Nestled into the intricate western façade of the Regensburg Cathedral is a sculpture depicting a contentious dance: the ancient Israelites’ dance around the golden calf (Exodus 32).Footnote 1 Created in approximately 1420, the sculpture portrays five Jewish men, marked by their oversized pointed hats, who dance around a large, elevated calf. Holding hands in a semi-circle, the men hunch forward and strain their necks upwards to gaze at the idol. Their long robes train behind them as three of them lift a single foot to make their next sidewards step. The men’s posture and bent knees emphasize their weighted connection to the ground. This kinaesthetically separates them from the aesthetics of fifteenth-century Christian courtly dance that equated a lifted posture and lightness of foot with virtuousness.Footnote 2 In this public artwork, dance becomes an embodied metaphor for medieval Christian antisemitism. The statue—coupled with an offensive Judensau (Jews’ sow) statue on the southern wall—projects Regensburg Christians’ antisemitic views towards the Jewish quarter, which stood immediately southwest of the cathedral.Footnote 3 Depictions of the Israelites’ dance, such as this one, were part of a much larger Christian discourse around Jewish dance in the late medieval period. In this essay, I examine how Christian approaches to Jewish dance within moralistic discourses and legal codes contributed to the racialization of Jews. Medieval Christians stereotyped, separated, and asserted control of Jews at a bodily level. Dance, I contend, served as a significant medium for Christians to construct racist, antisemitic ideas about Jewish identity and project those ideas onto Jewish bodies, real and imagined.

From the late twelfth century onwards, Christian theological concepts of racialized Jewish identity filtered into ecclesiastical and secular laws that actualized Jews’ subordinate status through discriminatory policies. In early Church discourse of Christian supersession, Christian theologians argued that Christianity superseded Judaism; Christians replaced Jews as God’s chosen people through a new covenant with Jesus. Christian theologians believed that biblical Jews’ rejection of and (alleged) crucifixion of Jesus forever subjugated Jews to an inferior spiritual status and perpetual servitude (servitus Judaeorum). M. Lindsay Kaplan argues that this ontological status, which she terms ‘hereditary inferiority,’ is a racial status (2019, 2). Ecclesiastical powers first translated this concept into law at the Third Lateran Council (1179) by legally defining Christians’ higher status with regards to court testimony, conversion, and hiring domestic servants (Wiedl 2021, 187). In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council further imposed theological concepts of Jewish inferiority and asserted jurisdiction over Jews with canons restricting Jewish social behaviour and economic activities. Significantly, Canon 68 required non-Christians to be physically distinguishable from Christians, which Dorothy Kim argues defined Jews and Muslims ‘as a racial as well as a religious other’ (2015, 57). In the Holy Roman Empire, canons pertaining to Jews entered secular law through their incorporation into the Schwabenspiegel (Swabian Law Book) in 1274–1275, which codified customary law in southern Germany. Imperial cities also adapted ecclesiastical laws, but only when doing so would serve the city authority’s political interests (Wenninger 1991, 328). Kaplan argues that this legal development ‘constitutes a racist construction of Jewish identity,’ one that ‘create[d] a new, racial status of second-class citizenship’ (2019, 56, 23).

While medieval legal codes protected Jewish people’s right to practice Judaism and observe Jewish law—largely in line with Augustine’s (d. 430) doctrine of Jews’ future role as witnesses to the second coming of Christ—these codes also diminished Jews’ social, economic, and political status.Footnote 4 These laws affected Jewish people’s everyday lived experiences, imposing restrictions on their work, clothing, and freedom of movement. Despite repeated laws intended to eliminate close social relations, medieval Jews still actively engaged in both their own communities and medieval society at large, forging relations with their Christian neighbours. However, legal codification of Christian antisemitism also led to antisemitic violence, particularly as Christians exploited laws to extort the Jewish community for money, made false allegations of blood libel and host desecration, instigated deadly pogroms, and forcibly removed Jews from localities through expulsion orders.Footnote 5 As Geraldine Heng (2018) argues in her analysis of Jews in England, legal codes which demarcated, segregated, and surveilled Jewish people directly marginalized them as racialized subjects. Heng defines race as an historically-specific socio-political construct; race-making strategically essentializes human characteristics to construct hierarchies of people figured as fundamentally different and to justify unequal distributions of power. In premodern European racial discourses, religion was a significant axis of difference, which could be essentialized and biologized in political and theological discourses, laws, and other technologies of power (Heng 2018, 27). Kaplan notes that attributing inferiority to a group in order to create a hierarchy is an essential component of racism (2019, 6). Thus, instances of attributed Jewish inferiority are fundamental to the figuration of medieval Jews as a racialized group. Building upon this work, I argue that dance was part of the racializing theological discourse and legal enforcement of medieval Jews’ subordinate status in the Holy Roman Empire. Christians typified Jewish dance as inherently immoral and instituted laws that limited Jews’ ability to practice their dances and associated religious rites.

