Handbooks devoted to a single area of ritual practice figure prominently among the
works produced by German Jews from the thirteenth century to the fifteenth. These handbooks
include minhagim books intended primarily as liturgical guides for cantors and manuals for
other types of communal functionaries, such as scribes and ritual slaughterers. Historians typically
associate minhagim books with the post–Black Death period and the desire to provide
guidance during a time of decline for German Jewry. Similarly, the flourishing of halakhic
manuals is considered a fourteenth-century phenomenon, a result of the rabbinate’s professionalization.
However, these explanations are insufficient since both genres emerged earlier.
This article links the production of ritual handbooks to two trends: geographic mobility and
a more text-oriented culture. Between the thirteenth century and the fifteenth, major changes
in German Jewish settlement patterns disrupted the transmission of ritual practice and led to a
need for practical guides. The proliferation of ritual handbooks was also related to the increase
in Ashkenazic society—as in medieval Europe generally—in the production of written texts.
These texts included liturgical genres and practical halakhic works, some of which served
as sources for the handbooks. However, the handbooks tend to be more accessible than their
predecessors and to include more practical details. The proliferation of late medieval ritual
handbooks demonstrates that changes typically associated with the advent of print, including
a growing reliance on written sources for practical information and a move toward the
standardization of ritual practice, began to emerge in earlier centuries

EB00000002476K

Available

• The Increasing Reliance on Ritual Handbooks in Pre–Print Era Ashkenaz