Anthonius Margaritha and the Jewish Faith: Jewish Life and Conversion in Sixteenth-Century Germany

2 “I Will Be Your God and You Will Be My People”

17 2 “I Will Be Your God and You Will Be My People” —Leviticus 26:12 Anthonius Margaritha’s presentation of the Jewish life cycle and its associated customs and practices is the essence of his ethnographical value for most scholars. If one turns from ethnography to Margaritha’s own Jewish life, his description reveals his daily and cyclical routines and observances. What he did and how he eventually came to understand Jewishness help explain his conversion to Christianity. Although it cannot be absolutely proven that the customs and practices he described in his first work, Der gantz Jüdisch glaub, were those followed by the Margoles family, Margaritha ’s repeated references to differing observances in other Jewish communities are a strong indication that the greater part of his presentation reflected personal experience.1 Margaritha, as a scion of a rabbinic family, lived a commandment driven, structured Jewish life. The belief that custom and ritual had been revealed at Sinai and transmitted through the generations served to create a socioreligious community, which viewed itself as God’s treasured people. Reflecting the position of the biblical prophets, the Jews looked to their past and present sins for the origins of the problems and persecutions they endured. They found comfort and purpose in the prescribed life cycle and hope for redemption in tradition. Margaritha was a member of 18 Chapter 2 a kehillah, or community. In some ways the kehillah resembled a coeducational monastery, where daily observances sanctified the mundane and led to a portion in the world to come. Jewish law did not so much focus on spiritual experiences as a way to connect with the divine, but rather on the daily actions and the yearly and occasional events that distinguished and defined Jews as God’s people. The observances that characterized Jewish life were powerful boundary markers, which defined Margaritha and his fellows as holy. The kehillah created a sense of intimacy with God through the Sinaitic covenant as expressed in the rabbinic formulation of laws and practices derived from the Pentateuch. As a child and young man, Margaritha learned from his teachers that although the written Hebrew Bible was a divine communication, the oral tradition provided the details for living a Jewish life. It was known to scholars, and certainly taught to Margaritha, that before the destruction of the temple in the first century CE, various sects held different understandings of the meaning of the law. Only the rabbinic (Pharisaical) tradition, with its oral law, survived the revolts against Roman authority. The rabbinic formulation of Jewish law was set down in the Mishnah in the second century CE. The Mishnah was elaborated in the Gemara in various academies into the sixth century and the two formed the Talmud. Further, scholarly treatises, rulings , and local custom guided each community. The result was a flexible yet defined holy life that unified the Jews according to the prophetic statement, “You only have I known of all the families of the earth” (Amos 3:2). Each Jew counted, and communal life had both secular and eternal consequences. Several codifications of Jewish law, such as Maimonides’s Mishnah Torah (Repetition of the Torah, c. 1170) and Rabbi Jacob ben Asher’s Arbaah Turim (Four columns, fourteenth century) prescribed and shaped Jewish observance before the sixteenth century. In 1542, the year of Margaritha’s death, Joseph Karo produced his commentary on the Arbaah Turim, which he called the Shulchan Aruch (Prepared table). It would become the definitive code of Jewish practice. Margaritha and the men in his rabbinic family learned from the Talmud and studied the available compilations and tractates , which formed the bases for Joseph Karo’s work. Rabbis referred to these written works and local traditions to answer questions and solve disputes regarding correct Jewish behavior. Of course, even after the publication of Shulchan Aruch, local custom and scholarship continued to control much of communal life.2 There were disadvantages to living in a rigorous, defined community. Not everyone flourishes under the stringent rules set out for the monk, nun, or observant Jew. Following the prescribed minutiae of daily life could be difficult and stressful. Margaritha and others who left the faith complained “I Will Be Your God and You Will Be My People” 19 that many practices seemed far removed from biblical prescriptions. Outside pressures and “commandment” fatigue occasioned frustration, which helped overcome the familial, social, and religious inertia that...