Medieval dance, especially medieval Jewish dance, poses a particular set of challenges for historians because of limited extant documentation and visual sources. I work around archival occlusions by following Priya Srinivasan’s and Saidiya Hartman’s models of tracking subaltern movement in archives. In Sweating Saris, Srinivasan (2012) conceptualizes what she terms the ‘bodily archive,’ a repository of embodied knowledge stored in the body that can be transmitted through bodily contact, to argue that Indian dancers influenced white American modern dance choreographers through such transmissions. Her concept helps me envisage undocumented transmissions between premodern Jewish and Christian communities. I look for evidence of exchanges of ‘bodily archives,’ or anxieties around such exchanges, by locating documented, possible, and anticipated bodily encounters in medieval records, including laws, arrests, and moral writings. In ‘Venus in Two Acts,’ Hartman uses the subjunctive mood to redress the violent erasures of the trans-Atlantic slavery archive by building speculative arguments based on a critical reading of the archive that intends ‘both to tell an impossible story and to amplify the impossibility of its telling’ (2008, 11). At times, I turn to the subjunctive to imagine the historical possibilities of premodern Jewish embodiment in the otherwise silent spaces of archival gaps. Applying these approaches to Jewish dance in the Holy Roman Empire, I begin by providing a brief overview of moral codes in late medieval Ashkenazi dance practices. I then turn to Christian moral attitudes towards dance and trace the development of the Israelites’ dance around the golden calf’s meanings from early Church anti-Jewish polemics to later antisemitic discourse. Finally, I consider how Christian antisemitic and anti-dance views came to bear on Jewish wedding dance practices through the implementation of ecclesiastical and secular laws. Through their focus on encoding and subjugating Jewish bodies, Christian dance discourse and legal codes effectively racialized medieval Jews.

Dance in late medieval Ashkenazic communities

Dance was a significant part of medieval Jewish religious practice and custom with distinct codes that reflected Jewish morality. Jewish dance has biblical roots, especially in the prophetess Miriam’s dance after crossing the Red Sea (Exodus 15: 20–21). Illuminations of this scene in medieval Haggadot, or household manuscripts used during the Passover seder feast to recount the Exodus story, are one of the few extant sources of Ashkenazic dance images. Three Haggadot from southern Germany illuminate this scene and depict moral Jewish dancing. The Second Nuremberg Haggadah and the Yahuda Haggadah from c. 1450–1500, held by The Schocken Institute for Jewish Research in Jerusalem (Israel MS 24087) and The Israel Museum in Jerusalem (MS 180/50), respectively, are nearly identical. In their illuminations, Miriam plays a tambourine near a female lute player while eight women in long modest gowns circle in a closely linked chain. The Floersheim Haggadah from 1502 depicts the Israelites dancing in a dance house, reflecting a common Ashkenazic practice.Footnote 6 These dancers appear to be modelled on male moresque dancers with large, angular movements. Donning pointed shoes, the uppermost dancer juts his right heel forward and splays his arms in a bent pose, one hand pointed upwards and the other to the floor. On his right, a dancer is mid-lunge, his right knee piercing forward, his head thrown back, and his arms swinging forwards and backwards in opposition. Just below and outside the house, removed from the male dancers, Miriam grasps her timbrel (tambourine) close to her chest. Her separation from the male dancers reflects late medieval Jewish moral codes around mixed-sex dancing, discussed below. The use of the medieval moresque dance style and dance house suggests that medieval Jews linked their contemporary practices to their ancient Israelite ancestors’ joyous dance at the Red Sea.

Medieval Jewish dance practices followed Talmudic law, rabbinical law (halakhah), and local customs (minhag), which dictated how and when Jews could partake in dance and musicmaking. Weddings were particularly important dance occasions because of the Talmudic commandment (mitzvah) to please the bride and groom with music and dance (Ingber 2005, 168). In the Late Middle Ages, rabbis codified Ashkenazic customs (minhag), outlining the proper, moral way to celebrate holidays and weddings. Yaakov ben Moshe Levi Moelin (d. 1427), known as the Maharil, was especially influential in his role as the rabbi of Worms (Steiman 1963, 83). According to the Maharil’s writings, Jewish wedding ceremonies in the fifteenth century most often took place on Friday mornings, immediately following morning prayers, in the synagogue courtyard (Steiman 1963, 47). Musicians and the rabbi led the bride from her home to the ceremony with song, dance, and musicmaking, which Jewish studies scholar Noa Sophie Kohler describes as a highly entertaining festival (2012, 395). Later, in the evening, the community gathered for a feast and dance accompanied by music. In southern Germany, medieval Jews began their wedding celebrations on the Sabbath preceding the ceremony at the Spinholz feast, which included dance, music, and feasting with the bride, groom, and friends (404). As both these celebrations occurred over the Sabbath when Talmudic law forbids Jews from playing instruments, rabbis, including the Maharil, permitted Jews to hire Christian musicians (Steiman 1963, 50).

Later in the fifteenth century, rabbis following in the Maharil’s tradition further specified the moral codes of Jewish dancing. One major issue was the practice of mixed-sex dancing, or men and women dancing together. An anonymous late-medieval kabbalistic text, titled Sefar ha-Kanah, expressly forbids mixed-sex dancing, listing numerous potential sins, including ‘pressing bodies against each other while dancing, suggestively holding hands, kissing, fondling, intercourse, coveting a neighbour’s wife, desecrating the Sabbath, and forbidden or adulterous relationships’ (Gollance 2021, 23). In responsa, or authoritative replies to questions about Jewish Law, rabbis stipulate how men and women should properly engage in dancing. Rabbi Moses ben Isaac ha-Levi Minz, active in fifteenth-century Germany, decreed that men may dance with single women if they are separated by a glove, but may never dance with a married woman (Ingber 2005, 174). Rabbi Yochanan Luria (d. 1514) in the Rhineland Alsace community agreed. In his Meshivat nefesh, he laments, ‘Woe is us concerning this evil custom, during the festivities in these lands when they sing and dance and drink...that the men take the women, even married women, and embrace them with their bare hands and dance with them, and there are even those who think that they are fulfilling a commandment to dance with the bride’ (Friedhaber 2011, 227). In the wedding mitzvah dance, many European Jewish communities from the fifteenth century onwards used handkerchiefs, girdle belts, gloves, or the train of a dress to separate the bride from dancing men (228). Some communities also used girdle belts as modesty garments at dances. One is referenced in a responsum (n. 210) in Terumat HaDeshen by Ashkenazic Talmudic authority Rabbi Israel Isserlein (d. 1460). Isserlein rules on the legitimacy of a man lending a young woman a girdle belt to participate in a dance on the condition of her betrothal. This responsum indicates that both Ashkenazi men and women donned girdle belts while dancing. Later in 1507 Padua, where many Ashkenazim immigrated following expulsions from the Holy Roman Empire, a rabbinical ruling stipulated that men could only dance with single women ‘on the condition they are attired by an outer garment on top of the “zupone,” in such a way as to cover at least the loins’ (Friedhaber and Manor 1990, 18). Through their attention to moral codes and connection to biblical traditions, Jewish communities used dance as a joyous way to express Jewish identity and observe Jewish religious practices.

