although proactive forgetting reveals as much about a community’s concern with memory of local events as do other types of records, it has—with a few exceptions—tended to escape the eyes of modern historians seeking to understand medieval and early modern communities’ relationship to their own past, as have short chronicles,

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folklore, local liturgies, family megillot, and additional genres discussed throughout this book. At the same time, other types of sources, not originally intended principally to record Prague’s communal memory, were viewed by later historians as doing just that.

“That Future Generations Will Know” In 1703, about when Ayn sheyn mayseh was published, Rabbi David Oppenheim came to Prague, called to fill the position of chief rabbi. He left behind his monumental library, trusting it to the care of his father-in-law, Lefman Behrend Cohen, in Hanover, Germany. The thousands of rare books and manuscripts, including contemporaneous ephemera alongside medieval classics, would not, he feared, be safe in Prague, where, in yet another manifestation of the tense situation for Jews, censors were known to confiscate, damage, and sometimes destroy Hebrew books. Ironically, the collection that could not be kept in the city became the sole preserver of much of what is known of Yiddish literature from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Prague, including Ayn sheyn mayseh and numerous Yiddish historical songs. Whatever purpose those historical songs might have served for the local population at the time of their original circulation, Oppenheim’s collecting activities single-handedly moved them from the realm of current events to that of history, from what may have been news reports for other Jewish communities or repetitions and embellishments intended for fellow eyewitnesses to collected testimonies preserved for posterity. In 1787, Emperor Joseph II ordered the Old Jewish Cemetery closed, and it, too, ceased to be living, current, ever-changing document and became instead a work of history, a collection in stone, its inscriptions eventually copied into paper books.23 On publishing the first of these, in 1856, Koppelman Lieben (a great-uncle of historian Salomon Hugo Lieben) wrote at length in his introduction about the importance of younger generations learning about the historical figures of Prague’s Jewish history:24 For when your children shall ask you, saying, “What are these stones to you?” you shall reply, “These stones are as a memory for the

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children of Israel ‘that future generations will know— children yet to be born’ (Psalms 78:6), to investigate and to seek out the biographies and histories of the great [people] of the city of Prague and the land of Bohemia, what they are to us.”25

Lieben was, of course, not the first Prague author to draw on this verse from Psalms in explaining the significance of his work. Judah Leib ben Joshua, author of Milḥ ama beshalom (ca. 1650), had similarly explained the meaning of his small book, quoted at the very outset of this one.26 Scholars have correctly looked to a change in modern Jews’ relationships with their Jewish past as a hallmark of the transition from traditional Jewish societies in Europe to modernity.27 If that is the case, however, then disregarding the simultaneous functioning of more “historic” modes of memory alongside the less historic among premodern Jewish societies leads to a distortion in our understanding of that tradition. To do so is also to idealize our ancestors, to flatten them to a single dimension, to overrate, in a grossly generalized way, their spiritual capacity while underestimating the vitality of their daily lives and the ways in which they themselves viewed the meaning of those lives. The juxtaposition of Koppelman Lieben’s and Judah Leib ben Joshua’s invocations of the same verse from Psalms suggests a different approach. Judah Leib’s framework assigns significance to remembering as a testimony to God’s greatness. It takes pride in Prague, its Jewish community, and its sovereign and places his own historical testimony in that context. Lieben’s framework, in contrast, while sharing pride in the local community, emphasizes an inherent interest in biographies of great individuals, whose good qualities serve as an example to coming generations. These different framing stories are significant insofar as they indicate that Judah Leib, the seventeenth-century historian, perhaps lacked a consciousness of writing history for its own sake, even though, it seems to me, that is precisely what he did.28 In the mind of the nineteenth-century historian Lieben, in contrast, this consciousness displays itself clearly. Despite this difference in how the two individuals explained their endeavors, Judah Leib did, throughout his work, demonstrate great interest in explaining historical events on their own terms. His narrative is far from a continual testimony to

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God’s greatness, and His invisible hand is not made present at every turn—nor even at most of them. In Judah Leib’s time and throughout the period from about 1580 to 1730, both communal and familial leaders in Jewish Prague—almost always men—used a variety of tools to promote religious, socioeconomic, and political values on the communal level. In local seliḥ ot, for example, they promoted loyalty to the ruling House of Habsburg, during the only part of the period under consideration when that regime faced a serious threat to its rule. Religious values were advanced by preserving memories of individuals through ideal characteristics presented in inscriptions on ritual objects and gravestones, the growing elaboration of which came to endorse socioeconomic status as an almost religious value in and of itself. On the familial level, Joseph Tein, H ̣  anokh Altschul, Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller, Joshua Edeles, and others framed tales of their own imprisonments into justifications of their actions, and sometimes into denunciations of their denouncers. Uri Shraga Feibush H ̣  alfan performed a similar task using an introduction to a book he wrote, and Abraham Groti and Moses Meir Perles likewise used introductions they wrote to fashion images of themselves for posterity. Alongside use of print for distribution of such messages, some manuscripts circulated widely. In one of them, Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller’s Megillat eivah, the author’s adoption of language used in autobiographical passages by Don Isaac Abarbanel, followed by the adoption of Heller’s language by H ̣  alfan, shows clearly that a discourse existed, authors of such tracts echoing one another.29 There may be more similar cases waiting to be uncovered. At around the same time, the distinction between writings in the sacred Hebrew and vernacular Yiddish began to break down, and more and more texts meant to preserve events or recall the past appeared, without apology, in Yiddish. This expanding acceptability of the vernacular for writing in a variety of genres allowed for greater participation by women in writing and publishing, including writings related to memory. In Prague, we saw this in the cases of Beila Perlhefter, Beila Horowitz, and Rachel Rausnitz around the turn of the eighteenth century. Occasionally, critics of Prague Jewish elite employed similar tools to paint pictures of the past that called into question accepted norms.

Conclusion

Abraham Groti, for example, espoused commonly accepted religious values of piety and learning but disparaged the social norm of accepting money for certain kinds of teaching. Moreover, it may not be coincidental that the more trenchant criticisms came from the few female authors in our collection, those who had just begun to appear on the scene: Beila Perlhefter framed her family’s experience as a biblically and rabbinically based protest against the self-righteousness of the wealthy, while Beila Horowitz and Rachel Rausnitz published Ayn sheyn mayseh in a manner that lauded a wise and worldly woman who saved the day for a bright but bumbling man. The dead, too, played a significant role in medieval and early modern Jewish society in Prague, including—perhaps particularly—in the realm of memory. They were especially present in cemetery but also in the synagogue. In both these spaces, communication between the living and the dead both reflected a deep-seated mentality in which the dead could still communicate with the living and provided a venue for the living to display wealth and social status. At the same time, during the early seventeenth century some gravestone inscriptions and a few hazkarot began to display a more biographical approach to their subjects. The emphasis on individual lives, especially those of the particularly prominent, grew considerably during this period. Rather than the compact, name-focused hazkarot of the medieval period, such entries written in the early seventeenth century often include extensive, elaborate praises to the dead and occasionally even abbreviated biographical remarks. Out of these various workings of communal and familial memory was formed, over a period of time, a historically based local consciousness among Prague Jews, which operated alongside their ongoing identification with overarching themes like exile and redemption, sin and punishment shared by Jewish communities worldwide. In fulfilling local precepts for 2 Adar and 14 H ̣  eshvan, Prague’s Jews were aware of being in this particular way different from Jews of other communities, differentiated by their history and the way in which that history was institutionalized in local synagogues. Hazkarot recalling groups of martyrs from particular incidents had a similar effect. Originating from Prague and from other towns in Czech lands and nearby areas,

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such as Strakonice (in southern Bohemia), these hazkarot suggest that regional consciousness might also have been quite significant, perhaps especially before Prague’s Jewish population climbed into the thousands around the turn of the seventeenth century. The rich variety of ways in which this historically based local consciousness was expressed were shaped by innumerable factors including biblical and rabbinic language, local traditions, changing aesthetic sensibilities, evolving literary genres, convenience, financial means, developing technologies, evolving gender roles and social hierarchies, political health of local Jewish leadership, cultural milieu, external pressures, and more. This historically based local consciousness was also expressed in the artistic and literary forms in which memories were stored. The degree to which these forms were unique to Prague is a matter requiring further research, but without doubt certain of them were in some measure particularly characteristic of local aesthetic traditions. The Prague gravestones look different than others from Poland; ceremonial textiles have a distinct local form; and Prague Jews might have specialized in writing megillot focused on denunciation, imprisonment, and release. Such literary and artistic structures have lives of their own that help shape, rather than simply reflecting, the contents of memories people sought to preserve. In a general sense, the creation of a work like David Gans’s Ẓ  emaḥ  David requires a culturally conducive context. In a more specific sense, extant forms encourage particular types of memories. Prague Jews who had been jailed and released, for example, had a ready-made outlet for expression, and some used it. As trends changed and the inscriptions on gravestones and ritual objects grew more verbose, this too affected the ways in which the dead were remembered. Critically, these forms changed over time. During the reign of Maximilian II as Habsburg emperor, the Rudolfine period that followed and for a time thereafter, new forms emerged, reshaping long-standing genres like gravestones and ritual objects and adjusting the newer notion of a local megillah and Purim day to different circumstances. After the Battle of White Mountain, during the period of the Baroque and Counter-Reformation in Bohemia, these forms underwent little further fundamental change but grew in elaboration

Conclusion

and verbosity. All these shifts affected the preservation and transmission of local traditions, as did other transformations discussed above: growing use of the vernacular and the beginnings of participation by more women, writings about the self, and the early eighteenth-century germinating veneration of earlier Prague personalities like Maharal and Mordecai Maisel. In contrast to Judah Leib ben Joshua, who urged his audience to take note of God’s providence and bequeathed future generations an inheritance to be accepted passively, a story of what had happened in years past, Koppelman Lieben urged his readers, “to investigate and seek out the biographies and histories” encompassed in the historical sources he put in print. His bequest required action; the heir would not simply receive information but should seek out history. The meaning of memory, history, and historical inquiry for nineteenth-century Jews, in Prague or elsewhere, is well beyond the scope of this book. Perhaps it would be profitable, however, to seek the difference between early modern and post-Enlightenment Jews’ relationships with their own pasts not so much in the level of importance assigned to that past itself but rather in a new-found significance attached to the very activity of investigating it.

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Introduction 1.  Judah Leib ben Joshua, Milḥ ama beshalom, as reprinted in Bikure haitim 4 (1824): 103 –30 (in Hebrew). 2.  David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989; Phoenix Mill, UK: Sutton, 2004). 3.  Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982), 43. 4.  For such a line of reasoning, see, for example, David G. Roskies, The Jewish Search for a Usable Past (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 1; Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, trans. Francis. J. Ditter and Vida Yazdi Ditter (New York: Harper & Row, 1950); Halbwachs, La topographie légendaire des évangiles (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1941). On history “remembered” as opposed to “recovered:” Bernard Lewis, History: Remembered, Recovered, Invented (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975). 5.  Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 7–25. 6.  Yerushalmi, Zakhor. 7.  This examination is more fully developed in Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, “Clio and the Jews: Reflections on Jewish Historiography in the Sixteenth Century,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 46 – 47 (1979 –1980): 607–38. For opposition to Yerushalmi’s understanding of the corpus described there and its place in the history of Jewish historiography: Robert Bonfil, “How Golden Was the Age of the Renaissance in Jewish Historiography,” in Essays in Jewish Historiography, ed. Ada Rapoport-Albert (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991), 78 –102; volume originally published as History and Theory 27 (1988); Bonfil, “Jewish Attitudes towards History and Historical Writing in Pre-Modern Times,” Jewish History 11 (1997): 7– 40.

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Notes to Introduction 8.  For example, Patrick H. Hutton, History as an Art of Memory (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1993); on medieval memory: Patrick J. Geary, Phantoms of Remembrance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). On more forms of medieval Jewish memory: Susan Einbinder, A Beautiful Death: Jewish Poetry and Martyrdom in Medieval France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Einbinder, No Place of Rest: Jewish Literature, Expulsion and the Memory of Medieval France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Ivan G. Marcus, “History, Story and Collective Memory: Narrativity in Early Ashkenazic Culture,” Prooftexts 10 (1990): 365 –88. On modern Israeli collective memory: Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 9.  Amos Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 10 –11. 10.  Elijah Capsali, Seder Eliyahu Zuta, ed. Aryeh Shmuelevits, Shlomo Simonsohn, and Meir Benayahu (Jerusalem: Mechon Ben-Zvi, 1975 –1983), 1:9 –10 (in Hebrew); translation based on that quoted in Bonfil, “Jewish Attitudes,” 18, with some modifications. 11.  For example, Patrick J. Geary, Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). 12.  David Gans, Z· emah·  David, ed. Mordecai Breuer (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1983). 13.  Hillel J. Kieval, Languages of Community: The Jewish Experience in the Czech Lands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 4 –5. Population figures are based on tables in Jaroslav Miller, Urban Societies in East-Central Europe, 1500– 1700 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008). 14.  For example, Yosef Kaplan, An Alternative Path to Modernity: The Sephardi Diaspora in Western Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 16 –22. 15.  Kieval, Languages of Community, 40 – 41; Alexandr Putík, “The Prague Jewish Community in the Late 17th and Early 18th Centuries,” Judaica Bohemiae 35 (1999): 8 –9. 16.  For example, Ignát Herrmann, Josef Teige, and Zikmund Winter, Das Prager Ghetto (Prague: Verlagsbuchhandlung der Böhm / Graphischen Gesellschaft “Unie,” 1903), 172; at once a beautiful “coffee table” book and a serious scholarly endeavor, this work is itself one example of the many efforts to preserve the memory of the ghetto. Likewise: Aladár Deutsch, Die Zigeiner-, Grossenhof- und Neusynagoge in Prag: Denkschrift (Prague: Kuh, 1907). Cathleen M. Giustino, Tearing Down Prague’s Jewish Town: Ghetto Clearance and the Legacy of MiddleClass Ethnic Politics around 1900 (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 2003) provides a detailed rendition of the course of events, although her analysis of them and of the motivations of their central actors leaves much room for debate. 17.  In certain cases, for example, records from the three synagogues destroyed at that time show distinct lacunae where parallel records from the six surviving synagogues are extant. For example, Deutsch, Zigeiner-, Grossenhof- und Neusynagoge

Notes to Introduction in Prag. On the museum: Hana Volavková, A Story of the Jewish Museum in Prague, trans. K. E. Lichtenecker (Prague: Artia, 1968); Richard I. Cohen, Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 198 –203; Magda Veselská, Defying the Beast: The Jewish Museum in Prague, 1906 – 1940, trans. Stephen Hattersley (Prague: Jewish Museum in Prague, 2006). 18.  Hana Volavková, one of the few museum workers who survived the war and returned to the museum, writes hauntingly of the absurdity of the situation and of conditions under which Jewish museum workers functioned from 1942 to 1944 throughout her Jewish Museum, for example, pp. 28 – 41. 19.  Leo Pavlát, “The Jewish Museum Once Again,” Judaica Bohemiae 30 –31 (1994 –1995): 4 –6. Early studies were concentrated especially in the Jahrbuch der ˇ echoslovakischen Republik (JGGJCR), Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Juden in der C edited by Samuel Steinherz and published in both German and Czech versions from 1929 to 1938, and in the volume that preceded its establishment: Samuel Steinherz, ed., Die Juden in Prag. Festgabe der Loge Praga des Ordens B′nai B′rith zum Gedenktage ihres 25jähringen Bestandes (Prague: Self-published [by Loge Praga des Ordens B ′nai B ′rith / Independent Order of B ′nai B ′rith, Loge Praga], 1927). Contemporary-era catalogs include Ludmila Kybalová, Eva Kosácˇková, and Alexandr Putík, eds., Textiles from Bohemian and Moravian Synagogues from the Collections of the Jewish Museum in Prague (Prague: Jewish Museum in Prague, 2003); Alexandr Putík, ed., Path of Life: Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, ca. 1525– 1609 (Prague: Academia / Jewish Museum in Prague, 2009); Olga Sixtová, ed., Hebrew Printing in Bohemia and Moravia (Prague: Academia / Jewish Museum in Prague, 2012). 20.  Concentrated especially in the JGGJCR (see the previous note). Šedinová’s studies have appeared in Judaica Bohemiae (JB): Šedinová, “Non-Jewish Sources in the Chronicle by David Gans, ‘Tsemah David,’” JB 8 (1972): 3 –15; Šedinová, “Czech History as Reflected in the Historical Work by David Gans,” JB 8 (1972): 74 –83; Šedinová, “Old Czech Legends in the Work of David Gans (1592),” JB 14 (1978): 89 –112. See also Šedinová, “Hebrew Literature as a Source of Information on the Czech History of the First Half of the 17th Century: The Reflection of the Events in Contemporary Hebrew Poetry,” JB 20 (1984): 3 –30; Šedinová, “Hebrew Literary Sources to the Czech History of the First Half of the 17th Century: End of the Thirty Years’ War in the Testimonies of Contemporaries,” JB 23 (1987): 38 –57; Šedinová, “Hebrew Lyrico-Epic Poetry of the 17th Century in Literary Context of Bohemia and Moravia,” JB 26 (1990): 84 –101; Šedinová, “Literary Structure of the 17th Century Hebrew Lyrico-Epic Poetry,” JB 25 (1989): 82 –106. Among the next generation, see, for example, Iveta Cermanová, “‘The Events of the Times’ by Abraham Trebitsch of Mikulov (Nikolsburg): The Chronicle and Its Relationship to the Development of Modern Historiography,” JB 37 (2001): 92 –144; Daniel Polakovicˇ, “Documentation of the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague,” JB 43 (2007– 2008): 167–92; Polakovicˇ, “Hebrew Manuscript Fragments in the Czech Republic:

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Notes to Introduction A Preliminary Report,” in “Genizat Germania”: Hebrew and Aramaic Binding Fragments from German in Context, ed. Andreas Lehnardt (Leiden: Brill, 2010): 32932; Pavel Sládek, “Širší kontext pražské židovské renesance” (Broader Context of the Prague Jewish Renaissance), Dialog myšlenkových proudu˚ strˇedoveˇkého Judaismu, ed. Jirˇina Šedinová (Prague: Academia, 2011), 332 – 462. 21.  Salomon Hugo Lieben, “Denkmäler jüdischer Tragödien Böhmens in der Liturgie,” Das Zelt 1 (1924): 241– 43; Lieben, “Handschriftliches zur Geschichte der Juden in Prag in den Jahren 1744 –1754,” Jahrbuch der Jüdisch-Literarischen Gesellschaft (JJLG) 2 (1904): 267–330; 3 (1905): 241–67 in the German section, 31–59 in the Hebrew section; Lieben, “Igereth Machalath,” JGGJCR 2 (1930): 293 – 401; Lieben, “Megillath Juchassin Mehral miprag. Die Deszendenztafen des hohen Rabbi Löw von Rabbi Meir Perels,” JJLG 20 (1929): 315 –36; Lieben, “Megillath Samuel,” JGGJCR 9 (1938): 307– 42; Lieben, “Die Prager Brandkatastrophen von 1689 und 1754,” JJLG 18 (1926 –1927): 175 –93; Otto Muneles, ed., Epitaphs from the Ancient Jewish Cemetery of Prague (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1988) (in Hebrew) (for the earlier Czech edition, see Chapter 4); Muneles, Prague Ghetto in the Renaissance Period (Prague: Orbis for the State Jewish Museum in Prague, 1965); Milada Vilímková, The Prague Ghetto, trans. Iris Urwin (Prague: Aventinum, 1990); David Altschuler, ed., The Precious Legacy: Judaic Treasures from the Czechoslovak State Collection (New York: Summit Books, 1983); Kybalová, Kosácˇková, and Putík, Textiles. 22.  Volavková, Story of the Jewish Museum, 220, 222. 23.  Tobias Jakobovits, “Die Erlebnisse des Oberrabiners Simon Spira-Wedeles in Prag (1640 –1679),” JGGJCR 4 (1932): 253 –96; Jakobovits, “Die Erlebnisse des R. Berl Jeiteles als Primator der Prager Judenschaft,” JGGJCR 7 (1935): 421– 36; Jakobovits, “Zur Geschichte der Familie Hallo,” Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland 6 (1935): 54 –56; Jakobovits, “Die Judenabzeichen in Böhmen,” JGGJCR 3 (1931): 145 –84; Jakobovits, “Die jüdischen Zünfte in Prag,” JGGJCR 8 (1936): 57–145; Jakobovits, “Das Prager und Böhmische Landesrabbinat Ende des siebzehnten und Anfang des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts,” JGGJCR 5 (1933): 79 –136; Jakobovits, “Die Verbindung der prager Familien Oettingen-Spira (Wedeles)-Bondi,” Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums (MGWJ) 76 (1932): 511–19; Jakobovits, “Wer ist Abraham Aron Lichtenstadt?” MGWJ 74 (1930): 35 – 41. Earlier a flawed but nevertheless monumental collection of documents was published by Gottlieb Bondy and Franz Dworský, eds., Zur Geschichte der Juden in Böhmen, Mähren und Schlesien von 906 bis 1620, 2 vols. (Prague: Bondy, 1906). 24.  For example, Jan Herˇman, “La communauté juive de Prague et sa structure au commencement des temps modernes (la première moitié du 16e siècle),” JB 5 (1969): 31–70; Herˇman, “The Conflict between Jewish and Non-Jewish Population in Bohemia before the 1541 Banishment,” JB 6 (1970): 39 –53; Herˇman, “Das Steuerregister der Prager Juden aus dem Jahre 1540 (1528),” JB 1 (1965): 26 –58;

Notes to Chapter 1 Herˇman, “Die wirtschaftliche Betätigung und die Berufe der Prager Juden vor ihrer Ausweisung im Jahre 1541,” JB 4 (1968): 20 –63. Alexandr Putík’s contributions include Putík, “Prague Jewish Community”; Putίk, “On the Topography and Demography of the Prague Jewish Town Prior to the Pogrom of 1389,” JB 30 –31 (1996): 7– 46; Putίk, “The Origin of the Symbols of the Prague Jewish Town: The Banner of the Old-New Synagogue, David’s Shield and the ‘Swedish Hat,’” JB 29 (1993): 4 –37; Putίk, “The Hebrew Inscription on the Crucifix at Charles Bridge in Prague: The Case of Elias Backoffen and Berl Tabor in the Appellation Court,” JB 32 (1997): 26 –103; Putίk, “Prague Jews and Judah Hasid: A Study on the Social, Political and Religious History of the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries,” JB 38 (2002): 72 –105; 39 (2003): 53 –92; 46 (2011): 33 –72. The younger generation’s publications include, for example, Marie Bunˇantová, “Die Prager Juden in Zeit vor der Schlacht am Weißen Berg: Handel und Wirtschaftsgebaren der Prager Juden im Spiegel des Liber albus Judeorum 1577–1601” (Ph.D. diss., University of Vienna, 2009); Miller, Urban Societies in East-Central Europe. For an overview of the current state of Jewish Studies in general in the Czech Republic: Marie Crhová, “Jewish Studies in the Czech Republic,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 10 (2011): 135 – 43.

Chapter 1 1.  Descriptions of the specific ways in which the Jewish Quarter was altered appear in Arno Parˇík and Pavel Štecha, The Jewish Town of Prague, trans. Gita Zbavitelová and Dušan Zbavitel (Prague: Oswald, 1992). See especially the caption on p. 14. For an account of the reconstruction: Cathleen M. Giustino, Tearing Down Prague’s Jewish Town: Ghetto Clearance and the Legacy of Middle-Class Ethnic Politics around 1900 (Boulder, CO: Eastern European Monographs, 2003). One can benefit from Giustino’s recapitulation of events without accepting her interpretation. A full view of the former Jewish Town is preserved in the cardboard model constructed by Antonin Langweil, an assistant at Prague’s university library, between 1826 and 1837, now located in the Museum of the City of Prague. Images available online at www.langweil.cz (accessed March 1, 2009). For photographs of portions of Langweil’s model showing the Jewish Quarter, and additional prereconstruction maps, see Milada Vilímková, The Prague Ghetto, trans. Iris Urwin (Prague: Aventinum, 1990). 2.  David Gans, Z·  emah·  David, ed. Mordecai Breuer (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1983), 146 (Jewish history section, 5352/1592). 3.  On the early history of Prague’s Jewish community: Vilímková, Prague Ghetto; Alexandr Putík, “On the Topography and Demography of the Prague Jewish Town Prior to the Pogrom of 1389,” Judaica Bohemiae 30 –31 (1994 –1995): 7– 46; Samuel Steinherz, ed., Die Juden in Prag. Festgabe der Loge Praga des Ordens B′nai B′rith zum Gedenktage ihres 25jähringen Bestandes (Prague: Self-published

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Notes to Chapter 1 [by Loge Praga des Ordens B ′nai B ′rith / Independent Order of B ′nai B ′rith, Loge Praga], 1927). The survey that follows also draws on Rachel L. Greenblatt, “Prague,” in Cambridge Dictionary of Jewish Religion, History, and Culture, ed. Judith R. Baskin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 4.  For an eighteenth-century reference to five towns of Prague, including the Jewish Town (die yehudim shtat), see, for example, Abraham Levie, Travels among Jews and Gentiles: Abraham Levie’s Travelogue Amsterdam 1764, ed. Shlomo Berger (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 68 (in Yiddish). 5.  Gans, Z·  emah·  David, ed. Breuer, 303 – 4 (universal history section, year 997). Breuer points out that Gans embellished his German source, a chronicle by Martin Boregk, with additional material. Its first appearance in historical writing is in Václav Hájek z Libocˇan’s Kronyka cˇeská (Czech Chronicle), which covers Czech history to 1526. On the factual historical record regarding the origins of the Jewish community in Prague, see Putík, “Topography and Demography,” and the literature summarized there. For a discussion of the story Z·  emah·  David and other historical writing by Prague Jews, see Chapter 5. 6.  Václav Ryneš, “L’incendie de la synagogue du Faubourg du château de Prague en 1142,” Judaica Bohemiae 1 (1965): 9 –25. 7.  Pope Urban II’s call to raise armies to fight the infidel in the Holy Land quickly transcended his own control, and marauding, decentralized armies of Crusaders saw little reason to wait for their arrival in the Muslim-held Land of Israel to begin their attacks. See Robert Chazan, European Jewry and the First Crusade (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); on Prague specifically: Samuel Steinherz, “Kreuzfahrer und Juden in Prag (1096),” Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für ˇ echoslovakischen Republik 1 (1929): 1–32. Geschichte der Juden in der C 8.  Ismar Elbogen, Jewish Liturgy: A Comprehensive History, trans. Raymond P. Scheindlin (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1993), 162 –63. On the later, weekly version of this ritual, see Chapter 2. 9.  Gans, Z·  emah·  David, ed. Breuer, 175 –76. For an English translation, see Jirˇina Šedinová, “Old Czech Legends in the Work of David Gans (1592),” Judaica Bohemiae 14 (1978): 89 –112. This bridge replaced a wooden one that had washed out, and in the fourteenth century, the first stone bridge also failed and was replaced by the structure known since the nineteenth century as the Charles Bridge. 10.  The first written evidence of this Jewish settlement dates from 1273, but it probably appeared much earlier: Putík, “Topography and Demography,” 10. 11.  Vilímková, Prague Ghetto, 110. 12.  Shimon Bernfeld, ed., The Book of Tears: The Occurrences of Decrees, Persecutions and Destructions (Berlin: Eshkol, 1923 –1926), 2:162 (in Hebrew). For a full English translation of the elegy, differing from my translation here, see Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). On the massacre, see František Graus, Struktur und Geschichte: Drei Volksaufstände im mittelalterlichen Prag (Sigmaringen, Germany:

Notes to Chapter 1 Thorbecke, 1971), 50 –60, 76 –78. On the elegy in the Prague tradition of liturgical memorials, see Chapter 4. 13.  Vilímková, Prague Ghetto, 109. 14.  Judah Leib ben Joshua, Milh· ama beshalom, as reprinted in Bikure haitim 4 (1824): 123 (in Hebrew). 15.  Milada Vilímková, “Seven Hundred Years of the Old-New Synagogue,” Judaica Bohemiae 5 (1969): 72 –83. 16.  For example, a document quoted in Alexandr Putík, “The Origin of the Symbols of the Prague Jewish Town: The Banner of the Old-New Synagogue, David’s Shield and the ‘Swedish Hat,’” Judaica Bohemiae 29 (1993): 10. 17.  See an illustration from Anton Langweil’s model in Vilímková, Prague Ghetto, photograph, 107; explanation, 75. 18.  By Zalman of St. Goar, a student of the leader of German Jewry Jacob Moelin (“Maharil”; 1365 –1427). For the text: Israel Jacob Yuval, “Jews, Hussites and Germans According to the Chronicle ‘Gilgul bnei Husim,’” Zion 54 (1989): 275 –320 (in Hebrew). Also published in German as “Juden, Hussiten und Deutsche, nach einer hebräischen Chronik,” Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 13 (1992): 59 –93. 19.  On Hus, see, for example, the works of Matthew Spinka, including Spinka, John Hus: A Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968); Thomas A.  Fudge, Jan Hus: Religious Reform and Social Revolution in Bohemia (London: Tauris, 2010). 20.  Ruth Gladstein, “Eschatological Trends in Bohemian Jewry during the Hussite Period,” in Prophecy and Millenarianism: Essays in Honour of Marjorie Reeves, ed. Ann Williams (Harlow, UK: Longman, 1980), 239 –56; Ruth Kestenberg, “Hussitentum und Judentum,” Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Juden ˇ echoslovakischen Republik 8 (1936): 1–26. Ruth Gladstein and Ruth in der C Kestenberg are the same individual; Kestenberg is Gladstein’s maiden name, and she commonly appears as “Kestenberg-Gladstein.” 21.  Gladstein, “Eschatological Trends.” 22.  Jirˇina Šedinová, “Kara, Avigdor,” in YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, ed. Gershon David Hundert (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 1:860. Also available online at http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article  .aspx/Kara_Avigdor (accessed January 5, 2012). On Kara, see also Chapter 2, note 1. 23.  Leshon ashkenaz (the language of Ashkenaz), a Hebrew phrase also employed in Yiddish sources, could, confusingly, be the language spoken by Jews in German lands or in Germany itself. 24.  Olga Sixtová, ed., Hebrew Printing in Bohemia and Moravia (Prague: Academia / Jewish Museum in Prague, 2012); Salomon Hugo Lieben, “Der hebräische Buchdruck in Prag im 16. Jahrhundert,” in Steinherz, Juden in Prag, 88 –106. 25.  Hana Volavková, The Pinkas Synagogue: A Memorial of the Past and of Our Days, trans. Greta Hort (Prague: Státní Pedagogické Nakladatelství [State Jewish Museum in Prague], 1955).

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Notes to Chapter 1 26.  Volavková, Pinkas Synagogue, 52. 27.  Elchanan Reiner, “Wealth, Social Position and the Study of Torah: The Status of the Kloiz in Eastern European Jewish Society in the Early Modern Period,” Zion 58 (1993): 287–328 (in Hebrew); Reiner, “The yeshivas of Poland and Ashkenaz during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries—Historical Developments,” in Studies in Honour of Chone Shmeruk, ed. Israel Bartal, Ezra Mendelsohn, and Chava Turniansky (Jerusalem: Shazar, 1993), 9 –90 (in Hebrew). 28.  Yosef Dan, “Horowitz Family,” YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, ed. Gershon David Hundert (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 1:754 –56; also available online at http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/  article.aspx/Horowitz_Family (accessed July 10, 2011); H. Horowitz, “Die Familie Horowitz in Prag im 16. Jahrhundert,” Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden in der Tschechoslowakei 2, no. 2 (December 1931): 89 –105; 2, no. 3 (March 1932): 225 –28; 3, no. 2 (February 1933): 127–31. 29.  Ferdinand introduced the Jesuit order in 1556 and in 1561 filled the post of the archbishop of Bohemia for the first time since becoming vacant in 1421, during the Hussite wars: for example, Zdeneˇk V. David, “Confessional Accommodation in Early Modern Bohemia: Shifting Relations between Catholics and Utraquists,” in Conciliation and Confession: The Struggle for Unity in the Age of Reform, 1415– 1648, ed. Howard P. Louthan and Randall C. Zachman (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), 172 –98. 30.  Hillel J. Kieval, “Jewish Prague, Christian Prague, and the Castle in the City’s ‘Golden Age,’” Jewish Studies Quarterly 18 (2011): 202 –15; Marie Bunˇatová, “Die Prager Juden in der Zeit vor der Schlact am Weißen Berg: Handel und Wirtschaftsgebaren der Prager Juden im Spiegel des Liber albus Judeorum 1577– 1601” (Ph.D. diss., University of Vienna, 2009); the latter also includes valuable background and source material. 31.  Joseph (Jossel) of Rosheim, Joseph of Rosheim, Historical Writings, ed. and trans. Chava Fraenkel-Goldschmidt (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1996) (in Hebrew); English translation published as Chava Fraenkel-Goldschmidt, ed., The Historical Writings of Joseph of Rosheim: Leader of Jewry in Early Modern Germany, ed. Adam Shear, trans. Naomi Schendowich (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 219 –30, 326 –28; Selma Stern, Josel of Rosheim: Commander of Jewry in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, trans. Gertrude Hirschler (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1965), 143 – 45. 32.  On various uses of relics in the Czech Christian context, see Howard Louthan, Converting Bohemia: Force and Persuasion in the Catholic Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 34 – 46. 33.  Moti Benmelech, “Shlomo Molcho: A Biography” (Ph.D. diss., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2006) (in Hebrew). 34.  Joseph M. Davis, Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller: Portrait of a SeventeenthCentury Rabbi (Oxford: Littman Library, 2004).

Notes to Chapter 1 35.  Heller’s commentary on R. Asher ben Yeh· iel’s Piskei ha-Rosh, Maadanei Yom Tov (in the section called Divrei ḥ amudot) on hilkhot ẓ iz·  it 25, 48, 59 (printed in the Vilna edition of the Talmud, after tractate Menah· ot). A later account confirms this general information: Moshe Idel, “Shlomo Molkho as Magician,” Sefunot, n.s., 3 [= 18] (1985): 208 –9 (in Hebrew). 36.  Matt Goldish, “Jews and Habsburgs in Prague and Regensburg: On the Cultural and Political Significance of Solomon Molkho’s Relics,” in Perspectives on Jewish Culture in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of David B. Ruderman, ed. Richard I. Cohen, Natalie Dohrmann, Adam Shear, and Elchanan Reiner (Cincinnati: HUC Press, forthcoming). I am grateful to Professor Goldish for sharing his paper with me prior to its publication. 37.  Volavková, Pinkas Synagogue. 38.  Additional evidence of the (continued memory) of these three synagogues as the central ones in sixteenth-century Prague comes from a story of the donation of three identical Torah curtains to the three synagogues by Akiva Hacohen, told in Moses Meir Perles, Sefer megillat yuh· asin, appearing at the end of Moses Katz, Sefer Matteh Moshe (Zolkiew, 1745), 23v–27r. 39.  Pinkas Synagogue Pinkas, 1601–1845, unnumbered manuscript, Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People film no. HM/2 4024. 40.  Putík, “Symbols of the Prague Jewish Town,” 18 –19. 41.  Putík, “Symbols of the Prague Jewish Town.” While it appears the story began with Hájek and from there reached local Jews, one cannot rule out, it seems to me, the possibility that Hájek’s version was taken from earlier oral traditions, even Jewish oral traditions. 42.  Zdeneˇk V. David, “Hájek, Dubravius and the Jews: A Contrast in SixteenthCentury Czech Historiography,” Sixteenth Century Journal 27 (1996): 997–1013. 43.  Later instances in Prague are discussed in Chapter 5. 44.  Alexandr Putík, “The Prague Jewish Community in the Late 17th and Early 18th Centuries,” Judaica Bohemiae 35 (1999): 4 –140, and the bibliography there; Putίk, “Ursachen und Folgen des Prager ‘Rabbinerumsturzes’ des Jahres 1579. Beitrag zur innenpolitschen Geschichte der Prager Jüdischen Gemeinde in der zweiten Hälfte des 16. Jahrunderts,” Judaica Bohemiae 46, Suppl. (2011): 33 –74 (parallel publication in Czech, 231–64). 45.  R. J. W. Evans, Rudolf II and His World: A Study in Intellectual History, 1576 – 1612 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973; corrected paperback edition, including updated bibliographical essay, London: Thames & Hudson, 1997); Eliška Fucˇiková et al., eds., Rudolf II and Prague: The Court and the City (Prague: Prague Castle Administration; New York: Thames & Hudson, 1997); Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, The School of Prague: Painting at the Court of Rudolf II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 46.  James R. Palmitessa, Material Culture and Daily Life in the New City of Prague in the Age of Rudolf II (Krems: Medium Aevum Quotdianum, 1997).

