Abstract
Jewish and Christian communities in the Rhineland between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries developed separate traditions about the Maccabean martyrs that transformed received cultural memories of them. In the wake of the First Crusade assaults of 1096, medieval Jewish authors utilized the narrative of the Maccabean martyrs to justify and commemorate the actions of women who martyred their own children. In fifteenth-and sixteenth-century Cologne, Helias Mertz, the priest in charge of the cloister and church of the Maccabean martyrs in that city, promoted the cult of these martyrs to raise funds and civic support for the institutions he oversaw. These two different examples of communal traditions about the Maccabean martyrs represent the reshaping of cultural memory by factors pertaining to local contexts.
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Notes
When discussing Jewish sources, I will refer to the subject of these texts as the “mother and seven sons,” rather than the “Maccabean martyrs.” The mother (often identified as Miriam or Hannah) and seven sons are never referred to as “Maccabean” in any late antique or medieval Jewish source. See Gunter Stem-berger, “The Maccabees in Rabbinic Tradition,” in The Scriptures and the Scrolls: Studies in Honour of A. S. van der Woude, ed. F. Garcfa Martinez (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 193.
On Jewish polemical works, see David Berger, The Jewish-Christian Debate in the High Middle Ages: A Critical Edition of the “Nizzahon Vetus” (New York: Jewish Publication Society, 1979).
Ivan G. Marcus, Rituals of Childhood: Jewish Acculturation in Medieval Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996)
Jeremy Cohen, Sanctifying the Name of God: Jewish Martyrs and Jewish Memories of the First Crusade (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004)
Israel Jacob Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, trans. Barbara Harshav and Jonathan Chipman (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006).
On the influence of Sefer Josippon and its narratives of resistance on the early Ashkenazi community, see Robert Chazan, European Jewry and the First Crusade (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987), 149–50
Steven Bowman, “Yosippon and Jewish Nationalism,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 61 (1995): 23–51.
Haym Soloveitchik, “Halakhah, Hermeneutics, and Martyrdom in Medieval Ashkenaz (Part II of II),” Jewish Quarterly Review 94, no. 2 (2004): 281–84.
On early rabbinic concepts of martyrdom and halakhic discussions of it, see Louis Finkelstein, “The Ten Martyrs,” in Essays and Studies in Memory of Linda R. Millar, ed. I. Davidson (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary Press, 1938), 29–55
Saul Lieberman, “The Martyrs of Caesarea,” Annuaire de l’institut de philologie et d’histoire orientales et slaves 7 (1939–44): 395–446
Shmuel Safrai, “Qiddush ha-Shem in the Teachings of the Tanaaim” [Hebrew], Zion 43 (1979): 28–42
Shmuel Shepkaru, Jewish Martyrs in the Pagan and Christian Worlds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 67–106
Solomon Zeitlin, “The Legend of the Ten Martyrs and Its Apocalyptic Origins,” Jewish Quarterly Review 36 (1945–46), 1–16.
See Gerson D. Cohen, “Hannah and Her Seven Sons in Hebrew Literature,” in Studies in the Variety of Rabbinic Culture (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1991), 40.
These texts were the basis for other midrashim on the mother and seven sons. Seder Eliahu 28 depended on Midrash Lamentations 1.16 and Midrash on Lamentations Zuta 21 developed from BT Gittin 57b. Gittin 57b was also anthologized in the medieval period in Yalkut Lamentations 1017–19. A separate midrash on the mother and seven sons, Pesikta Rabbati 43, had little influence on other midrashim or in Ashkenazi Judaism. See Cohen, “Hannah and Her Seven Sons,” 55–56n3; Elisheva Baumgarten and Rella Kushelevsky], “From ‘The Mother and Her Sons’ to ‘The Mother of the Sons’ in Ashkenaz,” [Hebrew] Zion 71, no. 3 (2006): 306–7.
Robert Doran, “The Martyr: A Synoptic View of the Mother and Her Seven Sons,” in Ideal Figures in Ancient Judaism: Profiles and Paradigms, ed. George W. E. Nickelsburg and John J. Collins (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1980), 189–221.