Christian conceptions of Jewish dancing

In Christian society, dance was a widespread practice across all social levels, but in the later medieval and early modern periods, it increasingly drew harsh criticism from clergy and moralists. Medieval Christian theology viewed dance as a potential source of sinful behaviour, including lust, adultery, gluttony, vanity, and missing church services. Dance detractors spread their anti-dance opinions through written treatises and exempla. Dance historian Alessandro Arcangeli (1992) explains that preachers regularly targeted female dancers as more prone to sexual corruption via dancing. Moralists and clergy often drew upon two biblical examples of immoral dances: the Israelites’ dance around the golden calf (Exodus 32:19) and Salome’s dance in front of Herod, which led to the beheading of St. John the Baptist (Mark 6:21–28 and Matthew 14:6–11).Footnote 7 These stories anecdotally demonstrated the dangers of dancing as part of sacrilegious idolatry or deadly seduction and reinforced antisemitism by linking Jewish dancing with immorality.

The golden calf episode became a locus of ecclesiastical discourse, especially as early Church Fathers sought to legitimize Christianity and delegitimize Judaism. In the biblical narrative, Israelites awaiting Moses’ return from Mt. Sinai melted their ornaments into a golden calf, created an altar, and worshiped the calf with dance. When Moses beheld their obscene dancing, he broke the tablets inscribed by God with the Ten Commandments, hammered the calf into dust, sprinkled water with the dust, and made the dancers drink the concoction. The calf worshippers died soon after by sword or plague. In the anti-Jewish Christian polemic of supersession, this idolatrous act broke, or prevented the assumption of, the Israelites’ covenant with God. Christian theologian Ephrem the Syrian (d. 375) argued that only Moses did not break the covenant, meaning there was one faithful strand of Israelites from which Jesus descended (Sephardson 2008, 81). Christian theologians claimed that as followers of Jesus, they were the spiritual descendants of that faithful strand and legitimate inheritors of God’s covenant. They considered contemporary Jews to be descendants of the idolatrous Israelites, spurned by God and burdened with their Law. Augustine claimed that by drinking the gold powder, the Israelites consumed and became the body of the devil (Smolar and Aberbach 1968, 101). He and others marked the episode as the first in a string of sins committed by the Israelites. These sins eventually led to Jews’ (alleged) crucifixion of Jesus and denial of Christ as the Messiah (97–98). Subsequent interpretations encoded the Israelites’ dancing with racist Christian antisemitism. Christians claimed that the Israelites’ creation and danced worship of the calf revealed their ‘foolish,’ ‘lustful,’ ‘immoral, impatient, stubborn, unrepentant, unbelieving, murderous character,’ which Christian theologians believed contemporary Jews directly inherited (100). Medieval Jews responded to this polemic by arguing that God’s subsequent mercy and forgiveness of the Israelites demonstrates that Jews are still God’s chosen people. Their covenant was never broken (Smolar and Aberbach 1968, 112).Footnote 8 The Jewish and Christian approaches to the Israelites’ dancing in Exodus stand in stark contrast. While Jews celebrated Miriam’s joyous and devotional dance, Christians only fixated on the golden calf dance of idolatrous worship.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the dance around the golden calf, and its connected antisemitism, circulated more widely in popular literature, public art, and moralistic writings. Christian chronicles, including the Nuremberg Chronicle compiled by Hartmann Schedel in 1493, often illustrate the golden calf episode, while skipping over Miriam’s dance entirely (Schedel 1493, fols. 30v–31r). German humanist Sebastian Brant takes up the story of the Israelites’ dance in his popular 1494 moralistic work in German verse, Das Narrenschiff (The Ship of Fools), to admonish dancing as the work of the devil. The condemnation, in Modern English translation, runs as follows:

  • The dance by Satan was invented

  • When he devised the golden calf

  • And taught some men at God to laugh,

  • And Satan dancing still doth use

  • To hatch out evil, to abuse.

  • It stirs up pride, immodesty,

  • And prompts men ever lewd to be. (Brant [1494] 1962, 205)

Echoing Augustine’s earlier connection between the Israelite dancers and the devil, Brant positions them, and those who follow them, as Satan’s dancing co-conspirators. To dance is to be like the Israelites, which by the logic of the Christian polemic, means to be Jewish. Jewishness, as expressed while dancing, is constructed here as evil, abusive, prideful, immodest, and lewd. In an accompanying woodcut by Nuernberger Albrecht Dürer (fig. 1), fools clad in donkey-eared caps dance around a calf perched atop a pillar. In the forefront, two couples take each other’s hands in a promenading dance, a popular medieval dance style. The central couple’s caps hang off their shoulders, as if dislodged by some vigorous movement. Here, the Israelite dancers are markedly fools and idolators, in step with the devil.

