Crossing the Jabbok: Illness and Death in Ashkenazi Judaism in Sixteenth- through Ninteenth-Century Prague (review)

This is an ambitious book: Sylvie-Anne Goldberg sets out to treat the attitudes to illness and death among Central European Jews, from the early modern to the modern period. Informed by the Annales school in general and by Philippe Ariès’s work on death in particular, her approach is to apply their historiographic methods to the Jewish past in order to illuminate what is a severely underresearched area. In the process of reconstructing Jewish mentalities, she sheds light on the most intimate of life’s moments for Jews—analyzing what attitudes, beliefs, and practices concerning illness and death they shared with their Christian neighbors, and what set them apart.

Goldberg ably demonstrates that the Jews’ customs concerning illness and death were in many ways remarkably similar to those of their neighbors. For example, Latin was used for Jewish funerary inscriptions until the ninth century, after which time they were written in Hebrew; Goldberg attributes this to the flourishing of Ashkenazic communities in Germany and France, the intellectual prestige and authority they came to enjoy, and the subsequent development of new, sacred conceptions of the relation of these new communities to the dead. Most strikingly, she has found no indications of the existence of a specifically Jewish cemetery before the eleventh century, and she hypothesizes that until this time, “Jews were buried . . . in funerary spaces shared by others and doubtless without the benefit of headstones” (p. 25). After about 1000 c.e. this situation changed. She suggests that the emergence of the Jewish cemetery was due to the spread of Christianity among Europeans, whose increasing sacralization of burial places—illustrated by the transference of the cemetery from outside the town to the interior of the church—forced Jews to make provision for their own funerary space. No longer could burial grounds be shared places of rest for Christians and Jews.

Elsewhere, Goldberg indicates those times and places where specific historical moments gave rise to particular Jewish customs. For example, the Crusades and the mass slaughter they brought in their wake for the Jews of the Rhineland saw the appearance of memorial books, the kaddish (prayer for the dead), and the annual lighting of memorial candles for the dead—all of which remain essential to the funerary practices of Jews to this very day.

In other spheres, Jewish practices are reminiscent of those among Christians, even though the origins of the two may be distinct. For example, similar to the notion of Christian mercy as expressed by Catholic brotherhoods, the Jewish obligation to visit the sick (bikkur holim) was based on a notion of “disinterested kindness” (hesed shel emet)—but rather than a mere imitation of Christian practice, Goldberg says that among Jews the visitations were inspired by the advent of Lurianic Kabbalah in the sixteenth century. In particular, Jewish burial societies first emerged in Italy (though Christian guilds in German lands had them as well), in areas populated by Iberian Jewish exiles. Kabbalah, with its themes of resurrection, atonement, and the individual life of the soul, inspired a “virtual explosion of books on death rituals” between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries (p. 86). One of these was the book by Aaron Berachia of Modena called Crossing the Jabbok (1626)—an allusion to the purifying river of fire that, kabbalists said, the soul passes over after death in order to reach the realm of eternal life.

It is Goldberg’s claim that death and suffering define community. Thus the centerpiece of her study is the hevra kaddisha of Prague, or its burial society, established in 1564, which became the prototype for all...