Eulogies Without Words: Gestures of Grief in Medieval Ashkenaz

In medieval Ashkenaz, death was a close neighbor. People generally died in their homes, and the community was involved with organizing and executing the delicate shepherding of their fellow Jews from the mortal world to the grave. Death and the moments closely before and after have a magnetic quality: one that draws communities together out of necessity if nothing else, and one which cries out for ritual – the kind where mourners and the community have specific and definite roles to play, the scripts and plots well-worn but new to the bereaved. Rituals abound around death, and the Jewish communities of medieval Ashkenaz were no exception. This paper draws on multiple genres of source material: legal commentaries and compilations both Jewish and Christian, like Sefer Tashbetz Katan and Burchard of Worms’ Decretum, and narrative exempla from Sefer Hasidim, Mahzor Vitry, and a 14th century collection of hagiographic tales about the medieval Hasidim.

It is impossible to study medieval Jewish life without being interrupted by the dead. While Jewish quarters were usually centrally located, the cemeteries were outside the town boundaries. Relations between Jews and Christians could range from neighborly coexistence to hostility and suspicion. The distance between the town center and the Jewish cemetery allowed for an unintentionally public performance of Jewish identity in an otherwise explicitly Christian context. This paper explores how these performances – specific acts and rituals – borrowed, commented upon, and subverted Christian understandings of death generally, and of Jewish death particularly. I survey three such acts, each of which sheds a different light on medieval Jews’ and Christians’ understandings of death: the funeral procession, pouring water upon hearing of a death, and of tossing earth behind oneself upon leaving the cemetery. 

Each of these rituals held deep religious significance, providing different outlets for the expression of Jewish grief within a Christian world. The funeral procession briefly transformed the street into a Jewish ritual space, as the procession passed through the town and outside the walls. The water-pouring announced a death and reflected Jewish beliefs about the mechanics of the afterlife, and of the figure of the angel of death. The earth-tossing indicated the severing of the spirit from the physical world. To Christian onlookers, however, these odd-looking gestures could foster confusion and dangerous anti-Jewish rhetoric. Examining these rituals that shepherded Jews from the realm of the living to the quiet of the grave, and comparing Christian understandings of them to their Jewish sources, offers a deeper understanding of how communication with, for, and about the dead functioned in medieval life. 

For Jews, the ritual purity concerns surrounding the proximity and handling of corpses were also kept at bay by the distance. The city gates, of course, played an important role and landmarks and portals for the living and the dead. In the narratives I present, the funeral processions of great rabbis result in city walls and bell towers being breached and destroyed as a posthumous commentary on the Christian majority, and on the spiritual and physical power of the deceased. The death and burial of Jews are thus presented as an occasion for a unique and dynamic form of Jewish presence: the procession from the Jewish quarter through the town, out the gate, and to the cemetery.

The second ritual, pouring out of water after a death, was a multifaceted and particularly Jewish ritual. The Jewish understanding does possess a modicum of superstition: the presence of death in a house was understood to pollute the water, which the angel of death might even use to cleanse his blade. Within this framework, disposing of the water in a house after a death was a crucial step to the prevention of more death. Perhaps even more striking is the simple, sensory explanation: in the world of medieval Ashkenaz, publicly proclaiming the news of a death out loud was dangerous – a good way to tempt fate or bring about further calamity. Pouring water was an accepted way of making the dire announcement wordlessly, and of thus allowing the news to spread from Jew to neighboring Jew without the burden of communication falling upon the recently bereaved.

The tossing of earth, which involved mourners pulling up some dirt or grass at some point between the graveside and the return from the cemetery and tossing it behind themselves, is generally understood as a kind of boundary-marking, marking a tangible divide between the world of the dead and that of the living. The ritual is framed in a particularly striking way in the 12th century Mahzor Vitry, where apostates accuse the Jews of tossing the dirt as part of casting deadly spells against the Christian king. What follows is a discussion between R. Moses b. Yechiel and Louis IX about the merits of the practice and, surprisingly, of the Jews. The end of the narrative sees the king approve of the practice. The report of this in Mahzor Vitry, however, is circumspect: the ritual is permitted in theory but should not be performed in practice, out of an abundance of caution to avoid further and potentially fatal reprisal. 

Each of the three Jewish death rituals presented in this paper showcases different facets of the dynamics of death in medieval Ashkenaz, and of the Christian responses to them. In surveying the practice, appearance, and afterlives of these rituals, we gain an understanding not simply of how Jews buried, grieved, and memorialized their dead at a particular point in time, but how the potential or real presence of a Christian audience impacted the multifaceted practice of mourning. By examining Jewish processions and gestural practices in a time when Christian eyes were watching and potential Christian influences abounded, we can shed light on how some of the most layered mourning practices reflect both relations between the two communities, and the mechanics of communication between the living and dead.