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Notes to Chapter 1 47.  Joaneath Spicer, “The Star of David and Jewish Culture in Prague around 1600, Reflected in Drawings of Roelandt Savery and Paulus van Vianen,” Journal of the Walters Art Gallery 54 (1996): 203 –24. 48.  Charles Hughes, ed., Shakespeare’s Europe: Unpublished Chapters of Fynes Moryson’s Itinerary, 2nd ed. (New York: Blom, 1967), 489. Also excerpted by Spicer, “Star of David,” 218. 49.  Alexandr Putík, ed., Path of Life: Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, ca. 1525– 1609 (Prague: Academia / Jewish Museum in Prague, 2009). 50.  On the development of the golem legend and its connection to Prague and Maharal, see Hillel J. Kieval, Languages of Community: The Jewish Experience in the Czech Lands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 95 –113. 51.  Alexander Kisch, “Das Testament Mardochai Meysels,” Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums 37 (1893): 25 – 40, 82 –91, 131– 46, esp. 33. 52.  Gans, Z·  emah· David, ed. Breuer, 415. 53.  Paul Nettl, Alte jüdische Spielleute und Musiker: Vortrag (Prague: Flesch, 1923); Nettl, “Alte und neue jüdischer Musiker,” Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für ˇ echoslovakischen Republik 1 (1929): 33 –39; Nettl, Geschichte der Juden in der C “Bemerkungen zur jüdischen Musik- und Theatergeschichte in Böhmen,” ˇ echoslovakischen Republik Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Juden in der C 2 (1930): 491–96. 54.  Richard I. Cohen and Vivian B. Mann, “Melding Worlds: Court Jews and the Arts of the Baroque,” in From Court Jews to the Rothschilds: Art, Patronage, and Power 1600– 1800, ed. Vivian B. Mann and Richard I. Cohen (New York: Prestel, 1996), 110 –12. 55.  On Rivkah bat Meir Tiktiner, see the recent edition: Frauke von Rohden, ed., Meneket Rivkah: A Manual of Wisdom and Piety for Jewish Women by Rivkah bat Meir, trans. Samuel Spinner and Maurice Tszorf (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2009). 56.  Vilímková, Prague Ghetto, 121. The relationship of the liturgical notebooks for memory of the dead belonging to the High Synagogue and the Altneuschul also suggests a close relationship between the two; see below. 57.  Vilímková, Prague Ghetto, 128. 58.  I am deeply grateful to Elchanan Reiner and Alexandr Putík for this wellfounded hypothesis and for their related conversations with me. 59.  See Chapter 5. 60.  David Kaufmann, “La synagogue de Mardochée Meisel et Jacob Segré,” Révue des études juives 20 –21 (1890): 143 – 45. 61.  Kisch, “Testament Mardochai Meysels,” 27–28. 62.  Putík, “Symbols of the Prague Jewish Town,” 10 –11. 63.  L. S. Porta, “Die erste Nobilisierung eines deutschen Juden—Meines Vorfahren Jakob Bassevi von Treuenberg,” Jüdische Familien-Forschung 1 (1924): 12 –15; Cecil Roth, “Der Ursprung der Familie Bassevi in Prag und Verona,”

Notes to Chapter 1 Jüdische Familien-Forschung 15 (1928): 58 –60; Jaroslav Rokycana, “Die Häuser des Jakob Bassewi von Treuenberg: Neue Quellenforschung,” Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden in der Tschechoslowakei 1 (1931): 253 –66. 64.  On the political factions, see Putík, “Prague Jewish Community,” 70 –71. 65.  Hughes, Shakespeare’s Europe, 490; cited by Spicer, “Star of David,” 218. 66.  For the size of the Jewish Town in the late eighteenth century, following some growth with the purchase of the “Liechtenstein Houses” in 1622, see Putík, “Prague Jewish Community,” 9. 67.  Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller, Megillat eivah (in Yiddish). Ms. Jewish Museum in Prague (JMP) 157, 2a. 68.  See Chapter 4. 69.  Josef V. Polišenský, The Thirty Years War, trans. Robert Evans (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971). 70.  Käthe Spiegel, “Die prager Juden zur Zeit des dreissigjährigen Krieges,” in Steinherz, Juden in Prag, 107–86; Vilímková, Prague Ghetto, 29 –30. 71.  See Chapter 3. 72.  On Prague’s synagogues today: Arno Parˇík, Dana Cabanová, and Petr Kliment, Prague Synagogues (Prague: Jewish Museum in Prague, 2000). 73.  In the same year as the beginning of the Bohemian uprising, the previously polychrome interior of the Altneuschul was whitewashed. Whether by choice or from some kind of fear or coercion seems impossible to say, but in that context, the symbolism could not have been missed: Vilímková, “Seven Hundred Years,” 79. A short Hebrew-language notice of the whitewashing and its date is also painted on the walls of the Altneuschul today. On Lutheran anger at Frederick’s destruction of images in the St. Vitus Cathedral: Sergiusz Michalski, The Reformation and the Visual Arts: The Protestant Image Question in Western and Eastern Europe (London: Routledge, 1993), 84 –85, 192. The architecture of these synagogues has been noted on many occasions. For example, Vilímková, Prague Ghetto; Carol Herselle Krinsky, Synagogues of Europe: Architecture, History, Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Architectural History Foundation, 1985); Agnes Vince, “Makom, essai sur la forme urbaine des quartiers juifs: Prague, Venise, Paris” (Travail personnel de fin d’études, École d’Architecture Paris-la Villette, 1985). 74.  The most thorough publication to date of extant items is to be found in Ludmila Kybalová, Eva Kosácˇková, and Alexandr Putík, eds., Textiles from Bohemian and Moravian Synagogues from the Collections of the Jewish Museum in Prague (Prague: Jewish Museum in Prague, 2003). Subsequent catalog numbers refer to this work. Lists include a Pinkas Synagogue notebook, 1601–1845, specifying objects and election results for male and female synagogue officers, JMP, unnumbered ms. (Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People film no. HM/2 4024); Jan Herain, “Iventárˇ mobilií Maislovské Školy,” Kalendárˇ cˇesko-židovský 33 (1913 –1914): 165 –72. Lists of ritual objects that had belonged to the three synagogues destroyed in the early twentieth-century clearance of the

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Notes to Chapter 1 Jewish Quarter can be found in Aladár Deutsch, Die Zigeiner-, Grossenhof- und Neusynagoge in Prag: Denkschrift (Prague: Kuh, 1907), 25 –29, 50 –54, 60 –63. Various items are catalogued as well in David Altschuler, ed., The Precious Legacy: Judaic Treasures from the Czechoslovak State Collection (New York: Summit Books, 1983); Bracha Yaniv, “Sixteenth- to Eighteenth-Century Bohemian and Moravian Parokhot with an Architectural Motif ” (Ph.D. diss., 4 vols., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1987) (in Hebrew). On the rotation of objects: Hana Volavková, The Synagogue Treasures of Bohemia and Moravia (Prague: Sfinx, 1949), viii; Benjamin Salomon Hamburger and Erich Zimmer, eds., Worms Minhag Book of R. Joseph (Yuzpa) Shammash (Jerusalem: Makhon Yerushalayim, 1992), 1:28 (par. 21), 102 (par. 98) (in Hebrew); and below. 75.  JMP inv. no. 27.391; Kybalová, Kosácˇková, and Putík, Textiles, cat. no. 224 (pp. 20 –21, 75, 184); Vivian B. Mann, “Symbols of the Legacy: Community Life,” in Precious Legacy, 128 –29 (fig. 11), cat. no. 2 (p. 227); Bracha Yaniv, “The Origins of the ‘Two-Column Motif ’ in European Parokhot,” Jewish Art 15 (1989): 26 – 43 (fig. 6, p. 29); and the dissertation on which that article is based, Yaniv, “Bohemian and Moravian Parokhot,” 1:43 –36 passim; 2:305 –6 (see index of personal names, 2:519 –34). For further bibliography, see Kybalová, Kosácˇková, and Putík, Textiles, 184. The Zaks parokhet is one of three surviving synagogue curtains from Rudolfineera Prague, the first extant exemplars featuring motifs that continued to develop in local Torah curtains throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 76.  Levie, Abraham Levie’s Travelogue, 69. Local Jews employed the rich material culture hinted at by this object in a variety of ways, including to promote their own status in the community and to mark the memory of individual dead in the communal context of the synagogue: Richard I. Cohen, Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 68 –113. 77.  Mann, “Symbols,” 136 – 45; Jana Doleželová, “Thorschilde aus den Werkstätten der prager Silberschmeide in den Sammlungen des staatlichen jüdischen Museums,” Judaica Bohemiae 19 (1983): 22 –34; the extant collection of the Jewish Museum in Prague has been organized into an exhibition on display in the Spanish Synagogue (formerly the Altschul) since 2001. David Oppenheim, chief rabbi in Prague from 1703 to 1736, reported in a responsum that gold and silver were not used in Prague’s synagogues on Yom Kippur, implying that their use was otherwise commonplace: David Oppenheim, She′elot uteshuvot nish′al David, ed. Yitzhak Dov Feld (Jerusalem: Makhon H ̣  atam Sofer, 1975), 3:26 (par. 16). 78.  Yeh· iel Michael ben Abraham Zalman, Sreyfe lid fun prag (Prague, 1689) (Bodleian Library Opp. 80 683). 79.  Pinkas shul book of seats (pinkas hamekomot), as described by Davis, Heller, 7. For a reference to selling seats in the synagogue as a significant matter, see Bernard D. Weinryb, “From the Hebrew Correspondence of Johann Christian Wagenseil (17th Century Hebrew Correspondence between Jews and Non-Jews),” Jewish Review 2 (1944): 109 –37, 211–14 (in Hebrew; Yiddish, English

Notes to Chapter 1 introduction); see p. 121 for a letter from Shalom to his brother Jehuda Leib, in which he considers the possibility of traveling from Germany to Poland specifically to see both his house and his synagogue seats. Weinryb dates the letter to ca. 1655 and no later than 1673. 80.  For example, Frumet bat Isaac Rofe (the second wife of Mordecai Maisel) in Otto Muneles, ed., Epitaphs from the Ancient Jewish Cemetery of Prague (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1988), 291 (no. 192) (in Hebrew). 81.  Moshe Rosman, “Innovative Tradition: Jewish Culture in the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth,” in Cultures of the Jews: A New History, ed. David Biale (New York: Schocken, 2002), 559 –60. 82.  For example, Jacob ben Elijah of Teplitz, Selih· os in taytshen (Prague, 1602). 83.  Vilímková, Prague Ghetto, 75; Gottlieb Bondy and Franz Dworský, eds., Zur Geschichte der Juden in Böhmen, Mähren und Schlesien von 906 bis 1620 (Prague: Bondy, 1906), 2:1091. 84.  Louthan, Converting Bohemia, 160 –72, 272 –73; R. J. W. Evans, The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy 1550– 1700: An Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), 117. 85.  Elisheva Carlebach, The Death of Simon Abeles: Jewish-Christian Tension in Seventeenth-Century Prague (New York: Center for Jewish Studies, Queens College, CUNY, 2001); Putík, “Prague Jewish Community,” 55 –60. See also Chapter 5. 86.  Alexandr Putík, “The Hebrew Inscription on the Crucifix at Charles Bridge in Prague: The Case of Elias Backoffen and Berl Tabor in the Appellation Court,” Judaica Bohemiae 32 (1997): 26 –103. 87.  Alexandr Putík and Olga Sixtová, History of the Jews in Bohemia and Moravia from the First Settlements until Emancipation (Exhibition Guide to the Maisel Synagogue) (Prague: Jewish Museum in Prague, 2002), 94 –96; Tamar Cholcman, “An Historian Speaks Art, an Artist Speaks History: On the Essence of Ephemeric Art,” in Image and Sound: Art, Music and History, ed. Richard I. Cohen (Jerusalem: Shazar, 2007), 197–224 (in Hebrew). 88.  Vilímková, Prague Ghetto, 14, 16, 218nn8, 15; Ryneš, “Incendie de la synagogue.” 89.  Muneles, Epitaphs, 357 (no. 237). 90.  Howard Colvin, Architecture and the After-Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 368. 91.  Daniel Polakovicˇ, “Documentation of the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague,” Judaica Bohemiae 43 (2007–2008): 167–92. 92.  Vilímková, Prague Ghetto, 145. 93.  See Chapter 5. 94.  On use of the cemetery for quarantine: Alfred Landau and Bernhard Wachstein, eds., Jüdische Privatbriefe aus dem Jahre 1619 (Vienna: Braumüller, 1911), letters 1, 2; on escape to the cemetery during a fire: Yeh· iel Michael ben Abraham Zalman, Sreyfe lid.

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Notes to Chapter 1 95.  Sylvie Anne Goldberg, Crossing the Jabbok: Illness and Death in Ashkenazi Judaism in Sixteenth- through Nineteenth-Century Prague, trans. Carol Cosman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 96.  On the beaker and others like it, see Isaiah Shachar, “‘Feast and Rejoice in Brotherly Love’: Burial Society Glasses and Jugs from Bohemia and Moravia,” Israel Museum News 9 (1972): 22 –51. A similar separate grouping of men and women in a Prague beaker from 1713 (Israel Museum no. 133/113) is on p. 25 there (fig. 2c, 2d). A close-up of women on a similar beaker appears in Volavková, Pinkas Synagogue, 14. 97.  The Brantspigel was a compendium based largely on traditional rabbinic sources, designed to teach women moral behavior. It was among the most popular works of its kind; seven editions were published in just over one hundred years (1596 –1706). A modern edition is Sigrid Riedel, ed., Moses Henochs AltschulJeruschalmi “Brantspigel”: Transkribiert und ediert nach der Erstausgabe Krakau 1596 (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1993). On earlier editions, see Moshe N. Rosenfeld, “Der Brandspiegel—An Unknown Edition, and Identification of Its Author,” Kiryat sefer 55 (1981): 617–21 (in Hebrew). On the Brantspigel and the genre of sifrei musar, see also Chone Shmeruk, Yiddish Literature in Poland (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1981), 44, 96 (in Hebrew; also published in a Yiddish edition). 98.  Cf. Eviatar Zerubavel, The Seven Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 99.  For example, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982), 46. For additional bibliography, see Chapter 2. 100.  These modes of purchasing hazkarot are related to the development of medieval Christian and Jewish memorials of similar types specifically for martyrs and benefactors, a topic to which I plan to devote a future article. The oldest Jewish examples are found in Siegmund Salfeld, Quellen zur Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland, vol. 3, Das Martyrologium des Nürnberger Memorbuches (Berlin: Leonhard Simion, 1898). See also Israel Lévi, “La commémoration des âmes dan le judaïsme,” Révue des études juives 29 (1894): 43 –60; Solomon B. Freehof, “Hazkarath Neshamoth,” Hebrew Union College Annual 36 (1965): 179 –89; M. Weinberg, Die Memorbücher der jüdischer Gemeinden in Bayern (Frankfurt: Neumann, 1937); Aubrey Pomerance, “‘Bekannt in den Toren’: Name und Nachruf in Memorbüchern,” in Erinnerung als Gegenwart: Jüdische Gedenkkulturen, ed. Sabine Hödl and Eleonore Lappin (Berlin: Philo, 2000), 33 –53; Elbogen, Jewish Liturgy, 163. 101.  For example, Ms. JMP 113, 4b (no. 17). 102.  Muneles, Epitaphs, 272 –74 (no. 182). 103.  For example, the dedication Kalman (Koppelman) Lieben added at the beginning of Ms. JMP 113 (Altneuschul Memorbuch), where he quotes the rabbinic Ethics of the Fathers (ca. 200 CE): “‘Rabbi Meir says: do not look at the vessel, but rather at its contents. There are new vessels with old contents.’ In the year 5610 (1850), I wrapped the remaining [pages] in new leather [binding].” For

Notes to Chapter 1 three of the synagogues, the Altschul, the Pinkas Synagogue, and the Klausen Synagogue, the only extant hazkarat neshamot manuscripts date from the nineteenth century: Ms. JMP 74, Ms. JMP 78, Ms. JMP 82, Ms. JMP 114. For a fourth, the Maisel Synagogue, one manuscript dates from the eighteenth century but contains relatively little of the hazkarat neshamot material, while another dates from the nineteenth: Ms. JMP 73, Ms. JMP 83. One manuscript, copied in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, is of unclear provenance and may have belonged to a single family rather than a congregation as a whole. 104.  Eleven surviving manuscripts include at least one from each of the six synagogues that survived the early twentieth-century reconstruction of the city’s Jewish Quarter. It appears that no such manuscript has survived from the three synagogues destroyed at that time. The extant manuscripts are Ms. JMP 73 (Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts, Jerusalem film no. 46977 [hereafter, Jerusalem film no.]), Maisel Synagogue, 1813; Ms. JMP 74 (Jerusalem film no. 46978), Pinkas Synagogue, 1822; Ms. JMP 78 (Jerusalem film no. 46956), Klausen Synagogue, 1824; Ms. JMP 82 (Jerusalem film no. 46970), Pinkas Synagogue, 1801; Ms. JMP 83 (Jerusalem film no. 46971), Maisel Synagogue, late 18th–19th centuries; Ms. JMP 89 (Jerusalem film no. 46974), High Synagogue, ca. 1690 –1705; Ms. JMP 113 (Jerusalem film no. 46490), Altneuschul, late 15th–18th centuries; Ms. JMP 114 (Jerusalem film no. 46491), Altschul, 19th century; Ms. JMP 217 (Jerusalem film no. 46617), Altneuschul, 18th–19th centuries; Ms. JMP 354 (Jerusalem film no. 46957), Altneuschul (?), 18th–19th centuries; Ms. Hebrew Union College 453 (Jerusalem film no. 18988), Prague, 1739. Most of these manuscripts are described in Vladimír Sadek, “From the Mss. Collections of the State Jewish Museum in Prague (Illuminated Manuscripts),” Judaica Bohemiae 10 (1974): 105 –12; Vladimír Sadek and Jirˇina Šedinová, “From the Mss. Collection of the State Jewish Museum in Prague (Manuscripts of Liturgical Contents),” Judaica Bohemiae 13 (1977): 74 –95. 105.  Ms. JMP 89, Ms. JMP 113. 106.  For example, the Book of Esther, Megillat ta′anit; see Vered Noam, ed., Megillat ta′anit: Versions, Interpretation, History, with a Critical Edition (Jerusalem: Yad Ben Zvi, 2003) (in Hebrew). Leopold Zunz, Die Ritus des synagogalen Gottesdienstes, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Lamm, 1919), 125 –26. Although Megillat ta′anit lists days on which it is prohibited to fast because they commemorate various victories, there does not seem to be a direct connection between this work and later local Purim days. Nonetheless, in the mid-seventeenth century, Abraham Halevi of Cracow invoked the precedent of Megillat ta′anit in his introduction to his own commentary on the work, in the course of which he established his own familial Purim: Avraham ben Yosef Halevi, Megillat ta′anit (Amsterdam, ca. 1659). On familial Purim days, see Chapter 3. 107.  Elbogen, Jewish Liturgy, 177–84. For a list of such days specific to Prague: Salomon Hugo Lieben, “Denkmäler jüdischer Tragödien Böhmens in der Liturgie,” Das Zelt 1 (1924): 241– 43. Cf. Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 45 – 46.

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Notes to Chapter 1 108.  Christians in seventeenth-century Bohemia sometimes also viewed history in this calendrical fashion. Chronicler Jirˇí Kruger’s Sacri pulveres (1669) listed events according to the calendar day and month on which they occurred, rather than by year; see Louthan, Converting Bohemia, 142. 109.  On these events and the establishment of 2 Adar as a commemoration of them, see Chapter 4. At some point after 1601, Ephraim later took the additional name “Solomon,” a practice believed in Ashkenazi lands to ward off grave illness by fooling the angel of death. 110.  The grammatical construct form megillat (according to modern Israeli Hebrew pronunciation) or megillas (in Yiddish or according to the Ashkenazic pronunciation used by Jews in early modern Prague) is used when the word Megillah is followed immediately by the name of that particular megillah. 111.  Elliott Horowitz, Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 287–88. ̣  ayyei Adam (Vilna, 1872), 204b (also labeled, in Arabic 112.  Abraham Danzig, H numerals, 408); Hilkhot megillah (originally published 1810), par. 8. 113.  Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Haggadah and History, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1997), 30 –35, plates 9 –13. 114.  Hughes, Shakespeare’s Europe, 491; cited by Spicer, “Star of David,” 218. 115.  The celebration of Shavuot on the fiftieth day after Passover led to its alternative English name, of Greek origin, “Pentecost.” 116.  Freehof, “Hazkarath Neshamoth,” 179 –89. 117.  On this date for elections, see Ms. JMP 422, regulations of the ḥ evra  kadisha, 2b (no. 11), and translation by M. Grünwald in Goldberg, Crossing the Jabbok, 221; originally published in Grünwald, “Älteste Stuatuten der Prager israelitischen Beerdinguns-Brüderschaft,” Das jüdische Centralblatt 8 (1889): 39 –57. On paintings, beakers, and the society’s self-image, see Cohen, Icons, 100 –13; Shachar, “Feast and Rejoice.” 118.  Salomon Hugo Lieben, “Megillath Samuel,” Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft ˇ echoslovakischen Republik 9 (1938): 340; Lieben, für Geschichte der Juden in der C “Denkmäler jüdischer Tragödien,” 242. 119.  See Chapter 4. 120.  Judah Leib ben Joshua, Sefer milh· ama beshalom, 109. On the graves from this period located near the entrance referred to here (which is no longer in use), see Jirˇina Šedinová, “Hebrew Literary Sources to the Czech History of the First Half of the 17th Century: End of the Thirty Years’ War in the Testimonies of Contemporaries,” Judaica Bohemiae 23 (1987): 46 – 47. 121.  Mordecai Jaffe, Sefer levush malkhut, Levush hah· ur, Orah· h· ayyim, 581:2. And Elijah Spira, Eliyahu rabbah, there. Spira’s commentaries on Jaffe’s Sefer levush malkhut, Eliyahu rabbah, and Eliyahu zuta appear in many editions of Sefer levush malkhut. 122.  On visiting graves on fast days in general: Mordecai Jaffe, Sefer levush malkhut, Orah· h· ayyim 579:3; for the Ninth of Av, ibid., 559:3. The custom of going to

Notes to Chapter 2 the cemetery on fast days is mentioned in the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Ta ′anit 16a, and many later commentaries and legal codes as well, including Sefer maharil, hilkhot ta′anit (in the edition by Shlomo J. Spitzer [Jerusalem, 1989], 270 [par. 18]); Shulh· an arukh, Orah·  h· ayyim, 579:3, and Magen Avraham there. 123.  Isaiah Horowitz, Shenei luh· ot habrit, Rosh hashanah (Haifa, 1992), 366 (par. 10). 124.  Chava Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs: Listening to the Prayers of Early Modern Jewish Women (Boston: Beacon, 1998), 133 – 46. The earliest reference to this custom that Weissler has found is to the poem written by R. Eleazar of Worms in memory of his wife, Dulcia (1197 CE). While none of Weissler’s evidence directly links this particular ceremony to Prague, she proves that this nearly thousand-yearold tradition represented such a highly developed, widespread practice among Ashkenazi women that it is hard to imagine Prague’s women would have been different. 125.  JMP, inv. no. 32.676 (undated, but not earlier, in my opinion, than the late eighteenth century, and perhaps a little later). In this small manuscript, every object is numbered. I am grateful to Alexandr Putík and Olga Sixtová of the Jewish Museum in Prague for providing me with a copy of this manuscript. Cited by Alexandr Putík, “Before the Curtain, Behind the Curtain: Parokhot of Prague Synagogues and Their Donors, 1648 –1744,” in Textiles from Bohemian and Moravian Synagogues from the Collections of the Jewish Museum in Prague, ed. Ludmila Kybalová, Eva Kosácˇková, and Alexandr Putík (Prague: Jewish Museum in Prague, 2003), 75. 126.  Spira, Eliyahu rabbah, Orah· h· ayyim, 547:2. 127.  Rivkah bat Meir Tiktiner, Simh· as torah lid leRivkah Tiktiner, ed. Yael Levine (Jerusalem: privately printed, 2004). 128.  Yeh· iel Michael ben Abraham Zalman, Sreyfe lid. 129.  Shachar, “Feast and Rejoice,” 24 –25, 48 – 49n11. Corroboration for the asking of forgiveness of the dead on the last day of Shevat, accompanied by fasting, comes from the burial society regulations; see Goldberg, Crossing the Jabbok, 221 (no. 11), in the original: Ms. JMP 422, 2b. 130.  A partial translation into German was published by Leopold Zunz, Literaturgeschichte der synagogalen Poesie (Berlin: Gerschel, 1865), 57; Lieben, “Denkmäler jüdischer Tragödien,” 241– 43. On the expulsion, see Samuel Steinherz, “The Expulsion of the Jews from Bohemia in 1541,” Zion 15 (1950): 70 –92 (in Hebrew).

Chapter 2 1.  This chapter draws on Rachel L. Greenblatt, “The Shapes of Memory: Evidence in Stone from the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 47 (2002): 43 –67. On Avigdor Kara, an introduction in a Western

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Notes to Chapter 2 language is Abraham David’s entry in the Encyclopaedia Judaica (Jerusalem, 1971), s.v. “Kara, Avigdor ben Isaac.” An English translation of one of Kara’s liturgical poems was published by Ruth Gladstein, “Eschatological Trends in Bohemian Jewry during the Hussite Period,” in Prophecy and Millenarianism: Essays in Honour of Marjorie Reeves, ed. Ann Williams (Harlow, UK: Longman, 1980), 239 –56. 2.  Otto Muneles, ed., Epitaphs from the Ancient Jewish Cemetery of Prague (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1988), 103 (no. 1) (in Hebrew); originally published in Czech, co-authored with Milada Vilímková, Stary židovsky hrˇbitov v Praze (Prague: Státní Pedagogické Nakladatelství [State Jewish Museum in Prague], 1955). Inscription translations from the original Hebrew are my own. Full references to biblical and rabbinic sources employed in the inscriptions’ Hebrew texts are included in Muneles, Epitaphs. I have noted these sources when they are directly relevant to my discussion of the texts. Muneles also surveys earlier literature on the cemetery and its documentation, see esp. p. 11. On more recent developments: Daniel Polakovicˇ, “Documentation of the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague,” Judaica Bohemiae 43 (2007–2008): 167–92. 3.  Muneles, Epitaphs, 297–98 (no. 197). A thorough treatment of Jacob Bassevi remains a desideratum. On his activities at court and the privileges accorded him and his family, see Heinrich Schnee, Die Hoffinanz und der moderne Staat: Geschichte und System der Hoffaktoren an deutschen Fürstenhöfen im Zeitalter des Absolutismus (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1955), 3:234 –37. Relatively brief descriptions appear in the encyclopedias, major surveys of Jewish history, and historical surveys of the Jews in Prague. For a brief, but more recent, summary of Bassevi’s activities, see Jonathan I. Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550– 1750, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 89 –90. 4.  Bracha Yaniv, “The Origins of the ‘Two-Column Motif ’ in European Parokhot,” Jewish Art 15 (1989): 26 – 43; Yaniv, “Sixteenth- to Eighteenth-Century Bohemian and Moravian Parokhot with an Architectural Motif (Ph.D. diss., 4 vols., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1987) (in Hebrew); Ludmila Kybalová, Eva Kosácˇková, and Alexandr Putík, eds., Textiles from Bohemian and Moravian Synagogues from the Collections of the Jewish Museum in Prague (Prague: Jewish Museum in Prague, 2003). 5.  Vivian B. Mann, “Art and Material Culture of Judaism—Medieval through Modern Times,” in Encyclopaedia of Judaism, ed. Jacob Neusner, Alan J. AveryPeck, and William Scott Green (Leiden: Brill, 2006); Brill Online, http://www  .brillonline.nl/public/art-material-culture (accessed June 14, 2009). 6.  The ritual of hazkarat neshamot (recollection of the souls) is described in Chapter 1. Unfortunately, very little is known about the material conditions or financial arrangements surrounding the gravestones and their placement in the cemetery. For evidence that in the eighteenth century at least some Jewish stones were carved by Christian masons: Milada Vilímková, The Prague Ghetto, trans. Iris Urwin (Prague: Aventinum, 1990), 145.

Notes to Chapter 2 7.  Muneles, Epitaphs, 297 (no. 197). “Where is”: the Hebrew word spelled alef-yod may be read as either ey (long “a”), meaning “where” (as in Genesis 4:9, “Where is Abel your brother?”), or as ee, meaning “alas/oy.” Either reading would constitute a reasonable translation of this inscription; “To the afternoon service . . .”: a loose translation of the original, le′minḥ a kemo be′yoẓ er nemhara. Yoẓ er refers to a particular part of the morning service for Sabbath and festivals. Rabbi Hamnuna derived many laws regarding prayer from the Scripture’s description of the prayer of Hannah; see Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Berakhot 31a; I Samuel 1:9 –17. 8.  Muneles, Epitaphs, 298 (no. 197). 9.  Cf. Glikl bat Judah Leib’s comments about attending synagogue: Beth-Zion Abrahams, trans. and ed., The Life of Glückel of Hameln, 1646 – 1724, Written by Herself (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2010), 97 passim. In the original Yiddish (and Hebrew translation): Glikl, Memoirs 1691– 1719, ed. and trans. Chava Turniansky (Jerusalem: Shazar, 2006), 330 –31 passim. 10.  Muneles, Epitaphs, 225 (no. 129). For a photograph of Sarah Yutl’s gravestone, see Muneles and Vilímková, Stary židovsky hrˇbitov, 392. 11.  Including, for example, a nearly identical text found on the stone of Reykl, wife of Isaac Puria; Muneles, Epitaphs, 224 (no. 128). 12.  Muneles, Epitaphs, 222 (no. 125). 13.  For gravestones from Prague mentioning women’s Torah study, see Rivkah bat Meir Tiktiner, Simḥ as Torah lid leRivkah Tiktiner, ed. Yael Levine (Jerusalem: privately printed, 2004), 9 –14. 14.  Muneles, Epitaphs, 248 (no. 157). 15.  Ms. Jewish Museum in Prague (JMP) 113, 28v (no. 148); Ms. JMP 89, 19v. In Ms. JMP 89, the phrase “‫ ”בשבע החכמות‬is mistakenly transcribed as the nonsensical “‫בשכול החכמות‬.” 16.  Muneles, Epitaphs, 103 (no. 1). 17.  Muneles, Epitaphs, 260 (no. 171); cf. Greenblatt, “Shapes of Memory,” 55 –56; Samuel Steinherz, “Sage und Geschichte,” Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für ˇ echoslovakischen Republik 9 (1938): 171–97. The marker Geschichte der Juden in der C for Aaron Simon Spira-Wedeles uses graphic imagery to refer to a story about Wedeles’s life: Tobias Jakobovits, “Die Erlebnisse des Oberrabiners Simon SpiraWedeles in Prag (1640 –1679),” Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Juden in ˇ echoslovakischen Republik 4 (1932): 253 –96. der C 18.  “Altneuschul Memorbuch” (Ms. JMP 113), 4b; “High Synagogue kuntres” (Ms. JMP 89), 17a–17b; “Hazkarat Neshamot, Pinkas Synagogue, 1801” (Ms. JMP 82), 6a. 19.  Genesis 35:20. 20.  Muneles, Epitaphs, 297 (no. 197). 21.  As noted by Muneles, from the medieval biblical commentator Rashi on Genesis 28:10.

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Notes to Chapter 2 22.  Throughout this chapter, I use the term “epitaph” in its lay meaning of an inscription on a tomb or grave; I am not referring to the specific type of grave marker called “epitaph” by art historians. 23.  Yoshia ben Aaron (d. 1444), Muneles, Epitaphs, 106 (no. 3). 24.  Eyn gomrin aleha hahallel. This is a play on the word gomrin, which means both “complete” and “recite,” as in “recite praises”; it is used particularly in reference to the recitation on festivals of the group of psalms known collectively as hallel (praise). 25.  Muneles, Epitaphs, 210 (no. 109). An extremely similar formula marks the burial place of Yentl bat Pereẓ , wife of Isaiah Flatiels, Muneles, Epitaphs, 197 (no. 97). Another example of a similar combination of elements is that of Hannah Fikin, wife of Hayim Zaks, Muneles, Epitaphs, 254 –55 (no. 164); photograph, 97. 26.  Meir ben Joseph Brandeis, Muneles, Epitaphs, 264 (no. 175). 27.  Muneles, Epitaphs, 321 (no. 212). 28.  Krzysztof Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500– 1800, trans. Elizabeth Wiles-Portier (Cambridge: Polity, 1990), 11– 44. 29.  Patrick J. Geary, Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). For changes and continuity in this medieval notion during the early modern period, see Natalie Zemon Davis, “Ghosts, Kin and Progeny: Some Features of Family Life in Early Modern France,” Daedalus 106 (1977): 87–114; reprinted in Jerome Kagan and Tamara K. Hareven, eds., The Family (New York: Norton, 1978), 87–114. Cf. Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall, eds., The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 30.  Lamentations 3:40. 31.  For the sources of the phrase, its variations, and its development over time, see Avraham (Rami) Reiner, “From ‘Paradise’ to ‘the Bonds of Life’: Blessings for the Dead on Tombstones in Medieval Ashkenaz,” Zion 76 (2011): 5 –28 (in Hebrew); Leopold Zunz, Zur Geschichte und Literatur (Berlin: Veit, 1845), 349 –54; Bernhard Wachstein, Die Inschriften des alten Judenfriedhofs in Wien (Vienna: Braumüller, 1912), 1:xxviii–xxxiii. 32.  Korban kalil ke′ayil. This expression is also used to refer specifically to a burnt offering of a ram and could therefore be read as a technical expression of a particular type of sacrifice rather than as the sacrifice of a perfect, or unblemished, animal. The two meanings are obviously interconnected. 33.  Muneles, Epitaphs, 161 (no. 61), photograph. Rebekah, known also by the last name “Tiktiner,” was also a published author, though the first known publication date of any of her works postdates her death. Her work of ethical teachings (sefer mussar) Meneket Rivkah was published in Prague in 1609 and in Cracow in 1618. 34.  See I Samuel 25:2 –35. 35.  Zunz, Zur Geschichte, 317.

Notes to Chapter 2 36.  For example, Mishnah, Tractate Yoma 8:8, and Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Yoma 85b, 86a passim; Ephraim E. Urbach, The Sages— Their Beliefs and Concepts, trans. Israel Abrahams (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1975; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 432 –36. 37.  Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Mo ′ed Katan 28a. See also Urbach, The Sages, 420 –522, esp. 435. 38.  For example, Muneles, Epitaphs, 318 –19 (no. 210). 39.  Muneles, Epitaphs, 264 (no. 165). 40.  Erwin Panofsky, Tomb Sculpture: Four Lectures on Its Changing Aspects from Ancient Egypt to Bernini (London: Abrams, 1964), for example, 20 –21, 39, 67, regarding Christian emphasis on the anticipatory function and the subsequent Renaissance return to retrospective commemoration. 41.  Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Knopf, 1981), 202 –93. 42.  Cf. Geary, Living with the Dead. 43.  Davis, “Ghosts, Kin and Progeny.” 44.  Ms. JMP 113, 7b. 45.  See Chapter 1. 46.  There appears to be an error in the manuscript here. 47.  Ms. JMP 89, 22a–22b. 48.  The entry may have appeared in the Altneuschul’s book as well; pages missing from that manuscript include deaths during the year that Heni was killed. 49.  Vlastimila Hamácˇková, “The Donation of Synagogue Textiles as Reflected in Epitaphs at the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague,” in Kybalová, Kosácˇková, and Putík, Textiles, 108 –15. 50.  Muneles, Epitaphs, 245 (no. 154). 51.  Cf. Hamácˇková, “Donation of Synagogue Textiles,” 110 –11. 52.  The extant entries in Ms. JMP 113, from the Altneuschul, commemorate 173 men (60% of the total) and 112 women (40%). Ms. JMP 89, from the High Synagogue, lists 43 men (77%) and 113 women (23%). The relevant portion of Ms. JMP 82, the Pinkas Synagogue, lists 164 men (65%) and 88 women (35%). 53.  Muneles, Epitaphs, 300 –301 (no. 198). 54.  The mantle (1697) and parokhet (1724) donated by Isaac Knina and his wife, Mirl, and mentioned on his gravestone (1736) provide examples of ritual objects posthumously considered remembrances of the donor. The mantle, JMP inv. no. 40.609, appears in Kybalová, Kosácˇková, and Putík, Textiles, cat. no. 13 and illustration, p. 17; the parokhet, JMP inv. no. 27.378, in Yaniv, “Bohemian and Moravian Parokhot,” 2:370 –71 (no. 35). The gravestone inscription, Archives of the JMP, K500, no. 6261, appears in abbreviated form in Simon Hock and David Kaufmann, eds., Mishpeḥ ot kehilat kodesh Prag: ′al-pi matsevotehen [Families of the Holy Community of Prague, According to Their Gravestones] (Pressburg: Alkalai, 1897), 320 (in Hebrew; German introduction). The description of the parokhet in

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Notes to Chapter 2 particular, as being embroidered in silver and gold, precisely matches the extant object. Cf. Kybalová, Kosácˇková, and Putík, Textiles, 75, where Putík mentions later use of the parokhet. 55.  Ms. JMP 113, 35a (no. 188, second half ). 56.  Alexandr Putík, “Before the Curtain, Behind the Curtain: Parokhot of Prague Synagogues and Their Donors, 1648 –1744,” in Kybalová, Kosácˇková, and Putík, Textiles, 72 –91. To the best of my knowledge, just one parokhet and one mantle donated by Mordecai Maisel are extant. Likewise, there is one parokhet donated by Bassevi, JMP inv. no. 27.396, Kybalová, Kosácˇková, and Putík, Textiles, cat. no. 277. 57.  Ms. JMP 89, 24a. 58.  JMP inv. no. 16.650, Kybalová, Kosácˇková, and Putík, Textiles, 215 (cat. no. 302). 59.  For example, Joel Sirkes, She′elot uteshuvot habaḥ  hayeshanot (Frankfurt am Main, 1697), 12a–13a (no. 17), cited by Jules Harlow, “Jewish Textiles in Light of Biblical and Post-Biblical Literature,” in Fabric of Jewish Life: Textiles from the Jewish Museum Collection, ed. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (New York: Jewish Museum, 1977), 33; Jair H ̣  ayyim Bacharach, She′elot uteshuvot havvot Ya′ir (Jerusalem, 1968), no. 161, and an English translation by Eliezer Diamond in Jewish Texts on the Visual Arts, ed. Vivian B. Mann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 61–63. See also Iris Fishof, From the Secular to the Sacred: Everyday Objects in Jewish Ritual Use (Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1985), cat. no. 261; Esther Juhasz, “Textiles for the Home and the Synagogue,” in Sephardi Jews in the Ottoman Empire: Aspects of Material Culture, ed. Esther Juhasz (Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1990), 69 –119, images of ritual objects made from dresses, pp. 81, 82, 84, 85, and plate 16. 60.  Peter Thornton, Baroque and Rococo Silks (New York: Taplinger, 1965), 80ff.; Aidleen Ribeiro, The Gallery of Fashion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 61.  For example, on the ark in the Altneuschul and in the Renaissance designs of the columned portals in the Pinkas Shul, see Hana Volavková, The Pinkas Synagogue: A Memorial of the Past and of Our Days, trans. Greta Hort (Prague: Státní Pedagogické Nakladatelství [State Jewish Museum in Prague], 1955). 62.  Ivan Muchka, “Die Architektur unter Rudolf II., gezeigt am Beispiel der Prager Burg,” Prag um 1600. Kunst und Kultur am Hofe Rudolfs II (Ausstellung, Kulturstiftung Ruhr, Villa Hügel, Essen, 10.6-30.10 1988) (Freren: Luca, 1988), 85 – 93. Muchka dates the outer portal of All Saints’ Chapel (his fig. 1) at 1580 and the entrance to Vladislav Hall (his fig. 2) as probably having been built close to that time as well, refuting the claims of earlier scholars who have dated it closer to 1600. 63.  On Jewish adoption and adaptation of this motif, see Yaniv, “Two-Column Motif ”; Vladimír Sadek also comments on the influence of Jewish participation

Notes to Chapter 2 in the Italian Renaissance on the Jews of Prague: Vladimír Sadek, “Die Prager Judenstadt zur Zeit der rudolfischen Renaissance,” in Muchka, Prag um 1600, 597–98; much of Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann’s extensive examination of art and architecture in central Europe during this period revolves around its relationship to Italian forms: Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Court, Cloister and City: The Art and Culture of Central Europe, 1450– 1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). For a different understanding of Italian as opposed to northern influences as they apply to architecture in Prague, see Oskar Pollak, “Studien zur Geschichte der Architektur Prags, 1520 –1600,” Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des Allerhoechsten Kaiserhauses 20 (1910): 85 –170. My thanks to Vladimír Urbanek for referring me to this valuable article. Pollak’s analysis is based in part on a series of gravestones in Prague, many in the St. Vitus Cathedral; see esp. 141– 49. 64.  On the power of symbols at the court of Rudolf II, see R. J. W. Evans, Rudolf II and His World: A Study in Intellectual History, 1576 – 1612 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973; corrected paperback edition, including updated bibliographical essay, London: Thames & Hudson, 1997); and on symbols in general, see Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities, 22. 65.  Jirˇina Šedinová, “Hebrew Literature as a Source of Information on the Czech History of the First Half of the 17th Century: The Reflection of the Events in Contemporary Hebrew Poetry,” Judaica Bohemiae 20 (1984): 3 –30; Šedinová, “Literary Structure of the 17th Century Hebrew Lyrico-Epic Poetry,” Judaica Bohemiae 25 (1989): 82 –106; Šedinová, “Hebrew Lyrico-Epic Poetry of the 17th Century in Literary Context of Bohemia and Moravia,” Judaica Bohemiae 26 (1990): 84 –101. 66.  šedinová, “Literary Structure,” 105; also šedinová, “Hebrew Lyrico-Epic Poetry,” 98. Muneles, Epitaphs, 38, also takes note of the similarity between the style of epitaphs and literary forms that flourished during the Baroque period. Two outstanding examples of such Baroque-type poetry inscribed on a gravestone are the gravestone of Miriam bat Moses, wife of Abraham H ̣  ayyim (d. 1639), Muneles, Epitaphs, 316 –17 (no. 209); and the gravestone of Moses Sofer Dayan ben Isaac  (d. 1646), Muneles, Epitaphs, 326 –27 (no. 215). 67.  For example, the sarcophagus of Wratislaw von Pernstein (Vratislav of Pernštejn) (d. 1582); see Pollak, “Architektur Prags,” 143 – 45 and fig. 56. Pollak traces this design to a handbook of gravestones by Hans Vredeman de Vries, an architect of Dutch origin active in Prague. 68.  For additional examples of the cherub’s face on Prague gravestones, see Pollak, “Architektur Prags,” 141– 49 and the accompanying illustrations. On other figural representation in the Old Jewish Cemetery, see Vladimír Sadek, “Grabsteine mit Figuralmotiven auf dem alten jüdischen Friedhof in Prag,” Judaica Bohemiae 14 (1978): 75 –88. 69.  Italian Jewish marriage contracts frequently featured self-created coats of arms of the community’s prominent families; see Shalom Sabar, “The Use and

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Notes to Chapter 2 Meaning of Christian Motifs in Illustrations of Jewish Marriage Contracts in Italy,” Journal of Jewish Art 10 (1984): 47–63. 70.  Cf. Armando Petrucci, Writing the Dead: Death and Writing Strategies in the Western Tradition (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 71.  It is not clear to me that the chronology of the monuments’ development can be ascertained by simple use of the date of death of those whose burial places they mark. For a fuller exploration of this issue, see Rachel L. Greenblatt, “‘Memory’ and the Relationship between the Living and the Dead in the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague: A Reading of Evidence in Stone” (master’s thesis, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1998), 105 –8. Prominent personalities buried beneath them include Maharal and his wife, Mordecai Maisel, Joseph Delmedigo, and many more of the city’s seventeenth- and eighteenth-century chief rabbis. For descriptions of the very different, even more elaborate monuments of the Ouderkerk Cemetery in Amsterdam, see Rochelle Weinstein, “Sepulchral Monuments of the Jews in Amsterdam in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1979). 72.  For example, Meir ben Fishel Bumsla (d. 1769), Muneles, Epitaphs, 353 –55 (no. 234). 73.  For example, Ms. JMP 113, 25b (no. 125), 1540 (dating based on Muneles, Epitaphs [no. 41]). 74.  Ms. JMP 113, 35b (no. 189); Ms. JMP 89, 19b. 75.  Ms. JMP 89, 21b. 76.  Robert Bonfil, Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy, trans. Anthony Oldcorn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 283. 77.  Muneles, Epitaphs, 210 (no. 109); 310 (no. 204). 78.  Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, The School of Prague: Painting at the Court of Rudolf II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 90 –99. 79.  Kaufmann, School of Prague, 200. On the appropriateness of different orders of columns and styles of architecture for different literary genres and types of people as described in the influential tractates of architect Sebastiano Serlio (1475 – 1554), see John Onians, Bearers of Meaning: The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 282 –86. 80.  For example, Jewish witnesses to the disinterment of Bohemian kings for the purpose of refurbishing the tombs in St. Vitus Cathedral in 1589 and the amulet with Jewish symbolism belonging to Rudolf ’s court; see Chapter 1. 81.  For example, Kaufmann, Court, Cloister and City, 201; Kaufmann, School of Prague, 101–5; Pollak, “Architektur Prags,” 100 –102, 113 –15; James R. Palmitessa, Material Culture and Daily Life in the New City of Prague in the Age of Rudolf II (Krems: Medium Aevum Quotidianum,1997), passim; see also Palmitessa’s warning against oversimplification of the impact of the Habsburg court on the art and architecture of Prague’s burgher class, 9 –16.