Figure 1
figure 1

Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut design for Sebastian Brant’s chapter on dance in Das Narrenschiff (The Ship of Fools) portrays the dance around the golden calf. In the forefront, two mixed-sex couples donning donkey-eared fools’ caps promenade before the large, elevated idol. From Sebastian Brant, Das Narrenschiff (Basel: Bergmann von Olpe, 1494). Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Rar. 121, 75v. Creative Commons. https://www.digitale-sammlungen.de/en/view/bsb00036978?page=154,155

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As the golden calf discourse closely associated the Israelites’ dance with antisemitic stereotypes, and further drew a direct line between the ancient Israelites and contemporary Jews, Christians typified contemporary Jewish dance as immoral in nature. Christians probably did not register how Jewish dancing embodied moral codes within the Jewish context, especially as late medieval Christian dances increasingly centred on paired, mixed-sex dances and handholding without gloves. Contemporary with Brant’s Narrenschiff, a stained-glass depiction of the dance around the golden calf in Nuremberg’s St. Lawrence Church (c. 1479–1481) publicly conveys Christian attitudes towards ancient and contemporary Jewish dance (fig. 2). I am struck by the disorderliness of the dancers’ bodies. Neither paired in couples nor formed into an orderly circle, the dancers appear to be more of a frenetic mob. They grasp their cloaks and skirts, some raise an arm overhead, and they press their torsos towards the golden idol. None of the dancers in the foreground are synchronized in their motions. One red-hosed man juts his left leg far forward while another squats low with deeply creased knees. This danced chaos is the very opposite of controlled, virtuous dancing idealized for Christians by humanist dancing masters, and it emphasizes the dancers’ perceived immoral qualities. Debra Strickland argues that the dancers’ pejorative physical markers and fashionable dress coloured yellow, which was often assigned to Jews in sumptuary laws, styles them as contemporary Jews (2003, 110). This contemporary stylization, she argues, creates a double meaning of representing both the biblical narrative and Christian accusations of ‘contemporary Jewish idol-worship’ (108). The artist’s stylization of the dancers as contemporary Jews transfers these negative qualities from the Israelites’ dance to medieval Jewish dance. More importantly, though, I would argue that this visual strategy tells Christians that contemporary Jewish dance leads directly to sin.

Figure 2
figure 2

The Rieter stained-glass window in St. Lawrence Church depicts contemporary Jews in a frenetic rendition of the dance around the golden calf, Nuremberg, Germany, c. 1479–1481. Photograph by Wolfgang Sauber, October 30, 2016. Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:N%C3%BCrnberg_Lorenzkirche_-_Rieter-Fenster_4_Tanz_um_das_Goldene_Kalb.jpg

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In addition to idol worship, another danger lurks, especially for Christian men. On the far right of the scene, an unaccompanied maiden, with uncovered, braided hair and clearly outlined breasts, lifts the front of her skirt during her dance. The blue negative space between her elbow and small waist beckons for a partner’s arm. Sara Lipton observes that depictions of the golden calf dance are one of the few places where Jewish women are included in medieval artworks (2014, 203). I believe that this is because from a Christian perspective, dancing Jewish women posed a more serious moral threat to Christians. Dance events could provide Christian men opportunities for intimate contact with Jewish women, potentially leading to sexual transgressions forbidden in canon law. This artwork warns its viewer that while the dancing Jewish maiden is visually appealing, her beauty and infatuation with the idol will lead Christians astray. Strickland argues that large-scale public works, such as this stained-glass window, operated as ‘an especially powerful form of propaganda’ because of their visibility (2003, 97). This colourful scene would remind Christians worshiping at St. Lawrence that to be a good Christian they must not dance, at least not like the ancient Israelites, or with contemporary Jews.

The hierarchical moral opposition between Jewish and Christian practices appears in the polemical ethnographic work of Hebraist and Zwinglian priest Johannes Böschenstein (d. 1540). In an anti-dance treatise published in 1533 and revised in 1536 Augsburg, he argues for a complete turn away from dance. Böschenstein directly links anti-dance and antisemitic discourse by naming biblical dance episodes as Jewish dance and using these examples to illustrate dance as a vice. He explains that ‘in the holy scriptures, no praise comes from dance. The Jews dance around the calf. The wicked girl Herodiadis [Salome] dances around the head of John the Holy Baptist. Yes, a thousand examples could still be produced because dancing is always a vice and never a virtue’ (1536, fols. 4r–4v; translation from German mine). Significantly, he refers to the golden calf dancers as Juden (Jews) and not as Israelites, perpetuating the link between dance, vice, and contemporary Jews. Further, his absolute view negates any possibility of using dance for divine worship. While many medieval Christians appropriated King David’s dance before the ark as a model of devout, Christian dancing, Böschenstein takes a totalizing view that dance is always a vice. Footnote 9 His argument disregards any possibility of dance serving a moral purpose in Christian or Jewish contexts.

Earlier in the text, Böschenstein strongly characterizes Jewish dance as sacrilegious by describing his understandings of contemporary Jewish practices and placing them in opposition to Christian practices:

On the Sabbath, they [Jews] do not handle money...and do not touch any instruments or tools that they work with. They are worried they will break the Sabbath; but they dance on it and do not worry at all if the soles of their shoes or fasteners on their pants break. Nor does a Jew stroke his hair on the Sabbath [as] he fears a hair will want to break off, and nevertheless they dance on the Sabbath. Yes, they [Jews] say, ‘that is what we do for the sake of a simhah [celebration] and a wedding, if we have one.’ I say, ‘why not have a wedding on another day and leave the Sabbath undefiled with the sinful dance?’ (f. 3v; translation from German mine)

In this description, Böschenstein paints Jews as contradictory in their observance of the Sabbath, taking care not to perform labor but allowing for dancing so vigorous it causes the dancers to wear through their clothing and shoes. His admonishment of dancing on the Sabbath operates both to dissuade Christians from dancing on holy days as well as denigrate Jewish dancing as immoral. He goes on, speaking to additional sins enacted by Jewish dancing:

The Jews also dance like we do (I have not seen it really. I have never danced at their dances, but I learnt about it through genuine accounts), unlike us, they are full and drunk: If you drink wine with a lot of people who know how to drink, so that you have to also dance and play, the devil shall come to life. (fols. 3v–4r; translation from German mine)

Böschenstein’s argument here is careful to delineate between Jewish and Christian dancing, despite their similarities in appearance, by adding the additional sins of drunkenness and gluttony to Jewish practices. In this manner, even though he is urging his Christian reader to forsake dancing altogether, he still creates a hierarchy between the forms, specifying that Jewish dancing is less moral than Christian dancing, so much so that it can stir up the devil. Böschenstein is also careful not to implicate himself in Jewish dancing by noting that he has never directly participated in the dancing himself, a clarification he added to the revised edition, perhaps to redress unwanted criticism. His arguments, then, are based on hearsay and likely indicative of common stereotypes against Jewish dance.

