Journal of Medieval History
ISSN: 0304-4181 (Print) 1873-1279 (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/rmed20
Meir b. Elijah of Norwich: persecution and poetry
among medieval English Jews
Susan L. Einbinder
To cite this article: Susan L. Einbinder (2000) Meir b. Elijah of Norwich: persecution and
poetry among medieval English Jews, Journal of Medieval History, 26:2, 145-162, DOI: 10.1016/
S0304-4181(00)00004-X
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0304-4181(00)00004-X
Published online: 03 Jan 2012.
Submit your article to this journal
Article views: 1175
View related articles
Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at
https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rmed20
Journal of Medieval History, Vol. 26, No. 2, pp. 145–162
2000
 2000 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
Printed in Great Britain
PII: S0304-4181(00)00004-X
0304-4181/00 $ - see front matter
Meir b. Elijah of Norwich: persecution and poetry among
medieval English Jews
Susan L. Einbinder
Hebrew Union College, 3101 Clifton Avenue, Cincinnati, OH 45220-2488, USA
Abstract
Given the prominent role played by martyrological literature among the Jewish communities of
northern France, and the close relationship between the two communities, the absence of martyrological writing from England is striking. Until now, scholars have largely assumed that the relatively small community of medieval English Jews was not culturally sophisticated enough to produce such literature on its own. This paper looks at a liturgical poem by Meir of Norwich, a
thirteenth-century English Jewish poet whose poems survive in a variety of genres. The poem ‘Put
a curse on my enemy’ describes the conditions of economic, communal and spiritual devastation
that characterize thirteenth-century English Jewry. The poet shows considerable literary ability and
moreover a keen understanding of the ‘modern’ poetic styles made fashionable by the Spanish
Jewish poets of the preceding century. Meir’s work suggests it is time to re-evaluate the cultural
activity of medieval English Jewry, which, like its continental analogues, sought to express the
particularity of its experience of persecution in verse. A translation and edited text follow.  2000
Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Medieval England; Medieval Hebrew literature; Persecution and literature
The following essay treats a poem by the thirteenth-century poet Meir b. Elijah
of Norwich. Although acknowledged as the chief representative of the poetic art
among the Jews of medieval England, Meir’s work has been noted more as a literary
curiosity than for its substance and style.1 Nonetheless, the poem discussed below
has noteworthy literary features as well as historical interest. Alluding to the per-
SUSAN EINBINDER is Associate Professor of Hebrew literature at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati.
She is currently working on a book on the literary conventions of medieval Hebrew martyrological poetry.
1
Meir’s poems, albeit few, are scattered through several publications. V.D. Lipman included a number of
them, as transcribed and annotated by A. Habermann, as an appendix to The Jews of Medieval Norwich
(London, 1967). The long poem recapitulating the biblical Exodus, included by Habermann, was also published in a rare edition of only 25 copies, by A. Berliner, as Haruzim, or Hebräische Poesieen des Meir
ben Elia aus Norwich (London, 1887). For a discussion of the poet, see Lipman’s brief but useful comments
in The Jews of Medieval Norwich, 157–159, and Cecil Roth, The Intellectual Activities of Medieval English
Jewry, British Academy Supplemental Papers No. VIII (London, nd?), 50–51.
145
146
Susan L. Einbinder
secution of English Jews in the period preceding their expulsion, the poem hints at
how England’s learned Jews adapted the conventions of the martyrological literature
that flourished among the Jewish communities of northern continental Europe.
From the time of the First Crusade and throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the literature of martyrdom and persecution played an important role in forming what have been called the ‘martyrocentric’ attitudes of northern French and
Rhenish Jewish communities.2 Anglo-Jewry retained strong linguistic and cultural
ties with these communities, particularly those in the Norman lands from which
they had emigrated.3 Normandy became a fertile ground for the dissemination of
martyrological teachings and poetry, particularly with its incorporation into the royal
French domain in 1204, and Anglo-Jewish appreciation of this literature would have
been more than vicarious. Although there is little evidence of anti-Jewish violence
in early twelfth-century England, by the end of the century, English Jews had experienced traumatic incidents of such violence in the massacres in London and York in
1189–90. Both incidents were rapidly incorporated into martyrological verse and
chronicle records. Violence, often with increasing judicial involvement, accompanied
local and collective anti-Jewish measures throughout the thirteenth century.4 Yet the
two surviving poetic laments for the victims of York were written, not by English
Jews, but by Joseph of Chartres and the Rhenish rabbi, Menahem b. Jacob.5 And
for the remaining century of Jewish life on English soil, no native attempts at purely
martyrological commemorations survive. The poem discussed below is, as far as I
know, one of only two Anglo-Jewish verse compositions to deal explicitly with persecution.6
It would be rash to assume that the lack of extant poetry implies a lack of literary
effort or talent, and yet too often such an assumption has shadowed the studies of
this corner of medieval Jewish life. Meir b. Elijah of Norwich offers a particularly
good focus for new attention, as his surviving corpus, albeit small, covers a range
of genres and topics. The poem Oyevi bim’eirah tiqqov [Put a curse on my enemy]
illustrates that medieval English Jewish writers not only attempted to commemorate
2
For the term ‘martyrocentric’, see William C. Jordan, The French Monarchy and the Jews (Philadelphia,
1989), 20.