Notes to Chapter 3 82.  The earliest possible, though ambiguous reference to memory on a textile inscription appears on a Torah mantle from 1615, JMP inv. no. 12.667, Kybalová, Kosácˇková, and Putík, Textiles, cat. no. 1 and p. 134: “Donated by Liberman H ̣  alfan, may God protect him, and his wife Sarah, in the year ‘he made a remembrance [zekher asa].’” A notable later example, clearer in its intent and apparently more representative chronologically, is a 1696 parokhet, JMP inv. no. 27.397, Kybalová, Kosácˇková, and Putík, Textiles, cat. no. 5 and p. 75: “A gift of . . . Leib son of . . . Gershon Karpels . . . and his wife Mrs. Esther daughter of Barukh Tillis . . . for which they used [a piece] from the parokhet of his father, saved from fire in the year 5449 (1689).” See Rachel L. Greenblatt, “A Community’s Memory: Jewish Views of Past and Present in Early Modern Prague” (Ph.D. diss., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2006), 266 –91. 83.  Putík, “Before the Curtain.” Also still valuable in this regard is Hana Volavková, The Synagogue Treasures of Bohemia and Moravia, trans. Greta Hort and Roberta Finlayson Samsour (Prague: Sfinx, 1949). 84.  In records from a slightly later period, Putík did, however, also find a few examples of people of more average financial means who donated ritual objects at much greater personal sacrifice. In addition, more than half the male donors were in the top echelons of Jewish Prague’s political leadership. Putík argues that the political dimension of donation, as a demonstration of both political and economic power, was especially prevalent during the years 1690 –1703, a particularly turbulent time in intracommunal affairs.

Chapter 3 1.  H ̣  anokh Altschul, “Megillat purei hakela′im,” in Jubelschrift zum siebzigsten Geburtstage des Prof. Dr. H. Graetz, ed. Abraham Zvi Kisch (Breslau: Schottlaender, 1887), 48 –52 in the Hebrew section; Joseph Tein, Megillat hakela′im (copied 1840), Ms. Jewish Museum in Prague (JMP) 263. 2.  For example, Arnošt Klíma, “Inflation in Bohemia in the Early Stage of the 17th Century,” in Proceedings of the Seventh International Economic History Conference, ed. Michael Flinn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1978): 375 –86; Golo Mann, Wallenstein: Sein Leben (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1971), 237– 45. No study of which I am aware explores Bassevi’s role specifically. 3.  Moses ben H ̣  anokh Altschul was author of the popular Yiddish ethical work Brantspigl (1602), mentioned in Chapter 1: Sigrid Riedel, ed., Moses Henochs Altschul-Jeruschalmi “Brantspigel”: Transkribiert und ediert nach der Erstausgabe Krakau 1596 (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1993). 4.  Altschul, “Megillat purei hakela′im.” 5.  On early modern Jewish autobiographical writing, see Marcus Moseley, Being For Myself Alone: Origins of Jewish Autobiography (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005); Jeffrey Howard Chajes, “Accounting for the Self: Preliminary

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Notes to Chapter 3 Generic-Historical Reflections on Early Modern Jewish Egodocuments,” Jewish Quarterly Review 95, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 1–15; Debra Kaplan, “The Self in Social Context: Asher ha-Levi of Reichshofen’s Sefer Zikhronot,” Jewish Quarterly Review 9, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 210 –36; Avriel Bar-Levav, “When I Was Alive: Jewish Ethical Wills as Ego-Documents,” in Egodocuments and History: Autobiographical Writing in Its Social Context since the Middle Ages, ed. Rudolf Dekker (Hilversum: Verloren, 2002), 45 –59; Natalie Zemon Davis, “Fame and Secrecy: Leon Modena’s Life as an Early Modern Autobiography,” in The Autobiography of a SeventeenthCentury Venetian Rabbi: Leon Modena’s Life of Judah, ed. Mark R. Cohen (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 50 –70; Michael Stanislawski, Autobiographical Jews: Essays in Self-Fashioning (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004). For a much earlier Hebrew autobiographical text, see Israel Jacob Yuval, “A German-Jewish Autobiography of the Fourteenth Century,” Binah 3 (1994): 79 –96; originally published in Hebrew in Tarbiz 55 (1986): 541–66. 6.  Prewar Prague scholars Tobias Jakobovits and Salomon Hugo Lieben both used the term “family megillah,” or German or Czech equivalents, to refer to this genre in the articles cited below. Contemporary literary scholar Marcus Moseley likewise employs “family scrolls” and “scrolls of deliverance” (e.g., Moseley, Being For Myself, 147). Joseph M. Davis also refers to “deliverance narrative”: Joseph M. Davis, Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller: Portrait of a Seventeenth-Century Rabbi (Oxford: Littman Library, 2004), 193 –94. I have followed Jakobovits and Lieben in choosing “family megillot” as best encompassing the genre’s various characteristics, but it is important not to confuse these megillot with another genre, megillot yuḥ asin, a genre detailing a family’s genealogical background that began to flourish in the early eighteenth century. This genre is also known sometimes as “family megillot” or megillot mishpaḥ tiyot. I would instead suggest referring to the megillot yuḥ asin as such or as “genealogical” or “family tree” megillot in English. 7.  On early modern writing about the self as reflecting social networks: Gabriele Jancke, Autobiographie als soziale Praxis: Beziehungskonzepte in Selbstzeugnissen des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts im deutschsprachigen Raum (Cologne: Böhlau, 2002). 8.  Altschul, “Megillat purei hakela′im,” 49. 9.  Tein, Megillat hakela′im, col. 6. That this scribe’s family name is the same as the second family involved in the same incident may be coincidental or may indicate a family history in the same synagogue or later intermarriage of the families. 10.  On this genre: Elliott Horowitz, Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 279 –315, including references to the earliest scholarly lists of such days; Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982), 46 – 48; Moseley, Being For Myself, 147–55. 11.  See Chapter 1. 12.  A Talmudic basis cited by some of the megillot is the requirement to recite a blessing of gratitude on returning to the place where one was miraculously saved

Notes to Chapter 3 from danger, Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 54a. But in the case of the Purim, the commemoration is based on a marker in time rather than in space. Cf. Abraham Gombiner, Magen Avraham, on Shulḥ an arukh, Oraḥ ḥayyim, 636. 13.  Christopher R. Friedrichs, “Politics or Pogrom? The Fettmilch Uprising in German and Jewish History,” Central European History 19 (1986): 186 –228; Rivka Ulmer, ed., Turmoil, Trauma and Triumph: The Fettmilch Uprising in Frankfurt am Main (1612– 1616) According to Megillas Vintz (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2001). For an additional discussion of Megillat Vinẓ   and the annual Frankfurt celebration, see Chapter 4. 14.  Shulḥan arukh, Oraḥ ḥayyim, 218:4. 15.  The Maimonides family day is mentioned in Eleazar Azikri, Sefer ḥaredim (Jerusalem, 1981), ch. 65 (ch. 5 of the Laws of Repentance), 253 –54; for the Purim from Fulda: Moritz Steinschneider, Catalogus Librorum Hebraeorum in Bibliotheca Bodleiana, 3 vols. (Berlin: Welt, 1931; original edition, 1852 –1860), 1186 – 87 (no. 22), under Jakob b. Asher, from a ms. of his Oraḥ ḥayyim. For an attempt to explain the background of this incident: Arye Maimon, Mordechai Breuer, and Yacov Guggenheim, eds., Germania Judaica III (Tübingen: Mohr, 1995), 1:420 –21. 16.  Yaakov Boksenboim, ed., Iggerot beit Karmi (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 1983). I am grateful to Elliott Horowitz for this reference. 17.  Gabriel Souchatow, Maẓ evat kodesh (Lemberg: Schrenzel, 1863). The work is not paginated. The section titled “Ma′aseh norah me′ir Prag” (A Terrible Event from the City of Prague) appears toward the end of the first volume, just before the indices. I am grateful to Haim Gertner for bringing this source to my attention. It is also listed by Moritz Steinschneider, Die Geschichtsliteratur der Juden (Frankfurt: Kauffman, 1905), 113. Documents related to the events appear in Gottlieb Bondy and Franz Dworsk‎ý, eds., Zur Geschichte der Juden in Böhmen, Mähren und Schlesien von 906 bis 1620 (Prague: Bondy, 1906), 2:843 – 46. On currency-related crimes, see, for example, Salo W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1969), 14:157. 18.  Joshua Edeles / Maharam ben Samuel Basch Edeles, Megillah, Ms. JMP 255 (1833). 19.  Edeles/Maharam, Megillah, col. 5. 20.  “Family Megillah of the Yampels-Segal Family,” Ms. JMP 251 (1721). 21.  Leibl Hoschmann / Abraham ben Eliah Broda, “A Prague Family Megillah from the Year 1732,” in Wachstein-Bukh: A Collection of Remembrances in Honor of Dr. Bernhard Wachstein, 1868– 1935, ed. S. Friedland (Vilna: YIVO, 1939), 69 –76 (in Yiddish). A Czech summary of the contents was published by Tobias Jakobovits, “Pražká rodinná megillah z r. 1732,” V e˘stník žikovské obce nábožkenské v Praze 4 (February 1937): 19 –20; Salomon Hugo Lieben, “Megillath Samuel,” Jahrbuch ˇ echoslovakischen Republik 9 (1938): der Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Juden in der C 310 –11. Lieben mistakenly calls the megillah, “Megilla der Familie Brod.” Although

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Notes to Chapter 3 Lieben and Friedland both refer to the manuscript as being in the possession of the Jewish Museum in Prague, I have not been able to locate it. 22.  These tensions, and their impact on Jewish historical writing, are explored in Chapter 5. 23.  “Megillas Shmuel,” ed. Aron Freimann, Kovetz al yad 9 (1899) (paginated separately) (in Yiddish; Hebrew introduction). Quotations are taken from this edition. One known manuscript is extant: Ms. Stadt und Universität Bibliothek Heb. oct. 37. A translation in German, with some explanatory notes, was published by Salomon Hugo Lieben in his article, “Megillath Samuel,” 314 –36. See also Alexandr Putík, “The Prague Jewish Community in the Late 17th and Early 18th Centuries,” Judaica Bohemiae 35 (1999): 19, 77, 79 –98; Putík, “Prague Jews and Judah Hasid: A Study on the Social, Political and Religious History of the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries,” Judaica Bohemiae 38 (2002): 73 –105, esp. 79 –80. 24.  “Megillas Shmuel,” 29: “To make a Purim and rejoice in eating and drinking with great joy. . . .” The release from jail is described on p. 25. Cf. Esther 9:27. 25.  “Megillas Shmuel,” 29. 26.  On this figure: Davis, Heller. 27.  For a comparison of the Hebrew and Yiddish versions, see Max Erik’s publication of Megillat eivah in Max Erik, ed., “The Memoirs of the Tosfes Yontef: A Seventeenth-Century Yiddish Manuscript of Megiles eivah,” Arkhiv far yiddisher shprakhvinshaft, literatur-forshung un etnologie 1 (1926 –1933): 179 –217, esp. 188 –90 (in Yiddish); Erik, The History of Yiddish Literature from Its Beginnings until the Haskalah Period (Warsaw: Kultur-lige, 1928; New York: Shulsinger, 1979), 414 –18 (in Yiddish). In both places, Erik provides a reasoned claim that the original Yiddish version of Megillat eivah was Heller’s own work, or a translation of another man in his immediate surroundings, but that the Hebrew version was written first. Cf. Davis, Heller, 228; Israel Zinberg, A History of Jewish Literature, trans. and ed. Bernard Martin (New York: Ktav, 1975), 6:100 –101, 7:240 – 41, who claims that Heller wrote the Yiddish version first and then translated it himself into Hebrew. 28.  Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller, Megillat eivah (Brooklyn, NY: Ehrenreich, 1991), 4. Versions of the printed text can be divided into two main groupings, one represented by the first publication from Breslau (1836) and another from Warsaw (1870); see J. Wreschner, ed., Megillat eivah (Jerusalem, 1999), 4 –7. Here, I quote from a version based on the Warsaw text, because it is widely available in the form a of a fifteen-page pamphlet reprinted multiple times in London, Tel Aviv, New York, and elsewhere. Translations are my own. Megillat eivah circulated widely in manuscript before first being published in 1836. The multiplicity of manuscripts and printed editions in Hebrew and Yiddish attests to the familiarity of this megillah to a wide audience and its preservation over time, but also poses a problem of multiple variant readings. On extant manuscripts and printed editions of Megillat eivah, see Davis, Heller, 228; Guido Kisch, “Die Megillat Eba in

Notes to Chapter 3 Seligmann Kisch’s Übersetzung,” Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Juden ˇ echoslovakischen Republik 1 (1929): 426 –34. in der C 29.  Putík, “Prague Jewish Community,” 63 –71. 30.  There was a separate Kaiserrichter for each of Prague’s three autonomous towns: František Roubík, “Královští rychtárˇi v pražských a jiných cˇeských me˘stech v letech 1547 až 1783,” Sborník prˇíspe˘vku˚ k de˘jinám hlavního meˇsta Prahy 6 (1930): 265 –355, 422 –24 (in Czech; French summary). 31.  On ongoing political tensions between Heller and his enemies within Prague’s Jewish community: Alexandr Putík, “Prˇíbeˇh z barokní Prahy: Rabi Moše Mendels, Rabi Lipman Heller a Jakob Baševi,” Židovská rocˇenka 5764 (2003 –2004): 19 –33. 32.  Heller, Megillat eivah, 5. 33.  Heller, Megillat eivah, 11. 34.  Heller, Megillat eivah, 15. 35.  Jacob Katz, Tradition and Crisis: Jewish Society at the End of the Middle Ages, trans. Bernard Dov Cooperman (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 113 –24, esp. 118 and 315n19. This theme is developed in an unpublished lecture: Elchanan Reiner, “The Nadler Affair: Familial Lineage and hoẓ a′at shem ra in Ashkenazi Culture in the Early Modern Period” (Presentation at the Annual Conference of the Israel Historical Society, Tel Aviv, July 7, 1993) (in Hebrew). I am grateful to Professor Reiner for providing me with a copy of the lecture. On Heller’s concern with honor and social station, see Davis, Heller, 7– 9. On tensions and developments within this system, especially during the seventeenth century, cf. Elchanan Reiner, “The yeshivas of Poland and Ashkenaz during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries —Historical Developments,” in Studies in Jewish Culture in Honour of Chone Shmeruk, ed. Israel Bartal, Ezra Mendelsohn, and Chava Turniansky (Jerusalem: Shazar, 1993), 9 – 80 (in Hebrew); Reiner, “Wealth, Social Position and the Study of Torah: The Status of the Kloiz in Eastern European Jewish Society in the Early Modern Period,” Zion 58 (1993): 287–328 (in Hebrew). 36.  Heller, Megillat eivah, 2. 37.  Heller, Megillat eivah, 10. 38.  Putík, “Prague Jewish Community, ” 35, 82ff. On the political atmosphere in Prague’s Jewish community during this period, see also Tobias Jakobovits, “Das Prager und Böhmische Landesrabbinat Ende des siebzehnten und Anfang des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts,” Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Juden in ˇ echoslovakischen Republik 5 (1933): 79 –136. der C 39.  Tobias Jakobovits, “Die Erlebnisse des Oberrabiners Simon Spira-Wedeles in Prag (1640 –1679),” Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Juden in der ˇ echoslovakischen Republik 4 (1932): 253 –96; Otto Muneles, ed., Epitaphs from C the Ancient Jewish Cemetery of Prague (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1988), 337–38 (in Hebrew).

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Notes to Chapter 3 40.  Václav Vojtíšek, “Nadace Albrechta z Valdštejna pro neofyty z pokolení židovského,” Kalendárˇ cˇesko-židovský 32 (1912 –1913): 77–82. Emphasis added. 41.  Pinchas Katzenellinbogen [sic], Jesh Manchilin, ed. Yitzchok Dov Feld (Jerusalem: Mekhon Hatam Sofer, 1986), 65. I am grateful to Alexandr Putík for bringing this source to my attention; cf. Putík, “Prˇíbeˇh z barokní Prahy.” 42.  Muneles, Epitaphs, 323, according to which Doberish was married to Samuel ben Abraham Bassevi, Jacob’s grandson. Other sources report that she was married to another of Jacob’s sons, also named Samuel, rather than to his grandson. 43.  Gutmann Klemperer, “The Rabbis of Prague: A History of the Rabbinate of Prague from the Death of Rabbi Loewe b. Bezalel (‘the High Rabbi Loew’) to the Present (1609 –1879),” Historia Judaica 12 (1950): 51. 44.  Katzenellinbogen, Jesh Manchilin, 65. 45.  Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (first published in German in Basel in 1860), is frequently cited as the first to make the equation between autobiography and the emergence of the individual. See also, among others, Karl J. Weintraub, The Value of the Individual: Self and Circumstance in Autobiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). For a more complete listing of references and critical discussion of this approach: Jancke, Autobiographie; Leo W. Schwarz, ed., Memoirs of My People: Jewish Self-Portraits from the 11th to the 20th Centuries (New York: Schocken, 1943, 1967). 46.  For example, Winfried Schulze, ed., Ego-Dokumente: Annäherung an den Menschen in der Geschichte (Berlin: Akademie, 1996); Rudolf Dekker, ed., Egodocuments and History: Autobiographical Writing in Its Social Context since the Middle Ages (Hilversum: Verloren, 2002). The term “egodocuments” was first employed by the Dutch historian Jacques Presser; see Dekker, Egodocuments, 7–20. 47.  Jancke, Autobiographie. 48.  Georg Misch, Der Autobiographie, 4 vols. (Frankfurt: Schulte-Bulmke, 1949 –1969). Volume 4, part 2, the last volume published, covers the period under discussion. On German-speaking areas in the seventeenth century, see Benigna von Krusenstjern, Selbstzeugnisse der Zeit des Dreissigjährigen Krieges: beschreibenes Verzeichnis (Berlin: Akademie, 1997); Krusenstjern, “Was Sind Selbstzeugnisse? Begriffskritische und quellenkundliche Überlegungen anhand von Beispielen aus dem 17. Jahrhundert,” Historische Anthropologie 2 (1994): 462 –71; Geoff Mortimer, Eyewitness Accounts of the Thirty Years’ War, 1618– 1648 (New York: Palgrave, 2002). Among the works that have most influenced my depictions are James S. Amelang, The Flight of Icarus: Artisan Autobiography in Early Modern Europe (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); Elizabeth C. Goldsmith, Publishing Women’s Life Stories in France, 1647– 1720 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2001). 49.  Jancke, Autobiographie, 101, 160. The best-known Czech-language (Christian) travel writing from this period details a trip to the Holy Land, Krištof (Christopher) Harant of Polžic (1564 –1621). For descriptions of this work and

Notes to Chapter 3 translated excerpts from it see Count Francis Lützow, A History of Bohemian Literature (London: Heinemann,1899), 325 –35; William E. Harkins, trans. and ed., Czech Prose: An Anthology (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1983), 6 –82. Harant was among the Bohemian nobles executed in June 1621, several months after the Battle of White Mountain. A historical account that includes the author’s own eyewitness reports of events was written by Paul Skála ze Zhorˇe, a Protestant who escaped Bohemia following White Mountain, and his victorious enemy William Count Slavata (one of the three victims of the defenestration of 1618) wrote Pameˇty (Memoirs/Memories) detailing events from the opposite point of view; see Lützow, History of Bohemian Literature, 335 –53. 50.  See especially Asher Levy of Reichshofen: Moses Ginsburger, ed., Die Memoiren des Ascher Levy aus Reichshofen im Elsass (1598 – 1635) (Berlin: Lamm, 1913) (in Hebrew and German). The German translation is not precise; cf. a new French translation: Ernest Kallmann and Simon Schwarzfuchs, trans. and eds., Les mémoires d’Ascher Levy de Reichshoffen (Paris: Cercle de généalogie juive, 2003); on Levy, see Kaplan, “Asher ha-Levi”; Stanislawski, Autobiographical Jews, 32 – 44. 51.  Additional Jewish autobiographical writing from Bohemia and environs includes Alexander Marx, “Seventeenth-Century Autobiography: A Picture of Jewish Life in Bohemia and Moravia: From a Manuscript in the Jewish Theological Seminary,” Jewish Quarterly Review, n.s., 8 (1918): 269 –304; Gershon ben Eliezer Sg ″l (Segan Levi; also appears as Eliezer ha′Levi), Gelillot Eretz-Yisrael, im tirgum le′ivrit beshem Igeret Hakodesh, ed. Yitzhak Ben Zvi (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1953); Isaac Schulhof ’s Megillat ofen in David Kaufmann, Die Erstürmung Ofens und ihre Vorgeschichte, nach dem Berichte Isak Schulhofs (1650– 1732) (Trier: Mayer, 1895); Meir Schmelkes ben Pereẓ , H ̣  idushim nifla′im (Prague, 1684) (in Yiddish), quoted by Max Erik, The History of Yiddish Literature from Its Beginnings until the Haskalah Period (Warsaw: Kultur-lige, 1928; New York: Shulsinger, 1979), 418 –19 (in Yiddish); Moses Porges, Darkhei ẓ ion (Frankfurt [?], 1650), published in Hebrew translation by Y. D. Wilhelm in Avraham Yaari, ed., Travel Stories of the Land of Israel by Jewish Immigrants (Tel Aviv: Gazit, 1946), 267–304, 770 –71 (in Hebrew), in German translation as K. Wilhelm, “Mosche Porges aus Prag: Ein jüdische-deutscher Palästinabericht von 1650,” Almanach des Schocken Verlags auf das Jahr 5696 (1935 –1936): 89 –98, in Czech (partial): Moše Porges z Prahy, “Zpráva o ceste˘ do Palestýny z roku 1650,” Židovský kalendarˇ na rok 5699 (1938 –1939): 160 –65, and discussed in a thesis by Daniel Polakovicˇ of Charles University and the Jewish Museum in Prague. Reflections on genre in early modern Jewish autobiographical writing include: Chajes, “Accounting for the Self ”; Bar-Levav, “When I Was Alive.” Examination of confessional tales of converts from Judaism to Christianity previously excluded from Judaica scholarship: Elisheva Carlebach, Divided Souls: Converts from Judaism in Germany, 1500– 1750 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001).

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Notes to Chapter 3 52.  For preliminary remarks in this direction, see two entries in the Encyclopaedia Judaica: Israel Ta-Shema and Samuel Rosenblatt, “Hakdamah,” vol. 7, cols. 1144 – 45; “Biographies and Autobiographies” (unsigned), vol. 2, cols. 1010 –13. On introductions to Yiddish works during this period, see Shlomo Berger, “An Invitation to Buy and Read: Paratexts of Yiddish Books in Amsterdam, 1650 –1800,” Book History 7 (2004): 31–61. 53.  This theme appears in the seventeenth-century introductions as well; see, for example, Elisheva Carlebach, The Pursuit of Heresy: Rabbi Moses Hagiz and the Sabbatian Controversies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 4 –5. 54.  Cf. Moseley, Being For Myself, where he claims that Jewish first-person writing prior to Rousseau lacked the critical element of “autobiographical discourse,” that is, relationships among various works, awareness of each other. 55.  On Abarbanel: Eric Lawee, Isaac Abarbanel’s Stance toward Tradition: Defense, Dissent, and Dialogue (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001); Benzion Netanyahu, Don Isaac Abravanel: Statesman and Philosopher, 5th rev. ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). 56.  Isaac Abarbanel, Commentary on the Former Prophets (Jerusalem, 1955), 2. 57.  Heller, Megillat eivah, 3. 58.  Jakobovits, “Prager und Böhmische Landesrabbinat,” 133n27; Putík, “Prague Jewish Community,” 78; Koppelman Lieben, ed., Gal-Ed: Grabsteininschriften des prager ihr. alten Friedhofs (Prague: Landau, 1856), no. 87 (in German and Hebrew). He also signed the rewritten regulations of the Prague Burial Society in 1692, Ms. JMP 422 (Pinkas of Prague’s burial society), 4b. 59.  Uri Shraga Feibush H ̣  alfan, Sefer dat eish (Berlin, 1740; Jerusalem, 1992), 1. 60.  Cf. Moseley, Being For Myself. 61.  Heller, Megillat eivah, 4. 62.  H ̣  alfan, Sefer dat eish, 1. 63.  Alexandr Putík reconstructs some of the background to the rivalries in which H ̣  alfan was involved: Putík, “Prague Jewish Community,” 78, 81 passim; further elaborated in Putík, “New Source for the Trial of Lipmann Heller and the Political Conflict in the Prague Jewish Community, 1629 –1630: Kurtzer Summarischer Wahrhafter Bericht,” Judaica Bohemiae 47 (2012): 57–97. 64.  Putík, “Prague Jewish Community,” 78; Putík, “The Hebrew Inscription on the Crucifix at Charles Bridge in Prague: The Case of Elias Backoffen and Berl Tabor in the Appellation Court,” Judaica Bohemiae 32 (1997): 37–38. 65.  Heller, Megillat eivah, 9. 66.  Heller, Megillat eivah, 13. ̣  alfan (referred to in German 67.  Documentation regarding the election of H documents as Feisch Manes Lichtenstadt) as rabbi of Mladá Boleslav is provided by Putík, “Hebrew Inscription.” On this community, see Moritz Grünwald, Jungbunzlauer Rabiner [Separat-Abdruck aus dem Jüdischen Centralblatt (Prague)], n.d. (reprinted from Jüdischen Centralblatt [1887]: 97–115, 165 –74;

Notes to Chapter 3 Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland, 1:288, 387– 88; Ungarischen Israelit 1887 [nos. 25, 28, 32, 34]; Jahresbericht der israelitischen deutschen klassigen Volksschule in Jungbunzlau, 1888); Arnošt E. Goldmann, “Geschichte der Juden in Jungbunzlau” (published simultaneously in Czech as “Deˇjiny Židu˚ v Mladé Boleslavi,” in Die Juden und Judengemeinden Böhmens in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, ed. Hugo Gold (Brno, 1934), 1:204 –21; Vladimír Sadek and Jirˇina Šedinová, “The Jewish Cemetery at Mladá Boleslav,” Judaica Bohemiae 23 (1982): 50 –54. 68.  The title page of Sefer dat eish takes the story a little further, explaining that from Prague, H ̣  alfan was called to Bumsla, and from there to Broda (Uherský Brod / Ungarisch Brod), another regional center, in southeast Moravia. In their approbations to the work, however, Rabbis Mordecai Melisa and Naftali Hirtz of Berlin, where it was published, reversed the order of the cities mentioned writing of H ̣  alfan, “who was head of the rabbinic court in the holy community of Broda, and early in his life was the head of the great rabbis, dayyanei more shaveh in the holy community of Prague, may God protect it.” These two rabbis, along with the author of an additional approbation and H ̣  alfan’s son in his publisher’s introduction, adjusted the word order so that the reader, if not the principal, moves from Broda to Prague. Practicing rabbis moved a great deal during this period, and a rabbi’s move from a leading, but still not the leading rabbinic position in a large community to be the head rabbi (rosh yeshiva and av beit din) in a smaller one would not necessarily have been a step down. Nevertheless, a careful reading of H ̣  alfan’s own text, together with the approbations with which it was published, suggests that in his own mind and perhaps in those of others as well, the order in which H ̣  alfan’s wanderings occurred demanded an explanation. H ̣  alfan’s narrative and the venom of the language he uses against his enemies in Prague suggest that to his view, rather than “ascending” from one minor rabbinic office to a slightly larger and more central one, H ̣  alfan moved in the opposite direction. H ̣  alfan’s autobiographical passage, centered on the crisis of the 1689 fire and his subsequent exile from Prague, sought to justify that path, to show that his descent was due to detractors and not to some personal fault. This personal public relations campaign was carried on by his son after his death. It is likely that H ̣  alfan, like Heller, wrote his autobiographical self-justification in order to preserve his family’s name and rabbinic status which, while not as exalted as that of his predecessor Heller, would still have carried considerable currency. 69.  Moses Meir ben Eleazar Perles, Megillat sefer (Prague, 1710). 70.  Perles, Megillat sefer, 3b. 71.  Perles, Megillat sefer, 4a– 4b. 72.  Perles, Megillat sefer, 3b – 4a. 73.  A very free translation, the intent being the smallest, least significant official. Gargutni is a net used inside a wine or oil press. 74.  Perles, Megillat sefer, 3b.

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Notes to Chapter 3 75.  On the censorship of Hebrew books in Prague—and in Habsburg lands in general— during this period, see Alexandr Putík, “The Censorship of Hebrew Books in Prague: 1512 –1670 (1672),” in Hebrew Printing in Bohemia and Moravia, ed. Olga Sixtová (Prague: Academia / Jewish Museum in Prague, 2012), 187–214; Putík, “Prague Jewish Community,” 28 –37; Guido Kisch, “Die Zensur jüdischer Bücher in Böhmen,” Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Juden in der ˇ echoslovakischen Republik 2 (1930): 456 –96, esp. 462 –65. Habsburg censorC ship was widespread: Marie-Elizabeth Ducreux and Martin Svatoš, eds., Libri Prohibiti: La censure dans l’espace habsbourgeois 1650– 1850 (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2005); Marie-Elizabeth Ducreux, “Reading unto Death: Books and Readers in Eighteenth-Century Bohemia,” in The Culture of Print: Power and the Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe, ed. Roger Chartier, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 191–229. 76.  The seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century secondary intelligentsia referred to here differs from the intellectual elite described by Jacob Katz as playing a pivotal role in the emergence of a neutral society in the latter half of the eighteenth century, especially in that Katz defined this later social grouping as marked particularly by a combination of secular and Jewish learning along with an ideological justification for that combination: Katz, Tradition and Crisis, 221–25; Katz, Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770 – 1870 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 47–56 passim. Cf. Elchanan Reiner, “A Biography of an Agent of Culture: Eleazar Altschul of Prague and His Literary Activity,” in Schöpferische Momente des europäischen Judentums in der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Michael Graetz (Heidelberg: Winter, 2000), 229 – 47. I would suggest that the lines between Reiner’s secondary intelligentsia and the very leading rabbinic strata were somewhat more fluid than the more rigid system Reiner’s analysis seems to imply. I also do not agree with his characterization of this class as a “middle strata” in Ashkenazi society of this period; it is, as the name suggests, secondary only to the very leading figures, and its members still considered themselves far superior to the commoners who far outnumbered them. On heterogeneity among the lower classes of society, see Shalhevet Dotan-Ophir, “R. Jacob son of Isaac of Janov’s Two Books: Ẓ einah ureina and Meliẓ  yosher” (master’s thesis, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2003) (in Hebrew). 77.  Reiner, “Altschul.” 78.  On rabbinic reticence regarding authorship of halakhic books, see Elchanan Reiner, “The Ashkenazi Élite at the Beginning of the Modern Era: Manuscript versus Printed Book,” Polin 10 (1997): 85 –98. The notion that the composition of rabbinic works was a necessary sign of scholarly stature was not new, although it may have received additional emphasis during this period; cf. Israel Yuval’s remarks about apologetic autobiographical passages in an ethical will by R. Judah ben Asher (1270 –1349): Yuval, “German-Jewish Autobiography,” 81–82, and the

Notes to Chapter 3 original Hebrew version in Tarbiz 55 (1986): 543, and references there to earlier medieval autobiographical introductions. 79.  Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1997), 196 –236; Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 185 –213, where White describes a purposely misleading preface supposedly written by the author. 80.  Abraham Groti, Sefer be′er Avraham (Sulzbach, 1708), 2b. 81.  Groti, Sefer be′er Avraham, 1b. Putík mentions another case of a Prague Jewish community official imprisoned—“preventively”— on the request of creditors. Putík, “Prague Jewish Community,” 72 –73. 82.  Groti, Sefer be′er Avraham, 2a. 83.  On social criticism of lack of respect for scholarly poor, as opposed to ignorant wealthy, see Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson, “Wealth and Poverty in the Teaching of the Preacher Reb Ephraim of Lenczyca,” Zion 19 (1954): 142 –66 (in Hebrew); Ben-Sasson, Hagut vehanhaga: The Social Views of Polish Jewry at the End of the Middle Ages (Jerusalem: Bialik, 1959) (in Hebrew); J. Bettan, Studies in Jewish Preaching (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1939), 273 –316. 84.  Groti, Sefer be′er Avraham, 2b. 85.  Perles, Megillat sefer, 3a. 86.  Perles, Megillat sefer, 3a. 87.  Cf. Abraham M. Haberman, ed., Jewish Women as Printers, Arrangers, Publishers, and Authors’ Supporters (Berlin: Mas, 1933) (in Hebrew). From Prague during the period under discussion, Haberman brings the example of Sheryl bat Jacob, who published a Yiddish song by her father, Jacob ben Elijah of Teplitz, publisher of Yiddish translations of the canonical liturgy: Haberman, Jewish Women, 11. 88.  Ms. Bodleian Library Mich. 447. The introduction to Tehila ledavid was printed in a different collection of responsa by Oppenheim: She′elot uteshuvot nish′al ̣  atam Sofer, 1972 –1975). There David, ed. Yitzhak Dov Feld (Jerusalem: Makhon H it appears just before the body of the text of vol. 1, as if it were the introduction to that work. 89.  Bar-Levav, “When I Was Alive,” 54 –57. The 1692 revised edition of David Gans’s Ẓ emaḥ David took specific note of this relationship among the Horowitz father-son team, their books, and the function of a son’s work in honor of his father: Ẓ emaḥ David heḥadash (Frankfurt am Main, 1692), pt. 1, p. 46b. 90.  Issachar Baer Eilenburg, Sefer ẓ eidah laderekh (Prague, 1623; Jerusalem, 1998), opposite p. 1. 91.  Nathaniel Riemer and Sigrid Senkbeil, eds., “Beer Sheva” by Beer and Bella Perlhefter: An Edition of a Seventeenth Century Yiddish Encyclopedia (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2011); Nathaniel Riemer, Zwischen Tradition und Häresie: “Beer Sheva”—Eine Enzyklopädie des jüdischen Wissens der Frühen Neuzeit (Wiesbaden:

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Notes to Chapter 3 Harrassowitz, 2010). On Baer Perlhefter, see Isaiah Tishby, Netivei emunah uminut: masot umehkarim besifrut hakabbalah vehashabta′ut (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1964, 1982), 81–107; Avraham Elqayam, “Leidato hasheniyah shel hamashiaḥ,” Kabbalah 1 (1996): 85 –166; Gershom Scholem, “Perakim apokoliptim umeshiḥ i′im al R. Mordekhai me′eizenshtat,” in Meḥḳere Shabta′ut, ed. Yehudah Liebes (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1991), 530 –62; David Malkiel, “Christian Hebraism in a Contemporary Key: The Search for Hebrew Epitaph Poetry in Seventeenth-Century Italy,” Jewish Quarterly Review 96 (2006): 135 –37. 92.  Bernard D. Weinryb, “From the Hebrew Correspondence of Johann Christian Wagenseil (17th Century Hebrew Correspondence between Jews and Non-Jews),” Jewish Review 2 (1944): 109 –37, 211–14 (in Hebrew; Yiddish, English introduction). 93.  Scholem, “Perakim apokoliptim,” 543, 553; Elqayam, “Leidato,” 101– 4. 94.  Here I quote from Ms. Bodleian Library Opp. 148. Nathanael Riemer has identified nine extant manuscripts and outlined the development of the text in them: Riemer, Zwischen Tradition und Häresie. Given a general trend in the direction of less careful cataloging of Yiddish as compared to Hebrew manuscripts, it is reasonable to assume that more than these nine could exist. See also Eleazar Shulman, The Ashkenazi-Jewish Language and Its Literatures, from the End of the Sixteenth to the End of the Eighteenth Centuries (Riga: Levin, 1913), 104 –5 (in Hebrew). 95.  The number seven is an established motif in Jewish literature; see, for example, Yael Levine’s extended review of the original Hebrew version of Margalit Shilo, Princess or Prisoner? Jewish Women in Jerusalem, 1840– 1914, trans. David Louvish (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2005) in Yeda Am 65 –66 (2005): 29 – 47 (in Hebrew). Nevertheless, this manuscript names all seven children, and another version gives equivalent Yiddish names. Even if the Perlhefters actually lost a different number of children, the meanings of Beila’s introduction remain basically unchanged. 96.  Issachar Ber Perlhefter and Beila Perlhefter, Sefer be′er sheva, Ms. Opp. 148 (17th century), 2a (in Yiddish). 97.  Perlhefter and Perlhefter, Sefer be′er sheva, 2a. 98.  For example, Perlhefter and Perlhefter, Sefer be′er sheva, 2b, where Beila writes of the rich: “They have little fear of sin, and their prayer is also not so diligent or thoughtful as the prayer of the poor.” 99.  Perlhefter and Perlhefter, Sefer be′er sheva, 4a. 100.  Perlhefter and Perlhefter, Sefer be′er sheva, 4a– 4b. 101.  Ms. JMP 287 contains a list of some three thousand victims of the plague and names many by the father’s name alone, such that it is in many cases evident that there were multiple deaths of siblings, or within a single home; Emden’s reports are scattered throughout his work, for example, Jacob Emden, Megillat sefer, ed. David Kahana (Warsaw, 1896), 150, 160, 161, 177, 180.