Anti-dance writings and artworks certainly did not dissuade Christians from partaking in dance. In his revised edition, Böschenstein complains that his readers expressed their dissent by throwing rocks at him in Augsburg’s streets. However, the vehemently antisemitic interpretation of the Israelites’ dancing propagated by Christian moralists and its circulation within an increasingly hostile German Christian populace impacted how Christians conceptualized contemporary Jewish dancing. These constructed associations between Jewishness, dance, and sin likely encouraged ecclesiastical and secular authorities to prohibit Christians from engaging with Jewish dances by limiting its visibility and practice. As I illustrate below, authorities sought to achieve these ends through antisemitic laws.

Jewish dance under Christian law

Guided by Christian moral understandings of Jewish dance, Christian law makers in the later medieval period targeted Jewish dance as a means of subjugating Jewish faith and bodily practices. Prompted by stipulations from the Fourth Lateran Council, Christian law makers focused on the social separation and demarcation of Jewish bodies to physically impose ideas of Jewish inferiority and bolster Christian superiority. Dance, as a social and embodied form, has the power to convey cultural values and social identities through the body, making it a prime medium to convey corporeal difference. While discursive media such as Böschenstein’s treatise articulated moral differences between Jewish and Christian dancing, legal codes sought to actualize such hierarchical differences. Ecclesiastical powers first targeted Jewish dance at the 1267 provincial councils of Breslau and Vienna, whose jurisdictions included Bavaria, Tyrol, and the Baltic States. Regulations on Jewish-Christian relations prohibited sexual intercourse, bathing together, Jewish doctors treating Christian patients, and, significant here, Christians participating in Jewish festivals (Wenninger 2005, 11). The Vienna Council stipulated that Christians ‘should not receive Jews to dine with them, dare to eat or drink with them, or even to presume to dance [saltare vel tripudiare] with them at their weddings, new moon festivals, or games’ (Salmen 1991, 113; translation from Latin mine). Shortly thereafter in 1275, the Schwabenspiegel similarly targeted weddings and festivals, this time prohibiting Christians from inviting Jews: ‘Christians are forbidden to eat in the company of Jews any food prepared by them; nor shall they invite any [Jews] to a wedding of conviviality. No Christian shall bathe together with Jews’ (Kisch 1970, 300–301). In subjecting Jews to an inferior status, these laws all targeted moments of shared embodiment, be it dancing, bathing, feasting, walking in the street, or being sexually intimate, when Jews and Christians could exchange bodily knowledge and blur boundaries between embodied Jewish and Christian identity. Of course, these laws did not prevent Jews and Christians from having social relations, including through dance. However, without explicitly stating so, these codes hindered Jewish people's ability to practice certain parts of their faith and community life. Harassed by Christian legal policies, medieval Jews were forced to adapt their dance practices within acceptable parameters set by Christians. Jewish weddings serve as a poignant example of how Christian law subjugated Jewish dance.

Antisemitic legal codes most directly inhibited the Jewish community’s ability to commune with Christians at their wedding dances. A few known cases and arrests clearly evidence Christian participation at Jewish weddings both as musicians and guests. Markus Wenninger (2005 and 2016) argues that Christians who received punishments for dancing only did so because they danced on a Christian feast or holy day, not because they danced at a Jewish event. However, we need to look more closely at the social context to understand municipal authorities’ response to Jewish-Christian dance exchanges and enforcement of legal codes. Two cases from Zurich separated by thirteen years demonstrate the quickly changing terms of dance exchanges. In the first case from 1391, two prominent Jewish men were charged with breaking the peace when their personal feud erupted into an altercation on the dance floor. Plaintiffs on both sides named numerous witnesses, many of whom were Christian. Several Christians were there professionally as musicians or servants, and another twelve were attending as invited guests (Wenninger 2016, 57). Most of the guests were patricians, including Johans Fink, the mayor in 1390, and Konrad Widmer, the town clerk who had friendly business dealings with the Jewish community. At least five of these guests lived near the streets where the Jewish quarter extended, meaning these guests were Christian neighbours (58). Over the course of the court case, the Christians’ attendance was never a point of issue. In 1404, however, the Zurich city council court opened an investigation into six Christians who participated in a Jewish wedding. The council court’s minutes stated that ‘a number of Christians danced with Jews at a Jewish wedding on a Friday’ (Wenninger 2005, 11; translation from German mine). Wenninger argues that the added refrain ‘on a Friday’ was the point of contention in this case, claiming that the Christians were at fault for dancing on a Christian feast day (2016, 51). He notes that the case is crossed out, indicating that the council court did not pursue the issue further.

