In Community with the Dead?: Relations with the Jewish Dead Across History, Time, and Space

Most cultures, Judaism included, have highly regimented rituals for how to handle dead bodies. Purity regulations and social taboos ensure that the “contamination” of a dead body does not spread from the living to the deceased–whether that “contamination” be considered physical, like a disease, or metaphysical, like impurity. There are rules for how to properly dispose of a body, how to behave before a corpse, and how to exit a cemetery. Although some of these rules are part of established halakha, many are traditions or minhag and have changed and developed over Jewish history, reflecting different ideas of how one ought to interact with the dead. 

In this panel we explore the ways that different Jewish sources, from different times and places in Jewish history, demonstrate what it means to be in community with the dead. In these sources it becomes clear that the dead are not simply absent, but rather continue to have an emotional, ethical, religious, or even conscious presence. In the texts and objects that we investigate the dead body is more than an ordinary object, or even objects of contagion (medical or spiritual). Instead the dead are owed some kind of relationship with the living, whether it is with those who care for the body, those who visit the cemetery, or the larger Jewish and non-Jewish society who observe these various rites and rituals. 

We begin with Shira Eliassian’s exploration of a story cycle in Bavli Brachot 18a-b about interactions between the living and the dead. Eliassian shows that this set of stories - about the interactions of rabbis and laypeople in cemeteries and how they speak with, overhear, and disrespect the dead - begs the question: why should it make a difference what one does in the presence of a corpse? Eliassian argues that the rabbis imagine the dead to maintain the capacity for a robust existence–one with social, emotional, and perhaps even physical dimensions. These stories illustrate how the rabbis consider the connections between the living and the dead to continue even after death, and think about what it means to forge a community that includes the living and the dead.

From Babylon in antiquity we move to medieval Ashkenaz with Emilie Amar-Zifkin’s presentation on Jewish death rituals in the context of a hostile Christian society. Amar-Zifkin looks at three Jewish death rites: public funeral processions, the pouring out of water in the home of the dead, and the tossing of dirt behind one’s back when leaving a cemetery. Amar-Zifkin is interested in the Christian response to these practices which fostered confusion and anti-Jewish sentiment among the majority population. By surveying the practice, appearance, and afterlives of these rituals, Amar-Zifkin argues we do not simply learn how Jews buried, grieved, and memorialized their dead, but how the potential or real presence of a Christian audience impacted the multifaceted practice of mourning. Thus Amar-Zifkin expands the community around the Jewish dead to include the larger, often hostile, gentile society. Amar-Zifkin’s presentation therefore shows how living Jews mediated between their dead and their Chrisitan neighbors to try to live in harmony together. 

Finally we will move to early modern Prague and the powerful chevra kaddisha (burial society) that cared for the dead there. Ranana Dine will investigate a late 18th century painting cycle created for the chevra kaddisha that depicts in great detail the steps for caring for the Jewish dead and dying. The paintings are highly unusual since death is not usually depicted in Jewish art. The paintings also hail from a period of intense political upheaval for the chevra kaddisha with the Hapsburg Emperor Franz Joseph II introducing hygiene reforms that would force the society to radically change its practices. The paintings are thus an ideological document demonstrating the hygienic and deeply religious nature of the rituals, and showing the obligatory status of these death care practices both to the larger public and to the members of the chevra kaddisha themselves. The paintings also all include multiple figures, illustrating the embodied intimacy between the chevra kaddisha’s members, the dead, and laypeople. They thus depict the way that the chevra kaddisha creates a particular community of care extending between the dead, their caretakers, the mourners, and the larger Jewish community. Dine argues that the paintings present a visual document of what it means to be in holy community with the newly dead, and are worth studying, alongside textual sources, for understanding the communal nature of Jewish death obligations in a moment of external state pressure.

These three presentations thus draw together different kinds of sources at very different moments of Jewish history to show the ways Jewish community is built and structured with the dead in mind. This panel thus presents several exciting opportunities for the furthering of Jewish studies and the study of death. By showing how across history, the nature of the relationship with the dead was a concern for Jews we argue that more attention needs to be paid to the dead as autonomous subjects in of themselves. Rather than focusing on afterlife beliefs or mourning, our panel is attentive to the dead themselves and their force within Jewish life across time and space. By covering three different times and places we draw connections between and point out transformations in Jewish rituals regarding the dead. This panel also showcases the need to be attentive to different kinds of sources when thinking about Judaism and death including extra-legal rabbinic stories, liturgical documents, gestures, records of Christian and other non-Jewish responses to Jewish rituals, and paintings. We hope that this panel can begin a robust conversation about how Jewish death rituals create a community bridging the dead, the Jewish community, and the larger society across time and space.