Notes to Chapter 4 102.  Perlhefter and Perlhefter, Sefer be′er sheva, 2a–2b. 103.  On this theme, see particularly Elqayam, “Leidato,” 101– 4; Scholem, “Perakim apokoliptim,” 543, 553. 104.  Cf. Kaplan, “Asher ha-Levi,” and Marx, “Seventeenth-Century Auto­ biography.”

Chapter 4 1.  Literature on the Thirty Years’ War, including these opening stages, is vast. For a Bohemian perspective, see Hans Sturmberger, Aufstand in Böhmen: Der Beginn des Dreißigjährigen Krieges (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1959); Josef V. Polišenský, The Thirty Years War, trans. Robert Evans (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971). 2.  Hillel J. Kieval, “Jewish Prague, Christian Prague, and the Castle in the City’s ‘Golden Age,’” Jewish Studies Quarterly 18 (2011): 202 –15; Kieval, Languages of Community: The Jewish Experience in the Czech Lands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 18 –20. 3.  Moritz Popper, “Les juifs de Prague pendant la guerre de trente ans,” Revue des Études Juives 29 (1894): 128 –31; Käthe Spiegel, “Die prager Juden zur Zeit des dreissigjährigen Krieges,” in Die Juden in Prag. Festgabe der Loge Praga des Ordens B′nai B′rith zum Gedenktage ihres 25jähringen Bestandes, ed. Samuel Steinherz (Prague: Self-published [by Loge Praga des Ordens B ′nai B ′rith / Independent Order of B ′nai B ′rith, Loge Praga], 1927), 117–18. 4.  Alfred Landau and Bernhard Wachstein, eds., Jüdische Privatbriefe aus dem Jahre 1619 (Vienna: Braumüller, 1911), 3 in the Yiddish section. In imperial archives in Vienna, the editors discovered and printed a cache of letters written on a single day with a single messenger, November, 22, 1619, from Jews in Prague to Jews in Vienna, apparently confiscated before reaching their destination. 5.  Landau and Wachstein, Jüdische Privatbriefe, 6 in the Yiddish section. 6.  On the possible level of Jewish understanding of and affinity with CzechProtestant theology in this and earlier periods, see Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson, “The Reformation in Contemporary Jewish Eyes,” Proceedings of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities 4, no. 12 (1971): 239 –326; Otto Dov Kulka, “The Historical Background of the National and Educational Teachings of Rabbi Judah Loeb ben Bezalel of Prague: A Suggested New Approach to the Study of Maharal,” Zion 50 (1985): 277–320 (in Hebrew; English summary); Orit Ramon, “Moses and Mordekhai: An Examination of the Maharal’s Commentary to the Book of Esther,” Masekhet 6 (2007): 141–52 (in Hebrew). 7.  Seliḥ ot le yom yod dalet ḥ eshvan (Prague, ca. 1621) (Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, rare books shelf number 1760:12), title page. 8.  Seliḥ ot le yom yod dalet ḥ eshvan, title page. 9.  The ability of a community to make this determination is noted by Abraham Gombiner of Kalisz (Poland; ca. 1635 – ca. 1683) in his Magen Avraham, printed in

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Notes to Chapter 4 editions of the Shulḥ an arukh, Oraḥ ḥ ayyim (hilkhot megillah), 686; Gombiner cites Moses Alsheikh, among other authorities, for his opinion. 10.  Robert Bireley, Religion and Politics in the Age of the Counterreformation: Emperor Ferdinand II, William Lamormaini, S.J., and the Formation of Imperial Policy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 15. 11.  On the Passau invasion: James R. Palmitessa, “The Prague Uprising of 1611: Property, Politics, and Catholic Renewal in the Early Years of Habsburg Rule,” Central European History 31 (1998): 299 –328. For a Jewish eyewitness report, see Abraham David, ed., A Hebrew Chronicle from Prague, c. 1615, trans. Leon J. Weinberger with Dena Ordan (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993), 62 –69; originally published in Hebrew as Abraham David, ed., A Hebrew Chronicle from Prague from the Early Seventeenth Century (Jerusalem: Merkaz Dinur, 1984). 12.  Seliḥ ot leyom bet adar (Prague, ca. 1613). I have used the copy housed in the rare book room at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (shelf number 1760:9). A facsimile appears in Binyamin Zeilingold, Haben yakir li Ephraim (Saint Paul, MN: Adath Israel Community Services Bureau, 1987). 13.  See Chapter 1. On the pogrom of 1389, see František Graus, Struktur und Geschichte: Drei Volksaufstände im mittelalterlichen Prag (Sigmaringen, Germany: Thorbecke, 1971); Arye Maimon, Mordechai Breuer, and Yacov Guggenheim, eds., Germania Judaica III (Tübingen: Mohr, 1995), 2:1121, 1134, 1150n357. 14.  Published in Shimon Bernfeld, ed., The Book of Tears: The Occurrences of Decrees, Persecutions and Destructions (Berlin: Eshkol, 1923 –1926), 2:155 –64 (in Hebrew), and in Prague collections of the early modern period, for example, Seliḥ ot keseder beit hakenesset hayeshanah (!) (Prague, 1605), 108r–109v; cf. Leopold Zunz, Literaturgeschichte der synagogalen Poesie (Berlin: Gerschel, 1865), 374, and his translation to German: Zunz, Die synagogale Poesie des Mittelalters (Frankfurt, 1920; Hildesheim, 1967), 330 –31. 15.  Bernfeld, Book of Tears, 2:160. 16.  Here Bernfeld’s text differs from all the published versions of the Seliḥ ot that I have seen. Bernfeld has “‫קרא אלי יום נחמות והתם חטא ועולות‬.” All the earlier published Seliḥ ot I have seen have “‫ ”נקם‬in place of “‫נחמות‬,” making the call for vengeance quite explicit. Thus, the stanza reads: /‫ קרא אלי יום נקם והתם חטא ועולות‬″  ‫ כי קרובה ישועתי לבוא וצדקתי‬/‫ יעודי נחמות ישעיהו מהר להעלות‬/‫ קבץ נדחנו וישר בערבה מסלות‬ ″‫להגלות‬. On the theme of vengeance in medieval European Jewry, see Israel Jacob Yuval, “Vengeance and the Curse: Hostility towards Christianity among Ashkenazic Jewry,” in Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, trans. Barbara Harshav and Jonathan Chipman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 92 –131. 17.  Seliḥ ot, 1605. Cf. K. Wilhelm, “An Unknown Prague Edition of Seliḥ ot (1579),” Kiryat sefer 37 (1961–1962): 516 (in Hebrew). 18.  Seliḥ ot, 1605, 109v. An early Yiddish translation makes explicit the reference to Jerusalem, Seliḥ os in taytshen, trans. Jacob ben Elijah of Teplitz (Prague, 1602),

Notes to Chapter 4 65b. ‫ קיין‬/‫ ווירד קער זי אז ואר מאל‬/‫ גידענקט איך ביט דיך דען פריזנט דר לייב דיין טאֿכטר דיא יודן‬″  ‫ זיא‬/‫ אז דיא טאג ֿפון איביג‬/‫ זי ווער ווערין גיזיסט צו דיר פריזנט‬′‫ אונ‬/‫  ירושלים דיא דא זול ווערן גיבויט‬  ″‫זו זיין ביווליגט אז איין אפֿפר שטעטיגליֿכן דז דו איז ווארן גימֿכט אויף ברג סיני‬. 19.  See the somewhat ambiguous and contradictory instructions printed in many editions of the Prague (and Altschul) rite Seliḥ ot, for example, Seliḥ ot (1605), 107b; Seliḥ ot (Prague, 1784), 73a, 91a; Seliḥ ot (Prague, 1836), 215b. The composition is listed by Israel Davidson, ed., Thesaurus of Medieval Hebrew Poetry (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1924 –1938; New York: Ktav, 1970), 1:211 (no. 4626). A translation into German was provided by Zunz, Synagogale Poesie, 22. A Yiddish translation appears in Seliḥ os in taytshen (1602), 48b – 49a. In nineteenth-century Posen (Poznán), “Elohim al dami ledami” was also sung to an established tune; perhaps that was the case in late medieval Prague as well: Kuntrus shel minhagei pozna (Frankfurt am Oder, 1829), 22a. 20.  For example, Benjamin Salomon Hamburger and Erich Zimmer, eds., Worms Minhag Book of R. Joseph (Yuzpa) Shammash (Jerusalem: Makhon Yerushalayim, 1988), 1:96 –97 (par. 89), on the custom for morning prayers on the eighth day of Passover. 21.  Wilhelm Peter Zimmerman, Relatio / Außführlicher Bericht / was sich mit den Passawi // schen Kriegsvolck von dem Monat December //. . . (Augsburg [?], 1611), quoted in Palmitessa, “Prague Uprising,” 307. 22.  Palmitessa, “Prague Uprising,” 314 –28. 23.  Seliḥ ot leyom bet adar, title page. 24.  David, Hebrew Chronicle, 67. 25.  Cf. Elliott Horowitz, Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 279 –315. 26.  On “my Purim” from Fulda, see Moritz Steinschneider, Catalogus Librorum Hebraeorum in Bibliotheca Bodleiana, 3 vols. (Berlin: Welt, 1931; original edition, 1852 –1860), 1186 –87 (no. 22), under Jakob b. Asher, from a manuscript of his Oraḥ  ḥ ayyim. For an attempt to explain the background of this incident, see Maimon, Breuer, and Guggenheim, Germania Judaica III, 1:420 –21. 27.  Davidson, Thesaurus of Medieval Hebrew Poetry, 1:196 (no. 4273). The liturgical poem for Yom Kippur appears, for example, in a festival prayer book published in Prague at about the same time as Luntschitz’s seliḥ ot, and reflecting a much older tradition: Maḥ zor mekol hashanah kesidra keminhag ashkenaz velo′az (Prague, 1613), beginning on a folio that appears following p. 131, during the afternoon service for Yom Kippur. In contemporary Ashkenazi practice, this composition is part of the musaf service; see, for example, Daniel Goldschmidt, ed., Maḥ zor leyamim nora′im lefi minhagei benei ashkenaz lekhol anfeihem (Jerusalem: Koren, 1970), 2:568 –73. 28.  “Ele ezkera,” in Seliḥ ot leyom bet adar, lines 5 –8. 29.  “Ele ezkera,” in Seliḥ ot leyom bet adar, lines 17–20. 30.  “Ele ezkera,” in Seliḥ ot leyom bet adar, line 24.

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Notes to Chapter 4 31.  “Ele ezkera,” in Seliḥ ot leyom bet adar, lines 29 –33. 32.  “Ele ezkera,” in Seliḥ ot leyom bet adar, lines 36 – 40. 33.  Seliḥ ot leyom bet adar, 1b. 34.  On the varying meanings of the term pizmon, see Ismar Elbogen, Jewish Liturgy: A Comprehensive History, trans. Raymond P. Scheindlin (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1993), 166. 35.  For a balanced survey of the events and the extensive historiography concerning them: Christopher R. Friedrichs, “Politics or Pogrom? The Fettmilch Uprising in German and Jewish History,” Central European History 19 (1986): 186 –228. See also Robert Jütte, “Der Frankfurter Fettmilch-Aufstand und die Judenverfolung von 1614 in der kommunalen Erinnerungskultur,” in Memoria Wege jüdischen Erinnern: Festschrift für Michael Brocke zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Birgit E. Klein and Christiane E. Müller (Berlin: Metropol, 2005), 163 –76. 36.  These days are mentioned in a book of local customs from Frankfurt: Joseph Hahn, Yosef omeẓ   (Frankfurt, 1928; Jerusalem, 1965), 211–12 (no. 953), 242 – 43  (nos. 1107–9). 37.  The full bilingual text, together with a German transliteration of the Yiddish and an English translation, appears in Rivka Ulmer, ed., Turmoil, Trauma and Triumph: The Fettmilch Uprising in Frankfurt am Main (1612– 1616) According to Megillas Vintz (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2001). For an additional discussion of Megillas Vinẓ   and the annual Frankfurt celebration, see Chava Turniansky, “The Events in Frankfurt am Main (1612 –1616) in Megillas Vints and in an Unknown Yiddish ‘Historical’ Song,” in Schöpferische Momente des europäischen Judentums in der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Michael Graetz (Heidelberg: Winter, 2000), 121–37. 38.  Such days included those preceding and during the Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashanah), the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur), and the ten days between the two, known as the Days of Awe (Yamim nora′im). For those used, see Hahn, Yosef omeẓ  , 212 (no. 953), 242 (no. 1107). Cf. Frankfurt Seliḥ ot, for example, Seliḥ ot lekol hashanah (Frankfurt am Main, 1763), and particularly the instructions on the reverse side of the title page, listing the seliḥ ot to be recited both for “The Fast of Vinẓ ,” and for a fire that occurred later, in 1711. 39.  Jews in Prague were aware of these events in Frankfurt, and almost certainly the literary response to them. One Prague Jew, a community official named Naḥ man ben Eliezer Pukh, even wrote a second Yiddish song about the Fettmilch uprising. See Turniansky, “Events in Frankfurt,” 131–37. 40.  For speculations on the date of composition and printing, see Alexander Kisch, “Die Prager Judestadt während der Schlacht am weißen Berge,” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums 56, no. 34 (August 19, 1892): 400 – 403. 41.  A German translation appears in Zunz, Synagogale Poesie, 175 –76. The first line is based on Psalms 20:8. 42.  Kisch, “Prager Judestadt.”

Notes to Chapter 4 43.  Sources listed in Chapter 3: Arnošt Klíma, “Inflation in Bohemia in the Early Stage of the 17th Century,” in Proceedings of the Seventh International Economic History Conference, ed. Michael Flinn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1978): 375 –86; Golo Mann, Wallenstein: Sein Leben (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1971), 237– 45. 44.  Seliḥ ot le yom yod dalet ḥ eshvan, 1a. In an apparently slightly later version of the introduction, this exchange from the Book of Isaiah is summarized simply as “and they rebelled.” See Abraham M. Haberman, “The Piyyutim and Poems of Rabbi Yom Tov Lipman Heller,” in Lekhvod Yom Tov, ed. Y. L. Hacohen Maimon (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1955 –1956), 131. 45.  Isaiah 1:19 –20. 46.  Seliḥ ot le yom yod dalet ḥ eshvan, 1a. 47.  Haberman, “Piyyutim and Poems,” 130, lines 29 –32 (Proverbs 21:16, Exodus 14:12). For translations of more extensive selections from the seliḥ ot, see Joseph M. Davis, Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller: Portrait of a Seventeenth-Century Rabbi (Oxford: Littman Library, 2004), 106 –9. 48.  Haberman, “Piyyutim and Poems,” 130, lines 35 –38. 49.  Haberman, “Piyyutim and Poems,” 130, lines 53 –54. Cf. Psalms 31:4. 50.  For example, Haberman, “Piyyutim and Poems,” 132, lines 22 –24; 133, lines 33 –35. 51.  Cf. Psalms 22:15, Jeremiah 48:11, Isaiah 28:22, Psalms 119:120. 52.  Haberman, “Piyyutim and Poems,” 132, lines 13 –15. 53.  In addition to special announcements made by the beadles in the synagogues, there were bans (ḥ erem) pronounced against anyone who cooperated in concealing Protestant goods from the officials who came to confiscate them, or anyone who dealt in stolen goods. For the text of bans against those who deal in stolen goods, and a prayer for the well-being of those who do not, see Ms. Jewish Museum in Prague (JMP) 83, 5b. Alexander Kisch claimed to have seen a manuscript including what appears to be a different ban, which referred specifically to the requirement of handing hidden (as opposed to stolen) goods over to the authorities: Kisch, “Prager Judestadt,” 402. 54.  For example, Spiegel, “Prager Juden,” 118. 55.  Seliḥ ot leyom bet adar, 1a. 56.  On the leadership positions of the Prague Jewish community, see Alexandr Putík, “The Prague Jewish Community in the Late 17th and Early 18th Centuries,” Judaica Bohemiae 35 (1999): 63 –65, and earlier literature cited there. 57.  “Minḥ at ha′erev” [minḥ a gedolah], specifying a later time than the noontime listed in the 2 Adar seliḥ ot introduction. 58.  Seliḥ ot le yom yod dalet ḥ eshvan. 59.  The phrase appears in the Babylonian Talmud: Megillah 4a, Shabbat 23a, Pesachim 108a. 60.  Zunz, Literaturgeschichte, 430.

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Notes to Chapter 4 61.  Rabbinic authority Moses Sofer (1762 –1839), known as H ̣  atam Sofer, reported keeping the Purim day of his native Frankfurt after leaving there: Shu″t H ̣  atam Sofer (Vienna, 1889; Pietrikov, 1903), Yoreh de ′ah, par. 233; see also his ruling in par. 16 there. 62.  Accounts of the fire, especially as it impacted the Jewish Quarter, include Jaroslav Prokeš and Anton Blaschka, “Der Antisemitismus der Behörden und das Prager Ghetto in nachweißenbergischer Zeit,” Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für ˇ echoslovakischen Republik 1 (1929): 111– 48; Salomon Geschichte der Juden in der C Hugo Lieben, “Die Prager Brandkatastrophen von 1689 und 1754,” Jahrbuch der Jüdisch-Literarischen Gesellschaft 18 (1926 –1927): 175 –93; Václav Vojtíšek, “Po ohni židovskeho meˇsto pražského,” Kalendárˇ cˇesko-židovský 34 (1914 –1915): 61–71. Further references appear in Prokeš and Blaschka, “Antisemitismus,” 142n1. 63.  Most of the surviving textiles are from the Altneuschul, whose interior was spared owing to its thick stone walls and its being a detached, stand-alone building. 64.  See, for example, Lieben, “Brandkatastrophen,” 177–78. 65.  Yeḥ iel Michael ben Abraham Zalman, Sreyfe lid fun prag (Prague, 1689) (Bodleian Library Opp. 80 683). 66.  Ms. JMP 89 (High Synagogue, ca. 1690 –1705), 11a. 67.  For example, Kuntrus shel minhagei pozna, 22a–27a. Cf. the kinah (poem of mourning) recalling the massacre of Jews in Frankfurt in 1241, inserted into Frankfurt’s local liturgy for Tisha b ′Av: Seligmann Baer, ed., Die Trauergesänge für Tischah beAb (Rödelheim, 1893), no. 43 (in Hebrew and German); Isidor Kracauer, Geschichte der Juden in Frankfurt a.M. (1150– 1824) (Frankfurt: Kaufmann, 1925 – 1927), 1:5 –9. 68.  Published by Lieben, “Brandkatastrophen.” This el malei raḥ amim is included in the manuscripts of hazkarat neshamot from the various synagogues, for example, Ms. JMP 67 (Klausen Synagogue, 18th century); Ms. JMP 82 (Pinkas Synagogue, 1801); Ms. JMP 89 (High Synagogue, ca. 1690 –1705); Ms. JMP 114 (Altschul, 19th century); Ms. JMP 217 (Altneuschul, 18th–19th centuries). 69.  Tobias Jakobovits, “Das Prager und Böhmische Landesrabbinat Ende des siebzehnten und Anfang des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts,” Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft ˇ echoslovakischen Republik 5 (1933): 79 –136, for the für Geschichte der Juden in der C position of “Stellvertreters,” 83 passim. 70.  Howard Louthan, Converting Bohemia: Force and Persuasion in the Catholic Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 71.  Putík, “Prague Jewish Community.”

Chapter 5 1.  Beila Horowitz and Rachel Rausnitz, Ayn sheyn mayseh (Prague, n.d.) (Bodleian Library Opp. 80 796[7]). A complete German translation was published in Ruth Gladstein-Kestenberg, “Identifikation der Prager Juden vor und während

Notes to Chapter 5 der Assimilation,” in Die Juden in den böhmischen Ländern: Vorträge der Tagung des Collegium Carolinum in Bad Wiessee vom 27. bis 29. November 1981, ed. F. Seibt (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1983), 161–97; reprinted in Peter Demetz, ed., Geschichten aus dem alten Prag (Frankfurt: Insel Taschenbuch, 1994). 2.  Cf. Gladstein-Kestenberg, “Identifikation,” 163n11, and, following her, Demetz, Geschichten, 43, who hold that these merchants were themselves Jews, based on a mistranslation of a line from the title page of the story: “do er durch zaynen yehudim oyf prag komen,” which Gladstein-Kestenberg renders as, “die er durch sein Juden nach Prag kommen hat lassen.” However, the phrase means “because of this [incident], Jews came to Prague,” and does not refer to “his Jews.” I am grateful to Professor Chava Turniansky for providing this translation. 3.  Horowitz and Rausnitz, Ayn sheyn mayseh, 1b. 4.  Horowitz and Rausnitz, Ayn sheyn mayseh, 5a–5b. 5.  Horowitz and Rausnitz, Ayn sheyn mayseh, 6a. 6.  Chapter 6. 7.  For example, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982). 8.  David Gans, Ẓ  emaḥ  David, ed. Mordecai Breuer (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1983), 303 – 4 (universal history section, year 997). Breuer points out that Gans embellished his source, the German chronicle by Martin Boregk, with additional material. 9.  For example, Bernard D. Weinryb, “The Beginnings of East-European Jewry in Legend and Historiography,” in Studies and Essays in Honor of Abraham A. Neuman, ed. Meir Ben-Horin, Bernard D. Weinryb, and Solomon Zeitlin (Leiden: Brill, 1962), 445 –502. 10.  David B. Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 92. On this point, see also Noah J. Efron, “Irenism and Natural Philosophy in Rudolfine Prague: The Case of David Gans,” Science in Context 10 (1997): 645. 11.  For example, Gans, Ẓ  emaḥ  David, ed. Breuer, 415. Also see Chapter 1. 12.  Joaneath Spicer, “The Star of David and Jewish Culture in Prague around 1600, Reflected in Drawings of Roelandt Savery and Paulus van Vianen,” Journal of the Walters Art Gallery 54 (1996): 203 –24. 13.  For example, David E. Fishman, “Rabbi Moshe Isserles and the Study of Science among Polish Rabbis,” Science in Context 10 (1997): 571–88. 14.  Efron, “Irenism and Natural Philosophy.” Parts of Neḥ mad vena′im had appeared earlier as Magen David. 15.  David Gans, Sefer Neḥ mad vena′im (Jesnitz, 1743) (in Hebrew; Latin introduction); André Neher, Jewish Thought and the Scientific Revolution of the Sixteenth Century: David Gans (1541– 1613) and His Times, trans. David Maisel (Oxford: Littman Library, 1986). For a translation of Gans’s description of his visit to Brahe’s laboratory, see Neher, Jewish Thought, 24 –26. On Kepler’s and Brahe’s

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Notes to Chapter 5 activities in Prague, see Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450– 1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 178 –203. 16.  For an English version of Breuer’s introduction to his edition of Ẓ  emaḥ  David, surveying Gans’s intellectual circles, see Mordecai Breuer, “Modernism and Traditionalism in Sixteenth-Century Jewish Historiography: A Study of David Gans’ Tzemaḥ  David,” in Jewish Thought in the Sixteenth Century, ed. Bernard Dov Cooperman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 49 –88. See also Jirˇina Šedinová, “Non-Jewish Sources in the Chronicle by David Gans, ‘Tsemah David,’” Judaica Bohemiae 8 (1972): 3 –15; Šedinová, “Czech History as Reflected in the Historical Work by David Gans,” Judaica Bohemiae 8 (1972): 74 –83; Šedinová, “Old Czech Legends in the Work of David Gans (1592),” Judaica Bohemiae 14 (1978): 89 –112. On Maximilian’s court, see Howard Louthan, The Quest for Compromise: Peacemakers in Counter-Reformation Vienna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 17.  Gans, Ẓ  emaḥ  David, ed. Breuer, 61–65 (Jewish history section, following the year 3448). 18.  Azariah de’ Rossi, The Light of the Eyes, trans. Joanna Weinberg (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001). On the controversy surrounding the work, see Weinberg’s introduction, xxvi, xlii–xliv; Robert Bonfil, “Some Reflections on the Place of Azariah de’ Rossi’s Meor Enayim in the Cultural Milieu of Italian Renaissance Jewry,” in Jewish Thought in the Sixteenth Century, ed. Bernard Dov Cooperman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 23 – 48; Robert Bonfil, ed., ′Azariah de’ Rossi: Selected Chapters from Sefer Me′or ′Einayim and Matsref la-Kessef (Jerusalem: Bialik, 1991), 96 –118 (in Hebrew). On Maharal’s debate with Azariah and Gans’s position in it, see Ruderman, Jewish Thought, 80 –83, and the notes there. 19.  Gans, Ẓ  emaḥ  David, ed. Breuer, 6. 20.  Grafton, Defenders, esp. 128ff. Cf. Ben-Zion Degani, “The Structure of World History and the Redemption of Israel in R. David Gans’ Ẓ  emaḥ  David,” Zion 45 (1980): 173 –200 (in Hebrew), who notes the influence of Gans’s scientific endeavors on his method of historical writing. 21.  Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, vol. 2, Historical Chronology (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993). 22.  Grafton, Defenders, 104 – 44; Efron, “Irenism and Natural Philosophy.” 23.  Gans lists years, but not months or days, so the discrepancy between the Julian and Gregorian calendars poses little difficulty for his dating of earlier events. He notes the date that calendar reform went into effect in Prague in 1585, Ẓ  emaḥ  David, 413 (universal history section, year 1585). 24.  Šedinová, “Non-Jewish Sources.” 25.  On Jewish historical writing in sixteenth-century Europe: Robert Bonfil, “How Golden Was the Age of the Renaissance in Jewish Historiography,” in

Notes to Chapter 5 Essays in Jewish Historiography, ed. Ada Rapoport-Albert (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991), 78 –102; volume originally published as History and Theory 27 (1988); Bonfil, “Jewish Attitudes towards History and Historical Writing in Pre-Modern Times,” Jewish History 11 (1997): 7– 40; Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, “Clio and the Jews: Reflections on Jewish Historiography in the Sixteenth Century,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 46 – 47 (1979 –1980): 607–38. Jewish historical writing in the medieval period is also critical to understanding the background to Gans’s writing, and the literature is extensive, for example, Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson, “Towards Trends in Medieval Jewish Chronology and Its Problems,” in Continuity and Variety, ed. Joseph R. Hacker (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1984), 379 – 401 (in Hebrew). 26.  See Šedinová, “Non-Jewish Sources,” for the particular authors relied upon. 27.  Harry Elmer Barnes, A History of Historical Writing, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Dover, 1962), 46 – 47. 28.  Gans, Ẓ  emaḥ David, ed. Breuer, 132 –33 (Jewish history section, year 5289). Gans also mentions Kara’s contemporary, Yom-Tov Lipmann Mülhausen, as author of the book Sefer haniẓ  aḥ on. Gans does not, however, note that Mülhausen spent many years in Prague, an apparent lacuna in his knowledge of the city’s Jewish history that may speak to lack of local traditions about some of its earlier rabbinic luminaries, a possible instance of forgetting among the many memories: Gans, Ẓ  emaḥ  David, ed. Breuer, 135 (Jewish history section, year 5219). On Mülhausen and his colleagues in Prague, see Ephraim Kupfer, “Concerning the Cultural Image of German Jewry and Its Rabbis in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,” Tarbiz 42 (1972 –1973): 113 – 47 (in Hebrew); Israel Jacob Yuval, Scholars in Their Time: The Religious Leadership of German Jewry in the Late Middle Ages (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1988) (in Hebrew). 29.  Gans, Ẓ  emaḥ David, ed. Breuer, 138 (Jewish history section, year 5290). On pilpul in this context, see Elchanan Reiner, “The yeshivas of Poland and Ashkenaz during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries—Historical Developments,” in Studies in Honour of Chone Shmeruk, ed. Israel Bartal, Ezra Mendelsohn, and Chava Turniansky (Jerusalem: Shazar, 1993), 9 –90 (in Hebrew). 30.  Gans, Ẓ  emaḥ  David, ed. Breuer, 141– 42 (Jewish history section, year 5323). Cf. Alexandr Putík and Daniel Polakovicˇ, “Judah Loew ben Bezalel, Called Maharal—A Study on His Genealogy and Biography,” in Path of Life: Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, ca. 1525– 1609, ed. Alexandr Putík (Prague: Academia / Jewish Museum in Prague, 2009), 42 – 49, where questions are raised concerning the relationship of Jacob of Warmaisa to Maharal’s family. 31.  Gans, Ẓ  emaḥ  David, ed. Breuer, 139 (Jewish history section, year 5301), 141 (Jewish history section, year 5319). 32.  I am grateful to Elchanan Reiner for his personal conversation regarding Maisel’s patronage. Simultaneous incumbency in both these rabbinic positions

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Notes to Chapter 5 (reish mativta and av beit din) was common and made one the clear spiritual leader of the community. 33.  For example, Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” in The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 1–25. 34.  Degani, “Structure of World History,” 179ff. 35.  As when Gans, unusually, deviates from his straight chronological structure to devote almost two full paragraphs to elaborate praise of Bohemia and Prague following an account of an early king of Bohemia: Gans, Ẓ  emaḥ David, ed. Breuer, 175 –76 (universal history section, Hebrew year 2455). For an English translation of the full text, see Šedinová, “Old Czech Legends,” 89. On bordering kingdoms: Degani, “Structure of World History,” 173 –74. 36.  Gans, Ẓ  emaḥ  David, ed. Breuer, 364 –66 (universal history section, years 1413, 1414). For a comparison to Christian sources about these events, Šedinová, “Czech History,” 77–78. 37.  Ruderman, Jewish Thought, 86. 38.  Hillel J. Kieval, “Jewish Prague, Christian Prague, and the Castle in the City’s ‘Golden Age,’” Jewish Studies Quarterly 18 (2011): 202 –15. 39.  Abraham David, ed., A Hebrew Chronicle from Prague, c. 1615, trans. Leon J.  Weinberger with Dena Ordan (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993); originally published in Hebrew as Abraham David, ed., A Hebrew Chronicle from Prague from the Early Seventeenth Century (Jerusalem: Merkaz Dinur, 1984). The manuscript is held at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York, Ms. Mic. 3849. Page numbers cited refer to the English translation. Entry numbers are the same in both editions. 40.  Rachel L. Greenblatt, “A Community’s Memory: Jewish Views of Past and Present in Early Modern Prague” (Ph.D. diss., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2006), 51–53. 41.  David, Hebrew Chronicle, 54 –58; Joseph M. Davis, “The Legend of the Maharal before the Golem,” Judaica Bohemiae 45 (2009): 41–59. 42.  David, Hebrew Chronicle, 62 –66. 43.  David, Hebrew Chronicle, 68 –69. 44.  Seliḥ ot leyom bet adar (Prague, ca. 1613). (Jewish Theological Seminary of America [JTS], shelf number 1760:9). 45.  While it may seem obvious that for the ritual to be meaningful, its participants, especially in future generations, would require historical context, Yerushalmi views the liturgical memorials as demonstrating lack of historical thinking: Yerushalmi, Zakhor, 45 –52. 46.  Seliḥ ot leyod dalet ḥ eshvan (Prague, 1621) (JTS shelf number 1760:2). 47.  Seliḥ ot leyod dalet ḥ eshvan. 48.  Hugh Agnew, The Czechs and the Lands of the Bohemian Crown (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University, 2004), 71.

Notes to Chapter 5 49.  Otto Muneles, ed., Epitaphs from the Ancient Jewish Cemetery of Prague (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1988), 321 (no. 212) (in Hebrew), quoted in Chapter 2. 50.  Käthe Spiegel, “Die prager Juden zur Zeit des dreissigjährigen Krieges,” in Die Juden in Prag. Festgabe der Loge Praga des Ordens B′nai B′rith zum Gedenktage ihres 25jähringen Bestandes, ed. Samuel Steinherz (Prague: Self-published [by Loge Praga des Ordens B ′nai B ′rith / Independent Order of B ′nai B ′rith, Loge Praga], 1927), 107–86. 51.  Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller, Megillat eivah (Brooklyn, NY: Ehrenreich, 1991), 4. 52.  Gutmann Klemperer, “The Rabbis of Prague: A History of the Rabbinate of Prague from the Death of Rabbi Loewe b. Bezalel (‘the High Rabbi Loew’) to the Present (1609 –1879),” Historia Judaica 12 (1950): 33 –66, 143 –52, esp. 51; Tobias Jakobovits, “Die Erlebnisse des Oberrabiners Simon Spira-Wedeles in Prag (1640 –1679),” Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Juden in der ˇ echoslovakischen Republik 4 (1932): 253 –96. C 53.  C. V. Wedgwood, The Thirty Years’ War, foreword by Anthony Grafton (New York: New York Review of Books, 2005; first published London, 1938), 483 –84. 54.  Josef V. Polišenský, The Thirty Years War, trans. Robert Evans (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 242 – 43; Agnew, The Czechs, 71; Wedgwood, Thirty Years’ War, 483. 55.  In the late seventeenth century, the Christian Hebraist Johann Christoph Wagenseil reprinted Milḥ ama beshalom in an edition placing the original Hebrew alongside a Latin translation: Johann Christoph Wagenseil, Exercitationes: Sex varii argumenti (Altdorf, 1697), 99 –159 (exercitatio tertia; in Hebrew and Latin). Among the Jews retained as teachers by Wagenseil was Issachar Baer Perlhefter of Prague, a connection that may or may not have led to his knowledge of and interest in this particular contemporary Hebrew text. Wagenseil’s text was reprinted in a Hebrew periodical in the early nineteenth century: Bikure haitim 4 (1824): 103 –30 (in Hebrew). This is the edition cited here. Aside from lacking the title page and two sentences from the author’s introduction, it follows Wagenseil’s publication nearly identically. A German translation of limited selections also appeared: Joseph Zedner, Auswahl historischer Stücke aus hebräischen Schriftstellern vom zweiten Jahrhundert bis auf die Gegenwart (Berlin, 1840), 138 – 45. For the dating, see Jirˇina Šedinová, “Hebrew Literary Sources to the Czech History of the First Half of the 17th Century: End of the Thirty Years’ War in the Testimonies of Contemporaries,” Judaica Bohemiae 23 (1987): 42. In that article, Šedinová has carefully compared it to a host of German, Czech, and Latin chronicles covering the same events. She has also shown that the author was a member of the local Porges family, the same family from which Rachel Rausnitz’s husband stemmed.