Midrash Lamentations was probably redacted sometime in the early fifth century. It primarily cites Palestinian Amoraim, rabbis from the second to fifth century CE. BT Gittin 57b attributes the story of the mother and her seven sons to Rav Yehudah, a Babylonian Amora from the late third century. This passage was probably redacted in the sixth century CE. See H. L. Strack and Gunter Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, trans. and ed. Markus Bockmuehl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 194–97
Galit Hasan-Rokem, Web of Life: Folklore and Midrash in Rabbinic Literature, trans. Batya Stein (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 108–11
See Daniel Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom in the Making of Judaism and Christianity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999)
Simha Goldin, The Ways of Jewish Martyrdom [Hebrew] (Lod: Dvir, 2002), 70–71.
On the development of the concept of martyrdom, and particularly the terminology and meaning of kiddush ha-Shem, within rabbinic Judaism, see footnote 5 above and also David Grunewald, “Qiddush ha-Shem, an Examination of a Term” [Hebrew], Molad 24 (1968): 476–84
Avraham Holtz, “Kiddush and Hillul Hashem,” Judaism 10 (1961): 360–68.
See Shalom Spiegel, The Last Trial: On the Legends and Lore of the Command to Abraham to Offer Isaac as a Sacrifice: The Akedah, trans. Judah Goldin (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 1993), 83–86
Jon D. Levenson, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 125–42.
See Hasan-Rokem, Web of Life, 121; Goldin, Ways of Martyrdom, 81nn82-83. Goldin takes up a suggestion from Hasan-Rokem that the similarity between the names of Miriam and Mary the mother of Jesus is significant. While Mary wept over the death of just one son, Miriam aided in the death of her sons. On the likelihood of rabbinic knowledge of late antique supersessionist arguments, especially in Palestine, see Marc G. Hirshman, A Rivalry of Genius: Jewish and Christian Biblical Interpretation in Late Antiquity, trans. Batya Stein (Albany, NY: State University Press of New York Press, 1996)
These attackers were not the “official” crusaders sanctioned by Pope Urban II. Rather, these crusaders were loose groups of various peoples inspired to capture Jerusalem. See Chazan, European Jewry and the First Crusade, 61–84; Kenneth Stow, “Conversion, Apostasy, and Apprehensiveness: Emicho of Flonheim and the Fear of Jews in the Twelfth Century,” Speculum 76 (2001): 911–33.
Here I use the term “mimicry” according to its sense in postcolonial studies. I understand mimicry to be an ambivalent repetition of colonizing discourses that in its articulation disrupts colonial power and discourses. For the seminal articulation of this concept, see Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994; reprint, 2006); 121–31.
On the behavior of Jews during these attacks and the forms of martyrdom chosen see Cohen, Sanctifying the Name of God, 4–9; David Malkiel, “Vestiges of Conflict in the Hebrew Crusade Chronicles,” Journal of Jewish Studies 52, no. 2 (2001): 323–40
Abraham Gross, Struggling with Tradition: Reservations about Active Martyrdom in the Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill, 2004)
Scholarship on the historical reliability of these texts varies. Robert Chazan and Abraham Gross view these chronicles as largely historically accurate. Ivan Marcus, Simha Goldin, and Avraham Grossman emphasize the literary qualities of these texts and de-emphasize, while not explicitly disavowing, their historicity. See Ivan Marcus, “From Politics to Martyrdom: Shifting Paradigms in the Hebrew Narratives of the 1096 Crusade Riots,” Prooftexts 2 (1982): 40–52
Simha Goldin, “The Socialisation for ‘Kiddush ha-Shem’ among Medieval Jews,” Journal of Medieval History 23, no. 2 (1997): 117–38
Avraham Grossman, Pious and Rebellious: Jewish Women in Medieval Europe, trans. Jonathan Chipman (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2004), 199–201.