3
Scholars agree that the vast majority of English Jews originated in Rouen. See note 7 below. More generally,
Lipman remarks that medieval Anglo-Jewry ‘culturally … formed part of the Jewry of Northern France and
the Rhineland, the Jewry, in fact, of Rashi and the Tosafists’. Lipman, 142. That view has remained essentially unchallenged by more recent scholarship, although, as Paul Hyams notes, ‘we say that the English
community originated in Rouen, because we know nothing better to say… [O]nce Jews were prospering in
England… they must have called in fellows from wherever they were to be found…’. Personal communication, 12 September 1999.
4
See R.B. Dobson, The Jews of Medieval York and the Massacre of March 1190 (York, 1974).
5
The poems were included by A. Habermann in his Sefer Gezerot Ashkenaz veTsarefat (Jerusalem, 1945),
142–155. Technically, Menahem’s poem covers several persecutions, but gives considerable space to the
tragedy at York.
6
The other may not even be English, although it most likely is. This is an anonymous penitential poem that
follows three poems by Jacob b. Judah of London in the ‘Etz Hayyim. The poem may or may not be by
Jacob, also. See ‘Adonai, adonai, evionei ‘amkha yeqavuka, in the ‘Etz Hayyim’, ed. Israel Brodie, vol. I
(Jerusalem, 1962), 127–129.
Meir b. Elijah of Norwich: persecution and poetry among medieval English Jews
147
the difficult experiences of their people in verse, but that in some cases those attempts
were both novel and noteworthy.
The story of medieval English Jewry has been blessed (or plagued) by an extraordinary abundance of archival resources, testifying to the meticulous record-keeping
of several royal administrations as well as to the financial accounting of the Jews
themselves. These materials continue to occupy scholars of economic and political
history, who occasionally pause to remark on the comparative dearth of other kinds
of cultural testimony. In particular, the prominent role played by martyrological
literature among the Jewish communities of northern France makes the absence of
such writing from England striking, all the more given the close relationship between
the two communities.7 The centrality of literature as a vehicle for commemorating
incidents of persecution and martyrdom in northern France and Germany was surely
familiar to England’s Jewish elite, who over the thirteenth century would experience
their own mass arrests, libels and acts of general and local brutality. These experiences might reasonably have found an echo in insular Jewish literature. The 1290
expulsion also might have been expected to surface in the writings of refugees or
those who received them (mostly back in Normandy), and yet the textual record
remains exceedingly bleak. Historians have debated whether this is a testimony to
a literature lost or to a literature that was never written. The total number of Jews
in England at the time of the expulsion was approximately 2,000, and the community
at its height probably never reached more than about 5,000 men and women.8 These
demographic considerations have undoubtedly influenced the school of opinion that
little, if any, Anglo-Jewish literature was ever written.
As early as 1894, B. Lionel Abrahams noted with passion the dearth of evidence
of an Anglo-Jewish literary culture. For Abrahams, the lack of literary texts not only
suggested an absence of literary activity – but even worse, the deplorable absence
of the literary sensibility that would in times of trouble have sought solace in prose
or verse:
If there had been one among the English Jews of the latter half of the thirteenth
century who was able to set forth in literary form any incidents of his own life
or of the lives of his brethren, we might have been able to form an idea of how
their sufferings, and the faith that enabled them to endure them, affected their daily
action and speech. But there was none such. The literary power which enables a
member of one generation to transmit to generations to come the living image of
his contemporaries is not a Jewish gift, and, in consequence, though the cruel
sufferings of the Jews who were expelled from England lend to Anglo-Jewish
7
For a general history of the English Jews, see H.G. Richardson, The English Jewry under the Angevin Kings
(London, 1960); Cecil Roth, History of the Jews in England, 3rd ed. (Oxford, 1978); Joseph Jacobs, The
Jews of Angevin England (London, 1893); Paul Hyams, ‘The Jewish minority in medieval England 1066–
1290’, Journal of Jewish Studies, 26 (1974), 270–293.