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Notes to Chapter 5 56.  Shvedish lid (Prague, 1649) (Bodleian Library Opp. 80 635). Recently published in Simon Neuberg, ed., Das Schwedesch lid: Ein westjiddischer Bericht über Ereignisse in Prag im Jahre 1648 (Hamburg: Buske, 2000) (in Yiddish; German transcription). Here I cite the 1649 Prague publication. 57.  For a detailed listing, see, in addition to Šedinová, “Hebrew Literary ˇ eneˇk Zíbrt, Bibliografie C ˇ eské akadˇ eské Historie (Prague: Nákladem C Sources”; C emie cisarˇe Františka Josefa pro veˇdy, slovesnost a umeˇ̣ni, 1912), 5:214 –22. 58.  Judah Leib ben Joshua, Milḥ ama beshalom, as reprinted in Bikure haitim 4 (1824): 104 (in Hebrew). “In the service of ” is a translation of the Hebrew eẓ  el. 59.  Judah Leib, Milḥ ama beshalom, 119. 60.  Chone Shmeruk, “Yiddish ‘Historical Songs’ in Amsterdam,” in Dutch Jewish History, ed. Jozeph Michman and Tirtsah Levie (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 1984), 143 (in Hebrew; English summary). See also Chone Shmeruk, Yiddish Literature: Aspects of Its History (Tel Aviv: Mifalim universita′im lehotza′ah la ′or, 1978), 71–79 (in Hebrew; a Yiddish edition also exists); Shmeruk, “The Martyr Reb Shachna: Krakow 1682,” in The Call for a Prophet, ed. Israel Bartal (Jerusalem: Shazar, 1999), 121–34 (in Hebrew and Yiddish); originally published in Gal-Ed 7–8 (1985): 57–69 (in Hebrew and Yiddish; English summary); Chava Turniansky, “Yiddish ‘Historical’ Songs as Sources for the History of the Jews in Pre-Partition Poland,” Polin 4 (1989): 42 –52; Turniansky, “Yiddish Song as Historical Source Material: Plague in the Judenstadt of Prague in 1713,” in Jewish History: Essays in Honour of Chimen Abramsky, ed. Ada Rapoport-Albert and Steven J. Zipperstein (London: Halban, 1988), 189 –98; Turniansky, “The Events in Frankfurt am Main (1612 –1616) in Megillas Vints and in an Unknown Yiddish ‘Historical’ Song,” in Schöpferische Momente des europäischen Judentums in der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Michael Graetz (Heidelberg: Winter, 2000), 121–37; Max Erik, The History of Yiddish Literature from Its Beginnings until the Haskalah Period (Warsaw: Kultur-lige, 1928; New York: Shulsinger, 1979), 384 –91 (in Yiddish). I am grateful to Chava Turniansky who gave endlessly of her own time and knowledge in discussing these songs and helping me to translate them, and shared with me her own personal copies and transcriptions of them. 61.  On the German form, see, for example, Erich Seemann, “Historisches Lied,” in Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturgeschichte, ed. Werner Kohlschmidt and Wolfgang Mohr, 2nd ed. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1958), 1:666 –69. 62.  Broadsheets and early newspapers had begun to appear in German and Czech, alongside earlier genres like popular songs; see, for example, Emery Snyder, “Learning and News in Baroque,” in A New History of German Literature, ed. David E. Wellerby, Judith Ryan, and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), 304 –9. 63.  Shmeruk has suggested Amsterdam might have been the main center for their publication for international markets, while the publishing houses in Prague

Notes to Chapter 5 focused on songs of local interest, intended for the local market: Shmeruk, “Yiddish ‘Historical Songs,’” 145 – 46. 64.  Shmeruk, for example, has noted certain similarities between many of the songs about tragic events and Hebrew kinnot, though the kinnot maintained a ritual function that placed them functionally in the synagogue—which was not the setting for the Yiddish songs—and were immeasurably more sparing in details provided. Other songs strongly resemble, in this regard, many chronicles in which eyewitnesses reported single events or series of events, a genre that was also extremely popular in seventeenth-century central Europe: Shmeruk, “Yiddish ‘Historical Songs,’” 143. 65.  Alexander Marx, “The History of David Oppenheimer’s Library,” in Studies in Jewish History and Booklore (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1944), 238 –55. 66.  Cf. Seemann, “Historisches Lied,” 667, on the variety of “half- or nonliterary” backgrounds of authors of the German genre. 67.  Judah Leib, Milḥ ama beshalom, 112. 68.  Cantors who composed Yiddish historical songs include David Perles, who wrote a 1705 elegy on the death of Emperor Leopold, and Ẓ  vi Hirsch ben Joseph Miklas, who wrote a song about a 1663 fire in Náchod: Tobias Jakobovits, “Die Brandkatastrophe in Nachod und die Austreibung der Juden aus BöhmischSkalitz (1663 –1705),” Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Juden in der ˇ echoslovakischen Republik 9 (1938): 271–305. C 69.  Shlomo Berger, “An Invitation to Buy and Read: Paratexts of Yiddish Books in Amsterdam, 1650 –1800,” Book History 7 (2004): 31–61. 70.  Shvedish lid, title page. 71.  Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Berakhot 54a; Shulḥ an arukh, Oraḥ  ḥ ayyim, 218:1–7. 72.  Wagenseil, Milḥ ama beshalom, 102. The original title page does not appear in the Bikure haitim publication. The phrase translated “brings relief ” means, literally, “in a wide space”; cf. Psalms 118:5. 73.  Judah Leib, Milḥ ama beshalom, 104. More of this passage is found at the opening of the Introduction to this book. 74.  Judah Leib, Milḥ ama beshalom, 109. 75.  Judah Leib, Milḥ ama beshalom, 110. On innovations in siege warfare during this period, see Christer Jörgensen, Michael F. Pavkovic, Rob S. Rice, Frederic C. Schneid, and Chris L. Scott, Fighting Techniques of the Early Modern World, A.D. 1500–A.D. 1763: Equipment, Combat Skills, and Tactics (New York: St.  Martin’s, 2005), 170 –209. “For our many sins” is a literal translation of the phrase be′avonoteinu harabim. At this point in history, the phrase was used as an expression meaning, in effect, “alas” or “pity” rather than as a literal acceptance of a metaphysical link between human sin and the divine.

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Notes to Chapter 5 76.  Writing in Communist Czechoslovakia, Šedinová, who did not cite the text of the Yiddish song housed in Oxford, was able to identify one of the victims named in Milḥ ama beshalom on the basis of a gravestone in the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague and a liturgical memorial for him: Šedinová, “Hebrew Literary Sources,” 47. 77.  Shvedish lid, stanzas 31–38. 78.  Shaul Stampfer, “Gzeyres Takh Vetat,” in YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, ed. Gershon David Hundert (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 1:644 – 47. Also available online at http://www.yivoencyclopedia  .org/article.aspx/Gzeyres_Takh_Vetat (accessed July 3, 2011). Heller wrote seliḥ ot for these massacres also. 79.  Milada Vilímková, The Prague Ghetto, trans. Iris Urwin (Prague: Aventinum, 1990), 30. 80.  Howard Louthan, Converting Bohemia: Force and Persuasion in the Catholic Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 160. 81.  Alexandr Putík, “The Origin of the Symbols of the Prague Jewish Town: The Banner of the Old-New Synagogue, David’s Shield and the ‘Swedish Hat,’” Judaica Bohemiae 29 (1993): 4 –37. 82.  Putík, “Symbols of the Prague Jewish Town,” 13. Cf. Jaroslav Prokeš and Anton Blaschka, “Der Antisemitismus der Behörden und das Prager Ghetto in nachweißenbergischer Zeit,” Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Juden in ˇ echoslovakischen Republik 1 (1929): 65ff. der C 83.  Jakobovits, “Simon Spira-Wedeles in Prag”; Jakobovits, “Die Erlebnisse  des R. Berl Jeiteles als Primator der Prager Judenschaft,” Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft ˇ echoslovakischen Republik 7 (1935): 421–36. für Geschichte der Juden in der C 84.  Prokeš and Blaschka, “Antisemitismus,” 72 –77. 85.  Vilímková, Prague Ghetto, 61–65. On Perles, see Chapter 3. 86.  Louthan, Converting Bohemia, 301–3; cf. additional sources there; Prokeš and Blaschka, “Antisemitismus”; V. Vojtíšek, “After the Fire of the Jewish Town of Prague in 1689,” Kalendárˇ cˇesko-židovský 34 (1914 –1915): 61–71 (in Czech). 87.  “List of the dead following the plague that broke out in Prague in the year 5440 (1679/80),” Ms. Jewish Museum in Prague (JMP) 287. 88.  The significance of this generational memory is adapted here from Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (Munich: Beck, 1992). 89.  Yeḥ iel Michael ben Abraham Zalman, Sreyfe lid fun prag (Prague, 1689) (Bodleian Library Opp. 80 683). 90.  Sreyfe lid fun prag, stanza 1. 91.  Sreyfe lid fun prag, stanzas 2 – 4. 92.  Sreyfe lid fun prag, stanza 11. 93.  Sreyfe lid fun prag, stanza 11. 94.  Vilímková, Prague Ghetto, 31–34.

Notes to Chapter 5 95.  Shmeruk, “Yiddish ‘Historical Songs,’” 143. In many rites, the first kinnah recited after reading of the Book of Lamentations on the night of Tisha  b′Av begins, “oy mah hayah lanu”: for example, Siddur umaḥ zor kol-bo, 4 vols. (Vilna: Re′em, 1935), vol. 4, 2a (p. 3) (in Hebrew). It is possible, however, that it was not recited in either Prague or Frankfurt; see Siddur umaḥ zor kol-bo, vol. 4, 2b (p. 4); Israel Davidson, Thesaurus of Medieval Hebrew Poetry (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1924 –1938; New York: Ktav, 1970), 1:81 (no.  1759) (in Hebrew); Ismar Elbogen, Jewish Liturgy: A Comprehensive History, trans. Raymond P. Scheindlin (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1993), 183 –84. Similar refrains appear in Yiddish historical songs about fires in the Bohemian town of Náchod (1663), in Frankfurt am Main (1711), and in songs dealing with other topics: for Náchod: Ẓ vi Hirsch ben Joseph Miklas, Al sereifat k″k Náchod (Prague, 1663); Frankfurt: David ben Shmaya Soygers from Prague, Groyse sreyfa bekak Frankfurt (Halle, 1711–1712) (Opp. 80 649). 96.  Turniansky, “Yiddish Song,” and see Chapter 6. 97.  See, for example, Salomon Hugo Lieben, “Die Prager Brandkatastrophen von 1689 und 1754,” Jahrbuch der Jüdisch-Literarischen Gesellschaft 18 (1926 –1927): 177–78. 98.  Lieben, “Brandkatastrophen,” 182. 99.  An expanded version of this analysis will appear in Rachel L. Greenblatt, “Saint and Counter-Saint: Catholic Triumphalism and Jewish Resistance in Baroque Prague’s Abeles Affair” in a volume to be edited by Micha Perry and Rebekka Voß. On Moses Abeles, see Alexandr Putík, “Before the Curtain, Behind the Curtain: Parokhot of Prague Synagogues and Their Donors, 1648 –1744,” in Textiles from Bohemian and Moravian Synagogues from the Collections of the Jewish Museum in Prague, ed. Ludmila Kybalová, Eva Kosácˇková, and Alexandr Putík (Prague: Jewish Museum in Prague, 2003), 81, 82, 84, 86, 88 –91. And see now ˇ eská literature 57, Daniel Soukup, “Šimon Abeles: Zrození barokní legendy,” C no.  3 (2009): 346 –71; Marie Vachenauer, Der Fall Simon Abeles: Eine kritische Anfrage an die zugänglichen Quellen (Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2011). 100.  On such conversions in early modern German-speaking lands: Elisheva Carlebach, Divided Souls: Converts from Judaism in Germany, 1500– 1750 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001). On the Bohemian context in particular: Alexandr Putík, “The Prague Jewish Community in the Late 17th and Early 18th Centuries,” Judaica Bohemiae 35 (1999): 37–63; Putík, “Fight for Conversion in Kolín nad Labem, Bohemia, in the Year 5426/1666,” Judaica Bohemiae 33 (1997): 4 –32. 101.  Louthan, Converting Bohemia, 277–316. 102.  Ayn nay kloglid (Amsterdam, 1695). Only this second edition of the song is extant; in it, reference is made to a previous printing. 103.  Ayn nay kloglid, stanza 4. 104.  Ayn nay kloglid, stanzas 6 –7.

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Notes to Chapter 5 105.  For example, Israel Jacob Yuval, “Vengeance and Damnation, Blood and Defamation: From Jewish Martyrdom to Blood Libel Accusations,” Zion 58 (1993): 33 –90 (in Hebrew; English summary); Mary Minty, “Kiddush Ha-shem in German Christian Eyes in the Middle Ages,” Zion 59 (1994): 209 –66 (in Hebrew; English summary). 106.  Ayn nay kloglid, stanzas 8 –15, 16 –22, 26, 30 –31. 107.  Ayn nay kloglid, stanza 41. 108.  Ayn nay kloglid, stanzas 42 – 43. 109.  Ayn nay kloglid, stanzas 47–53. 110.  Ayn nay kloglid, stanza 52. 111.  Processus Inquisitorius, Welcher in der köngl. Böhm. Residenz-Stadt Prag von dem hochlöbl. köngl. Appelationstribunal als einem / im Erb-Königreich Böheimb /  .  .  . im Jahr 1694. wider bende Prager-Juden Lazar Abeles und Löbl Kurzhandl / wegen des / ex odio Christianae Fidei, von ihnen Juden / ermordeten zwölffjährigen Jüdischen Knabens / Simon Abeles . . . (Prague, 1696). 112.  Brandstätter’s own manuscript account also survives in Prague, titled Mirabilis Conversio Levi Kurtzhandl a Judaismo ad Catholicam fidem in Supplicio rotae baptizati . . . , and is described by Putík, “Jewish Community,” 47– 48. 113.  Processus, 92v. 114.  The image is reproduced in Louthan, Converting Bohemia, 307, fig. 23. My description and analysis follow Louthan, Converting Bohemia, 306. 115.  Processus, Praefatio. 116.  Processus, 93r. 117.  Gladstein-Kestenberg, “Identifikation,” 262n8, citing Moritz Stein­ schneider, Catalogus Librorum Hebraeorum in Bibliotheca Bodleiana, 3 vols. (Berlin: Welt, 1931; original edition, 1852 –1860), no. 3935. 118.  On historians and folk literature, see, for example, Eli Yassif, “Legends and History: Historians Read Hebrew Legends of the Middle Ages,” Zion 64 (1999): 187–220 (in Hebrew); Moshe Rosman, “The Art of Historiography and the Methods of Folklore,” Zion 65 (2000): 209 –18 (in Hebrew); Eli Yassif, “‘Legend and History’—Second Thoughts,” Zion 65 (2000): 219 –28 (in Hebrew). 119.  Gabriel Motzkin, “Memoirs, Memory and Historical Experience,” Science in Context 7 (1994): 103 –19, and further bibliography there, regarding the eighteenth-century debate as to whether fiction or history best represents the past. 120.  For origin myths of Ashkenazi Jewry: Arye Graboïs, “The Legendary Figure of Charlemagne,” Tarbiz 36 (1966): 22 –58 (in Hebrew); Sara Zfatman, The Jewish Tale in the Middle Ages: Between Ashkenaz and Sepharad (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1993), 97–110 (in Hebrew); Ivan G. Marcus, “History, Story and Collective Memory: Narrativity in Early Ashkenazic Culture,” Prooftexts 10 (1990): 371–83; Robert (Reuven) Bonfil, “Between Eretz Israel and Babylonia,” Shalem 5 (1987): 1–30 (in Hebrew). Historian of Polish Jewry Bernard Weinryb outlined five general

Notes to Chapter 6 themes common to many such stories, some of which appear in Ayn sheyn mayseh: “Beginnings,” 453. 121.  Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955 –1958), J 1176.3. On the earliest known Jewish adaptation of this motif, see Eli Yassif, The Hebrew Folktale: History, Genre, Meaning, trans. Jacqueline S. Teitelbaum (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 276 –77. 122.  For example, J. Perles, “Rabbinische Agada’s in 1001 Nacht: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Wanderung orientalischer Märchen,” Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums 22 (1873): 14 –34, 61–85, 116 –25. Cf. Rosman, “Historiography and Folklore,” 215. 123.  On the Mayseh bukh, see Sara Zfatman, “The Mayse-Bukh: An Old Yiddish Literary Genre,” Hasifrut 28 (April 1979): 126 –52 (in Hebrew). On the relationship of Hebrew and Yiddish folklore in medieval Europe: Yassif, Hebrew Folktale, 247– 48; and on literature in the two languages in general: Alexander ben Yiẓ ḥ ak Pfaffenhofen, Sefer massah umerivah, ed. Chava Turniansky (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1985), 126 –34 (in Hebrew). 124.  For example, Moses Gaster, ed. and trans., Ma′aseh Book (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1934, 1981), 2:452 –56. For additional references, see Thompson, Motif-Index, J 1176.3. 125.  Cf. Exodus 1:10. 126.  Zdeneˇk V. David, “Hájek, Dubravius and the Jews: A Contrast in SixteenthCentury Czech Historiography,” Sixteenth Century Journal 27 (1996): 1012. 127.  Ms. JMP 251 (Family Megillah of the Yampels-Segal Family, 1721); Leibl Hoschmann / Abraham ben Eliah Broda, “A Prague Family Megillah from the Year 1732,” in Wachstein-Bukh: A Collection of Remembrances in Honor of Dr. Bernhard Wachstein, 1868– 1935, ed. S. Friedland (Vilna: YIVO, 1939), 69 –76 (in Yiddish); and see Chapter 3.

Chapter 6 1.  Beila Horowitz and Rachel Rausnitz, Ayn sheyn mayseh (Prague, n.d.) (Bodleian Library Opp. 80 796[7]), 6r; see note 1 in Chapter 5 for additional bibliographic information on Ayn sheyn mayseh. 2.  Horowitz and Rausnitz, Ayn sheyn mayseh, 7b. 3.  Horowitz and Rausnitz, Ayn sheyn mayseh, 9b. 4.  Horowitz and Rausnitz, Ayn sheyn mayseh, 10a. 5.  Evidence of another Jewish woman from Prague’s proficiency in music in the late seventeenth century appears in letters written by Beila Perlhefter, in Hebrew, to Christian Hebraist Johann Christoph Wagenseil and to her husband, Baer, published in Bernard D. Weinryb, “From the Hebrew Correspondence of Johann Christian Wagenseil (17th Century Hebrew Correspondence between Jews and

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Notes to Chapter 6 Non-Jews),” Jewish Review 2 (1944), 211–14 in the English section, 109 –37 in the Yiddish section, for example, letter 15, p. 134. 6.  Ms. Jewish Museum in Prague (JMP) 251 (Family Megillah of the YampelsSegal Family, 1721), and Chapter 3. 7.  Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson, The Types of the Folk-Tale (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1961), no. 882. Motifs include Thompson K 2112.1, false tokens of woman’s unfaithfulness, and N  15, chastity wage. It also appears in some editions of the Mayseh bukh, though none that are known to predate the Prague story: Sara Zfatman, “The Mayse-Bukh: An Old Yiddish Literary Genre,” Hasifrut 28 (April 1979): 126 –52 (in Hebrew); Max Grünbaum, Jüdischdeutsche Chrestomathie (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1882), 421–25, and p. 385 on the different editions of the Mayseh bukh he used. The edition from which he drew this tale is Rödelheim, 1753, fol. 503. It does not appear in the other edition on which Grünbaum relied, from Wilmersdorf, which is not dated, but earlier than the Rödelheim edition. Cf. Eli Yassif, The Hebrew Folktale: History, Genre, Meaning, trans. Jacqueline S. Teitelbaum (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 346ff. 8.  Ruth Gladstein-Kestenberg, “Identifikation der Prager Juden vor und während der Assimilation,” in Die Juden in den böhmischen Ländern: Vorträge der Tagung des Collegium Carolinum in Bad Wiessee vom 27. bis 29. November 1981, ed. F. Seibt (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1983), 169; reprinted in Peter Demetz, ed., Geschichten aus dem alten Prag (Frankfurt: Insel Taschenbuch, 1994). 9.  Horowitz and Rausnitz, Ayn sheyn mayseh, title page. 10.  Cf. Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1991), 30 –31, on nonconservative functions of myth-making. 11.  David Gans, Ẓ  emaḥ  David, ed. Mordecai Breuer (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1983), 270 –71 (universal history section, year 722). On this tale, see, for example, František Graus, Lebendige Vergangenheit: Überlieferung im Mittelalter und in den Vorstellungen vom Mittelalter (Cologne: Böhlau, 1975), 89 –109; Peter Demetz, Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City (New York: Hill & Wang, 1997), 3 –29. For Gans’s adaptation of the Libuše legends, along with more on the forms they take in various of the Czech chronicles, see Jirˇina Šedinová, “Old Czech Legends in the Work of David Gans (1592),” Judaica Bohemiae 14 (1978): 96 –99; Georg Escher, “Prager Femmes Fatales—Stadt, Geschlecht, Identität,” Kakanien Revisited (July 6, 2004): 1–8, http://www.kakanien.ac.at/ beitr/fallstudie/GEscher1. 12.  Olga Sixtová, ed., Hebrew Printing in Bohemia and Moravia (Prague: Academia / Jewish Museum in Prague, 2012); Salomon Hugo Lieben, “Der hebräische Buchdruck in Prag im 16. Jahrhundert,” in Die Juden in Prag. Festgabe der Loge Praga des Ordens B′nai B′rith zum Gedenktage ihres 25jähringen Bestandes, ed. Samuel Steinherz (Prague: Self-published [by Loge Praga des Ordens B ′nai

Notes to Chapter 6 B ′rith / Independent Order of B ′nai B ′rith, Loge Praga], 1927), 88 –106. For earlier lists of Hebrew-letter books printed in Prague, see Yeshayahu Vinograd, Otzar hasefer ha′Ivri (Treasury of the Hebrew Book) (Jerusalem, 1993), 2:531–64 (in Hebrew); Bedrˇich Nosek, “Katalog mit der Auswahl hebräischer Drucke Prager Provenienz, I. Teil: ‘Drucke der Gesoniden im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert,’” Judaica Bohemiae 10 (1974): 13 – 41; “II. Teil: ‘Die Buchdruckerei der Familie Bak,’” Judaica Bohemiae 11 (1975): 29 –53; “III. Teil: ‘1700 –1799,’” Judaica Bohemiae 13 (1977): 96 –120; 14 (1978): 35 –58; and additions by Andrea Braunová and Daniel Polakovicˇ, “Additions to the Catalogue of Prague Hebrew Prints from the Collection of the Jewish Museum in Prague,” Judaica Bohemiae 33 (1997): 109 –31; Aron Freimann, “Die hebräischen Druckereien in Prag,” Soncino-Blätter 3, no. 2 – 4 (1929 –1930): 113 –14; Leopold Zunz, “Druckereien in Prag” and “Annalen der hebräischen Typographie von Prag, vom Jahre 1513 bis zum Jahre 1657,” in Zur Geschichte und Literatur (Berlin: Veit, 1845), 1:261–303; Arno Parˇík, “Kohen Family,” YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article  .aspx/Kohen_Family (accessed November 18, 2011); Zeev Gries, “Bak Family,” YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/ article.aspx/Bak_Family (accessed November 19, 2011). 13.  Gans, Ẓ  emaḥ  David, ed. Breuer, 369 (universal history section, year 1440). 14.  Judah Loew ben Beẓ alel, Sefer be′er hagolah (Tel Aviv: Pardes, 1955), 126 – 41, esp. 127, 141 (final portion of the sixth well) (in Hebrew). 15.  For example, Isadore Twersky, “The Shulhan ′Arukh: Enduring Code of Jewish Law,” Judaism 16 (1967): 141–58; Joseph M. Davis, “The Reception of the ‘Shulḥ an ′Arukh’ and the Formation of Ashkenazic Jewish Identity,” AJS Review 26 (2002): 251–76. 16.  As described in Chapter 3. See also Rachel L. Greenblatt, “‘And He Wrote Many Books’: Print, Remembrance, Autobiographical Writing and the Maharal of Prague,” in Maharal of Prague: Four Hundred Years since His Death, ed. Elchanan Reiner (Jerusalem: Shazar, forthcoming) (in Hebrew). 17.  Elchanan Reiner, “A Biography of an Agent of Culture: Eleazar Altschul of Prague and His Literary Activity,” in Schöpferische Momente des europäischen Judentums in der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Michael Graetz (Heidelberg: Winter, 2000), 229 – 47. 18.  Moshe Rosman, “Innovative Tradition: Jewish Culture in the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth,” in Cultures of the Jews: A New History, ed. David Biale (New York: Schocken, 2002), 530 – 47. 19.  For example, Seliḥ ot lefi seder k″k Prag (Prague: Gershom Kohen, 1529). 20.  “Megillat Rabbi Meir,” Koveẓ  al yad 10 (1903): 1–16 (in Hebrew) (Bodleian Library Opp. 40 1406). 21.  “Megillas Shmuel,” ed. Aron Freimann, Kovetz al yad 9 (1899): 29 (paginated separately) (in Yiddish; Hebrew introduction).

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Notes to Chapter 6 22.  Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993). 23.  Discussed in Chapter 3. Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller, Megillat eivah, with German translation by Y. H. Mira (Breslau: Hirsch Sulzbach, 1836); Joseph M. Davis, Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller: Portrait of a Seventeenth-Century Rabbi (Oxford: Littman Library, 2004), 228, and references there. The Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts at the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem has microfilm copies of sixteen Hebrew and nine Yiddish manuscripts of the work, dating from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, housed in university and archive collections worldwide. Many more are probably in private hands. 24.  Elchanan Reiner, “The Ashkenazi Élite at the Beginning of the Modern Era: Manuscript versus Printed Book,” Polin 10 (1997): 85 –98; Reiner, “Agent of Culture”; Rosman, “Innovative Tradition.” 25.  On “men who are like women”: Chava Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs: Listening to the Prayers of Early Modern Jewish Women (Boston: Beacon, 1998), esp. 54 –59. 26.  Jacob Elbaum and Chava Turniansky, “Tsene-rene,” in YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, ed. Gershon David Hundert (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 2:1912 –13. Also available online at http://www.yivoency  clopedia.org/article.aspx/ Tsene-rene (accessed November 2, 2011). Among them was also a posthumously printed Yiddish work by a woman whose final resting place is in Prague, Meneket Rivkah, by Rivkah Tiktiner, who also wrote a Hebrew poem for the celebration of Simḥ at Torah; see Chapter 2. 27.  Alexander ben Yiẓ ḥ ak Pfaffenhofen, Sefer massah umerivah, ed. Chava Turniansky (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1985), 126 –34 (in Hebrew); Chava Turniansky, “The Relation between the Hebrew and Yiddish Versions of a Bilingual Song (Ashlikh yagon ve-anaḥ a),” Massorot 9 –11 (1997): 421– 41 (in Hebrew); Turniansky, “Les langues juives dans le monde ashkénaze traditionnel,” in Milles ans de cultures ashkénazes, ed. Jean Baumgarten, Rachel Ertel, Itzhok Niborski, and Annette Wieviorka (Paris: Liana Levi, 1994), 419 –26. 28.  Similar complex uses of allegory based on classical sources was characteristic of much topical or historical poetry of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Bohemia, in a variety of languages; see Jirˇina Šedinová, “Hebrew Literature as a Source of Information on the Czech History of the First Half of the 17th Century: The Reflection of the Events in Contemporary Hebrew Poetry,” Judaica Bohemiae 20 (1984): 3 –30. 29.  My translation, according to the context of this stanza in the seliḥ ah, rather than the biblical context. 30.  The reading of the word used here for “wing” (‫)אבר‬, which ordinarily means more simply “limb,” would be nearly impossible to decipher in this context without reference to Psalms 55:7. 31.  II Kings 9:30.

Notes to Chapter 6 32.  II Kings 9:33. 33.  Seliḥ ot le yom yod dalet ḥ eshvan, “Anusah le′ezra,” stanza 7. 34.  Seliḥ ot le yom yod dalet ḥ eshvan, “Arkhu hayamim,” stanza 6. 35.  Yeḥ iel Michael ben Abraham Zalman, Sreyfe lid fun prag (Prague, 1689) (Bodleian Library Opp. 80 683), stanza 45. 36.  On the contraction of religious life to solely religious spheres, see, for example, Yosef Kaplan, An Alternative Path to Modernity: The Sephardi Diaspora in Western Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 16 –22. On changes in the Ashkenazi cultural sphere during the period 1650 –1750: Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770– 1870 (New York: Schocken, 1973), 28 – 41. 37.  Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller, Bris melaḥ  (Prague, ca. 1628). 38.  For example, Jacob ben Elijah of Teplitz, Seliḥ os in taytshen (Prague, 1602), including a Yiddish version of Kara’s seliḥ ot. 39.  Asher ben Yeḥ iel, Orḥ ot ḥ ayyim (Prague, 1626); Alfred Landau and Bernhard Wachstein, eds., Jüdische Privatbriefe aus dem Jahre 1619 (Vienna: Braumüller, 1911), 28 –29 in the Hebrew section, 49 in the German transcription. For listings of additional extant letters, see Davis, Heller, 229. For a claim that Heller himself composed the Yiddish, see Chapter 3. 40.  Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller, Megillat eivah, Ms. Jewish Theological Seminary of America 3741. 41.  Heller, Megillat eivah, Ms. JMP 157 (in Yiddish). On the yeshiva curriculum in early modern Ashkenaz and changes it underwent, see Elchanan Reiner, “The yeshivas of Poland and Ashkenaz during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries—Historical Developments,” in Studies in Honour of Chone Shmeruk, ed. Israel Bartal, Ezra Mendelsohn, and Chava Turniansky (Jerusalem: Shazar, 1993), 9 –90 (in Hebrew). 42.  Quoted by Israel Zinberg, A History of Jewish Literature, trans. and ed. Bernard Martin (New York: Ktav, 1975), 7:222, where Zinberg quotes according to Eleazar Schulman, “Haktav vehamikhtav,” Hashilo′aḥ , 8 (1901): 132 – 40, esp. 135. 43.  Landau and Wachstein, Jüdische Privatbriefe, letter 41, p. 49 in the Hebrew section, p. 82 in the German section. 44.  H ̣  anokh Altschul, “Megillat purei hakela′im,” in Jubelschrift zum siebzigsten Geburtstage des Prof. Dr. H. Graetz, ed. Abraham Zvi Kisch (Breslau: Schottlaender, 1887), 52 in the Hebrew section. 45.  Ms. JMP 251; “A Prague Family Megillah from the Year 1732,” in WachsteinBukh: A Collection of Remembrances in Honor of Dr. Bernhard Wachstein, 1868– 1935, ed. S. Friedland (Vilna, 1939), 69 –76 (in Yiddish). 46.  The first printed edition appeared in 2011: Nathaniel Riemer and Sigrid Senkbeil, eds., “Beer Sheva” by Beer and Bella Perlhefter: An Edition of a Seventeenth Century Yiddish Encyclopedia (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2011). 47.  Issachar Ber Perlhefter and Beila Perlhefter, Sefer be′er sheva, Ms. Opp. 148 (17th century), 5b (in Yiddish); cf. Zinberg, History of Jewish Literature, 7:222.

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Notes to Chapter 6 48.  Ma′aneh lashon (Amsterdam, 1677–1678), 44a (par. 18). (This edition closely followed one printed in Prague in 1657–1658, edited by Eliezer Liberman.) Chava Weissler has also noted this differentiation of roles as expressed in Ma′aneh lashon: Weissler, Voices, 48. 49.  Ma′aneh lashon, 42b (par. 17). 50.  Herman Pollack, Jewish Folkways in German Lands (1648– 1806): Studies in Aspects of Daily Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 40, quoting Johann Jacob Schudt, Jüdischer Merckwürdigkeiten (Frankfurt, 1714). 51.  Weissler, Voices, 200n46. Weissler also speculates briefly on the cemetery as a place of women’s prayer and as a space combining aspects of both public and private domains. 52.  Isaiah Shachar, “‘Feast and Rejoice in Brotherly Love’: Burial Society Glasses and Jugs from Bohemia and Moravia,” Israel Museum News 9 (1972): 22 –51, esp. 26 –29. 53.  Hana Volavková refers to these figures as “weeping women.” Volavková, The Pinkas Synagogue: A Memorial of the Past and of Our Days, trans. Greta Hort (Prague: Státní Pedagogické Nakladatelství [State Jewish Museum in Prague], 1955), 7. 54.  Described and compared by Chava Turniansky, “Yiddish Song as Historical Source Material: Plague in the Judenstadt of Prague in 1713,” in Jewish History: Essays in Honour of Chimen Abramsky, ed. Ada Rapoport-Albert and Steven  J. Zipperstein (London: Halban, 1988), 189 –98, and listed by A. E. Cowley, Catalogue of the Hebrew Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library (Oxford: Clarendon, 1886 –1906), 153. 55.  Moses ben H ̣  ayyim Eisenstadt Katzenellenbogen’s “Eyn nay kloglid benign Prostitser-kdoyshim-lid iber den groysn ershreklekn ipesh” (Prague, 1713). A second edition was printed in Amsterdam (the place of the first printing is not known, though the presumption of Prague would be justified): Moritz Steinschneider, Catalogus Librorum Hebraeorum in Bibliotheca Bodleiana, 3 vols. (Berlin: Welt, 1931; original edition, 1852 –1860) (hereafter, CB), no. 3685; Cowley, Catalogue, 465 (Opp. 80 632). 56.  Issachar Baer (Berl) Katz, “Ipesh lid fun Prag benign adir ayom venora” (Prague, 1713); Steinschneider, CB, nos. 5278, 8143; Cowley, Catalogue, 285 (Opp. 80 643[D]). 57.  Far loyf den ipesh (Prague, n.d.); Steinschneider, CB, no. 4007A; Cowley, Catalogue, 528 (Opp. 80 645[4]). 58.  Far loyf den ipesh, title page. 59.  Gans, Ẓ  emaḥ David, ed. Breuer, 5 passim; Judah Leib ben Joshua, Milḥ ama beshalom, as reprinted in Bikure haitim 4 (1824): 103 – 4 (in Hebrew). 60.  Far loyf den ipesh, stanza 61. 61.  Glikl, Memoirs 1691– 1719, ed. and trans. Chava Turniansky (Jerusalem: Shazar, 2006) (in Hebrew and Yiddish); English translation: Beth-Zion Abrahams,

Notes to Conclusion trans. and ed., The Life of Glückel of Hameln, 1646 – 1724, Written by Herself (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2010).

Conclusion 1.  Ms. Jewish Museum in Prague (JMP) 82, title page. 2.  Additional early nineteenth-century pinkasim reveal similar concerns. One written for the Maisel Synagogue in 1813 relates that the old Hazkaros pinkas (a Yiddishization of the Hebrew term pinkas hazkarot) was written “not according to their order [of the hazkarot].” In other words, new entries had been written in wherever they fit among the old ones, Ms. JMP 73, 1a. The manuscript from the Klausen Synagogue, 1824, claims to include all the prayers the cantor will need “from Yekum purkan until returning the Torah scroll to the ark,” so that the cantor will not need to “search in various prayer books as it had been until now,” Ms. JMP 78, 2a. 3.  Ms. JMP 82, 5a. The name Joseph “Klomenks” (kuf-lamed-vav-mem-nunkuf-shin) may have been mistranscribed from the earlier manuscript. 4.  For the earlier elaborate hazkarah for Isaiah Horowitz, see Chapter 2. 5.  Abraham M. Haberman, “The Piyyutim and Poems of Rabbi Yom Tov Lipman Heller,” in Lekhvod Yom Tov, ed. Y. L. Hacohen Maimon (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1955 –1956), 126 (in Hebrew). 6.  Gutmann Klemperer, “The Rabbis of Prague: A History of the Rabbinate of Prague from the Death of Rabbi Loewe b. Bezalel (‘the High Rabbi Loew’) to the Present (1609 –1879),” Historia Judaica 12 (1950): 65 –66; Alexander Kisch, “Die Prager Judestadt während der Schlacht am weißen Berge,” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums 56, no. 34 (August 19, 1892): 400 – 403, esp. 400; Käthe Spiegel, “Die prager Juden zur Zeit des dreissigjährigen Krieges,” in Die Juden in Prag. Festgabe der Loge Praga des Ordens B′nai B′rith zum Gedenktage ihres 25jähringen Bestandes, ed. Samuel Steinherz (Prague: Self-published [by Loge Praga des Ordens B ′nai B ′rith / Independent Order of B ′nai B ′rith, Loge Praga], 1927), 118. 7.  Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (Munich: Beck, 1992), 20 –21, 48 –59. 8.  I am grateful to Moshe Rosman for discussion on this point. Rosman uses the term “living memory”; see, for example, Moshe Rosman, How Jewish Is Jewish History? (Oxford: Littman Library, 2007), 158. 9.  Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 10.  Chapter 3. 11.  Ms. JMP 255. 12.  Chapter 3. 13.  JMP inv. no. 12.667; Ludmila Kybalová, Eva Kosácˇková, and Alexandr Putík, eds., Textiles from Bohemian and Moravian Synagogues from the Collections of the

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Notes to Conclusion Jewish Museum in Prague (Prague: Jewish Museum in Prague, 2003), cat. no. 1,  illus. (front side only), 134. Illustrations of both the front and reverse sides of the mantle appear on Synagogue Textiles, CD-ROM produced by the Jewish Museum in Prague, 2003, no. I/IA/1. 14.  Moses Meir Perles, Sefer megillat yuḥ asin, appearing at the end of Moses Katz, Sefer Matteh Moshe (Zolkiew, 1745), 25a; or Perles, Megillat yuḥ asin (Warsaw, 1864), 12a. 15.  Perles, Sefer megillat yuḥ asin, in Matteh Moshe, 25a left side. 16.  “Megillas Shmuel,” ed. Aron Freimann, Kovetz al yad 9 (1899), 3 (paginated separately) (in Yiddish; Hebrew introduction). 17.  A publication history appears in the introduction to Haim Hominer, ed., Tzemach David Complete (Warsaw, 1859; Jerusalem, 1966), 26 – 41 (in Hebrew). In Latin, Wilhelm Horst (Guillaum Henri Vorstis), trans., Chronologia sacra-profana a mundi conditu ad annul M. 5352 vel Christi 1592 . . . (Leiden: Lugduni Batavorum, 1644). 18.  Haim Gertner, “The Beginning of ‘Orthodox Historiography’ in Eastern Europe: A Reassessment,” Zion 67 (2002): 293 –336, esp. 302n57 (in Hebrew). 19.  Rachel L. Greenblatt, “‘And He Wrote Many Books’: Print, Remembrance, Autobiographical Writing and the Maharal of Prague,” in Maharal of Prague: Four Hundred Years since His Death, ed. Elchanan Reiner (Jerusalem: Shazar, forthcoming) (in Hebrew). 20.  For example, Elisheva Carlebach, “Between History and Hope: Jewish Messianism in Ashkenaz and Sepharad,” Third Annual Lecture of the Victor J. Selmanowitz Chair of Jewish History (New York: Touro College, 1998); Paweł Maciejko, The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement, 1755– 1816 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). 21.  Carlebach, “Between History and Hope”; Rebekka Voß, “Entangled Stories: The Red Jews in Premodern Yiddish and German Apocalyptic Lore,” AJS Review 36 (2012): 1– 41, esp. 32ff.; Voß, Umstrittene Erlöser: Politik, Ideologie und jüdisch-christlicher Messianismus in Deutschland, 1500– 1600 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), 41–51 passim. 22.  Alexandr Putík, “The Hebrew Inscription on the Crucifix at Charles Bridge in Prague: The Case of Elias Backoffen and Berl Tabor in the Appellation Court,” Judaica Bohemiae 32 (1997): 67–68. 23.  Koppelman Lieben, ed., Gal-Ed: Grabsteininschriften des prager ihr. alten Friedhofs (Prague: Landau, 1856) (in German and Hebrew); for the history of the cemetery’s documentation, see Otto Muneles, ed., Epitaphs from the Ancient Jewish Cemetery of Prague (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1988), 38 – 42 (in Hebrew); Daniel Polakovicˇ, “Documentation of the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague,” Judaica Bohemiae 43 (2007–2008): 167–92. 24.  The younger Lieben, writing under his Hebrew name, Shlomo Ẓ  evi, remarked on the familial connection in notes he added at the beginning of  Ms. JMP 217, pinkas from the Altneuschul, 18th–19th centuries.