On the question of the halakhic dimensions of these acts, see Haym Soloveitchik, “Religious Law and Change: The Medieval Ashkenazic Example,” Association for Jewish Studies Review 12 (1987): 205–21
For a survey of Jewish-Christian theological encounters in the twelfth century, see Anna Sapir Abulafia, Christians and Jews in the Twelfth-Century Renaissance (London: Routledge, 1995).
See Spiegel, The Last Trial; Levenson, Death and Resurrection, 197–99; Marcus, Rituals of Childhood, 6–7. An exemplar of this idea is Ephraim of Bonn, “The Slaughter of Isaac and His Revival,” in The Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse, ed. and trans. T. Carmi (New York: Penguin, 1981), 379–84.
Cohen, Sanctifying the Name of God, 107–29; Marcus, Rituals of Childhood, 7; Lena Roos, “God Wants It!”: The Ideology of Martyrdom in the Hebrew Crusade Chronicles and Its Jewish and Christian Background (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 107–10.
Such exposure has been documented in the works of scholars such as Jeremy Cohen, Ivan Marcus, and Israel Yuval. Jewish polemical works such as the Nizzahon Vetus also reflected Jewish exposure to supersessionist thought. See Berger, The Jewish-Christian Debate in the High Middle Ages: A Critical Edition of the “Nizzahon Vetus”; Daniel Lasker, Jewish Philosophical Polemics Against Christianity in the High Middle Ages (New York: Ktav, 1977).
On Jewish conversion in this period, see Karl F. Morrison, Conversion and Text: The Case of Augustine of Hippo, Herman-Judah, and Constantine Tsatsos (Char-lottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1992)
Jonathan M. Elukin, “The Discovery of the Self: Jews and Conversion in the Twelfth Century,” in Jews and Christians in Twelfth-Century Europe, ed. Michael A. Signer and John Van Engen (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001), 63–76
Susan Einbinder, Beautiful Death: Jewish Poetry and Martyrdom in Medieval France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 24–25
Israel Davidson, ed., Ozar ha-Shirah ve-ha-Piyyut, rev. ed., 4 vols. (New York: Ktav, 1970), vol. 1, no. 5971
Abraham Rosenfeld, ed., Authorised Kinot for the Ninth of Av (London: n.p., 1965
Abraham Habermann, ed., Sefer Gezerot Ashkenaz ve-Sarfat (Jerusalem: Tarshish, 1945), 81–82
Meir of Rothenburg, Responsa, Rulings and Customs of Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg, ed. Isaac Kahana (Jerusalem: Mosad ha-Rav Kuk, 1960), 75.
For a brief biography of Helias Mertz, see Hansgeorg Molitor, “Helias Marcaeus,” in Contemporaries of Erasmus, ed. Peter G. Bietenholz, 2 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 2:381–82.
Ursula Rautenberg, Überlieferung und Druck: Heiligenlegenden aus frühen Kölner Offizinen (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1996), 233.
On these inscriptions, see Hans Vogts, “Die Machabäerkirche in Köln, eine Kunststätte der Spätgotik,” Jahrbuch des Kölnischen Geschichtsvereins 5 (1922): 87–112
Marion Grams-Thieme, “Der Makkabäerschrein,” Colonia Romanica: Jahrbuch des Fördervereins Romanische Kirchen Köln 5 (1990): 101–10.
Several scholars have discussed the reliquary of the Maccabean martyrs in detail. See especially Hirner, “Der Makkabäerschrein”; Anton von Euw, “Die Makkabäerbrüder: Spätjudische Märtyrer der Christlichen Heiligenverehrung,” in Monumenta Judaica: 2000 Jahre Geschichte und Kultur der Juden am Rhein, ed. Konrad Schilling (Köln: Joseph Melzer, 1964), 782–86
I used the printed edition found in Oskar Schade, ed., Geistliche Gedichte des XIV und XV Jahrhunderts vom Niederrhein (Hannover: Rumpler, 1854; reprint, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1968), 366–93.
