Tradition, Migration, and the Impact of Print: Local Rites of Seliḥot Recitation in Early Modern Ashkenaz

Abstract

Abstract:This article examines the history of the various rites of seli@hot (penitential prayers) recitation for what it can tell us about the changes the legacy of medieval Ashkenaz underwent in the early modern period. An eminently local matter by definition, these penitential liturgies were inevitably affected by the large-scale emigration of Jews from the German lands that marked the end of the Middle Ages. They were also subject to the trend toward standardization that came with the new technology of printing. While the local seli@hot rites were among the first Hebrew books to be printed in northern Italy, in Prague, and in Krakow, a similarly direct transition from practice into print was not an option in post-expulsion Germany. Hence, when Jewish communities began to revive in western Ashkenaz from the sixteenth century onward, local choices were predicated upon the availability of printed editions that had originated elsewhere, and the liturgical landscape changed accordingly. Nevertheless, even as the first seli@hot editions printed in Germany itself followed the Italo-Ashkenazic rite for the bulk of their corpus, they also preserve unacknowledged evidence of an indigenous rite well rooted in medieval tradition. Pockets of local tradition, it turns out, sometimes remained in place when rural Jews continued to uphold the rite of a historical region even after the urban community that had served as its center had ceased to exist. Liturgical sources are thus shown to shed unexpected light on Jewish life in sixteenth-century Germany, a dark age in German-Jewish history in more than one respect.