Stefan C. Reif (editor) - Death in Jewish Life: Burial and Mourning Customs Among Jews of Europe and Nearby Communities

Avriel Bar-Levav is Senior Lecturer in Judaic Studies in the Department of History, Philosophy and Judaic Studies at the Open University of Israel, and editor of Peamim: Studies in Oriental Jewry , published by the Ben-Zvi Institute, Jerusalem, Israel.

Bar-Levav offers a framework for depicting and understanding the varied Jewish attitudes towards death, particularly in the medieval period. The author differentiates between death as an idea and death as a reality, and between the presence and absence of death. He suggests that, by and large, death is marginal in the framework of Jewish culture. Jewish attitudes towards death can be anchored between time, space and texts. There is a time of mourning and remembrance, there is a place for the dead (the cemetery), and there are distinct texts that are used in the contexts of dying and mourning. The paper describes various axes along which ideas about death may be perceived: death as punishment or desideratum; the amalgamation of the personality during life and its disintegration in death; the relationship between this world and the world to come; the connection of the soul and the body; and the burial society as a social and religious organization. Death offers a moral perspective on life, and this is also connected with the comprehension of dying as a life passage, and with the construction of the idea of the proper death.

Frederick S. Paxton is the Brigida Pacchiani Ardenghi Professor of History at Connecticut College, in New London, Connecticut, U.S.A.

Paxtons paper attempts to gather together the myriad social and religious behaviours around death, dying and commemoration of the dead in the Latin Christian Middle Ages within a common conceptual framework: the medieval economy of salvation. He argues that the medieval economy of salvation grew out of the patristic notion of the divine economy, whereby Gods gift of his sons life opened up a path to eternal salvation for humankind, to eventually encompass the transfer of people, goods, lands and incomes from private hands to religious communities in exchange for masses, psalms, prayers and alms for the poor, which were then offered to God in return for the salvation of the souls of the donors and their families. Paxtons particular focus is on the early growth of the economy of salvation, which culminated in the extraordinary success of the Benedictine Abbey of Cluny in the eleventh century and twelfth centuries.

Stefan C. Reif is Emeritus Professor of Medieval Hebrew Studies and Fellow of St Johns College at the University of Cambridge, U.K.

Reif began his response to Paxtons keynote address by stressing the need for Jewish scholars clinically to investigate the reasons, both theological and more general, for the revolutionary developments in death liturgy, especially among the Ashkenazi communities of the high Middle Ages. He stressed the major contribution made by pre-medieval and medieval Jewish teachers to liturgical development, how closely related Jewish trends were to their Christian counterparts, and the link made in the rabbinic sources, especially in liturgical custom, between prayers for the dead and charitable gifts. Reif also pointed to the tensions between halakhists and philosophers on one side of the religious spectrum and mystics on the other with regard to customs appertaining to burial and cemeteries. His concluding remarks drew parallels between Christian and Jewish periods of mourning, trends towards standardization and the composition of special benedictions for those who performed special communal tasks.