On the importance of Cologne as a destination for pilgrims and its status as a city having a remarkably large collection of relics, see Gerald Chaix, De la cité chrétienne á la métropole catholique: Vie religieuse et conscience civique á Cologne au XVIe siècle. Thèse pour le doctorat d’état (Université de Strasbourg, 1994); Virginia Reinburg, “Religious Life and Material Culture in Medieval and Reformation Cologne,” in Fragmented Devotion: Medieval Objects from the Schnütgen Museum Cologne, ed. Nancy Netzer and Virginia Reinburg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 40–59.
A younger contemporary of Mertz, Ortwinus Gratius was a member of the faculty of arts at the University of Cologne and active in the publishing trade in Cologne. On Gratius, see Contemporaries of Erasmus, 2:124-25; Dietrich Reichling, Ortwin Gratius: Sein Leben und sein Wirken (Heiligenstadt: n.p., 1884; reprint, Nieuwkoop: B. de Graaf, 1963); J. Hashagen, “Hauptrichtungen des rheinischen Humanismus,” Annalen des Historischen Vereins für den Niederrhein 106 (1922): 1–56.
On the cult of Ursula, see Acta Sanctorum 9 (October 1885), 73–303; W. Levinson, “Das Werden der Ursula-Legende,” Bonner Jahrbücher, 132 (1927): 1–164
Guy de] Tervarent, La Légende de S. Ursule dan la littérature et l’art du moyen âge, 2 vols. (Paris:Les éditions G. van Oest), 19
On the location of these churches, see Paul Clemen, “Das Benediktinerinnenkloster zu den H. Machabäern” in Die Kunstdenkmäler der Stadt Köln (Düsseldorf: L. Schwann, 1937), 254
On the history of the cult of the Three Kings in Cologne, see Hans Hofmann, Die Heiligen Drei Könige: Zur Heiligenverehrung im kirchlichen, gesellschaftlichen und politischen Leben des Mittelalters (Bonn: Röhrscheid, 1975)
Adam Wienand, Die Heiligen Drei Könige: Heilsgeschichtlich, Kunsthistorisch, das religiöse Brauchtum (Cologne: Wienand, 1974)
Frank Gunter Zehnder, ed., Die Heiligen Drei Könige: Darstellung und Verehrung (Cologne: Das Museum, 1982).
Julius Ficker, Reinald von Dassel: Reichskanzler und Erzbischof von Köln, 1156–1167 (1850; reprint, Aalen: Scientia Verlag, 1966)
Patrick J. Geary, Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 243–56
Richard C. Trexler, The Journey of the Magi: Meanings in History of a Christian Story (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
See Thomas Ilgen, “Kritische Beiträge zur rheinisch-westfälischen Quellenkunde des Mittelalters,” Westdeutsche Zeitschrift für den Geschichte und Kunst 30 (1911): 232
Manfred Gröten, “Zur Enstehung des Benediktinerinnenklosters zu den Machabäern in Köln,” in Aus überrest und Tradition. Festschrift für Anna-Dorothee von den Brincken, ed. Peter Engels (Erlangen: Europaforum, 1999), 157.
Aegidius Gelenius, De Admiranda, Sacra, et Civili Magnitudine Coloniae Claudiae Aggripinensis Ubiorum Urbis (Colonia Agrippinae: n.p., 1645), 537
Herman Crombach, S. J., Vita et martyrium S. Ursulae et Sociarum undecim millium vir-ginum (Colonia Agrippinae: n.p., 1647), 473–74
Rhaban Haacke, ed., Die Benediktinerklösters in Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germania Benedictina (St. Ottilen: Eos, 1980), 8:68–69.
Ilgen, “Kritische Beiträge,” 243; Gröten, “Benediktinerinnenklosters zu den Machabäern in Köln,” 159; Richard Knipping, ed., Die Regesten der Erzbischofe von Köln im Mittelalter (Bonn: Hanstein’s Verlag, 1901), 2:303.
See for example the version edited by Godfried Eckkert in “Cronica presulum et Archiepiscopum Coloniensis ecclesie,” Annalen des historischen Vereins für den Niederrhein 4 (1857): 198–99.
Cologne, Dom Frühdruck 217; there are illustrations of this print in Joachim Plotzek and Anton von Euw, Glaube und Wissen im Mittelalter: Die Kölner Bibliothek (München: Hirner, 1998), 499–503.