Nonetheless, the difference between the two cases strikes me as significant, especially given the city council’s response and the smaller number of Christian participants in the second instance. Perhaps in 1391, the presence of Christians with strong city council influence, including the former mayor and clerk, deterred any kind of punitive action for Christian participation. It is likely, though, that the deteriorating status of Jews in Switzerland in the early 1400s contributed to the changed response. Just three years prior, in 1401, antisemitic riots seized north-eastern Switzerland based on an allegation in Deisenhofer of a widespread ritual murder coverup and of plans for Jews to poison the air to kill off Christians (Hsia 1988, 88). While Schaffhausen and Winterthur burned dozens of Jews at the stake, Zurich protected its Jewish population. However, in 1404, the same year as the dance investigation, the council revoked Zurich Jews’ right to testify in court against Christians. In 1423, the city expelled its Jewish community. Given this turn of events, the city council investigation could be indicative of an antisemitic turn towards segregating the Jewish community. This progression indicates that while legal codes did not eliminate Jewish-Christian dance relations, these codes could be easily weaponized in moments of increased antisemitism. The threat of their enforcement, alongside antisemitic violence, permeated well beyond the guest list for Jewish weddings, impacting where and when Jews could dance and observe the mitzvah.

One of the immediate impacts of antisemitic legal codes was the limitation on where Jews could safely practice their dances. While it is certainly possible that Jewish communities had dedicated dance spaces earlier in the Middle Ages, the evidence suggests that the development of dance houses was driven by the simultaneous increase in legal regulations on Jewish-Christian relations. Beginning in the later thirteenth century, Ashkenazi communities in urban centres established designated dance halls to facilitate communal dance festivities, including weddings, Simchat Torah, and Purim. Sometimes called a tanzhaus (dance house), spielhaus (playhouse), brauthaus (bridal house), or hochzeithaus (wedding house) in German or bet chatunnot (wedding house) in Hebrew, these dance houses were located close to the synagogue, adjacent to a shared courtyard (Salmen 1995, 108). This development was unique to the Jewish community, as German Christians only began constructing municipal dance houses a century later in the late 1300s. The earliest record of a Jewish dance house comes from Cologne, where in 1288 the community's domus universitatis iudeorum (Jewish meeting house), which stood from the mid-twelfth century, was re-designated as a speylhüz (playhouse). Two years later in 1290, the Augsburg community gained city council approval to establish a separate bath house and dance house.Footnote 10 Additional dance houses were recorded in Bamberg in the thirteenth century, Nuremberg (1296), Mainz (1306), Trier (1315), Frankfurt (before 1360), and Erfurt (1386) (Salmen 1995, 109–118). Several communities, including Ulm and Speyer, had dance houses prior to mid-fourteenth century pogroms, when Christians burned or repossessed the houses (Salmen 1995, 109–118). By designating a dance house, the Jewish community signalled their compliance with newly codified laws and perhaps ensured their safety. To partake in a Jewish dance, a Christian would now have to knowingly enter a Jewish space, located at the heart of Jewish quarters, committing a wilful act beyond plausible ignorance.

Christian legal process that necessitated separate dance spaces further harassed Jewish wedding dances by impacting the dances’ social function. Dance houses were likely the only social and recreational spaces available to Jews. Cramped living conditions in Jewish neighbourhoods also influenced the development of dance houses because subdivided homes did not have large enough rooms to host events (Friedhaber 1984, 5). Consequently, late medieval Jews likely had few, if any, private dance spaces. The general lack of private dance spaces meant that wedding dances were public or at least semi-public within the community. This could have established more community oversight on dances and limited private events. On the other hand, the centralization of the Jewish dance and festival space might have positively supported the community’s efforts to reform its minhag following the major disruptions of the Black Death and associated pogroms. The dance house might have provided a concentrated space for the community to form together while collectively (re)constructing its traditions. Jews were also barred from using spaces where Christians danced, such as bathhouses and city halls (Wiedl 2021, 189). These spaces allowed Christians to separate themselves by social rank while using dance to fraternize, demonstrate privilege, and expand their social and political networks. With limited spaces, Jewish dancers may have had less opportunity to separate themselves by social status and use dance to demonstrate privilege. As a result, Jewish dances may have been more inclusive across the community, unlike Christian events. The Jewish community may have also practiced a more unified dance style than their Christian counterparts, whose dances began to splinter into courtly and commoner forms.

Despite the establishment of separate dance spaces, Jews and Christians likely witnessed each other’s wedding processional dances. Weddings were one of the most highly legislated activities in late medieval imperial cities. Municipal ordinances stipulated that Christian weddings must include a public procession to prove the validity of the marriage (Roper 1985). While unwritten customs, not legal codes, dictated how Christians danced in these processions, the municipal ordinances often limited how many musicians Christians could hire to accompany their dances. For example, Augsburg’s city law book (Stadtbuch) specifies a maximum of four musicians at the wedding procession and celebration. These musicians’ celebratory music would have echoed through cities’ narrow medieval streets and caught the attention of fellow residents. Christian processions travelled from the church to the banquet and dance, which were often held in taverns and dance houses in the centre of town. They likely passed near the centrally located Jewish quarters and probably drew Jewish spectators. Jewish wedding practices also included dance processions when leading the bride to the ceremony (Kohler 2012, 403). While these probably occurred in the Jewish quarter, hired Christian musicians as well as Christian neighbours could have easily witnessed Jewish dancing.

