Our next meeting of this academic year takes place on Tuesday, March 12, at Faculty House. Our speaker is Rachel Zohn Mincer, visiting scholar, Jewish Theological Seminary.
Her talk is entitled: The Increasing Reliance on Ritual Handbooks in Late Medieval Asheknaz
She has provided the following abstract:
Liturgical custom books figure prominently among the works produced by German Jews from the thirteenth through the fifteenth century. Scholars have typically attributed the popularity of these handbooks to the desire to preserve customs and provide guidance in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—the so-called post–Black Death period, a time of upheaval and decline for German Jewry. However, this explanation is insufficient, particularly since the earliest German Jewish custom books are from the thirteenth century. In this talk, I will link the emergence and continued flourishing of these works to two trends: (1) the geographic mobility of German Jewry, not only in the post–Black Death era but also during the century and a half preceding it, and (2) the increase in the production of written texts in Ashkenazic society, paralleling a similar trend in medieval Europe as a whole. Medieval Ashkenazic texts included a variety of liturgical genres and ritual guides, some of which were accessible to Jews who, though educated, were not rabbinic scholars. As a result of these developments, by the last centuries of the medieval period, even before the advent of print, there was a growing reliance on written works for the transmission of Jewish tradition.
The evening will follow our usual format: the talk begins at 5 p.m. at Faculty House, with dinner at 7 p.m. Please RSVP for both the talk and the dinner with our rapporteur, Alma Igra (ai2298@columbia.edu). Dinner is PAYABLE BY CHECK ONLY, $30.
I am in process of revising our email list. If you would prefer not to included, please let me know: [email protected]
Our final meeting of the academic year will take place on April 30. Martin Elsky, of Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, will speak on "Erich Auerbach's Aufhebung: Figural Interpretation and the Nazi Era Church."
