“The Lord Was with Them, and They Were Not Found Out”: Jews, Christians, and the Veneration of Saints in Medieval Ashkenaz

Abstract

This study takes a fresh look at the tale of Rabbi Amram of Mainz, which appears in both Gedalyah ibn Yaḥya’s Hebrew Shalshelet haqabbalah (Venice, 1587) and the Yiddish Mayse bukh (Basel, 1602). Based on the legend of Saint Emmeram of Regensburg, the tale has long been considered a classic case of Jewish narrative borrowing from Christian hagiography. Drawing on both literary and archival sources of both Christian and Jewish provenance to place the tale in its local context, the article shows that the legend’s narrators in fact appropriated the Christian saint in a very sophisticated way. Rather than simply dressing a Jewish hero in a Christian plot, they implied that their own, clearly derivative version was the one containing ultimate religious truth and that the ostensibly more successful Christian cult was a fraud. They thus used their intimate knowledge of Christian legendry to beat the church with its own weapons. In this sense, the narrative does testify to the great attraction that the veneration of saints must have held for medieval Jews; at the same time, it is a monument to its narrators’ sense of self-preservation in the face of the Christian master narrative so dominant in medieval Europe.