Processions likely did not allow for Jews and Christians to dance together, but these kinaesthetic encounters opened avenues of spectatorship across religious lines that could support exchanges of embodied knowledge. Srinivasan demonstrates the significance of spectatorship in shaping dance practices in her analysis of American choreographer Ruth St. Denis’ encounter with Indian nautch dancers at Coney Island in 1904. Challenging previous histories that attributed St. Denis’ orientalist choreographic style to her own research, Srinivasan ‘examine[s] the possibility that nachwalis’ artistic labour was transmitted between bodies and can therefore be excavated through the basic dance principles of movement’ (Srinivasan 2012, 68). She argues that subaltern Indian dancers’ ‘dancing bodies left archival kinaesthetic traces that were absorbed by white women dancers,’ like St. Denis, who incorporated choreographic elements she witnessed into her later stage works (82). Srinivasan’s idea that dance knowledge can move between bodies through the bodily archive can help us imagine how Jewish and Christian dancing was co-constitutive in the medieval period. Through the act of watching each other dance, even if only in short glimpses during processional dances, Jews and Christians could absorb elements of each other’s dance practices that might later influence their approaches to their own dances, be it through the adaptation of steps, rhythms, attitudes, or other movement qualities. While cross-religious witnessing might affirm ideas of absolute difference if the observed dances seem unfamiliar, it could alternatively threaten ideas of difference if the dances seem familiar. In this manner, Jews and Christians could have engaged in dance exchanges through observation, which in turn might have disrupted or affirmed perceptions of embodied difference between Jewish and Christian people.

Antisemitic Christian attitudes towards Jewish dance and Jewish-Christian social relations likely influenced negative responses to public Jewish dance by Christians. For example, in his chronicle, Franciscan Johannes von Winterthur (d. 1348) describes a public Jewish procession in Austria. He recounts that ‘one day, at the wedding of a certain Jew during a dance with other Jews, in the presence of a great multitude of the faithful [Christians], he [the Jewish man] was proceeding through one of the streets of the city, when he was shaken by a divine nod to stand motionless at a fixed step’ (Mentgen 2016, 124 n. 27; translation from Latin mine). Earlier in the narrative, Winterthur claims that the same Jewish man stole a consecrated host. Thus, the man’s immobilization in the midst of his danced joy was a divine punishment for his misdeed. Winterthur’s inclusion of this story indicates that Christians viewing Jewish wedding dances was a normal occurrence within the urban landscape of shared city streets. His staging of this dance encounter, though, expresses his anxiety around Christians observing, and possibly joining, Jewish dancing. Rather than allowing Christians to view the dancing and appreciate Jewish cultural expression, he imagines the public dance as a way for Christians to witness God’s power over Jews. His narrative insinuates that Jewish dancing in Christian presence should be stopped and doing so is an expression of Christianity triumphing over Judaism and Jewish sin.

Later legal action supported Christian negative attitudes towards cross-religious dance witnessing and exchanges. In one known case from Frankfurt in 1498, a Jewish man named Gumprecht v. Weisenau was punished for watching the wedding dances of Landgrave Wilhelm the Younger of Hess to Princess Elisabeth of Palatinate. He was briefly imprisoned and heavily fined by the city council (Salmen 1995, 108). Later in the sixteenth century, at least in one instance, Christian lawmakers attempted to stop public Jewish wedding dance processions altogether. In an ordinance from the Ensisheim and Breisgau communities near Freiburg, lawmakers forbade Jews from dancing in front of or with Christians, stating that an approved wedding must be held ‘in quiet and not publicly on the streets in front of common Christian crowds’ (Salmen 1991, 113–114; translation from German mine). Whereas Christian public dancing was required in wedding ordinances, Jewish public dancing was hindered and placed under Christian surveillance by legal codes. Even in localities without explicit prohibitions of Jewish public dancing and observation of Christian dances, repeated legal measures against social mixing and prevalent antisemitic attitudes towards Jewish dance likely made such public displays dangerous, or at least required high vigilance during Jews’ joyous celebration.

During the Easter season, increased restrictions and surveillance of Jewish movement and public presence further impeded Jews’ ability to practice wedding dances in public or private. As early as the Synod of Orleans in 538, Christians enacted Easter-time restrictions on Jewish public visibility (Wenninger 1991, 323). These restrictions were by and large ineffective, though, until later in the Middle Ages when Christianity and antisemitism were more widespread. In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council reiterated Holy Week restrictions in Canon 68:

On the days of Lamentation and on Passion Sunday they [Jews] shall not appear in public at all, because some of them on such days, so we have heard, do not blush to parade in their most elegant clothes and are not afraid to ridicule the Christians, who exhibit a memorial of the most holy Passion and display signs of grief. What we most strictly forbid is for them to venture to burst out at all in derision of the Redeemer. (Kim 2015, 57)

The Schwabenspiegel and many municipal statutes subsequently repeated the restrictions (Wenninger 1991, 328). Municipal regulations also restricted dance during Christian sacred times, including Holy Week, Lent, and notable feast days (Salmen 1995, 119). Such restrictions interfered with Jews’ ability to celebrate weddings as well as Purim, a festive holiday which often falls during the Lenten season. If not explicitly prohibited to dance within a certain municipality, Jews celebrating such occasions while finely dressed could be charged with blasphemous displays of ornamentation that conflicted with Christian imperatives for sombre mourning. In one such case in 1506, Gumprecht von Weisenau of Frankfurt hosted a wedding in February during Lent, which was attended by many well-dressed Jews and observed by many Christians. Consequently, the official office of Mainz sued the Jewish community of Frankfurt for showing excessive pomp and other violations (Mentgen 2016, 125). These Easter-time restrictions interfered with Jewish religious practice and observation of mitzvah, forcing Jews to modify or forgo celebrations to abide by Christian doctrine.