Notes to Conclusion 25.  Lieben, Gal-Ed, p. iii of the Hebrew section. 26.  Judah Leib ben Joshua, Milḥ ama beshalom, as reprinted in Bikure haitim 4 (1824): 104 (in Hebrew). 27.  For example, Ismar Schorsch, From Text to Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1994). 28.  Following the logic Jacob Katz invoked regarding the difference between German maskilim and many of their commandment-shirking predecessors. See, for example, Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770– 1870 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 28 – 41, esp. 34 –35. 29.  Cf. Marcus Moseley, Being For Myself Alone: Origins of Jewish Autobiography (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 13 passim.

263

Selected Bibliography

Note: I have included here most works cited throughout the book but have excluded some mentioned just once that are not of central significance for the discussions and topics at hand. Where Hebrew or Yiddish titles have been transliterated, no note has been made of their original language. When an English title page exists or translation could be offered without unduly obscuring the book referred to, that title has been used instead, the original language noted in parentheses. In listing manuscripts, I have, for the convenience of scholars who may wish to consult materials cited, listed the microfilm number used by the Institute for Microfilmed Manuscripts in Jerusalem, where I, like many others, consulted most of the manuscripts concerned. Many of the pre–World War II German-language periodicals are now available online at www.compactmemory.de.

Abbreviations CB— Catalog number in Moritz Steinschneider, Catalogus Librorum Hebraeorum in Bibliotheca Bodleiana. 3 vols. (Berlin: Welt, 1931; original edition, 1852 – 1860). Cowley—A. E. Cowley, Catalogue of the Hebrew Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library (Oxford: Clarendon, 1886 –1906). Opp.— Oppenheimer collection, housed in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

Manuscripts Cincinnati, Hebrew Union College (HUC) Ms. 453 (Jerusalem film no. 18988). Synagogue kuntres, Prague, 1739. Frankfurt, Stadt und Universität Bibliothek Heb. oct. 37 (Jerusalem film no. 4245). Megillas Shmuel. New York, Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTS)

266

Selected Bibliography Ms. 3806 (Jerusalem film no. 29611). H ̣  anokh Altschul, Megillat hakela′im, 1713. Mic. 3849 (Jerusalem film no. 29654). Anonymous chronicle from Prague, ca. 1615. New York, M. Lehmann NL 140 (Jerusalem film no. 72961). Megillat hakela′im, 19th century. Oxford, Bodleian Library Mich. 447 (Jerusalem film no. 21924). David Oppenheim, Tehillah ledavid (autograph), 18th century. Opp. 711, fol. 1703 (Jerusalem film no. 20492). Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller, Megillat eivah (in Yiddish), 18th century. Opp. 148 (Jerusalem film no. 22440). Issachar Ber Perlhefter and Beila Perlhefter, Sefer be′er sheva (in Yiddish), 17th century. Prague, Jewish Museum in Prague (JMP) Gravestone inscriptions, Old Jewish Cemetery of Prague. Inventory number 32.676. List of ceremonial objects, Altneuschul, 19th century. Unnumbered manuscript. Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People (CAHJP) film no. HM/2 4024. Pinkas Synagogue pinkas, 1601–1845. Ms. 67 (Jerusalem film no. 46968 ). Klausen Synagogue, 18th century. Ms. 73 (Jerusalem film no. 46977). Maisel Synagogue, 1813. Ms. 74 (Jerusalem film no. 46978). Pinkas Synagogue, 1822. Ms. 78 (Jerusalem film no. 46956). Klausen Synagogue, 1824. Ms. 82 (Jerusalem film no. 46970). Pinkas Synagogue, 1801. Ms. 83 (Jerusalem film no. 46971). Maisel Synagogue, late 18th–19th centuries. Ms. 89 (Jerusalem film no. 46974). High Synagogue, ca. 1690 –1705. Ms. 113 (Jerusalem film no. 46490). Altneuschul, late 15th–18th centuries. Ms. 114 (Jerusalem film no. 46491). Altschul, 19th century. Ms. 157 (Jerusalem film no. 46529). Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller, Megillat eivah (in Yiddish). Ms. 217 (Jerusalem film no. 46617). Altneuschul, 18th–19th centuries. Ms. 251 (Jerusalem film no. 46616). Family Megillah of the Yampels-Segal Family, 1721. Ms. 254 (Jerusalem film no. 46484). H ̣  anokh Altschul, Megillat hakela′im, 18th century. Ms. 255 (Jerusalem film no. 46482). Joshua Edeles / Maharam ben Samuel Basch Edeles, Megillah, 1833. Ms. 263 (Jerusalem film no. 46483). Joseph Tein, Megillat hakela′im (in Yiddish), 1840. Ms. 287 (Jerusalem film no. 46402). List of plague victims, Prague, 1679 –1680.

Selected Bibliography Ms. 354 (Jerusalem film no. 46957). Altneuschul (?), 18th–19th centuries. Ms. 422 (Jerusalem film no. 46502). Pinkas of the Prague burial society, 1702 – ca. 1858. Private Collection (anonymous) Institute for Microfilmed Manuscripts at the Jewish National and University Library, PH 2828. Mainz (“Nürnberger”) memorbuch.

Printed Primary Sources Abarbanel, Isaac. Commentary on the Former Prophets. Jerusalem, 1955. Abrahams, Beth-Zion, trans. and ed. The Life of Glückel of Hameln, 1646 – 1724, Written by Herself. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2010. Altschul, H ̣  anokh. “Megillat purei hakela′im.” In Jubelschrift zum siebzigsten Geburtstage des Prof. Dr. H. Graetz, edited by Abraham Zvi Kisch, Hebrew section, 48 –52. Breslau: Schottlaender, 1887. Altschul, Moses Henochs. Moses Henochs Altschul-Jeruschalmi “Brantspigel”: Transkribiert und ediert nach der Erstausgabe Krakau 1596. Edited by Sigrid Riedel. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1993. Azikri, Eleazar. Sefer ḥ aredim. Jerusalem, 1981. Bacharach, Jair H ̣  ayyim. She′elot uteshuvot ḥ avvot Ya′ir. Translated by Eliezer Diamond. In Jewish Texts on the Visual Arts, edited by Vivian B. Mann, 61–63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Bernfeld, Shimon, ed. The Book of Tears: The Occurrences of Decrees, Persecutions and Destructions (in Hebrew). 3 vols. Berlin: Eshkol, 1923 –1926. Boksenboim, Yaakov, ed. Iggerot beit Karmi. Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 1983. Bondy, Gottlieb, and Franz Dworský, eds. Zur Geschichte der Juden in Böhmen, Mähren und Schlesien von 906 bis 1620. 2 vols. Prague: Bondy, 1906. Capsali, Elijah. Seder Eliyahu Zuta. Edited by Aryeh Shmuelevits, Shlomo Simonsohn, and Meir Benayahu. 3 vols. Jerusalem: Mechon Ben-Zvi, 1975 –1983. Danzig, Abraham, H ̣  ayyei Adam. Vilna, 1872. David, Abraham, ed. A Hebrew Chronicle from Prague, c. 1615. Translated by Leon J. Weinberger with Dena Ordan. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993. Originally published in Hebrew as David, Abraham, ed. A Hebrew Chronicle from Prague from the Early Seventeenth Century. Jerusalem: Merkaz Dinur, 1984. Davidson, Israel, ed. Thesaurus of Medieval Hebrew Poetry (in Hebrew). 4 vols. New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1924 –1938; New York: Ktav, 1970. Eilenburg, Issachar Baer. Sefer ẓ eidah laderekh. Prague, 1623; Jerusalem, 1998. Emden, Jacob. Megillat sefer. Edited by David Kahana. Warsaw, 1896.

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Selected Bibliography Far loyf den ipesh. Prague, ca. 1714 (Bodleian Library, Opp. 80 645[4]; CB, no. 4007A). Freimann, Aron, ed. “Megillas Shmuel” (in Yiddish; Hebrew introduction). Kovetz al yad 9 (1899): paginated separately. Gans, David. Tzemach David Complete (in Hebrew). Edited by Haim Hominer. Warsaw, 1859; Jerusalem, 1966. ———. Ẓ  emaḥ David. Edited by Mordecai Breuer. Jerusalem: Magnes, 1983. ———. Ẓ  emaḥ David heḥ adash. Frankfurt am Main, 1692. Gaster, Moses, ed. and trans. Ma′aseh Book. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1934, 1981. Gershon ben Eliezer Sg  ″l, Gelillot Eretz-Yisrael, im tirgum le′ivrit beshem Igeret Hakodesh (in Yiddish and Hebrew). Edited by Yitzhak Ben Zvi. Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1953. Ginsburger, Moses, ed. Die Memoiren des Ascher Levy aus Reichshofen im Elsass (1598– 1635) (in Hebrew and German). Berlin: Lamm, 1913. Goldschmidt, Daniel, ed. Maḥ zor leyamim nora′im lefi minhagei benei ashkenaz lekhol anfeihem. 2 vols. Jerusalem: Koren, 1970. Groti, Abraham. Sefer be′er Avraham. Sulzbach, 1708. Grünwald, M. “Älteste Stuatuten der Prager israelitischen BeerdingunsBrüderschaft.” Das jüdische Centralblatt 8 (1889): 39 –57. Haberman, Abraham M. The Book of Decrees of Germany and France (in Hebrew). Jerusalem, 1945. ———. “The Piyyutim and Poems of Rabbi Yom Tov Lipman Heller” (in Hebrew). In Lekhvod Yom Tov, edited by Y. L. Hacohen Maimon, 129 –33. Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1955 –1956. Hahn, Joseph. Yosef Omeẓ . Frankfurt, 1928; Jerusalem, 1965. Halevi, Avraham ben Yosef. Megillat ta′anit. Amsterdam, ca. 1659. H ̣  alfan, Uri Shraga Feibush. Sefer dat eish. Berlin, 1740; Jerusalem, 1992. Hamburger, Benjamin Salomon, and Erich Zimmer, eds. Worms Minhag Book of R. Joseph (Yuzpa) Shammash (in Hebrew). 2 vols. Jerusalem: Makhon Yerushalayim, 1992. Heller, Yom-Tov Lipmann. Megillat eivah. Brooklyn, NY: Ehrenreich, 1991. ———. Megillat eivah. Edited by J. Wreschner. Jerusalem, 1999. ———. “The Memoirs of the Tosfes Yontef: A Seventeenth-Century Yiddish Manuscript of Megiles eivah” (in Yiddish). Edited by Max Erik. Arkhiv far yiddisher shprakhvinshaft, literatur-forshung un etnologie (1926 –1933): 1:179 –217. ———. Seliḥ ot al gezeirot ukreina. Prague, ca. 1652. ———. Seliḥ ot for 14 H ̣  eshvan (in Hebrew). Prague, ca. 1621 (Jewish Theological Seminary rare books shelf number 1760:12). Heller, Yom-Tov Lipmann, and Ephraim Luntschitz. Seliḥ ot. Prague, ca. 1621 (Bodleian Library, Opp. 80 988[2]; CB, no. 2945; Cowley, p. 188).

Selected Bibliography Herain, Jan. “Iventárˇ mobilií Maislovské Školy.” Kalendárˇ ˇc esko-židovský 33 (1913 –1914): 165 –72. Hock, Simon, and David Kaufmann, eds. Mishpeḥ ot kehilat kodesh Prag: ‘al-pi matsevotehen [Families of the Holy Community of Prague, According to Their Gravestones] (in Hebrew; German introduction). Pressburg: Alkalai, 1897. Horowitz, Beila, and Rachel Rausnitz. Ayn sheyn mayseh. Prague, n.d. (Bodleian Library, Opp. 80 796[7]). Horowitz, Isaiah. Shenei luḥ ot habrit. Haifa, 1992. Hoschmann, Leibl / Abraham ben Eliah Broda. “A Prague Family Megillah from the Year 1732” (in Yiddish). In Wachstein-Bukh: A Collection of Remembrances in Honor of Dr. Bernhard Wachstein, 1868– 1935, edited by S. Friedland, 69 –76. Vilna: YIVO, 1939. Hughes, Charles, ed. Shakespeare’s Europe: Unpublished Chapters of Fynes Moryson’s Itinerary. 2nd ed. New York: Blom, 1967. Jaffe, Mordecai. Levush malkhut, levush hatekheilet im peirush Eliyahu zuta. Prague, 1689. ———. Levush malkhut, levush hatekheilet ulevush haḥ or im peirush Eliyahu zuta. Prague, 1701. ———. Sifrei halevushim. 7 vols. Jerusalem, 2000. Jakobovits, Tobias. “Die Brandkatastrophe in Nachod und die Austreibung der Juden aus Böhmisch-Skalitz (1663 –1705).” Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für ˇ echoslovakischen Republik 9 (1938): 271–305. Geschichte der Juden in der C ———. “Pražská rodinná megillah z r. 1732.” Veˇstník žikovské obce nábožkenské v Praze 4 (February 1937): 19 –20. Jeiteles, Moses Wolf. Zikharon leyom aḥ aron. Prague, 1828. Joseph (Jossel) of Rosheim. Historical Writings (in Hebrew). Edited by Chava Fraenkel-Goldschmidt. Jerusalem: Magnes, 1996. English translation published as Fraenkel-Goldschmidt, ed. The Historical Writings of Joseph of Rosheim: Leader of Jewry in Early Modern Germany. Edited by Adam Shear. Translated by Naomi Schendowich. Leiden: Brill, 2006. Judah Leib ben Joshua, Milḥ ama beshalom. Bikure haitim 4 (1824): 103 –30. ———. Milḥ ama beshalom (in Hebrew and Latin). In Johann Christoph Wagenseil, Exercitationes. Sex varii argumenti, 99 –159 (exercitatio tertia). Altdorf, 1697. ———. Sefer Milḥ ama beshalom. Prague, ca. 1650 (Bodleian Library, Opp. 80 87[2]; CB, no. 5730; Cowley, p. 362). Judah Loew ben Beẓ alel (Maharal). Sefer be′er hagolah. Tel Aviv: Pardes, 1955. Kahane, Yiẓ ḥ ak Ze′ev. “Takanot of the H ̣  evra Kadisha of Nikolsburg” (in Hebrew). Sinai 17 (Summer 1945): 182 –93. Katz, Berl. Ipush lid fun prag. Prague, 1714 (Bodleian Library, Opp. 80 643[4]; CB, nos. 3684, 5278[1]; Cowley, pp. 285, 465 (where it is incorrectly attributed to Moses Katznellenbogen).

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Selected Bibliography Katzenellinbogen, Pinchas [sic]. Jesh Manchilin. Edited by Yitzchok Dov Feld. Jerusalem: Mekhon Hatam Sofer, 1986. Kaufmann, David. Die Erstürmung Ofens und ihre Vorgeschichte, nach dem Berichte Isak Schulhofs (1650– 1732). Trier: Mayer, 1895. Kisch, Alexander. “Das Testament Mardochai Meysels.” Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums 37 (1893): 25 – 40, 82 –91, 131– 46. Kisch, Guido. “Die Megillat Eba in Seligmann Kisch’s Übersetzung.” Jahrbuch ˇ echoslovakischen Republik 1 der Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Juden in der C (1929): 426 –34. Kybalová, Ludmila, Eva Kosácˇková, and Alexandr Putík, eds. Textiles from Bohemian and Moravian Synagogues from the Collections of the Jewish Museum in Prague. Prague: Jewish Museum in Prague, 2003. Landau, Alfred, and Bernhard Wachstein, eds. Jüdische Privatbriefe aus dem Jahre 1619. Vienna: Braumüller, 1911. Levie, Abraham. Travels among Jews and Gentiles: Abraham Levie’s Travelogue Amsterdam 1764 (in Yiddish). Edited by Shlomo Berger. Leiden: Brill, 2002. Lieben, Koppelman, ed. Gal-Ed: Grabsteininschriften des prager ihr. alten Friedhofs (in German and Hebrew). Prague: Landau, 1856. Lieben, Salomon Hugo. “Die Prager Brandkatastrophen von 1689 und 1754.” Jahrbuch der Jüdisch-Literarischen Gesellschaft 18 (1926 –1927): 175 –93. Luntschitz, Ephraim. Sefer siftei da′at, Sefer oraḥ  leḥ ayyim. Edited by Binyamin Zeilingold (reprinted together with a biography of Luntschitz by the editor). St Paul, MN: Adath Israel Community Services, 1987. ———. Seliḥ ot leyom bet adar. Prague, 1613 (Jewish Theological Seminary rare books shelf number 1760:9). ———. Seliḥ ot leyom bet adar. In Seliḥ ot. Prague, 1618 (Bodleian Library, Opp. 40 1222[3]; CB, no. 2849; Cowley, p. 189). Ma′aneh lashon (Sefer ma′aneh lashon). Amsterdam, 1677–1678. “Ma′aseh Nora Me′ir Prag.” In Maẓ evat kodesh, edited by Gabriel Souchatow (not paginated). Lemberg: Schrenzel, 1863. Maḥ zor mekol Hashanah kesidra keminhag ashkenaz velo′az. Prague, 1613. Mann, Vivian B., ed. Jewish Texts on the Visual Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Marcus, Jacob R. “The Triesch Hebra Kaddisha, 1687–1828.” Hebrew Union College Annual 19 (1945 –1946): 169 –204. Marx, Alexander. “Seventeenth-Century Autobiography: A Picture of Jewish Life in Bohemia and Moravia: From a Manuscript in the Jewish Theological Seminary.” Jewish Quarterly Review, n.s., 8 (1918): 269 –304. “Megillas Shmuel” (in Yiddish; Hebrew introduction). Edited by Aron Freimann (paginated separately). Kovetz al yad 9 (1899). “Megillath Samuel” (in Yiddish). Edited by Salomon Hugo Lieben. Jahrbuch der ˇ echoslovakischen Republik 9 Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Juden in der C (1938): 307– 42.

Selected Bibliography “Megillat Missraim, or the Scroll of the Egyptian Purim.” Edited by G. Margoliouth. Jewish Quarterly Review, o.s., 8 (1896): 274 –88. “Megillat Miẓ rayim.” Edited by Zvi Malachi. Studies in Medieval Hebrew Literature 1 (1971): 54 –60. “Megillat Rabbi Meir” (in Hebrew). Koveẓ  al yad 10 (1903): 1–16 (Bodleian Library, Opp. 40 1406). Megillat Ta′anit: Versions, Interpretation, History, with a Critical Edition (in Hebrew). Edited by Vered Noam. Jerusalem: Yad Ben Zvi, 2003. Möllin, Jacob. The Book of Maharil: Customs by Rabbi Yaacov Mulin (in Hebrew). Edited by Shlomo J. Spitzer. Jerusalem, 1989. Mortimer, Geoff. Eyewitness Accounts of the Thirty Years’ War, 1618– 1648. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Muneles, Otto, ed. Epitaphs from the Ancient Jewish Cemetery of Prague (in Hebrew). Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1988. Muneles, Otto, and Milada Vilímková. Stary židovsky hrˇbitov v Praze. Prague: Státní Pedagogické Nakladatelství [State Jewish Museum in Prague], 1955. Oppenheim, David. She′elot uteshuvot nish′al David. 2 vols. Edited by Yitzhak Dov Feld. Jerusalem: Mekhon H ̣  atam Sofer, 1972 –1975. Perles, Moses Meir ben Eleazar. Megillat sefer. Prague, 1710. ———. Megillat yuḥ asin. Warsaw, 1864. ———. Sefer megillat yuḥ asin. In Moses Katz, Sefer Matteh Moshe. Zolkiew, 1745. Perlhefter, Baer, and Bella Perlhefter. “Beer Sheva” by Beer and Bella Perlhefter: An Edition of a Seventeenth Century Yiddish Encyclopedia. Edited by Nathaniel Riemer and Sigrid Senkbeil. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2011. Porges, Moses. Darkhei ẓ ion (in Yiddish). Frankfurt am Main (?), 1650. ———. Darkhei ẓ ion (in Hebrew translation). Trans. Y. D. Wilhelm. In Travel Stories of the Land of Israel by Jewish Immigrants (in Hebrew), edited by Avraham Yaari, 267–304, 770 –71. Tel Aviv: Gazit, 1946. Processus Inquisitorius, Welcher in der köngl. Böhm. Residenz-Stadt Prag von dem hochlöbl. köngl. Appelationstribunal als einem / im Erb-Königreich Böheimb / . . . im Jahr 1694. wider bende Prager-Juden Lazar Abeles und Löbl Kurzhandl / wegen des / ex odio Christianae Fidei, von ihnen Juden / ermordeten zwölffjährigen Jüdischen Knabens / Simon Abeles . . . Prague, 1696. Rossi, Azariah de’. The Light of the Eyes. Translated by Joanna Weinberg. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001. Salfeld, Siegmund. Das Martyrologium des Nürnberger Memorbuches. Vol. 3 of Quellen zur Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland. Berlin: Leonhard Simion, 1898. Salfeld, Siegmund, and Moritz Stern. Die israelitische Bevölkerung der deutschen Städte. III. Nürnberg im Mittelalter, 95 –205. Kiel: Fiencke, 1894 –1896. Schmelkes, Meir ben Pereẓ . H ̣  idushim nifla′im (in Yiddish). Prague, 1684 (Bodleian Library, Opp. 80 1103[23]; CB 6327.1).

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Selected Bibliography Schwarz, Leo W., ed. Memoirs of My People: Jewish Self-Portraits from the 11th to the 20th Centuries. New York: Schocken, 1943, 1967. Das Schwedesch lid: Ein westjiddischer Bericht über Ereignisse in Prag im Jahre 1648 (in Yiddish; German transcription). Edited by Simon Neuberg. Hamburg: Buske, 2000. Seder hakinot letisha b′av. Edited by Daniel Goldschmidt. Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1968. Seliḥ os in taytshen. Translated by Jacob ben Elijah of Teplitz. Prague, 1602. Seliḥ ot keminhag pihem. Prague, 1784. Seliḥ ot keseder beit hakenesset hayeshanah. Prague, 1605. Seliḥ ot lekol hashanah. Frankfurt am Main, 1763. Shvedish lid. Prague, 1649 (Bodleian Library, Opp. 80 635; CB, no. 3660; Cowley, p. 666). Siddur umaḥ zor kol-bo. 4 vols. Vilna: Re′em, 1935. Sirkes, Joel. She′elot uteshuvot habaḥ hayeshanot. Frankfurt am Main, 1697. Sofer, Moses. Shu ″t H ̣  atam sofer. Vienna, 1889; Pietrikov, 1903. Souchatow, Gabriel. Maẓ evat kodesh. Lemberg: Schrenzel, 1863. Soygers, David ben Shmaya. Groyse sreyfa bekak Frankfurt. Halle, 1711–1712 (Bodleian Library, Opp. 80 649; CB, no. 4845; Cowley, p. 154). Tein, Joseph. “Die Jiddische Version der Familienmegilla ‘Vorhangpurim’ aus dem Jahre 1623.” Translated and edited by Vladimír Sadek. Judaica Bohemiae 4 (1968): 73 –78. Teller, Issachar Be′er. Be′er mayim ḥ ayyim (in Yiddish). Prague, 1655. Tiktiner, Rivkah bat Meir. Meneket Rivkah: A Manual of Wisdom and Piety for Jewish Women by Rivkah bat Meir. Edited by Frauke von Rohden. Translated by Samuel Spinner and Maurice Tszorf. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2009. ———. Simḥ as Torah lid leRivkah Tiktiner. Edited by Yael Levine. Jerusalem: privately printed, 2004. Ulmer, Rivka, ed. Turmoil, Trauma and Triumph: The Fettmilch Uprising in Frankfurt am Main (1612– 1616) According to Megillas Vintz. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2001. Wachstein, Bernhard. Die Inschriften des alten Judenfriedhofs in Wien. Vol. 1. Vienna: Braumüller, 1912. Wahrmann, Nahum. Sources for the History of the Massacres in 1648– 1649: Prayers and Liturgical Poems for the Twentieth of Sivan (in Hebrew). Jerusalem: Bamberger et Vahrman, 1949. Weinberg, M. Die Memorbücher der jüdischer Gemeinden in Bayern. Frankfurt: Neumann, 1937. Weinryb, Bernard D. “From the Hebrew Correspondence of Johann Christian Wagenseil (17th Century Hebrew Correspondence between Jews and NonJews)” (in Hebrew; Yiddish, English introduction). Jewish Review 2 (1944): 109 –37, 211–14.

Selected Bibliography Wolkan, Rudolf. Das deutsche Kirchenlied der böhmischen Brüder im XVI. Jahrhundert. Hildesheim: Olms, 1968. ———, ed. Deutsche Lieder auf den Winterkönig. Prague: Koch, 1898. Yeḥ iel Michael ben Abraham Zalman. Sreyfe lid fun prag. Prague, 1689 (Bodleian Library, Opp. 80 683; CB, no. 3698; Cowley, p. 313). Z ̣ vi Hirsch ben Joseph Miklas. Al sereifat k ″k Náchod. Prague, 1663 (Bodleian Library, Opp. 80 1103[26]; CB, nos. 3697, 7427; Cowley, p. 719).

Secondary Sources Agnew, Hugh. The Czechs and the Lands of the Bohemian Crown. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, Stanford University, 2004. Altschuler, David, ed. The Precious Legacy: Judaic Treasures from the Czechoslovak State Collection. New York: Summit Books, 1983. Amelang, James S. The Flight of Icarus: Artisan Autobiography in Early Modern Europe. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Aptroot, Marion. “‘I Know This Book of Mine Will Cause Offense . . .’: A Yiddish Adaptation of Boccaccio’s Decameron (Amsterdam 1710).” Zutot 3 (2003): 152 –59. Ariès, Philippe. The Hour of Our Death. Translated by Helen Weaver. New York: Knopf, 1981. Assmann, Jan. Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen. Munich: Beck, 1992. Bar-Levav, Avriel. “When I Was Alive: Jewish Ethical Wills as Ego-Documents.” In Egodocuments and History: Autobiographical Writing in Its Social Context since the Middle Ages, edited by Rudolf Dekker, 45 –59. Hilversum: Verloren, 2002. Ben-Sasson, Haim Hillel. “The Reformation in Contemporary Jewish Eyes.” Proceedings of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities 4, no. 12 (1971): 239 –326. ———. “Towards Trends in Medieval Jewish Chronology and Its Problems” (in Hebrew). In Continuity and Variety, edited by Joseph R. Hacker, 379 – 401. Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1984. ———. “Wealth and Poverty in the Teaching of the Preacher Reb Ephraim of Lenczyca” (in Hebrew). Zion 19 (1954): 142 –66. Berger, Shlomo. “An Invitation to Buy and Read: Paratexts of Yiddish Books in Amsterdam, 1650 –1800.” Book History 7 (2004): 31–61. Bireley, Robert. Religion and Politics in the Age of the Counterreformation: Emperor Ferdinand II, William Lamormaini, S.J., and the Formation of Imperial Policy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981. Bonfil, Robert, ed. ‘Azariah de’ Rossi: Selected Chapters from Sefer Me′or ‘Einayim and Matsref la-Kessef (in Hebrew). Jerusalem: Bialik, 1991.

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Selected Bibliography ———. “How Golden Was the Age of the Renaissance in Jewish Historiography.” In Essays in Jewish Historiography, edited by Ada Rapoport-Albert, 78 –102. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991. Volume originally published as History and Theory 27 (1988). ———. “Jewish Attitudes towards History and Historical Writing in Pre-Modern Times.” Jewish History 11 (1997): 7– 40. ———. “Some Reflections on the Place of Azariah de’ Rossi’s Meor Enayim in the Cultural Milieu of Italian Renaissance Jewry.” In Jewish Thought in the Sixteenth Century, edited by Bernard Dov Cooperman, 23 – 48. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983. Braunová, Andrea, and Daniel Polakovicˇ. “Additions to the Catalogue of Prague Hebrew Prints from the Collection of the Jewish Museum in Prague.” Judaica Bohemiae 33 (1997): 109 –31. Breuer, Mordecai. “Modernism and Traditionalism in Sixteenth-Century Jewish Historiography: A Study of David Gans’ Tzemaḥ David.” In Jewish Thought in the Sixteenth Century, edited by Bernard Dov Cooperman, 49 –88. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983. Carlebach, Elisheva. The Death of Simon Abeles: Jewish-Christian Tension in Seventeenth-Century Prague (New York: Center for Jewish Studies, Queens College, CUNY, 2001). ———. Divided Souls: Converts from Judaism in Germany, 1500– 1750. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001. ———. The Pursuit of Heresy: Rabbi Moses Hagiz and the Sabbatian Controversies. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Chajes, Jeffrey Howard. “Accounting for the Self: Preliminary Generic-Historical Reflections on Early Modern Jewish Egodocuments.” Jewish Quarterly Review 95, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 1–15. Chazan, Robert. “The Timebound and the Timeless: Medieval Jewish Narration of Events.” History and Memory 6 (1994): 5 –34. Cholcman, Tamar. “An Historian Speaks Art, an Artist Speaks History: On the Essence of Ephemeric Art” (in Hebrew). In Image and Sound: Art, Music and History, edited by Richard I. Cohen, 197–224. Jerusalem: Shazar, 2007. Cohen, Richard I. Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Cohen, Richard I., and Vivian B. Mann. “Melding Worlds: Court Jews and the Arts of the Baroque.” In From Court Jews to the Rothschilds: Art, Patronage, and Power 1600– 1800, edited by Vivian B. Mann and Richard I. Cohen, 97–123. New York: Prestel, 1996. Colvin, Howard. Architecture and the After-Life. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991. Cressy, David. Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989; Phoenix Mill, UK: Sutton, 2004.

Selected Bibliography David, Zdeneˇk V. “Confessional Accommodation in Early Modern Bohemia: Shifting Relations between Catholics and Utraquists.” In Conciliation and Confession: The Struggle for Unity in the Age of Reform, 1415– 1648, edited by Howard P. Louthan and Randall C. Zachman, 172 –98. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004. ———.“Hájek, Dubravius and the Jews: A Contrast in Sixteenth-Century Czech Historiography.” Sixteenth Century Journal 27 (1996): 997–1013. Davis, Joseph M. “The Reception of the ‘Shulḥ an ‘Arukh’ and the Formation of Ashkenazic Jewish Identity.” AJS Review 26 (2002): 251–76. ———. Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller: Portrait of a Seventeenth-Century Rabbi. Oxford: Littman Library, 2004. Davis, Natalie Zemon. “Fame and Secrecy: Leon Modena’s Life as an Early Modern Autobiography.” In The Autobiography of a Seventeenth-Century Venetian Rabbi: Leon Modena’s Life of Judah, edited by Mark R. Cohen, 50 –70. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988. ———. “Ghosts, Kin and Progeny: Some Features of Family Life in Early Modern France.” Daedalus 106 (1977): 87–114. Degani, Ben-Zion. “The Structure of World History and the Redemption of Israel in R. David Gans’ Ẓ  emaḥ David” (in Hebrew). Zion 45 (1980): 173 –200. Dekker, Rudolf, ed. Egodocuments and History: Autobiographical Writing in Its Social Context since the Middle Ages. Hilversum: Verloren, 2002. Demetz, Peter. Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City. New York: Hill & Wang, 1997. Deutsch, Aladár. Die Zigeiner-, Grossenhof- und Neusynagoge in Prag: Denkschrift. Prague: Kuh, 1907. Doleželová, Jana. “Thorschilde aus den Werkstätten der prager Silberschmeide in den Sammlungen des staatlichen jüdischen Museums.” Judaica Bohemiae 19 (1983): 22 –34. Ducreux, Marie-Elizabeth. “Reading unto Death: Books and Readers in EighteenthCentury Bohemia.” In The Culture of Print: Power and the Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe, edited by Roger Chartier, translated by Lydia G. Cochrane, 191–229. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989. Ducreux, Marie-Elizabeth, and Martin Svatoš, eds. Libri Prohibiti: La censure dans l’espace habsbourgeois 1650– 1850. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2005. Efron, Noah J. “Irenism and Natural Philosophy in Rudolfine Prague: The Case of David Gans.” Science in Context 10 (1997): 627– 49. Einbinder, Susan. A Beautiful Death: Jewish Poetry and Martyrdom in Medieval France. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. ———. No Place of Rest: Jewish Literature, Expulsion and the Memory of Medieval France. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. Elbogen, Ismar. Jewish Liturgy: A Comprehensive History. Translated by Raymond P. Scheindlin. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1993.

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Selected Bibliography Elqayam, Avraham. “Leidato hasheniyah shel hamashiaḥ .” Kabbalah 1 (1996): 85 –166. Erik, Max. The History of Yiddish Literature from Its Beginnings until the Haskalah Period (in Yiddish). Warsaw: Kultur-lige, 1928; New York: Shulsinger, 1979. Escher, Georg. “Prager Femmes Fatales—Stadt, Geschlecht, Identität.” Kakanien Revisited (July 6, 2004): 1–8. Evans, R. J. W. The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy 1550– 1700: An Interpretation. Oxford: Clarendon, 1979. ———. Rudolf II and His World: A Study in Intellectual History, 1576 – 1612. London: Thames & Hudson, 1997. Fishman, David E. “Rabbi Moshe Isserles and the Study of Science among Polish Rabbis.” Science in Context 10, no. 4 (1997): 571–88. Fishof, Iris. From the Secular to the Sacred: Everyday Objects in Jewish Ritual Use. Catalog no. 261. Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1985. Freehof, Solomon B. “Hazkarath Neshamoth.” Hebrew Union College Annual 36 (1965): 179 –89. Freimann, Aron. “Die hebräischen Druckereien in Prag.” Soncino-Blätter 3, no. 2 – 4 (1929 –1930): 113 –14. Friedrichs, Christopher R. “Politics or Pogrom? The Fettmilch Uprising in German and Jewish History.” Central European History 19 (1986): 186 –228. Fucˇiková, Eliška, James M. Bradburne, Beket Bukovinská, Jaroslava Hausenblasová, Lumomír Konecˇný, Ivan Muchka, and Michal Sronek, eds. Rudolf II and Prague: The Court and the City. Prague: Prague Castle Administration; London: Thames & Hudson, 1997. Funkenstein, Amos. Perceptions of Jewish History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Geary, Patrick J. Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994. ———. Phantoms of Remembrance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. Genette, Gérard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Giustino, Cathleen M. Tearing Down Prague’s Jewish Town: Ghetto Clearance and the Legacy of Middle-Class Ethnic Politics around 1900. Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 2003. Gladstein, Ruth. See Kestenberg-Gladstein, Ruth. Goldberg, Sylvie Anne. Crossing the Jabbok: Illness and Death in Ashkenazi Judaism in Sixteenth- through Nineteenth-Century Prague. Translated by Carol Cosman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Goldish, Matt. “Jews and Habsburgs in Prague and Regensburg: On the Cultural and Political Significance of Solomon Molkho’s Relics.” In Perspectives on Jewish Culture in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of David B.

Selected Bibliography Ruderman, edited by Richard I. Cohen, Natalie B. Dohrmann, Adam Shear, and Elchanan Reiner. Cincinnati: HUC Press, forthcoming. Gordon, Bruce, and Peter Marshall, eds. The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Graboïs, Arye. “The Legendary Figure of Charlemagne” (in Hebrew). Tarbiz 36 (1966): 22 –58. Grafton, Anthony. Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450– 1800. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. ———. Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship. Vol. 2: Historical Chronology. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993. Graus, František. Lebendige Vergangenheit: Überlieferung im Mittelalter und in den Vorstellungen vom Mittelalter. Cologne: Böhlau, 1975. ———. Struktur und Geschichte: Drei Volksaufstände im mittelalterlichen Prag. Sigmaringen, Germany: Thorbecke, 1971. Greenblatt, Rachel, L. “‘And He Wrote Many Books’: Print, Remembrance, Autobiographical Writing and the Maharal of Prague” (in Hebrew). In Maharal of Prague: Four Hundred Years since His Death, edited by Elchanan Reiner. Jerusalem: Shazar, forthcoming. ———. “A Community’s Memory: Jewish Views of Past and Present in Early Modern Prague.” Ph.D. diss., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2006. ———. “‘Memory’ and the Relationship between the Living and the Dead in the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague: A Reading of Evidence in Stone.” Master’s thesis, Hebrew University of Jerusalem 1998. ———. “Prague.” In Cambridge Dictionary of Jewish Religion, History, and Culture, edited by Judith R. Baskin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. ———. “The Shapes of Memory: Evidence in Stone from the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague.” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 47 (2002): 43 –67. Haberman, Abraham, ed. Jewish Women as Printers, Arrangers, Publishers, and Authors’ Supporters (in Hebrew). Berlin: Mas, 1933. Halbwachs, Maurice. The Collective Memory. Translated by Francis J. Ditter and Vida Yazdi Ditter. New York: Harper & Row, 1950. ———. On Collective Memory. Translated by Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. ———. La topographie légendaire des évangiles. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1941. Hamácˇková, Vlastimila. “The Donation of Synagogue Textiles as Reflected in Epitaphs at the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague.” In Textiles from Bohemian and Moravian Synagogues from the Collections of the Jewish Museum in Prague, edited by Ludmila Kybalová, Eva Kosácˇková, and Alexandr Putík, 108 –15. Prague: Jewish Museum in Prague, 2003. Harkins, William E., trans. and ed. Czech Prose: An Anthology. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1983.

