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Burchard of Worm's CORRECTOR and Eleazar of Worms' HILKHOT TESHUVAH: Medieval Jewish and Christian penitentials and Jewish "inner acculturation".

Mon, December 17, 3:00 to 4:30pm, Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, Cambridge 1

Abstract

Recent scholarship, such as that of Elisheva Baumgarten and Talya Fishman, has been challenging the previously regnant perception of Medieval Ashkenazic Jewry as a community isolated, intellectually and socially, from the surrounding Christian culture. To the contrary, commonalities have been found not only in the use of dialectic by both Jews and Christians in glosses to their respective religious and legal texts, but folk religious practices as well.
Specifically, there are significant parallels between the DECRETUM of Burchard, Bishop of Worms, (c. 950-1025) and the SEFER HA-ROQUEAH (Book of the Perfumer) of R. Eleazar of Worms, (c. 1176-1238) a prominent member of the semi-separatist Jewish pietistic group of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries known as HASIDEI ASHKENAZ, or German Pietists. Though these works were composed two hundred years apart, Burchard's CORRECTOR, the penitential section of his DECRETUM, enjoyed wide circulation in the thirteenth century. Both the DECRETUM and SEFER HA-ROQUEAH are compilations of religious law which have introductions that stress piety and penance, both have a separate penitential section, and the actual penances prescribed share many similarities.
While Peter Schafer has written about the Second Temple origins of the aesthetic practices of the German Pietists, it seems clear that the environment of the Rhineland in the thirteenth century "turned on" a pietistic "gene" in medieval Jewry, (to borrow a term from epigenetics). For both Christians and Jews, penance was not only a means to deter sin; its primary purpose was to cleanse and heal the penitent from the spiritual pollution of sin.
This paper seeks to continue the work of scholars such as Ivan Marcus, who described the acculturation of medieval Jewry as "inner acculturation"-that is, an acculturation which absorbs elements of the majority surrounding culture and "Judaizes" it. The parallels between medieval Christian and Jewish penitentials give a glimpse of the parallels in the religious sensibilities of both communities; instead of the classic image of two communities only sharing hostilities, a richer and more variegated picture emerges.

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