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Cursing the Christians? A History of the Birkat HaMinim
Ruth Langer
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam
Copyright © 2012 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Langer, Ruth. Cursing the Christians? : a history of the Birkat haminim I Ruth Langer. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-19-978317-5 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. Birkat ha-minim. 2. Amidah (Jewish prayer) 3. Judaism-Relations-Christianity. 4. Christianity and other religions-Judaism. I. Title. BM675.B49L36 2012 296.4'5-dc22 2011014200
135798642 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
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CONTENTS
Introduction
3
1
Origins and Early History: Late Antiquity
16
2
Under Early Islam: The Period of the Ge'onim and the Geniza
40
3
The Birkat HaMinim in Europe of the High Middle Ages
66
4
Living with Censorship?: Early Modern Realities
102
5
The Modern Period: Changes by Choice to the Text
139
Afterword 183 Appendix 1: Geniza Texts of the Birkat HaMinim 187 Appendix 2: Evidence for the Birkat HaMinim in the Pre-Sephardized ~ef~~~~~ lW Appendix 3: Uncensored Medieval European Texts of the Birkat HaMinim 203 Appendix 4: Censored Texts of the Birkat HaMinim, 1550 to the Present 221 Appendix 5: Texts of the Liberal Movements 247 Abbreviations 255 Notes 257 Glossary 353 Bibliography of Secondary Sources 355 Primary Source Index 373 Subject Index 379
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Cursing the Christians?
Introduction
A decade ago, when scrolling through microfilms of medieval Jewish prayer book manuscripts, blacked out texts and erasures caught my attention. These were not scribal errors in the manuscripts, but rather bits of liturgy offensive to Christians that had been censored. The most consistent loci of this censorship were a small set of prayers: the morning blessing praising God "who has not made me a gentile"; the line in the concluding prayer, 'aleynu, "for they bow down to emptiness and nothingness and pray to a god that does not save"; 1 and the prayer called the birkat haminim (the blessing, or malediction, of the heretics), which is the focus here. This last, in its premodern forms, functioned in Europe as a curse of apostates to Christianity, Christians themselves, enemies of the Jews, and the Christian governing powers. It is easy to understand why it became a source of controversy. From the Jewish perspective, the most serious loss to censorship of these three was also the last. The blessing "who has not made me a gentile;' while mandated in the Babylonian Talmud and therefore required, is a prayer originally meant for private recitation. For a while, prayer books simply substituted alternative language, often a positive phrasing "who has made me a Jew" or "who has not made me a