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Selected Bibliography Haverkamp, Eva, ed. Hebräische Berichte über die Judenverfolgungen während des Ersten Kreuzzugs (in Hebrew and German, German and Hebrew introductions). Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 2005. Herˇman, Jan. Der alte jüdische Friedhof in Prag. Translated by Bedrˇich Král. Prague: State Jewish Museum in Prague, 1966. Herrmann, Ignát, Josef Teige, and Zikmund Winter. Das Prager Ghetto. Prague: Verlagsbuchhandlung der Böhm / Graphischen Gesellschaft “Unie,” 1903. Horowitz, Elliott. Reckless Rites: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Horowitz, H. “Die Familie Horowitz in Prag im 16. Jahrhundert.” Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden in der Tschechoslowakei 2, no. 2 (December 1931): 89 –105; 2, no. 3 (March 1932): 225 –28; 3, no. 2 (February 1933): 127–31. Hutton, Patrick H. History as an Art of Memory. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1993. Israel, Jonathan I. European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550– 1750. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon, 1985. Jakobovits, Tobias. “Die Erlebnisse des Oberrabiners Simon Spira-Wedeles in Prag (1640 –1679).” Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Juden in der ˇ echoslovakischen Republik 4 (1932): 253 –96. C ———. “Das Prager und Böhmische Landesrabbinat Ende des siebzehnten und Anfang des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts.” Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für ˇ echoslovakischen Republik 5 (1933): 79 –136. Geschichte der Juden in der C Jancke, Gabriele. Autobiographie als soziale Praxis: Beziehungskonzepte in Selbstzeugnissen des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts im deutschsprachigen Raum. Cologne: Böhlau, 2002. Juhasz, Esther. “Textiles for the Home and Synagogue.” In Sephardi Jews in the Ottoman Empire: Aspects of Material Culture, edited by Esther Juhasz, 64 –119. Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1990. Jütte, Robert. “Der Frankfurter Fettmilch-Aufstand und die Judenverfolung von 1614 in der kommunalen Erinnerungskultur.” In Memoria Wege jüdischen Erinnern: Festschrift für Michael Brocke zum 65. Geburtstag, edited by Birgit E. Klein and Christiane E. Müller, 163 –76. Berlin: Metropol, 2005. Kammen, Michael. Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture. New York: Knopf, 1991. Kaplan, Debra. “The Self in Social Context: Asher ha-Levi of Reichshofen’s Sefer Zikhronot.” Jewish Quarterly Review 9, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 210 –36. Kaplan, Yosef. An Alternative Path to Modernity: The Sephardi Diaspora in Western Europe. Leiden: Brill, 2000. Katz, Jacob. Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770– 1870. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973; New York: Schocken, 1973.

Selected Bibliography ———. Tradition and Crisis: Jewish Society at the End of the Middle Ages. Translated by Bernard Dov Cooperman. New York: New York University Press, 1993. Kaufmann, David. “La synagogue de Mardochée Meisel et Jacob Segré.” Révue des études juives 20 –21 (1890): 143 – 45. Kaufmann, Thomas DaCosta. Court, Cloister and City: The Art and Culture of Central Europe, 1450– 1800. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. ———. The School of Prague: Painting at the Court of Rudolf II. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Kestenberg-Gladstein, Ruth (as Ruth Gladstein). “Eschatological Trends in Bohemian Jewry during the Hussite Period.” In Prophecy and Millenarianism: Essays in Honour of Marjorie Reeves, edited by Ann Williams, 239 –56. Harlow, UK: Longman, 1980. ——— (as Ruth Kestenberg). “Hussitentum und Judentum.” Jahrbuch der ˇ echoslovakischen Republik 8 Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Juden in der C (1936): 1–26. ———. “Identifikation der Prager Juden vor und während der Assimilation.” In Die Juden in den böhmischen Ländern: Vorträge der Tagung des Collegium Carolinum in Bad Wiessee vom 27. bis 29. November 1981, edited by F. Seibt, 161–97. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1983. Later published in Geschichten aus dem alten Prag, edited by Peter Demetz, 161–200. Frankfurt: Insel Taschenbuch, 1994. Kestenberg, Ruth. See Kestenberg-Gladstein, Ruth. Kieval, Hillel J. “Jewish Prague, Christian Prague, and the Castle in the City’s ‘Golden Age.’” Jewish Studies Quarterly 18 (2011): 202 –15. ———. Languages of Community: The Jewish Experience in the Czech Lands. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Kisch, Alexander. “Die Prager Judestadt während der Schlacht am weißen Berge.” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums 56, no. 34 (August 19, 1892): 400 – 403. Kisch, Guido. “Die Zensur jüdischer Bücher in Böhmen.” Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft ˇ echoslovakischen Republik 2 (1930): 456 –96. für Geschichte der Juden in der C Klemperer, Gutmann. “The Rabbis of Prague: A History of the Rabbinate of Prague from the Death of Rabbi Loewe b. Bezalel (‘the High Rabbi Loew’) to the Present (1609 –1879).” Historia Judaica 12 (1950): 33 –66, 143 –52; 13 (1951): 55 –82. Klíma, Arnošt. “Inflation in Bohemia in the Early Stage of the 17th Century.” In Proceedings of the Seventh International Economic History Conference, edited by Michael Flinn, 375 –86. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1978. Kracauer, Isidor. Geschichte der Juden in Frankfurt a.M. (1150– 1824). 2 vols. Frankfurt: Kaufmann, 1925 –1927. Krinsky, Carol Herselle. Synagogues of Europe: Architecture, History, Meaning. Cambridge, MA: Architectural History Foundation, 1985.

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Selected Bibliography Krusenstjern, Benigna von. Selbstzeugnisse der Zeit des Dreissigjährigen Krieges: beschreibenes Verzeichnis. Berlin: Akademie, 1997. ———. “Was Sind Selbstzeugnisse? Begriffskritische und quellenkundliche Überlegungen anhand von Beispielen aus dem 17. Jahrhundert.” Historische Anthropologie 2 (1994): 462 –71. Kulka, Otto Dov. “The Historical Background of the National and Educational Teachings of Rabbi Judah Loeb ben Bezalel of Prague: A Suggested New Approach to the Study of Maharal” (in Hebrew; English summary). Zion 50 (1985): 277–320. Kupfer, Ephraim. “Concerning the Cultural Image of German Jewry and Its Rabbis in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries” (in Hebrew). Tarbiz 42 (1972 –1973): 113 – 47. Lévi, Israel. “La commémoration des âmes dan le judaïsme.” Révue des études juives 29 (1894): 43 –60. Lewis, Bernard. History: Remembered, Recovered, Invented. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975. Lieben, Salomon Hugo. “Denkmäler jüdischer Tragödien Böhmens in der Liturgie.” Das Zelt 1 (1924): 241– 43. ———. “Der hebräische Buchdruck in Prag im 16. Jahrhundert.” In Die Juden in Prag. Festgabe der Loge Praga des Ordens B′nai B′rith zum Gedenktage ihres 25jähringen Bestandes, ed. Samuel Steinherz, 88 –106 (Prague: Self-published [by Loge Praga des Ordens B ′nai B ′rith / Independent Order of B ′nai B ′rith, Loge Praga], 1927). Louthan, Howard. Converting Bohemia: Force and Persuasion in the Catholic Reformation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. ———. The Quest for Compromise: Peacemakers in Counter-Reformation Vienna. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Love, Harold. Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993. Lützow, Francis, Count. A History of Bohemian Literature. London: Heinemann, 1899. Maimon, Arye, Mordechai Breuer, and Yacov Guggenheim, eds. Germania Judaica III. Tübingen: Mohr, 1995. Mann, Golo. Wallenstein: Sein Leben. Frankfurt: Fischer, 1971. Mann, Vivian B. “Art and Material Culture of Judaism—Medieval through Modern Times.” In Encyclopaedia of Judaism, edited by Jacob Neusner, Alan J. Avery-Peck, and William Scott Green. Leiden: Brill. Brill Online, http://www.brillonline.nl/public/art-material-culture (accessed June 14, 2009). Marcus, Ivan G. “History, Story and Collective Memory: Narrativity in Early Ashkenazic Culture.” Prooftexts 10 (1990): 365 –88.

Selected Bibliography Michalski, Sergiusz. The Reformation and the Visual Arts: The Protestant Image Question in Western and Eastern Europe. London: Routledge, 1993. Miller, Jaroslav. Urban Societies in East-Central Europe, 1500– 1700. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008. Minty, Mary. “Kiddush Ha-shem in German Christian Eyes in the Middle Ages” (in Hebrew; English summary). Zion 59 (1994): 209 –66. Misch, Georg. Der Autobiographie. 4 vols. Frankfurt: Schulte-Bulmke, 1949 –1969. Moseley, Marcus. Being For Myself Alone: Origins of Jewish Autobiography. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. Motzkin, Gabriel. “Memoirs, Memory and Historical Experience.” Science in Context 7 (1994): 103 –19. Muchka, Ivan. “Die Architektur unter Rudolf II., gezeigt am Beispiel der Prager Burg.” Prag um 1600. Kunst und Kultur am Hofe Rudolfs II [Exhibit. cat.], 85 –93. Freren: Luca, 1988. Neher, André. Jewish Thought and the Scientific Revolution of the Sixteenth Century: David Gans (1541– 1613) and His Times. Translated by David Maisel. Oxford: Littman Library, 1986. Nettl, Paul. Alte jüdische Spielleute und Musiker: Vortrag. Prague: Flesch, 1923. ———. “Alte und neue jüdischer Musiker.” Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für Geschichte ˇ echoslovakischen Republik 1 (1929): 33 –39. der Juden in der C ———. “Bemerkungen zur jüdischen Musik- und Theatergeschichte in Böhmen.” ˇ echoslovakischen Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Juden in der C Republik 2 (1930): 491–96. Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 7–25. Nosek, Bedrˇich. “Katalog mit der Auswahl hebräischer Drucke Prager Provenienz, I. Teil: ‘Drucke der Gesoniden im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert.’” Judaica Bohemiae 10 (1974): 13 – 41. ———. “Katalog mit der Auswahl hebräischer Drucke Prager Provenienz, II. Teil: ‘Die Buchdruckerei der Familie Bak,’” Judaica Bohemiae 11 (1975): 29 –53. ———. “Katalog mit der Auswahl hebräischer Drucke Prager Provenienz, III. Teil: ‘1700 –1799.’” Judaica Bohemiae 13 (1977): 96 –120; 14 (1978): 35 –58. Onians, John. Bearers of Meaning: The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988. Palmitessa, James R. Material Culture and Daily Life in the New City of Prague in the Age of Rudolf II. Krems: Medium Aevum Quotdianum, 1997. ———. “The Prague Uprising of 1611: Property, Politics, and Catholic Renewal in the Early Years of Habsburg Rule.” Central European History 31 (1998): 299 –328. Panofsky, Erwin. Tomb Sculpture: Four Lectures on Its Changing Aspects from Ancient Egypt to Bernini. London: Abrams, 1964.

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Selected Bibliography Parˇík, Arno, Dana Cabanová, and Petr Kliment. Prague Synagogues. Prague: Jewish Museum in Prague, 2000. Parˇík, Arno, and Pavel Štecha. The Jewish Town of Prague. Translated by Gita Zbavitelová and Dušan Zbavitel. Prague: Oswald, 1992. Pavlát, Leo. “The Jewish Museum Once Again.” Judaica Bohemiae 30 –31 (1994 – 1995): 4 –6. Perles, J. “Rabbinische Agada’s in 1001 Nacht: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Wanderung orientlischer Märchen.” Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums 22 (1873): 14 –34, 61–85, 116 –25. Polakovicˇ, Daniel. “Documentation of the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague.” Judaica Bohemiae 43 (2007–2008): 167–92. ———. “Hebrew Manuscript Fragments in the Czech Republic: A Preliminary Report.” In “Genizat Germania”: Hebrew and Aramaic Binding Fragments from Germany in Context, edited by Andreas Lehnardt, 329 –32. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Polišenský, Josef V. The Thirty Years War. Translated by Robert Evans. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. Pollack, Herman. Jewish Folkways in German Lands (1648– 1806): Studies in Aspects of Daily Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971. Pollak, Oskar. “Studien zur Geschichte der Architektur Prags, 1520 –1600.” Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des Allerhoechsten Kaiserhauses 20 (1910): 85 –170. Pomian, Krzysztof. Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500– 1800. Translated by Elizabeth Wiles-Portier. Cambridge: Polity, 1990. Popper, Moritz. “Les juifs de Prague pendant la guerre de trente ans.” Revue des Études Juives 29 (1894): 127– 41. Porta, L. S. “Die erste Nobilisierung eines deutschen Juden—meines Vorfahren Jakob Bassevi von Treuenberg.” Jüdische Familien-Forschung 1 (1924): 12 –15. Prokeš, Jaroslav, and Anton Blaschka. “Der Antisemitismus der Behörden und das Prager Ghetto in nachweißenbergischer Zeit.” Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für ˇ echoslovakischen Republik 1 (1929): 111– 48. Geschichte der Juden in der C Putík, Alexandr. “Fight for Conversion in Kolín nad Labem, Bohemia, in the Year 5426/1666.” Judaica Bohemiae 33 (1997): 4 –32. ———. “The Hebrew Inscription on the Crucifix at Charles Bridge in Prague: The Case of Elias Backoffen and Berl Tabor in the Appellation Court.” Judaica Bohemiae 32 (1997): 26 –103. ———. “New Source for the Trial of Lipmann Heller and the Political Conflict in the Prague Jewish Community, 1629 –1630: Kurtzer Summarischer Wahrhafter Bericht.” Judaica Bohemiae 47 (2012): 57–97. ———. “On the Topography and Demography of the Prague Jewish Town Prior to the Pogrom of 1389.” Judaica Bohemiae 30 –31 (1994 –1995): 7– 46.

Selected Bibliography ———. “The Origin of the Symbols of the Prague Jewish Town: The Banner of the Old-New Synagogue, David’s Shield and the ‘Swedish Hat.’” Judaica Bohemiae 29 (1993): 4 –37. ———, ed. Path of Life: Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, ca. 1525– 1609. Prague: Academia / Jewish Museum in Prague, 2009. ———. “The Prague Jewish Community in the Late 17th and Early 18th Centuries.” Judaica Bohemiae 35 (1999): 4 –140. ———. “Prague Jews and Judah Hasid: A Study on the Social, Political and Religious History of the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries.” Judaica Bohemiae 38 (2002): 72 –105. ———. “Prˇíbeˇh z barokní Prahy: Rabi Moše Mendels, Rabi Lipman Heller a Jakob Baševi.” Židovská rocˇ enka 5764 (2003 –2004): 19 –33. ———. “Ursachen und Folgen des prager ‘Rabbinerumsturzes’ des Jahres 1579. Beitrag zur innenpolitischen Geschichte der prager jüdischen Gemeinde in der zweiten Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts.” Judaica Bohemiae. Supplementum: Individuum und Gemeinde. Juden in Böhmen, Mähren und Schlesien 1520– 1848 (Prague: Jewish Museum in Prague; Brno: Gesellschaft für Geschichte ˇ echischen Republic, 2011): 33 –74; Czech version, 231–64. der Juden in C Putík, Alexandr, and Olga Sixtová. History of the Jews in Bohemia and Moravia from the First Settlements until Emancipation. Exhibition Guide to the Maisel Synagogue. Prague: Jewish Museum in Prague, 2002. Ramon, Orit. “Moses and Mordekhai: An Examination of the Maharal’s Commentary to the Book of Esther” (in Hebrew). Masekhet 6 (2007): 141–52. Reiner, Elchanan. “The Ashkenazi Élite at the Beginning of the Modern Era: Manuscript versus Printed Book.” Polin 10 (1997): 85 –98. ———. “A Biography of an Agent of Culture: Eleazar Altschul of Prague and His Literary Activity.” In Schöpferische Momente des europäischen Judentums in der frühen Neuzeit, edited by Michael Graetz, 229 – 47. Heidelberg: Winter, 2000. ———. “The Nadler Affair: Familial Lineage and hoẓ a′at shem ra in Ashkenazi Culture in the Early Modern Period” (in Hebrew). Presentation at the Annual Conference of the Israel Historical Society, Tel Aviv, July 7, 1993. ———. “Wealth, Social Position and the Study of Torah: The Status of the Kloiz in Eastern European Jewish Society in the Early Modern Period” (in Hebrew). Zion 58 (1993): 287–328. ———. “The yeshivas of Poland and Ashkenaz during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries—Historical Developments” (in Hebrew). In Studies in Honour of Chone Shmeruk, edited by Israel Bartal, Ezra Mendelsohn, and Chava Turniansky, 9 –90. Jerusalem: Shazar, 1993. Riemer, Nathaniel. Zwischen Tradition und Häresie. “Beer Sheva”—Eine Enzyklopädie des jüdischen Wissens der Frühen Neuzeit. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010.

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Selected Bibliography Rokycana, Jaroslav. “Die Häuser des Jakob Bassewi von Treuenberg: Neue Quellenforschung.” Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden in der Tschechos­ lowakei 1 (1931): 253 –66. Rosenfeld, Moshe N. “Der Brandspiegel—An Unknown Edition, and Identification of Its Author” (in Hebrew) Kiryat Sefer 55 (1981): 617–21. Rosman, Moshe. “The Art of Historiography and the Methods of Folklore” (in Hebrew). Zion 65 (2000): 209 –18. ———. How Jewish Is Jewish History? Oxford: Littman Library, 2007. ———. “Innovative Tradition: Jewish Culture in the Polish-Lithuanian Com­ monwealth.” In Cultures of the Jews: A New History, edited by David Biale, 519 –70. New York: Schocken, 2002. Roth, Cecil. “Der Ursprung der Familie Bassevi in Prag und Verona.” Jüdische Familien-Forschung 15 (1928): 58 –60. Roubík, František. “Královští rychtárˇi v pražských a jiných cˇeských meˇstech v letech 1547 až 1783” (in Czech; French summary). Sborník prˇíspeˇvku˚ k deˇjinám hlavního meˇsta Prahy 6 (1930): 265 –355, 422 –24. Rubin, Miri. Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Ruderman, David B. Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. Ryneš, Václav. “L’incendie de la synagogue du Faubourg du château de Prague en 1142.” Judaica Bohemiae 1 (1965): 9 –25. Sadek, Vladimír. “From the Mss. Collections of the State Jewish Museum in Prague (Illuminated Manuscripts).” Judaica Bohemiae 10 (1974): 105 –12. ———. “Grabsteine mit Figuralmotiven auf dem alten jüdischen Friedhof in Prag.” Judaica Bohemiae 14 (1978): 75 –88. ———. “Die Prager Judenstadt zur Zeit der rudolfischen Renaissance.” Prag um 1600. Kunst und Kultur am Hofe Rudolfs II [Exhibit. cat.], 597–98. Freren: Luca, 1988. Sadek, Vladimír, and Jirˇina Šedinová. “From the Mss. Collection of the State Jewish Museum in Prague (Manuscripts of Liturgical Contents).” Judaica Bohemiae 13 (1977): 74 –95. ———. “The Jewish Cemetery at Mladá Boleslav.” Judaica Bohemiae 23 (1982): 50 –54. Schnee, Heinrich. Die Hoffinanz und der moderne Staat: Geschichte und System der Hoffaktoren an deutschen Fürstenhöfen im Zeitalter des Absolutismus. 3 vols. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1952 –1963. Scholem, Gershom. “Perakim apokoliptim umeshiḥ i′im al R. Mordekhai me′eizenshtat.” In Meḥ ḳere Shabta′ut, edited by Yehudah Liebes, 530 –62. Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1991. Schulze, Winfried, ed. Ego-Dokumente: Annäherung an den Menschen in der Geschichte. Berlin: Akademie, 1996.

Selected Bibliography Šedinová, Jirˇina. “Czech History as Reflected in the Historical Work by David Gans.” Judaica Bohemiae 8 (1972): 74 –83. ———. “Hebrew Literary Sources to the Czech History of the First Half of the 17th Century: End of the Thirty Years’ War in the Testimonies of Contemporaries.” Judaica Bohemiae 23 (1987): 38 –57. ———. “Hebrew Literature as a Source of Information on the Czech History of the First Half of the 17th Century: The Reflection of the Events in Contemporary Hebrew Poetry.” Judaica Bohemiae 20 (1984): 3 –30. ———. “Hebrew Lyrico-Epic Poetry of the 17th Century in Literary Context of Bohemia and Moravia.” Judaica Bohemiae 26 (1990): 84 –101. ———. “Kara, Avigdor.” In YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, edited by Gershon David Hundert. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. http:// www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Kara_Avigdor (accessed January 5, 2012). ———. “Literary Structure of the 17th Century Hebrew Lyrico-Epic Poetry.” Judaica Bohemiae 25 (1989): 82 –106. ———. “Non-Jewish Sources in the Chronicle by David Gans, ‘Tsemah David.’” Judaica Bohemiae 8 (1972): 3 –15. ———.“Old Czech Legends in the Work of David Gans (1592).” Judaica Bohemiae 14 (1978): 89 –112. Seibt, F., ed. Die Juden in den böhmischen Ländern: Vorträge der Tagung des Collegium Carolinum in Bad Wiessee vom 27. bis 29. November 1981. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1983. Shachar, Isaiah. “‘Feast and Rejoice in Brotherly Love’: Burial Society Glasses and Jugs from Bohemia and Moravia.” Israel Museum News 9 (1972): 22 –51. Shmeruk, Chone. “The Martyr Reb Shachna: Krakow 1682” (in Hebrew and Yiddish; English summary). Gal-Ed 7–8 (1985): 57–69. Republished in The Call for a Prophet, edited by Israel Bartal, 121–34. Jerusalem: Shazar, 1999. ———. “Yiddish ‘Historical Songs’ in Amsterdam” (in Hebrew; English summary). In Dutch Jewish History, edited by Jozeph Michman and Tirtsah Levie, 143 –61. Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 1984. ———. Yiddish Literature: Aspects of Its History (in Hebrew). Tel Aviv: Mifalim universita′im lehotza′ah la′or, 1978. ———. Yiddish Literature in Poland (in Hebrew). Jerusalem: Magnes, 1981. Shulman, Eleazar. The Ashkenazi-Jewish Language and Its Literatures, from the End of the Sixteenth to the End of the Eighteenth Centuries (in Hebrew). Riga: Levin, 1913. Sixtová, Olga, ed. Hebrew Printing in Bohemia and Moravia. Prague: Academia / Jewish Museum in Prague, 2012. Sládek, Pavel. “Širší kontext pražské židovské renesance” (Broader Context of the Prague Jewish Renaissance). In Dialog myšlenkových proudu˚ strˇedoveˇkého Judaismu, edited by Jirˇina Šedinová, 332 – 462. Prague: Judaica [Academia], 2011.

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Selected Bibliography Snyder, Emery. “Learning and News in Baroque.” In A New History of German Literature, edited by David E. Wellerby, Judith Ryan, and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, 304 –9. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004. Spicer, Joaneath. “The Star of David and Jewish Culture in Prague around 1600, Reflected in Drawings of Roelandt Savery and Paulus van Vianen.” Journal of the Walters Art Gallery 54 (1996): 203 –24. Spiegel, Käthe. “Die prager Juden zur Zeit des dreissigjährigen Krieges.” In Die Juden in Prag. Festgabe der Loge Praga des Ordens B′nai B′rith zum Gedenktage ihres 25jähringen Bestandes, ed. Samuel Steinherz, 107–86 (Prague: Selfpublished [by Loge Praga des Ordens B ′nai B ′rith / Independent Order of B ′nai B ′rith, Loge Praga], 1927). Stanislawski, Michael. Autobiographical Jews: Essays in Self-Fashioning. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004. Steinherz, Samuel. “The Expulsion of the Jews from Bohemia in 1541” (in Hebrew). Zion 15 (1950): 70 –92. ˇ echoslovakischen ———, ed. Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Juden in der C Republik. Prague: Flesch, 1929 –1938. ———, ed. Die Juden in Prag. Festgabe der Loge Praga des Ordens B′nai B′rith zum Gedenktage ihres 25jähringen Bestandes (Prague: Self-published [by Loge Praga des Ordens B ′nai B ′rith / Independent Order of B ′nai B ′rith, Loge Praga], 1927). ———. “Kreuzfahrer und Juden in Prag (1096).” Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für ˇ echoslovakischen Republik 1 (1929): 1–32. Geschichte der Juden in der C ———. “Sage und Geschichte.” Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Juden ˇ echoslovakischen Republik 9 (1938): 171–97. in der C Steinschneider, Moritz. Catalogus Librorum Hebraeorum in Bibliotheca Bodleiana. 3 vols. Berlin: Welt, 1931; original edition, 1852 –1860. ———. Die Geschichtsliteratur der Juden. Frankfurt: Kauffman, 1905; New York: Arno, 1980. Sturmberger, Hans. Aufstand in Böhmen: Der Beginn des Dreißigjährigen Krieges. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1959. Teplitsky, Joshua Z. “Between Court Jew and Jewish Court: David Oppenheim, the Prague Rabbinate, and Eighteenth-Century Jewish Political Culture.” Ph.D. diss., New York University, 2012. Tishby, Isaiah. Netivei emunah uminut: masot umehkarim besifrut hakabbalah vehashabta′ut. Jerusalem: Magnes, 1964, 1982. Turniansky, Chava. “The Events in Frankfurt am Main (1612 –1616) in Megillas Vints and in an Unknown Yiddish ‘Historical’ Song.” In Schöpferische Momente des europäischen Judentums in der frühen Neuzeit, edited by Michael Graetz, 121–37. Heidelberg: Winter, 2000. ———. “Les langues juives dans le monde ashkénaze traditionnel.” In Milles ans de cultures ashkénazes, edited by Jean Baumgarten, Rachel Ertel, Itzhok Niborski, and Annette Wieviorka, 419 –26. Paris: Liana Levi, 1994.

Selected Bibliography ———. “The Relation between the Hebrew and Yiddish Versions of a Bilingual Song (Ashlikh yagon ve-anaḥ a)” (in Hebrew). Massorot 9 –11 (1997): 421– 41. ———, ed. Sefer massah umerivah by Alexander ben Yiẓ ḥ ak Pfaffenhofen. Jerusalem: Magnes, 1985. ———. “Yiddish ‘Historical’ Songs as Sources for the History of the Jews in PrePartition Poland.” Polin 4 (1989): 42 –52. ———. “Yiddish Song as Historical Source Material: Plague in the Judenstadt of Prague in 1713.” In Jewish History: Essays in Honour of Chimen Abramsky, edited by Ada Rapoport-Albert and Steven J. Zipperstein, 189 –98. London: Halban, 1988. Twersky, Isadore. “The Shulhan ‘Arukh: Enduring Code of Jewish Law.” Judaism 16 (1967): 141–58. Vilímková, Milada. The Prague Ghetto. Translated by Iris Urwin. Prague: Aventinum, 1990. ———. “Seven Hundred Years of the Old-New Synagogue.” Judaica Bohemiae 5 (1969): 72 –83. Vince, Agnes. “Makom, essai sur la forme urbaine des quartiers juifs: Prague, Venise, Paris.” Travail personnel de fin d’études, École d’Architecture Paris-la Villette, 1985. Vojtíšek, Václav. “Nadace Albrechta z Valdštejna pro neofyty z pokolení židovského.” Kalendárˇ ˇc esko-židovský 32 (1912 –1913): 77–82. ———. “Po ohni židovskeho meˇsto pražského.” Kalendárˇ ˇcesko-židovský 34 (1914 –1915): 61–71. Volavková, Hana. The Pinkas Synagogue: A Memorial of the Past and of Our Days. Translated by Greta Hort. Prague: Státní Pedagogické Nakladatelství [State Jewish Museum in Prague], 1955. ———. A Story of the Jewish Museum in Prague. Translated by K. E. Lichtenecker. Prague: Artia, 1968. ———. The Synagogue Treasures of Bohemia and Moravia. Translated by Greta Hort and Roberta Finlayson Samsour. Prague: Sfinx, 1949. Weinryb, Bernard D. “The Beginnings of East-European Jewry in Legend and Historiography.” In Studies and Essays in Honor of Abraham A. Neuman, edited by Meir Ben-Horin, Bernard D. Weinryb, and Solomon Zeitlin, 445 –502. Leiden: Brill, 1962. Weinstein, Rochelle. “Sepulchral Monuments of the Jews in Amsterdam in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1979. Weintraub, Karl J. The Value of the Individual: Self and Circumstance in Autobiography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Weissler, Chava. Voices of the Matriarchs: Listening to the Prayers of Early Modern Jewish Women. Boston: Beacon, 1998. White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.

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Selected Bibliography Wilhelm, K. “An Unknown Prague Edition of Seliḥ ot (1579)” (in Hebrew). Kiryat sefer 37 (1961–1962): 516. Yaniv, Bracha. “The Origins of the ‘Two-Column Motif ’ in European Parokhot.” Jewish Art 15 (1989): 26 – 43. ———. “Sixteenth- to Eighteenth-Century Bohemian and Moravian Parokhot with an Architectural Motif ” (in Hebrew). 4 vols. Ph.D. diss., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1987. Yassif, Eli. The Hebrew Folktale: History, Genre, Meaning. Translated by Jacqueline S. Teitelbaum. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. ———. “‘Legend and History’—Second Thoughts” (in Hebrew). Zion 65 (2000): 219 –28. ———. “Legends and History: Historians Read Hebrew Legends of the Middle Ages” (in Hebrew). Zion 64 (1999): 187–220. Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim. “Clio and the Jews: Reflections on Jewish Historiography in the Sixteenth Century.” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 46 – 47 (1979 –1980): 607–38. ———. Haggadah and History. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1997. ———. Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982. Yuval, Israel Jacob. “A German-Jewish Autobiography of the Fourteenth Century.” Binah 3 (1994): 79 –96. First published in Hebrew in Tarbiz 55 (1986): 541–66. ———. “Jews, Hussites and Germans According to the Chronicle ‘Gilgul bnei Husim’” (in Hebrew). Zion 54 (1989): 275 –320. Later published in German as “Juden, Hussiten und Deutsche, nach einer hebräischen Chronik.” Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 13 (1992): 59 –93. Zerubavel, Eviatar. The Seven Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Zerubavel, Yael. Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Zfatman, Sara. The Jewish Tale in the Middle Ages: Between Ashkenaz and Sepharad (in Hebrew). Jerusalem: Magnes, 1993. ———. “The Mayse-Bukh: An Old Yiddish Literary Genre” (in Hebrew). Hasifrut 28 (April 1979): 126 –52. Zinberg, Israel. A History of Jewish Literature. Translated and edited by Bernard Martin. New York: Ktav, 1975. Zunz, Leopold. Literaturgeschichte der synagogalen Poesie. Berlin: Gerschel, 1865. ———. Die Ritus des synagogalen Gottesdienstes. 2nd ed. Berlin: Lamm, 1919. ———. Die synagogale Poesie des Mittelalters. Berlin: Springer, 1855; Hildesheim: Olms, 1967. ———. Zur Geschichte und Literatur. Berlin: Veit, 1845.

Index

Italic page numbers indicate material in figures. 2 Adar, commemoration of Passau invasion: form of celebration, 39, 87, 123; liturgy for, 87–88, 120, 123 –26, 145 – 46, 191; proximity to Purim, 40; still practiced into 1700s, 87 7 Adar, commemoration of death of Moses, 45 14 and 15 Adar (Purim), 40 19 and 20 Adar (Adar I), commemoration of 1614 Frankfurt expulsion, 126 7 Av, 149 –50 9 Av, Tisha b ′Av commemoration, 42 – 43 10 Av, Swedish bombardment, 154 –55 27 Elul, commemoration of 1614 Frankfurt expulsion, 126 14 H ̣  eshvan (Prager Purim), 44, 130, 199; cessation of observance, 190; continued in absence of chief rabbi, 148; liturgy for, 119, 126 –27, 130 –33, 176, 190; publication of text for, 147– 48 15 Shevat (Tu be′Shevat), New Year for trees, 45 21 Shevat, fast day established by Tausk, 90 30 Shevat, forgiveness of dead on last day of, 219n129 7 Sivan, commemoration of Pauker Decree, 42 3 Tammuz, commemoration of 1689 fire, 42, 133 5 Tammuz, Heller familial fast day, 93

17 Tammuz, commemoration of 70 CE attack on Jerusalem, 1389 massacre, 15, 42, 123 Aaron (biblical brother of Moses and Miriam), 60 Abarbanel, Isaac, 101–2, 141, 198 Abeles, Lazar, 161, 163 –64 Abeles, Leah, 163 Abeles, Moses, 161 Abeles, Simon, 32, 161–65, 195 Abigail, 60 Abraham ben Avigdor, 45, 54, 77 Ahab, 176 Akiba (Rabbi), 41 Altneuschul (Old New Synagogue): and 1389 massacre, 15 –16; banners in, 22, 27; building of, 15; golem allegedly stored in, 24; hazkarat neshamot of, 37, 48 –51, 50, 51, 54, 64 –65, 73; no space for women in, 31; and politics of power, 21–22; proximity of to Town Hall, 25; whitewashing of, 29, 213n73; Zaks parokhet in, 29, 30, 43, 65, 80, 214n75 Altneuschul Memorbuch, 50, 51 Altschul (Old Synagogue), 15 –16, 21–22, 41– 42 Altschul, H ̣  anokh ben Moses, 83 –87, 96, 119, 180, 198 Altschul, Moses ben H ̣  anokh, 35, 83 –84

290

Index Altstadt (Old Town). See Staré Meˇsto Ana elohei Avraham (Abraham ben Avigdor), 45 anonymous authorship, 133 –35 “anticipatory” gravestone inscriptions, 61 “Anusah le′ezra” (Heller), 176 –77 Arabian Nights, The, 166 Aramaic, 179 Arcimboldo, Giuseppe, 77 Ariès, Philippe, 61 “Arkhu hayamim utela′ah ravtah” (Heller), 129, 177 Asher ben Yeḥ iel (Rabbeinu Asher, the Rosh), 178 Ashkenazi, Yaakov ben Yitzchak, 175 Ashkenaz region, 12 Assmann, Jan, 190 –91 astonishment at one’s existence, 1, 3 – 4, 143, 147 atonement, 59 –63, 70, 74 –75. See also Yom Kippur Austerlitz, Baruch, 45 autobiographical writings, 5, 83 –116; Abarbanel biblical exegesis, 101–2; descriptions of enemies in, 104; displacement motif in, 101; early modern Jewish, 99 –107; as “egodocuments,” 100; as family memories, 85; forms of, 84; as introductions to unrelated books, 86; Sefer be′er Avraham (Groti), 109 –10; Sefer be′er sheva (Perlhefter), 112 –16; Sefer dat eish (H ̣  alfan), 103 –5; Selbstzeugnisse, 100; Yesh manḥ ilin (Katzenellenbogen), 97–98; Ẓ eidah laderekh (Menaḥ em ben Zeraḥ ), 101; Zikhroynes (Glikl of Hameln), 185. See also megillah/megillot av beit din (head of rabbinic court), 131, 134, 142 Ayn nay kloglid, 162 –65, 195 Ayn sheyn mayseh: Jewish wisdom winning respect, 138, 167, 170; modesty and worldliness, 170; in Oppenheim collection, 196; publication of, 171–72, 181, 199, 244 – 45n1; story of Gumpricht and wine jug, 136 –37, 165 –67; story of Gumpricht’s fiancée, 137, 168 –72

Bak, Jacob, 172 banners, communal, 22, 26 –27, 29, 32 “Baroquization” in Bohemian poetry, 70 Bassevi (Schmieles) von Treuenberg, Jacob: alliance with Heller, 27, 92 –93, 97–98, 99, 105; dying in disgrace, 99; granting of “von Treuenberg” title to, 27; and Lie­chtenstein Houses, 28; member of currency-minting consortium, 83, 127; monument for wife Hendl, 47– 49, 49, 52 –53, 56, 59, 70 –73; paying for Heller’s release, 93; paying for merchants’ release, 88 Battle of White Mountain (1620): allowing purchase of Liechtenstein Houses, 28; described in Megillat eivah, 91–92; Frederick V, 28, 87, 91, 117–18, 127–29, 147; Jewish community’s actions during, 83, 117–18, 129; local rabbinic leadership during, 131; Prager Purim commemoration of, 44, 87, 118 –19, 127; seliḥ ot for commemoration, 131–33, 147– 48; as start of Thirty Years’ War, 83 Beckovský, Jan, 167 Be′er Avraham (Groti), 109 –10 Be′er sheva (Perlhefter), 112, 181, 182, 185 Bischitz, Mori (husband of Reizl bat Moses Plohn), 66, 67, 80 Black Sabbath (Shabbat sheḥ orah), 42 blood libel, 41, 163 blot out, remembering to, 194 –96 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 171 Bodleian Library collection, 8 Bohemian Diet, 39, 117 Boleslav II (Duke), 14, 138 “bound in the bond of life,” 59 –63 Brahe, Tycho, 140 Brandeis, Meir ben Joseph, 57–58, 61 Brandstätter, Johann, 164 Brantspigel (Moses ben H ̣  anokh Altschul), 35 Bris melakh (Heller), 178 Broda, Abraham, 110 Bumsla. See Mladá Boleslav burial practices, 33 –36, 35, 182 –83. See also gravestones burial society (ḥ evra kadisha), 35, 41, 45, 183

