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ix Preface On one winter day in 1995 I found myself participating in the daily afternoon prayer service at one of the tiny synagogues that dot the Mahaneh Yehuda open-air market in Jerusalem. The synagogue’s gabbai (sexton of synagogue affairs) had flagged me down and asked me to come help form the minyan (the requisite quorum of ten men). When I entered, I quickly counted the gathered worshipers so that I could estimate how long I would have to wait before the quorum was present and the prayers would begin. To my surprise, I counted nine others, but the gabbai remained outside trying to convince another passerby to enter. I stepped out and told him that we were already ten. He replied that one of the men inside could not be counted in the quorum because “he’s not entirely okay.” At that moment another man, number eleven, walked in. We were thus ten male adults, the required quorum to perform the service, actually ten “normal” male adults and one who was “different.” The service began immediately, and I had no opportunity to ask the gabbai to explain his diagnosis. I did not know which of the men in the room was exceptional, and during the portion of the service during which each devotee recites the amidah prayer silently, I tried to figure out who the gabbai had not seen fit to count. Only by looking closely was I able to discern that one of the devotees was behaving unusually. Had I not been alerted by the gabbai , though, I probably would not have noticed anything out of the ordinary about him. As the leader of the service repeated the amidah prayer out loud, I stole another look at the man, who was still engaged in his silent prayer. I saw that he followed the words in his prayer book with his finger as he read. When he completed his personal devotion, much later than the rest of us, he listened to the remainder of the leader’s repetition and uttered the appropriate responses. The only facet of his behavior that indicated anything out of the ordinary was his voice, which was louder than that of the other worshipers. He stressed the words sharply and repeated the responsive phrases several times. Why did the gabbai think this man could not be included in the quorum? Ostensibly, he met all the criteria for active participation in the religious x PrEFACE ritual of the afternoon prayer service. But apparently something else, concealed behind the formal requirements, bound the quorum together and made distinctions between who could and could not be included within it. This event is not the reason I chose to study marginal individuals in medieval European Jewish society, but it helped sharpen my feeling that my subject was as relevant to modern society as to past ones. It should also be noted that medieval rabbinic law and tradition continue to resonate in present day orthodox Judaism, and thus the matters that will be discussed in this book share a contemporary relevance alongside the historical ones. I will not enumerate here all the reasons that led me to devote myself to this issue, but I am honor-bound to name two works that inspired me to delve into the subject. The first is a short book by Shulamit Shahar on marginal groups in the Middle Ages, and it immediately caught my eye.1 In reading it, I learned that while there had been extensive research on the Jews as a marginal group, this was hardly the case when it came to Jewish society’s collective attitudes to the marginal individuals within it. A bibliographical survey provided further confirmation. Furthermore, in light of the Jewish community’s position at the margins of European society, the questions Shahar posed seemed even more acute with regard to marginal individuals in the Jewish community itself. Another work that encouraged me to pursue the subject was an article by Bronislaw Geremek, a medievalist who became Poland’s foreign minister after the fall of Communism. Geremek contributed an in-depth discussion of marginal individuals in medieval European society to a collection edited by the late French historian Jacques Le Goff.2 I conjectured that, given the small size of the Jewish community in medieval Europe, I would have difficulty investigating marginal groups within it, and that my study would need to focus not on collectives but rather on individuals who for one reason or another...

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