See Thomas H. Bestul, Texts of the Passion: Latin Devotional Literature and Medieval Society (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996)
Sara Lipton, Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible moralisée (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999).
Shulamit S. Magnus, Jewish Emancipation in a German City: Cologne, 1798–1871 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 14–17
Matthias Schmandt, “Cologne, Jewish Centre on the Lower Rhein,” in The Jews of Europe in the Middle Ages (Tenth to Fifteenth Centuries), Proceedings of the International Symposium held at Speyer, October 20–25, 2002, ed. Christoph Cluse (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), 367–78.
Alfred Haverkamp, “The Jewish Quarters in German Towns during the Late Middle Ages,” in In and Out of the Ghetto: Jewish-Gentile Relations in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany, ed. R. Po-Chia Hsia and Hartmut Lehmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 13–28
Arye Maimon, ed., Germania Judaica (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1987), 3.1:632–50.
Dean Philip Bell, Sacred Communities: Jewish and Christian Identities in Fifteenth-Century Germany (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 142–45
Some eastern theologians, beginning with Origen, associated the sword of Simeon’s prophecy with Mary’s experience of doubt during the crucifixion. In the west, beginning with Ambrose, the sword is taken as a sign of Mary’s emotional suffering at the passion. Peter Damian applied this prophecy to present her as a cosufferer with Christ. Bernard of Clairvaux deepened this to present Mary as experiencing an inner martyrdom at the cross. This development entered into the Marian piety popularized by the reforming orders of the Cistercians, Dominicans, and Franciscans. See Hilda Graef], Mary: A History of Doctrine and Devotion (London: Sheed & Ward, 1963), 45–46
Sandro Sticca, The Planctus Mariae in the Dramatic Tradition of the Middle Ages, trans. Joseph R. Berrigan (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1988), 26–36
Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 199
Fulton, From Judgment to Passion, 405–58; Donna Spivey Ellington, From Sacred Body to Angelic Soul: Understanding Mary in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2001), 2.
André Wilmart, Auteurs spirituels et texts dévots de moyen âge latin: études d’histoire littéraire (Paris: études Augustiniennes, 1971), 511
Amy Neff, “The Pain of Compassio: Mary’s Labor at the Foot of the Cross,” The Art Bulletin 80, no. 2 (1998): 254–73.
Hugh of Saint Cher, In Liber II Machabaeorum, in Opera Omnia in Universam Vetus & Novum Testamentum (Lugduni: Sumptibus Societatis Bibliopolarum, 1703)
Grams-Thieme, “Der Makkabäerschrein,” 103; Anton Legner, Kölner Heilige und Heiligtümer: Ein Jahrtausends europäischer Reliquienkultur (Köln: Greven, 2003), 233.
Hirner, “Der Makkabäerschrein,” 128–29; Klaus Schreiner, Märtyrer, Schlachtenhelfer, Friedenstifter: Krieg und Frieden im Spiegel mittelalterlicher und frühneuuzeitlichen Heiligenverehrung (Opladen: Leske + Budrich, 2000), 47.
Pierre Nora, “Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” in “Memory and Counter-Memory,” special issue, Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 19.
S. Brad Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 45.
Cologne, Historische Archiv des Stadts Köln, W 12° 68, 26v-31r. These prayers were composed in “Niederrheinisch” German, showing a mix of medieval Dutch and German vernaculars. For the details of this manuscript, see Karl Menne, ed., Deutsche und niederländische Handschriften (Köln: Neubner, 1937), 335–37.
Andreas Freitäger, Johannes Cincinnius von Lippstadt (ca. 1485–1555): Bibliothek und Geisteswelt eines westfälischen Humanisten (Münster: Aschendorff, 2000), 200.
David J. Collins, Reforming Saints: Saints’ Lives and Their Authors in Germany, 1470–1530 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 80–97.
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Joslyn-Siemiatkoski, D. (2009). Jewish Saints and Christian Cities. In: Christian Memories of the Maccabean Martyrs. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100138_5
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