Table Talk and the Bond of Reading: A Jewish Broadsheet for Meals

Jewish rituals are highly dynamic. Although they seem to be stable, in reality, once they emerge, they constantly evolve, change, and erode. They do this slowly and subtly, but if we examine the emergence and spread of Jewish rituals across consecutive centuries—say, between the mid-seventeenth and the beginning of the twentieth—we would be bound to detect the numerous changes they have undergone over time. For example, Jewish deathbed rituals—a new phenomenon in the second quarter of the seventeenth century, attested to in dozens of booklets, editions, and translations—disappeared almost totally by the end of the nineteenth century.¹ Many factors combine to modify or alter the course of Jewish ritual practices: newly emergent sensibilities, communication technologies, towering personalities, influential books and other printed materials, and the spread of new ideologies.

In this chapter I present a hitherto unknown broadsheet which, I claim, illustrates Jewish domestic table rituals as they developed in eastern Europe during the eighteenth century. This broadsheet, which comprises various texts to be studied and performed at mealtimes, is an example, on the one hand, of the creation of personalized rituals, and on the other hand, of the attempt to disseminate them through print. It belongs in the context of other Jewish ritualization projects in eastern Europe, such as the 1666 printing of the kabbalistic prayer book Sha’arei tsiyon in Prague, yet it is much more modest and more compact—focusing on table rituals only. These were an important aspect of the domestic religiosity developing among both Jews and Christians at that time.²

The Polish Rabbi Naftali Hakohen Katz (1650–1719), in his Sha’ar hahakhanah, testified:

I have heard that the illustrious Rabbi David Segal [1586–1667], who wrote Turei zahav [a commentary on the Shulḥan arukh], used to always recite the sabbath and the festivals Kiddush from a book. He said that the reason for this was, besides the sanctity of the [Hebrew] letters of the alphabet,³ that he would sometimes be the guest of an uneducated person, an am ha’arets, or he would stay with him in a house, such as a rented place or a sukkah, and the uneducated person would not know the Kiddush off by heart, and would be ashamed to recite it from a prayer book. He [David Segal] would therefore read out the Kiddush so that the uneducated person would not be ashamed. And sometimes he would say to the uneducated person: do as I do, say it from a prayer book. He would do this because it is a great commandment, and it was all in order that the uneducated person would not be ashamed. This is a praiseworthy custom indeed.⁴

The passage is an interesting illustration of the relationship between text, printed book, and performance. Jewish rituals are mainly textual, or at least have a strong textual component. Such is the Kiddush, performed on Saturdays and festival days, which combines drinking wine from a goblet with the recitation of a short text. The Kiddush was traditionally performed by the communal cantor at the end of the synagogue service and could then be repeated by individuals in their homes. Scholars and learned people usually knew the text by heart, as they did many other regularly recited texts, and could recite it without assistance, while an individual who resorted to a book would be marked as being uneducated. Rabbi David Segal was evidently trying to break this connection between those who relied on printed sources and the unlearned. He was acting as a popularizer of the ritual, offering his personal example of one who performs it with the aid of a printed book.

Indeed, print facilitated the dissemination of Jewish rituals and was at least partially responsible for the increase in the number of rituals during the early modern period.⁵ Quite a few of the rituals that emerged at that time were domestic, such as those for mealtimes or for times of illness at home. Segal was promoting not only a particular ritual but specifically a home-based...