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This chapter suggests a new narrative of the genesis of Ashkenazic culture. It points to a key source, one of the major components of that civilization. This source of Ashkenazic halakhah has been open to public view ever since 1881, when ‘The Brothers and Widow of Romm’ published in Vilna immediately became the standard edition of the Talmud. The chapter goes on to explain that this starting point goes far in explaining some of the lasting characteristics of Ashkenaz. It argues for the centrality of the Babylonian Talmud in Ashkenazic halakhic culture. Hence, this chapter sketches the contours of a proposal to conclude the re-evaluation of Early Ashkenaz on a constructive note.

This chapter comments upon an influential article written by Israel M. Ta-Shma. In the article, the unique significance and force that ‘custom’ (minhag) possessed in Ashkenaz is emphasized. It is holly unlike the subsidiary role that minhag played in other west European Jewish cultures of the Middle Ages. In Early Ashkenaz (c. 950–1096) religious life was conducted according to custom and custom alone. When a conflict was detected between the prescriptions of the Talmud and popular practice, the latter prevailed — not simply by force of habit, but out of the deep conviction that the law embodied in the traditional conduct of the people should override any formal, written dictate. In the course of the twelfth century, the law inscribed in the Talmud came to predominate in Ashkenaz, but only after a bitter struggle with custom. Ta-Shma attributes this distinctive view of the power of established practice to the Palestinian origins of the Ashkenazic community. The Palestinian Talmud (Yerushalmi), in sharp contrast to the Babylonian (Bavli), was of the opinion that custom overruled the dictates of prescriptive law — minhag mevattel halakhah.

This chapter contends that the recent scholarship on communication in early medieval Europe has undermined the major tacit assumption of the reigning theory of the cultural origins of the Ashkenazic community. Nineteenth-century Jewish scholars who pioneered the academic study of Judaism (Wissenschaft des Judentums) discovered that the Ashkenazic rite had strong Palestinian influences, and the past half-century has witnessed a vigorous reassertion of this viewpoint. It has been claimed that the underlying religious culture of Early Ashkenaz was Palestinian, and that only later did the Babylonian Talmud achieve the dominance in the religious life of Ashkenaz. The chapter challenges this underlying premise, namely, that the nascent Ashkenazic community was located in some transalpine corner of Europe with only a tenuous connection to the East and dependent on a single cultural source whose pipeline ran from Byzantine Palestine to Byzantine southern Italy and from there through the Alpine passes to the Rhineland. The liturgical poetry of Ashkenaz was, indeed, nurtured by just such an umbilical cord, and so, it is claimed, it stands to reason that its culture generally, and its religious rites in particular, were similarly nourished.

This chapter dissent from the now widely held view — which has arisen over the past quarter of a century as a result of the writings of Grossman — that the scholars of Early Ashkenaz did not feel bound by the Babylonian Talmud (Bavli); that, on the contrary, they knowingly and openly disregarded that corpus in their rulings and resolved halakhic questions on the basis of Mishnah, aggadah, and biblical verses. This view was then expanded by I. M. Ta-Shma to include the Tosafists. Hence, the chapter addresses the arguments made for Early Ashkenaz. It shows that the controlling role of the Bavli is in evidence everywhere and, it should be emphasized, from the earliest days of the Ashkenazic community. The determinations of the Bavli are at all times dispositive of the question at bar, and the rare exceptions to the rule merit careful examination.

This chapter expresses doubts regarding the Palestinian origins of Ashkenaz. It begins with the methodological problems in the claims for the Palestinian origins of Ashkenaz. The chapter argues that, given the questionable methodology underlying most of the claims for the Palestinian origins of the Ashkenazic community, the thesis remains unproven. To this the chapter adds two empirical objections. The first is that there is no evidence that Early Ashkenaz even possessed a text of the Yerushalmi. Second, medieval scholars in Ashkenaz were actively engaged in exegeting in unprecedented detail the entire corpus of the Bavli. The chapter thus contends that Early Ashkenaz could not have labored mightily on the Bavli and ignored the Yerushalmi if they were guided all the while by Palestinian halakhah and its rite.

This chapter turns to the use of aggadah by the Tosafists. It looks to Ta-Shma's contention that the Tosafists, no less than the scholars of Early Ashkenaz, invoked aggadic sources in halakhic arguments. The chapter argues that such arguments were, in most cases, an anathema both to the halakhists of pre-Crusade Ashkenaz and to those of the tosafist movement. Aggadah-based halakhic arguments appear only when no directive for the matter at hand can be found in the halakhic sources. In Ashkenaz, such arguments also emerge when the culturally axiomatic is challenged to account for itself before the court of the Written Word. In these rare instances, such as suicide in the face of apostasy or even the murder of children to prevent their being raised as Christians and suffer eternal death, the Tosafists drew upon aggadic material to justify the self-understood correctness of the long-hallowed practice of their community.

This chapter takes a close reading of early reports into preparing meat for Jewish consumption. It focuses on a scathing letter written by Agobard of Lyons, a ninth-century archbishop, to Emperor Louis the Pious in Aachen. Among the charges leveled was that meat that was deemed unclean (immundum) and unfit for Jewish consumption was regularly sold to Christians and called derisively ‘Christian meat’. Agobard had in mind the dietary laws of sheḥitah (ritual slaughter) and terefot (the bodily defects that render the animal, even if correctly slaughtered, not kosher). His detailed description of what the Jews deemed immundum is the earliest report available of sheḥitah and terefot as practiced by the Jews of Europe. In addition to Agobard's letter, the chapter also studies the Megillat Aḥima'ats (Chronicle of Aḥima'ats).