Sprache:
Englisch
Erscheinungsjahr:
2021
Titel der Quelle:
Jewish History
Angaben zur Quelle:
35,1-2 (2021) 1-29
Schlagwort(e):
Śimḥah,
;
Ashkenazim Social life and customs
;
Judaism Ashkenazic rite
;
Liturgy
;
Jews Social life and customs 11th century
;
Manuscripts, Hebrew
Kurzfassung:
This article focuses on Maḥzor Vitry, a work considered the major source of the liturgical rite, laws, and customs of the lost Jewish communities of northern France and, more broadly, constituting a landmark of intellectual creativity in medieval Franco-Germany. Compiled sometime in the second half of the eleventh century by Simḥah ben Samuel of Vitry (d. 1105), one of Rashi’s (1040/1–1105) closest disciples, the original manuscript of the Maḥzor Vitry is now lost. However, thirteen copies of the work, dated between the mid-twelfth and the second half of the fourteenth century, are still preserved in public and private collections worldwide. The only surviving work of its kind (from the school of Rashi) to combine liturgy and law, this dual-natured work can be regarded as a liturgical-halakhic compendium, rather than a traditional maḥzor. The aim of this study is to examine the corpus of extant manuscripts, describing their legal content and textual transmission, as well as their internal organization. In addition, it will consider unrelated addenda from a gamut of literary genres that were appended to these manuscripts from the first half of the thirteenth century onwards. A sample list of eight comparable liturgical-halakhic compendia from Franco-Germany (thirteenth to fifteenth centuries) are also briefly described, demonstrating that the dual and encyclopedic nature of these liturgical-halakhic compendia are not limited to Maḥzor Vitry and, therefore, can be viewed as a highly popular genre, used by the rabbinical and intellectual elite of medieval Franco-Germany.
DOI:
10.1007/s10835-021-09416-0
URL:
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