Index calendar(s): burial society procession Tevet/ Shevat, 45; days of observance, 38 –39; incorporating belief systems, 1–2; Jewish use of Gregorian, 37–38, 38; local and familial commemorative days, 39, 45 – 46; “lunisolar” Hebrew, 38; and reading of hazkarot, 37; Shabbat sheḥ orah (Black Sabbath), 42. See also seliḥ ah/seliḥ ot; individual months Capsali, Elijah, 4 Carmi family, 88 Castle District (Hradcˇany), 11, 13, 149 Catholic Church, 23, 122 cemeteries: and attitudes to death in history and art history, 61; gender separation, 35 –36; older sites in Prague, 32 –33; Old Jewish Cemetery, 32 –36, 47– 49, 51–63, 68 –73, 76 –79, 196; as plague quarantine sites, 34. See also burial practices; burial society; gravestones “Central Jewish Museum,” 9. See also Jewish Museum in Prague Charles Bridge, 13, 122, 152, 195, 208n9 Charles IV, 22 Charles V, 20 children, explaining the death of, 112 –15 Christianity/Christians: focus on afterlife, 61; Hussite split within, 17, 143; interactions with Prague Jews, 23 –24; Jewish converts to, 32, 97, 161–65, 195 Cikán, Solomon, 27 Civitates Orbis Terrarum (Hoefnagel and Hogenberg), 150 Clementinum College, 161 coats of arms on gravestones, 72 Cohen, Lefman Behrend, 196 “collective memory,” 2 –3 commemorations for dead, 52 –55. See also dead persons; familial commemorations; gravestones “communicative” vs. “cultural” memory, 190 –91 consciousness, regional vs. local, 200 conversions to Christianity, 162 Counter-Reformation, 77, 117, 135, 200 court culture, 78

crucifix, Jews compelled to finance, 32 curtains, stolen, 83 –84, 88 –89, 96 –97, 130, 180 curtains, Torah. See parokhet/parokhot Cymbeline (Shakespeare), 171 Daniel, Book of, 102, 142 Darshan, David ben Menashe, 174 Dat eish (H ̣  alfan), 103 –5 David (King), 166 David, Abraham, 144 dead persons: atonement and sacrifice by/ for, 59 –63; calling out to, 58; channel of communication with, 79; children, 112 –15; continuing involvement of in society, 5 –6; hazkarat neshamot as interactions with, 48 –50, 59, 61–62; ideal qualities commemorated in, 52 –55, 76 –77; as invisible but present, 58, 61, 66, 79, 199; lists of, 142; memorials to local dead, 43 – 44; prayers to, 43; prearranged post-mortem donations, 65 –66; presence of, 199. See also cemeteries; gravestones Decameron (Boccaccio), 171 De emendatione temporum (Scaliger), 141 deliverance tales. See autobiographical writings; megillah/megillot displacement motif, 101 donors for hazkarot entries, 37 Ecclesiastes, Book of, 87, 113 –14 Edeles, Joshua, 89, 198 Edeles, Samuel ben Maharam, 192 Edeles family megillah, 89, 192, 198 “egodocuments,” 100 Egypt, Jewish exodus from, 2 “Eḥ ad yaḥ id umeyuḥ ad” (Kara), 17 Eidlitz, Kaufmann, 53 Eilenburg, H ̣  ayyim ben Issachar Baer, 111 elders, 131 “Ele barekhev” (Simon ben Isaac), 127, 129 “Ele ezkerah” (Luntschitz), 124 Elisha, 176 Elizabeth of Bohemia, 147 el malei raḥ amim, 133 –34, 151, 160 –61, 174, 177, 189

291

292

Index “El nekamot hofi′ah” (Kara), 120 –21, 191 “Elohim al dami ledami,” 121 Elul, preparations for upcoming festivals, 42 – 43 Emden, Jacob, 114 Enlightenment and extra-urban burial, 33 epitaphs. See gravestones Esther, Book of (Megillat Esther): in 14 H ̣  eshvan liturgy, 119; and festival of Purim, 40; Fettmilch compared to Haman in, 126, 127; Meir Perles commentary on, 106; as prototype for autobiographical tales, 87, 105, 123, 180, 192 Et kol hatela′ah (Kara): call for revenge in, 121; circumstances of 1389 massacre, 41; commemorated on third of Tammuz, 42, 133; description of 1389 massacre, 15 –16, 120 –21; printing of, 174, 191; use of “tela′ah” in, 124 –25; written in Hebrew, 172; in Yom Kippur liturgy, 15, 43, 125 exegesis, biblical, 101 exodus from Egypt, 2 “Eyn nay kloglid benign Prostitser-kdoyshimlid iber den groysn ershreklekn ipesh” (Katzenellenbogen), 183 familial commemorations, 84 –90, 94, 96, 105 –7, 116. See also autobiographical writings familial rescue/deliverance tales, 4, 86. See also megillah/megillot family name, defending, 5 –6, 84, 95, 99, 106, 194 “Far loyf den ipes,” 183 –84 fast days, 39 Ferdinand I, 19 –20, 22, 210n29 Ferdinand II: declaring commemoration of his victory, 119; de facto religious tolerance toward Jews, 20; protecting Jewish Quarter, 118, 128 –30; Protestant rebellion against, 28, 117; succession of, 147. See also Battle of White Mountain Ferdinand III, 158 –59 Fettmilch, Vincenz, 126 –28 Fettmilch uprising, 87, 126, 242n39

“Fifth Town,” 12 fire: of 1142, 15; of 1689, 42, 44, 103, 133 –35, 159 –61; Judengasse, 159 –61 First Crusade (1096), 14 flugblätter, 123 Frankfurt, 87, 126, 128, 136, 181 Frederick V (of the Palatinate), 28, 87, 91, 117–18, 127–29, 147 Fulda, 88, 123 Funkenstein, Amos, 3 gabai ẓ edakah (treasurer for charitable donations), 73 gabbai, 64 Gadil ben Azriel Shamash, 51 Gans, David: arriving in Prague, 139 – 40; birth and education of, 140; Neḥ mad vena′im, 140. See also Ẓ emaḥ David Geary, Patrick, 58 gender roles, 6, 53 –55, 64, 115 –16, 168 –72, 180 –86, 198 –99 “generational” memory, 191. See also “communicative” vs. “cultural” memory Genette, Gérard, 109 Gersonides printing house: bilingual Hebrew-Yiddish prayer books, 31; founding of, 172; Gershom ben Solomon Kohen, 18; Haggadah (printed 1526), 41; H ̣ amisha H ̣ umshei Torah, 19; printing of Ẓ emaḥ David, 194 “Gilgul bnei H ̣ usim” (Hussite Cycle), 16 –17 Glikl of Hameln, 185 God’s providence, affirmations of, 4 “going out clean,” 105 Goldish, Matt, 21 Gombiner, Abraham, 106 gravestones, 5, 47– 49, 51–63, 220n6; of Avigdor Kara, 33, 47– 48, 48, 55, 56; coats of arms on, 72; double, 55; as engraved defense against denunciations, 96; epitaphs/inscriptions on, 49, 70, 200; exhibiting artistic/literary genres, 81; growing specialization/elaboration of, 76 –78; of Hendl, 47– 49, 49, 52 –53, 56, 59, 71; ideal qualities listed on, 52 –55; to mark wealth, 78; as mourning stones,

Index 56 –59, 57; themes of atonement and sacrifice on, 59 –63; trade and guild symbols on, 68, 72; two-column motif on, 68, 69, 77–78; and Western focus on afterlife, 61; as witnesses, 77. See also burial practices Great Court (Velkodvorská) Synagogue, 27 Great Synagogue, 16. See also Altneuschul Gronim, Evril, 47 Groti, Abraham, 109 –10, 198 –99 Gumpricht, 137, 166, 168 –70 Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, 148 Gutenberg, Johannes, 173 ha′alufim habatei dinim (religious court judges), 131 Habsburgs: censorship under, 108; court culture of, 100, 140, 143; and cult of Simon Abeles, 162; defenestration of officials, 117, 127, 176; and Heller’s arrest, 92 –95; Jewish alignment with, 117; Jewish community’s relationship with, 83, 117–19, 127–30, 149, 156, 198; Leopold I’s action against Jews, 159; Passau invasion (1611), 39, 121–23, 145 – 46, 149; Peace of Westphalia, 134, 157; Prague as capital and main residence of, 140; Prince Karl von Liechtenstein, 28, 83, 180; return to power (1621), 131; and weakening of Jewish communities, 120. See also Battle of White Mountain; Ferdinand I; Ferdinand II; Ferdinand III; Rudolf II Hacohen, Akiva, 211n38 Haggadah, 18, 41 Hájek, Václav, 22 Halbwachs, Maurice, 2 –3 Halevi, Abraham, 217n106 Halevie, Avraham, 29 H ̣  alfan, Lieberman and Sarah, 192 –93 H ̣  alfan, Uri Shraga Feibush, 102 –5, 175, 198 Haman, 40, 126 H ̣ amisha H ̣ umshei Torah, 19 H ̣  anokh (Heni) ben Judah Leib Gedalyes, 33 –34, 34, 62 –63, 63, 155 –57 Hanukkah, 44 – 45 Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), 8, 178

H ̣  ayyat, Zalman ben Moses, 68, 72 H ̣  ayyim ben Nathan, 179 hazkarat neshamot (pinkasei hazkarat neshamot, kuntrasim): 36 –37, 54 –55; Altneuschul Memorbuch, 50, 51; changes in over time, 48 –52, 62; copying from, 37; donations of ritual objects detailed in, 37, 63 –66, 188 –89; entries to in Hebrew, 178; entry for Heni ben Judah Leib Gedalyes, 155 –57; entry for Maharal and his wife Pearl, 73 –74; evolution of entries over time, 48 –51, 73 –77, 187–89, 199; examples of entries in, 62 –63, 63, 73 –76; exhibiting artistic/literary genres, 81; gender differences in, 54 –55, 64; ideal qualities featured in, 54 –55, 73; as interactions between living and dead, 48 –50, 59, 61–62; kuntrasim as name for, 33, 63, 160, 174, 187; martyrs’ entries in, 36 –37, 55, 199 –200; memorial prayer for 1689 fire inserted into, 134, 160, 174; miniature biographies in, 74 –75; pinkasei hazkarat neshamot (lists of the dead), 142; from Pinkas Synagogue, 22, 187–91, 188; placeholders for cantor in, 188, 188; purchase of entries in, 36 –37, 48, 62, 73; readings becoming connected to date of death, 37; replacement of, 37, 187; ritual reading from, 36, 65 Hebrew calendar, 38, 38 – 43 Hebrew language: as language of ritual and liturgy, 17–18, 178; not understood by most women, many men, 175. See also leshon hakodesh heizlich (small house), 73 Heller, Yom-Tov Lipmann: alliance with Bassevi, 27–28, 97–98; “Anusah le′ezra,” 176 –77; “Arkhu hayamim utela′ah ravtah,” 129, 177; arrest of, 92, 118; birth and marriage of, 90; Bris melakh, 178; as chief rabbi, 91–92, 98, 132; and dispute over taxation, 92; on familial Purim day, 94, 96; hazkarah for, 134, 189; inscribing gravestone for daughters and grandchildren, 58, 148; loss of chief rabbi position, 28, 94; and Maharal, 24; on Molkho

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Index Heller, Yom-Tov Lipmann (continued ) relics, 20 –21; on Prague defenestration, 176 –77; release purchased, 93; rivalry with Mendels, 132; seliḥ ot by, 44, 126 –29, 131–32, 176 –77; and Tosafot Yom-Tov, 20, 91; transfer to Vienna, 93; using house for study rooms, 28; writing in Hebrew and Yiddish, 91, 178 –80, 230n27. See also Megillat eivah Hendl, gravestone of: daughter of Evril Gronim, wife of Jacob Bassevi, 47; epitaph/inscription, 52 –53, 56, 59, 70; ornamentation of, 47, 71, 76 –77 Herˇman, Jan, 9 H ̣  eshvan, bitter (Marḥ eshvan), 44 ḥ evra kadisha (burial society), 35, 41, 45, 183 “Hineinu adonay hineinu,” 125 historisches lied, 151 hitḥ akhmu (outsmarted), 167 ḥ -kh-m (Hebrew root for “wise” and “wisdom”), 167 Hoefnagel, Joris, 77,  150 Hoffman, Hans, 77 Hogenberg, Franz, 150 Horowitz, Aaron Meshulam (Zalman Munk), 18, 21 Horowitz, Abraham, 111, 140 Horowitz, Beila, 136, 167, 198 Horowitz, Isaiah (the Shelah), 43, 74 –75, 98, 111, 131–32, 148, 189 Horowitz, Jacob, 111 Horowitz, Shabbetai Sheftel, 111 Horowitz family, 19 –23 host desecration charges, 41, 120 Hradcˇany, 11, 13, 149 Hradschin, 13 Hus, Jan, 17 Iberian Jews, 7 ibn Ya′aqub, Ibrahim, 14 “Ipesh lid fun Prag benign adir ayom venora” (Katz), 183 Isserles, Moses (the Rema), 140, 173 Jacob ben Asher (Ya′kov ben ha-rosh), 88 Jacob ben Elijah of Teplitz, 31

Jacob of Warmaisa, 142 Jaffe, Mordecai, 43, 140, 142 Jehu, 176 Jeiteles, Berl, 159 Jesus, calendar years demarking birth of, 1–2 Jewish Garden cemetery, 32 –33 “Jewish hat” on official seal of Prague Jewish community, 157–58 Jewish Museum in Prague, 8, 44, 192 Jewish Quarter/Jewish Street/Jewish Town, 8, 11, 12, 15, 16, 23, 25 –28, 31, 42, 103, 131, 133, 146, 149, 153 –54, 160 Jewish Reduction Committee, 159 Jezebel, 176 Josefov, 12 Joseph II, 33, 196 Joshua, Book of, 101 Jossel of Rosheim, 20 –21 Judah Leib ben Joshua. See Milḥ ama beshalom Judah Loew ben Beẓ alel (Maharal), 173; arrest of, 145; censoring Me′or einayim, 141; concerns about printed books, 173; credited with creating a golem, 24; double gravestone and hazkarah with wife Pearl, 37, 73 –74; family tree of, 193; meeting with Rudolf II, 24; positions held by, 24; praised by Pollack, 142; response to rumor-mongering, 194 Jungbunzlau. See Mladá Boleslav kadosh (martyr), 61–62. See also martyrs Kafka, Franz, 27 Kaiserrichtern, 92, 231n30 Kaplan, Yosef, 178 Kara, Avigdor: “Eḥ ad yaḥ id umeyuḥ ad,” 17; “El nekamot hofi′ah,” 120, 121; in “Gilgul bnei H ̣ usim” (Hussite Cycle), 16 –17; gravestone of, 33, 47– 48, 48, 55, 56; hazkarah for, 77, 134, 188; in Ẓ emaḥ  David, 142. See also Et kol hatela′ah Karo, Joseph, 173 Katz, Isaac, 193 Katz, Issachar Ber (Berl), 183 Katzenellenbogen, Moses ben H ̣  ayyim Eisenstadt, 183

Index Katzenellenbogen, Pinḥ as, 97–98 Kaufmann, Thomas DaCosta, 77–78 kefira (heresy), 162 Keli yakar (Luntschitz), 131 Kepler, Johannes, 100, 140 keẓ inum (officers), 131 Khlesl, Melchior, 100 Khmelnytskyi uprising (1648), 157 Kings, Book of, 101, 176 kinnah/kinnot, 121, 161 kiryat ḥ uẓ ot hayehudim, 11 Klausen Synagogue, 25, 29, 45 Kleinseite. See Malá Strana Kohen, Gershom ben Solomon. See Gersonides printing house Kohen, Mordecai Ẓ emaḥ , 55, 74 Königsmarck, Hans Christoff, 149 korban kalil ke′ayil, 222n32 Kressl bat Gershon Shamash, 63 –64 Kurtzhandl, Löbl, 163 –65, 195 Lamentations, Book of, 59, 87, 161 Langweil, Antonín, 12 leap years, 38 “Lekha adonay haẓ edakah” (Luntschitz), 125 Leopold (bishop of Passau), 39, 120, 121–22, 145. See also Passau invasion Leopold I, 159 leshon ashkenaz, 17, 209n23. See also taytsh; Yiddish leshon hakodesh, 17, 175, 178. See also Hebrew language Liberles, Hirsch, 193 Liberles, Isaiah, 193 Liberman, Eleazar, 193 Libuše, 171 Lieben, Koppelman, 196 –97, 201, 216n103 Lieben, Salomon Hugo, 8 –9 Liechtenstein, Prince Karl von, 28, 83, 180 Liechtenstein Houses, 28, 83, 180 Little Side. See Malá Strana liturgical poems. See kinnah/kinnot; piyyutim; seliḥ ah/seliḥ ot Louthan, Howard, 135, 162 Luntschitz, Ephraim (Solomon Ephraim ben Aaron), 39, 120, 123 –25, 131, 145; “Ele

ezkerah,” 124; Keli yakar, 131; “Lekha adonay haẓ edakah,” 125; “Tola′at ya′akov,” 125 Luria, Solomon, the physician (cousin of Solomon Luria known as “Maharshal”), 95 Ma′aneh lashon (Liberman), 193 Maccabees, Books of the, 45 Magen Avraham, 106 Maharal of Prague. See Judah Loew ben Beẓ alel Maimonides, Moses, 88, 116 Maisel, Mordecai, 25 –29, 115, 142, 193 Maisel Synagogue, 26, 27, 29, 115, 188, 217nn103 – 4, 261n2 Malá Strana (Little Side): during 1611 Passau invasion, 146, 149; building of synagogue in, 14, 138; captured by Swedish forces, 149; cemetery in, 32 manhigei hakehillah (lower elected officials), 131 Mann, Vivian, 51 manuscript form, publishing in, 174 –75 Marḥ eshvan (bitter H ̣  eshvan), 44 Marian column, 31, 157–59, 158 martyrs, 36 –37, 61 Matthias, 39, 117, 121–22, 127–28, 147, 176 Maximilian II, 23, 140 Mayseh bukh, 166 megillah/megillot: colophons by descendants, 192; evolving into familial narratives, 85 –89, 86, 192; and familial Purim days, 88 –90, 94, 96, 116, 200; lack of for Maimonides, 116; language of, 180, 230n28; of Maharal, 144 – 45; original meaning of, 87; precursors of, 88, 145; printed versions of, 174; use of term, 218n110, 228n6; women in, 170. See also individual titles Megillas Shmuel, 90, 96, 174, 180, 193 Megillas Vinẓ , 126 Megillat eivah (Heller): circulation of in manuscript, 103, 174 –75; compared to H ̣  alfan text, 102 –5, 198; on days before Heller’s arrest, 104; on delay in

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Index Megillat eivah (Heller) (continued ) appointment as chief rabbi, 98 –99, 132; and familial Purim day, 94, 96, 105, 192; in Hebrew and Yiddish, 91, 178 –80, 230n27; Heller’s use of, 97, 99; inspired by scriptures and Abarbanel, 101–2, 105, 198; opening of, 95, 102; outline of text, 91–94; as premodern autobiography, 90; preserving familial commemorations, 116; Purim from still observed today, 192; purpose behind, 95, 99 –100; report on son’s wedding, 94 –95; similarities to autobiographical introductions, 101–3; on war’s impact on Prague, 148 Megillat Esther. See Esther, Book of Megillat hakela′im (Tein), 85, 180, 192 Megillat Rabbi Meir, 174 Megillat sefer (Perles), 106 –8, 110 –11, 114, 193 Megillat ta′anit, 217n106 Megillat yuḥ asin, 193 memorbuch/memorbücher. See hazkarat neshamot memorial objects. See ritual objects men, ideal qualities of, 53 –55 Menahem ben Zeraḥ , 101, 102 Mendels, Moses (Moses ben Isaiah Menaḥ em), 98 –99, 132 –33, 148 Me′or einayim (Rossi), 141 Messenger of Old Czech Happenings, The (Beckovský), 167 Michna, Pavel, 83 Milḥ ama beshalom (Judah Leib ben Joshua): as action “thriller,” 152 –53; as celebration of God’s providence, 4, 157; composition of, 149; description of mortar explosion in, 154, 156; as detailed chronicle of events, 3, 42, 154; inability to bury dead in cemetery, 42; introduction to, 1, 4, 151, 197; juxtaposition with Koppelman Lieben’s work, 197–98, 201; on preserving mortar damage as memorial, 16; reference to Ẓ emaḥ David in, 152, 194; as remembrance for posterity, 153, 156; reprinting of, 249n55; self-standing focus of, 157; use of zikaronot in, 184 Miriam, 60

Mishnah, 39, 45, 91, 179 Mladá Boleslav (Bumsla, Jungbunzlau), 105 modernity, transition to, 197 Moldau River. See Vltava River Molkho, Solomon, 20 –21, 44 Mordecai, 40 Mordecai of Eisenstadt, 112 –13, 115 mortar explosion, descriptions of, 154 –56 Moryson, Fynes, 23, 27–28 Moses ben Jacob, 64 “Moshel ba′elyonim” (Mendels), 132 mourning, 5, 180 –86. See also dead persons Muchka, Ivan, 68 Muneles, Otto, 9 Munk, Moses Aaron, 90 –91 Munk, Zalman, 18 Neḥ ama (wife of Shalom Uri), 56, 58, 59 –60, 76 –77 Neḥ mad vena′im (Gans), 140 Neustadt. See Nové Meˇsto New (Wechsler) Synagogue, 27 New Town. See Nové Meˇsto Nisan (month of Passover), 41 Nora, Pierre, 2 Nové Meˇsto (New Town, Neustadt), 11, 13, 14 Numbers, Book of, 15 ohel (tent), 73 Old High German, 17 Old Jewish Cemetery, 32 –36, 34, 196 Old New Synagogue. See Altneuschul Old Town. See Staré Meˇsto Oppenheim, David, 8, 111, 152, 196 Oppenheimer, Samuel, 30 Oppenheim family, 109 Orḥ ot ḥ ayyim (Asher ben Yeḥ iel), 178 origin myth, 137, 165 –67 Palmitessa, James, 122 Panofsky, Erwin, 61 Parˇížská Street, 16, 27 parokhet/parokhot (Torah curtains), 81; defined, 50; donation of three identical,

Index 211n38; from dress of Reizl bat Moses Plohn, 65 –66, 67, 80; economic status of donors of, 79; as independent from mantles, 51; Prague and Bavarian styles of, 80 –81, 81; refurbished by later generations, 192 –93; two-column motif on, 58 –59, 68; Zaks parokhet, 29, 30, 43, 65, 80, 214n75 Passau invasion (1611), 39, 121–23, 145 – 46, 149. See also 2 Adar Passover, 18, 38, 41 Pauker Decree, 42 Peace of Westphalia, 134, 157 Pearl (wife of Maharal), 37, 73 –74 perdon tax, 80 Pereẓ , ben Pereẓ , 155 Perles, Meir (Moses Meir), 106 –11, 159, 193 Perlhefter, Beila, 112 –15, 181, 185, 198 –99 Perlhefter, Issachar Baer, 112, 181 Pfefferkorn, Jonah ben Meir Puria, 68, 70, 71, 76 pilpul form of Talmudic study, 142 Pinkas Synagogue, 18, 20 –22, 44, 187–89 piyyutim (liturgical poems), 39 pizmon, 119, 120, 126, 127, 242n34; “Ele barekhev” (Simon ben Isaac), 127, 129; “El nekamot hofi′ah” (Kara), 120 –21, 191; “Hineinu adonay hineinu,” 125; “Lekha adonay haẓ edakah” (Luntschitz), 125; “Moshel ba′elyonim” (Mendels), 132 plague, 34, 148, 159, 161, 183 –85 Plohn, Reizl bat Moses (wife of Mori Bischitz), 65 –66, 67, 80 Polák, Josef, 9 Poland, 17 political pragmatism, 5 Pollack, Elijah, 145 Pollack, Jacob, 142 Pomian, Krzysztof, 58 Prager Burg. See Prague Castle Prager Purim. See 14 H ̣  eshvan Prague Castle, 11–12, 13, 71, 140, 149, 150 Prague Jewish community: alliance with Habsburgs, 117–18, 127–28, 156; as continuation of Jewish history, 7; and coronation of Frederick V, 87,

117–18, 128 –29, 147; daily conflicts with Christians, 31–32; as a dispersed people, 7; expulsions of (1541, 1559), 22 –23; history of Jewish Town, 12 –13, 138; local Jewish days, 119 –20; local leadership of, 130 –33; local liturgical tradition, 120 –26; origin tales of, 136 –39; public processions of, 32; relative religious tolerance under Rudolf II, 23 –27, 121–22, 143 – 45; sketches of, 140; threats of expulsions (1602), 144; use of Hebrew and Yiddish in, 178 –80; in Ẓ emaḥ David, 143 prayers: bilingual books of, 31; to the dead, 43; at Yom Kippur, 43 Pražský Hrad. See Prague Castle printing: concern over access of masses to, 173; and importance of authorship, 173 –74; movable type, 172 –73; printed works, 6, 173 –75; “public print,” 174; in Yiddish, 175, 198. See also Gersonides printing house Processus Inquisitorius, 164 –65 Psalms, Book of, 1, 59, 121, 176, 197 publications: by family of deceased authors, 111–12; as memorials for family, 111–16; scholarly requirement of, 108 –9. See also autobiographical writings; printing Pukh, Naḥ man ben Eliezer, 242n39 Purim, 6, 40, 192 “Purim” days, familial, 6, 87–88, 106 –7 Putík, Alexandr, 9, 79, 195 Rachel, 56 rashim (elders), 131 Raudniẓ , Löbl. See Kurtzhandl, Löbl Rausnitz, Rachel, 136, 167, 198 –99 Regensburg, 21 regional consciousness, 200 Reiner, Elchanan, 108, 173 reish metivta (academy head), 131, 134, 142 relics, 20 –21, 27, 44 Rema. See Isserles, Moses remembered vs. recovered history, 203n4 rescue tales. See autobiographical writings; megillah/megillot Reubeni, David, 20

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Index revenge, calls for, 121 ritual objects, 227n84; arranged rotation of use, 29; banners and hangings, 29, 32; changing relation of congregation to, 189; donations listed on epitaphs, 53; donations of by elites, 227n84; donations of by women, 63 –64; donations of to obtain hazkarot, 37; exhibiting artistic/ literary genres, 81; loss of in 1689 fire, 133, 177; maintaining donor’s presence after death, 64 –66; from personal clothing, 66; preserved in Jewish Museum in Prague, 8 –9; refurbished by later generations, 192 –93; Torah arks and other protection for, 29 –30, 36, 46, 50, 63 –65; Torah mantles, 21, 29, 51, 64, 192 –93, 223n54, 227n82; Torah scrolls, 36, 65, 160, 193, 177; two-column motif on, 68. See also parokhet/parokhot Rofe, Jacob ben Mendel, 89 Roman Empire, 142 – 43 Rosh Hashanah (New Year), 38, 43 Rosman, Moshe, 174 Rossi, Azariah de’, 141 Ruderman, David, 139, 143 Rudolf II, 126; art and literature under, 68, 77–78, 140; Gans portrayal of Prague under, 143; gold amulet gift to, 25 –26; invasion by Leopold and Charles Bridge battle (2 Adar), 39 – 40, 122 –23, 126; meeting with Maharal, 24; religious tolerance under, 23 –27, 121–22, 143 – 45 Rudolfine architecture, 68, 200 rumor-mongering, 194 Ruth, Book of, 87 Sabbath, 36 sacred objects. See ritual objects Šaloun, Ladislav, 24 Sarah Yutl bat Moses, 53, 76 Saul (King), 166 Saul ben Azriel, 64 Savery, Roelandt, 23, 77 Scaliger, Joseph, 141 sciences, decline of interest in, 139

“secondary intelligentsia,” 108 –9 secular and sacred content, 147, 177–78 Seder, 41 Seder Eliyahu zuta (Capsali), 4 Šedinová, Jirˇina, 9, 70 Segré, Jacob, 26 Selbstzeugnisse, 100 seliḥ ah/seliḥ ot (laments): for 14 H ̣  eshvan, 176, 190; Ana elohei Avraham (Abraham ben Avigdor), 45; commemorating Battle of White Mountain (1621), 131–32, 147; commemorating invasion of Passau (1611), 120; commemorating Prague defenestration, 176; composed during siege, 151; development of, 39; Et kol hatela′ah (Kara) as, 121; by Heller, 126 –29, 176; read during fasts, 88; during Thirty Years’ War, 174 Shabbat sheḥ orah (Black Sabbath), 42 Shabbetai Ẓ evi, 112, 115, 194 –95 Shakespeare, William, 171 Shalom Uri, 56 –58, 57 shamash, 84 Shavuot, 38, 41 Shelah. See Horowitz, Isaiah Shemini Aẓ eret, 44 Shenei luḥ ot habrit (Horowitz), 111 Shmeruk, Chone, 151 Shulḥ an arukh, 173 Shvedish lid, 149 –58 siege. See Swedish invasion and siege Simḥ at Torah (Rejoicing of the Law), 44, 60 Simon ben Isaac, 127 Simon of Trent, 163 Solomon (King), 113 Song of Songs, 87 songs: Ayn nay kloglid, 162 –65, 195; “Eḥ ad yaḥ id umeyuḥ ad” (Kara), 17; “Eyn nay kloglid benign Prostitser-kdoyshim-lid iber den groysn ershreklekn ipesh” (Katzenellenbogen), 183; “Far loyf den ipes,” 183 –84; fire songs, 29, 133, 160 –61, 177, 184, 253n95; “Ipesh lid fun Prag benign adir ayom venora” (Katz), 183;

Index of Moses on exodus, 2; of mourning and lament, 56; plague songs, 183 –84; by Rebekah bat Meir Tikotin (Rivkah Tiktiner), 44, 60; Shvedish lid, 149 –58; Sreyfe lid fun prag, 133, 160, 177, 184; by women, 44, 60, 183. See also pizmon; seliḥ ah/seliḥ ot; Yiddish historical songs Spanish Synagogue, 15, 16 Spira-Wedeles, Aaron Simon: as chief rabbi of Prague, 1, 148, 149; denounced and jailed, 159; father of Benjamin Wolf, 102, 134; gravestone of, 96; illness and death of, 159; printing of seliḥ ot by, 151 Spira-Wedeles, Benjamin Wolf, 102 –3, 134 Spranger, Bartholomäus, 77 Sreyfe lid fun prag, 133, 160, 177, 184 Staré Meˇsto (Old Town, Altstadt), 11, 13, 150; building of bridge to, 15; executions in Old Town Square, 83; fire of 1689 in, 42, 44, 103, 133 –35, 159 –61; Hus statue in, 17, 24; Marian column in, 31, 157–59, 158; Týn Church, 12, 13, 32, 158, 162 –63. See also Charles Bridge; Tandel Market State Jewish Museum, 9. See also Jewish Museum in Prague Strakonice, 200 St. Vitus Cathedral, 12, 13, 71, 150; disinterment of Bohemian kings, 24 Sukkot (Festival of Booths), 38, 44 Swedish invasion and siege (1648): capture of Malá Strana and Castle District, 149, 153; celebratory procession in Prague following, 157–58; deaths from mortar fire, 154 –56; Jews joining in defense against, 149 –51; loss of civilian lives during, 33 –34; Yiddish songs about, 152 –53. See also H ̣  anokh (Heni) ben Judah Leib Gedalyes; Milḥ ama beshalom synagogues: Altschul (Old Synagogue), 15 –16, 21–22, 41– 42; Great Court (Velkodvorská) Synagogue, 27; increasing importance of, 8; interior furnishings of, 29; Klausen Synagogue, 29; lost in 1689 fire, 160; Maisel Synagogue, 26, 28, 29; New (Wechsler) Synagogue, 27; Pinkas

Synagogue, 18, 20 –22, 44, 187–89; private, 18, 26 –27; requirements for building of, 18; seating in, 30 –31; Spanish Synagogue, 15, 16; Wechsler Synagogue, 27. See also Altneuschul Talmud (Babylonian), 39, 45, 60, 114, 132, 142, 175, 179, 219n122 Tandel Market, 13, 31, 89, 96, 167 Tausk, H ̣  ayyim, 90 Tausk, Samuel (Shmuel), 96, 193. See also Megillas Shmuel taytsh (Yiddish), 17, 31, 178 –86 Tehila ledavid (Oppenheim), 111 Tein, Joseph: condemned to death over stolen curtains, 83 –84; deliverance narrative of, 87; establishing familial Purim day, 119; Megillat hakela′im, 85, 180, 192; payment for release of, 84, 96 –97 tela′ah/tela′ot, 124 Temple, memory of destruction of, 2 Ten Days of Repentence, 43 Teplitz, Jacob ben Elijah of, 31 Tevet, burial society processions during, 45 Thirty Years’ War: anonymous chronicle of, 145 – 49; and Catholic Renewal, 77; Milḥ ama beshalom opening on, 1; passing of generation of, 159; precipitating events of, 28, 83, 145; print format of seliḥ ot of, 174; seliḥ ot commemorating, 126 –30, 167; significance of, 139. See also Passau invasion; Swedish invasion and siege Tikotin, Rebekah bat Meir (Rivkah Tiktiner), 25, 44, 60, 68 –71, 69, 76 Tisha b′Av. See 9 Av tkhines, 183 “Tola′at ya′akov” (Luntschitz), 125 Torah: arks and other protection for, 29 –30, 36, 46, 50, 63 –65; curtains for (see parokhet/parokhot); mantles, 21, 29, 51, 64, 192 –93, 223n54, 227n82; providing dialogue with past sages, 2; scrolls, 36, 65, 160, 177, 193; scrolls lost in 1689 fire, 160, 177; Simḥ at Torah celebration, 44, 60; study of as ideal, 54

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Index Tosafot Yom-Tov (Heller), 20, 91 tovim (community elders), 131 truth through fiction, 166 –67 two-column motif, 68, 69, 77–78, 182, 187 Týn Church, 12, 13, 32, 158, 162 –63 Urban II (Pope), 208n7 Vavei amudim (Horowitz), 111 Vianen, Paulus van, 23 Vilímková, Milada, 9 Vinẓ  Hans Purim / Frankfurter Purim, 87 Vladislav Hall, 68, 71, 71 Vladislav I, 14 –15 Vladislav II, 22 Vltava River (Moldau), 11, 13, 15 Volavková, Hana, 205n18 Vyšehrad (High Castle), 13, 14 Wagenseil, Johann Christoph, 112 walled cities, definition of, 40 Wallenstein, Albrecht von: assassination of, 99; funding Jewish converts to Christianity, 97; and Heller incarceration, 93; issuing death sentence over stolen curtains, 83 –84; as Jewish Town leader, 27; pushing out Gustavus Adolphus, 148 Wechsler Synagogue, 27 Weissler, Chava, 43, 181–83 Wenceslaus IV, 17 Wertheimer, Samson, 106, 108 –9 whitewashing of Altneuschul, 213n73 “Winter King” (Frederick V), 28 wisdom origin myth, 165 –67 Witte, Hans de, 83 women: candle/wick ritual, 43, 182 –83; donations of ritual objects by, 64 –65; explaining the death of children, 112 –15; female board of Pinkas Synagogue, 22; ideal qualities of, 52 –53, 55; importance of Yiddish publications to, 175, 180 –81; Kressl bat Gershon Shamash, 63 –64; leading prayers, 31; Libuše, 171; Neḥ ama (wife of Shalom Uri), 56, 58, 59 –60, 76 –77; participation in special rituals, 132; Pearl (wife of Maharal), 37, 73 –74; as

public mourners, 181–82, 185; published works by, 181–86, 182; Reizl bat Moses Plohn, 65 –66, 67, 80; role in publishing, 171–72; Sarah Yutl bat Moses, 53, 76; seating for in synagogues, 30 –31; separation of the sexes, 34 –36; wisdom of Gumpricht’s fiancée, 168 –72. See also Glikl of Hameln; Hendl, gravestone of; Horowitz, Beila; Perlhefter, Beila; Rausnitz, Rachel; Tikotin, Rebekah bat Meir Worms, 15 Yampels, Hirsch ben Selig, 89, 170 Yampels-Segal family, 86 Yaniv, Bracha, 58 –59 Yeḥ iel Michael ben Abraham Zalman, 160 Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim, 2 –3 Yesh manḥ ilin (Katzenellenbogen), 97–98 Yesh noḥ alin (Horowitz), 111 Yiddish: Beila Perlhefter’s defense of, 181; expansion of in print, 7, 17, 175; historical songs in, 4, 6, 151–53. See also leshon ashkenaz; taytsh Yiddish historical songs, 6, 149; about Fettmilch uprising, 242n39; about Swedish invasion and siege, 152 –53; Ayn nay kloglid, 162 –65, 195; collections of, 196; composers of, 251n68; development of, 6; “Eyn nay kloglid benign Prostitser-kdoyshim-lid iber den groysn ershreklekn ipesh” (Katzenellenbogen), 183; fire songs, 29, 133, 160 –61, 177, 184, 253n95; “Ipesh lid fun Prag benign adir ayom venora” (Katz), 183; plague songs, 183 –84; reporting current events, 151–52; resemblance to kinnot, 161, 251n6; Shvedish lid, 149 –58; Sreyfe lid fun prag, 133, 160, 177, 184 Yizkor ceremony, 37, 44, 134 Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement), 15, 38, 42 – 43, 125 Zaks, Karpel, 65 Ẓ eidah laderekh (Eilenburg), 111 Ẓ eidah laderekh (Menaḥ em ben Zeraḥ ), 101

Index Ẓ emaḥ David (Gans): on building of Malá Strana synagogue, 14; compared to anonymous contemporary account, 143 – 47; cultural context of, 200; on empires and kingships, 142 – 43; on events of recent memory, 142; on Holy Roman Empire, 142 – 43; influence of science on, 141, 246n20; on Jews rewarded by Duke Boleslav II, 14, 138, 167; on King Vladislav, 14 –15; on Libuše, 171; on Maharal, 24, 142; Maisel support for, 193; on Mordecai Maisel, 25 –26, 142; on Mordecai Ẓ emaḥ  Kohen, 55; omitting expulsion threats, 6, 143 – 44; on Prague, 11, 143, 172, 248n35; praise for Bohemia and Prague, 248n35; praise for printing

press, 173; publishing of, 6, 194; referred to by Judah Leib ben Joshua, 152 –53; section 1 on Jewish history, 140 – 41, 143; section 2 on world history, 141, 143; on succession of rabbinic authority, 141– 42; survival of copies of, 193 –94; as true “Jewish historiography,” 137–38; use of material from Boregk, 208n5; use of term zikaron, 184; on Yom-Tov Lipmann Mülhausen, 247n28 Ẓ e′enah ure′enah (Ashkenazi), 175 Ẓ evi, Shabbetai, 112, 115, 194 –95 zikaron/zikhronot (memory/memories), 184 Zikhroynes (Glikl of Hameln), 185 Zunz, Leopold, 60

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