Lauren Urbont: Death and Burial Culture among the Jews of Medieval Ashkenaz

            Last winter, I applied to the Europe Center Grant for a summer of archival research in Germany for my doctoral dissertation, which examines the burial and commemoration of the dead among Jews in medieval German lands between 1000 and 1350.  My interest in this topic stems from the fact that the Jews experienced several radical innovations in the philosophy, memorialization and material customs relating to human death in the very same way their Christian neighbors did. My goal for this trip to Germany was to survey the major holdings in German libraries, and to gain a stronger sense of which manuscripts pertaining to death customs would be useful for my dissertation.  My second goal was to survey the material traces left by the Jews of Ashkenaz, to see how they intersect with the remaining written record; this included cemeteries in particular. On both of these counts, the trip laid necessary groundwork for continuing my dissertation on this subject. I would like to thank the Europe Center in particular for enabling me to conduct this research and to successfully carry out my plan for this trip.  

            The research trip to Germany was more successful than I could have hoped.  While the sequence of my visits changed slightly since I submitted my application, I was able to stop and survey each library and archive that I initially aspired to visit, and to spend some initial time with their holdings. My first stop was the Aryeh Maimon Institute in Trier, where I gained familiarity with perhaps the most impressive secondary library on the Jews of medieval Europe that exists in Germany. This first stop equipped me with some additional information about how best to navigate subsequent research trips to the archives themselves.  The same was true of my next stop, at the Germania Judaica Collection in Cologne. These two stops have convinced me that applying to a DAAD, affiliated with the Aryeh Maimon Institute in particular, would be a fruitful next step for my dissertation. 

            After spending a total of 10 days at these libraries, I was able to combine archival visit and physical site-trips at Cologne, Mainz, Worms, Speyer, and Wuerzburg, where small collections of liturgical manuscripts relating to death remain, and where some remnants of Jewish cemeteries also still stand.  The most impressive of the material remains I was able to view and take notes on were at Worms, at the Heiliger Sands cemetery where the great rabbinic authorities of Ashkenaz were buried in an unbroken chain for centuries, and the astonishing collection of medieval Hebrew tombstones at the Shalom Europa museum of Wuerzburg. A generous volunteer at the museum led me into the climate-controlled room where the tombstones are held, so that I could compare the published epitaphs with the material remains.   I was particularly interested to see the scripts and stone-types for myself. 

            My last stop was Munich, where I devoted roughly two-thirds of my time to the Bavarian Main State Library, and the last third to the Main State Archive of Bavaria.  As this was my last stop, I was able to target my search through the largest collection of medieval Judaica manuscripts in Germany.  By now, I had realized that while quite a number of the manuscripts located in municipal archives had been edited, there were many piyyutim (liturgical poems) relating to death that had not been.  My time at Munich was spent surveying the manuscripts pertaining to death and the cemetery, with a particular interest in how poetic sources might interact with the more widely known legal sources. 

            I have left this trip with a stronger sense of which sources I will incorporate into my dissertation (particularly poetry and epitaphs), which manuscripts would be useful to consult in the future, and the knowledge that it would help my research immensely to spend a much longer period in Trier and Munich in particular. I would like to say thank you again to the Europe Center for making this research possible; I am truly grateful for this opportunity, which has changed the course of my studies.