Outside of laws, antisemitic vitriol and violence prevalent during the Easter season also endangered Jews gathering for wedding dances, especially as Easter plays reinforced antisemitic stereotypes and associations between Jewish dance and sacrilegious acts. Passion plays in the later medieval period grew increasingly antisemitic by emphasizing Jesus’ suffering and Jewish culpability. Similar to golden calf iconography, Passion plays made little distinction between biblical and contemporary Jews (Wenninger 1991, 329). These plays physically mapped Christian antisemitism onto Jewish dance. Christian actors pejoratively personified Jews and devils on stage together using dance and sung gibberish, such as in a fourteenth-century passion play in Colmar (Salmen 1991, 87). Christian dancers also portrayed Jews by re-enacting the dance around the golden calf, as in a play in 1583 Lucerne, Switzerland and Corpus Christi procession in 1582 Munich (87). These live representations of stereotyped Jewish dance strengthened the connection between Jewish bodily movement and their alleged devilish acts, which extended to deicide, host desecration, and ritual murder. Wenninger argues that these affective plays stirred up increased hatred towards Jews that translated into antisemitic violence, especially with ritual murder and host desecration charges that escalated into deadly trials and pogroms (Wenninger 1991, 329). Significantly, these allegations often occurred when Jews gathered for weddings, such as Ravensburg in 1429, Sternberg in 1492, and Brandenburg in 1510 (Mentgen 2016, 123 n. 24). Consequently, even when isolated from Christian society, Jews celebrating weddings were endangered by associations between false antisemitic Christian tropes and Jewish dancing.

Throughout the year, travel restrictions imposed on Jews impeded them from freely gathering for wedding celebrations. As territories and cities in the Holy Roman Empire began to implement Jewish expulsions and travel restrictions, especially in the fifteenth century, traveling to weddings required Jews to navigate around hostile areas. Obtaining a valid letter of safe conduct did not always ensure a Jewish person’s safety, as Christians often ignored them and threatened traveling Jews with violence (Mentgen 2016, 139). Further, disputes about travel rights could cause other legal problems. In one notable case in July 1495 in Münster bei Bingen, Philipp the Upright, Elector Palatine of the Rhine, ordered the night-time arrest of Jews who attended the wedding of David of Münster and Sara of Friedberg. Court documents cite broken escort, sacrilege, and misbehaviour (miszhenndel) as the cause of arrest (143). Gerd Mentgen argues that it is possible that with the confusing, fragmented jurisdiction in the area, the attending Jews, who travelled from a wide variety of locales, unwittingly violated escort rules (141). This arrest had major economic and social consequences. The arrested Jews admitted fault and were obligated to pay a ransom of 4,000 guilders, later reduced by 1,900 guilders, to secure their safe release. Later in December, David attempted to retrieve Sara’s dowry from Frankfurt Rabbi Gumpchin, who refused on the grounds of David’s and Sara’s separation. In David’s appeal to the Frankfurt city council on January 17, 1496, he complained that after paying the ransom with his own funds, he found Sara had left with household goods and refused to return (132). The stress of the arrest likely contributed to the failure of the newly formed marriage. While this is an exceptional case, legal and physical risks while traveling could have deterred many Jews from partaking in communal customs, disrupting sociocultural connections across the Ashkenazic community at large.

Wedding dances were an important time for sustaining Jewish community, custom, and religious practice. Multiple bodies stepping, turning, and jumping together in time to music produces a powerful collective energy. Christian discursive and legal attacks on Jewish dancing sought to disrupt that community, threatening a core feature of medieval Jewish identity and ritual. Ultimately, the Jewish community found ways to continue their practices, but to do so, they had to circumvent significant antisemitic legal and social barriers imposed by Christians.

Conclusion

Medieval Christians sought to craft a superior moral identity by implementing social, legal, and economic mechanisms to subordinate Jews, clearly distinguish Jews from Christians, and police the permeable borders between those identities. Better known legal codes that regulated dress, sexual relations, conversions, and economic roles certainly worked towards that end. However, dance was also a significant part of constructing a racialized, subordinate Jewish Other in Christian discourse and law that supported Christian hegemony. By stereotyping Jewish dance as inherently immoral, Christians promoted their own dances, and bodies, as more virtuous. This distinction, though, could only hold up so long as Christian dances were actually distinct from Jewish dances. Given known and possible instances of Jews and Christians observing each other’s festive events, exchanges of embodied knowledge between Jews and Christians probably occurred. Such kinaesthetic exchanges would have blurred the distinction between Jewish and Christian dance. Anxieties of slippage between embodied Jewishness and embodied Christianness may have been a driving factor in Christian attempts to limit Christian contact with Jewish dancing through legal restrictions. The resulting Christian laws, which limited where, when, and with whom Jews could practice dance, marginalized Jews by subordinating their embodied customs and religious practices to Christian moral codes and the Christian religious calendar.

Debra Kaplan and Magda Teter argue that Jewish history has largely been placed in an ‘historiographic Jewish ghetto,’ where Jewish history is separated from general European history when in reality, these histories are closely intertwined (2009, 367). Similarly, premodern dance studies often separate Jewish dance histories from larger European dance histories, with only a few exceptions by Jewish-focused scholars, including Walter Salmen, Barbara Sparti (2011), and Markus Wenninger. To dismantle the medievalist legacies in premodern dance studies that have prioritized elite Christians practices, we need to break out of the stranglehold of archival hierarchies to begin imagining a much more complex, heterogeneous landscape of dance in premodern Europe. Doing so will require us to rethink our evidence, our methodologies, and indeed, many preconceptions of the medieval world haunting the field. Working in the subjunctive and reading the bodily archive for possible moments of dance encounters and traces of kinaesthetic transmissions provides glimpses of Jewish dance practices that have otherwise been subsumed by the dominant Christian voices in archival records. These methods cannot fully account for Jewish perspectives or details of marginalized practices. In her own study, Srinivasan acknowledges that while she ‘begin[s] to tell nautch women’s stories…these stories can only be partial, filled with half truths, and at time, fictive’ (Srinivasan 2012, 72). Nevertheless, attuning ourselves to documented and undocumented possibilities of subaltern movement alongside critical discourses of race in the premodern period can help us better consider how a much wider range of people living in the premodern world practiced, exchanged, and contributed to a vibrant dance culture.