8
Hyams, 271; and the recent review of the various estimates in Robin Mundill, England’s Jewish Solution:
Experiment and Expulsion, 1262–1290 (Cambridge, 1998), 25–26; see also Zefira Rokeah, ‘Money and the
hangman in late 13th-century England: Jews, Christians and coinage offences alleged and real’, Jewish
Historical Studies, 31 (1990), 83–109.
148
Susan L. Einbinder
history the most dramatic of the few dramatic episodes that it possesses, yet the
sufferers are to us mere shadows, and not even the most patriotic or the most
imaginative of the Jews of today can enter for a moment into their thoughts or
their feelings.9
In moderated tones, many historians have continued to assume that the absence
of literary evidence is equivalent to an absence of literary interest, or at least of
original literature per se. Thus, for instance, Robin Mundill has recently argued that
the fiscal strategies that ultimately broke England’s Jews financially resulted unpredictably in their stiffened resistance to conversion. The failure of English Jewry
to convert
must have been another factor in Edward’s final decision to expel them from
England. The Jews of Edwardian England remained true to themselves and their
faith: it is perhaps an irony that their memory is preserved not in any Memorbuch
or martyrology but only in their remaining financial bonds and fines.10
Nonetheless, meagre as it was, the literature of medieval English Jews found at
least two promoters in the cautiously admiring surveys by Arthur Marmorstein and
Cecil Roth.11 Marmorstein and Roth produced studies of a modest corpus of literature, whose few noteworthy practitioners they recommended for long overdue recognition and acclaim. While, as has generally been the case in studies of the literature
of northern European Jewish communities, their focus was on Talmudic scholarship,
both men acknowledged, a bit desperately perhaps, the presence of a handful of
poets from the Land of the Isle. Leaving aside the case of Berachiah haNaqdan, who
may or may not have been the Berachiah haNaqdan who composed the lively and
remarkable Hebrew fox fables (Mishlei shu’alim), these early scholars of English
Jewry pointed to the fragmentary poetic corpus of two men, Meir b. Elijah (or Elias)
of Norwich, and Jacob b. Judah of London, both of whom were writing in the thir9
B. Lionel Abrahams, ‘The condition of the Jews in England at the time of their expulsion in 1290’, Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England [henceforth, TJHSE], 2 (1894), 84.
10
Mundill, 276. For a review of differing explanations for Edward’s decision, see Mundill, 260 and following;
Robert Stacey, ‘English Jewry in the thirteenth century and the problem of the expulsion’ [in Hebrew], in:
Gerush veShivah: Yehudei Angliah behilufei hazemanim (Jerusalem, 1993), 9–27; and Stacey, ‘Recent work
on medieval English Jewish history’, Jewish History, 2/2 (Fall 1987), 61–72 and esp. 68. On the phenomenon
and pace of Jewish conversion, see Stacey, ‘The conversion of the Jews to Christianity in thirteenth-century
England’, Speculum, 67 (1992), 263–283; F.D. Logan, ‘Thirteen London Jews and conversion to Christianity:
problems of Apostasy in the 1280s’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 45 (1972), 214–229.
11
It is perhaps an indication of the uphill battle they anticipated that both of them begin by assembling evidence
for the claim that the English Jews owned books. Cecil Roth’s essay on the intellectual life of medieval
English Jewry began with a reference to Neubauer, who ‘in an excess of zeal … once stated that in the
Middle Ages “Hebrew Books … did not exist in England”’. The citation is taken from the Oxford Historical
Society, Collectanea, ii.288; see Roth, The Intellectual Activities of Medieval English Jewry, 7. Marmorstein
opens his study with the remark that ‘it is an often repeated platitude that there is very little or no evidence
for the literary activities of English Jews before the Expulsion’. Two paragraphs later he begins with ‘an
enquiry as to Hebrew Manuscripts in England in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Scholarship is dependent
on books. What books did the Jews in England use, or own?’; A. Marmorstein, ‘New material for the literary
history of the English Jews before the expulsion’, TJHSE, 12 (1928–31), 103, 105.
Meir b. Elijah of Norwich: persecution and poetry among medieval English Jews
149
teenth century and probably close to the time of the expulsion.12 Only three penitential hymns by the latter survive.13 But a number of poems – Habermann listed 21 –
by Meir of Norwich remain. These include a long verse history of the Exodus, containing what may be the longest identifying acrostic in the history of Hebrew poetry;
a hymn for the end of the Sabbath; a lament describing the persecution of the Jews
in England towards the close of the century; and 16 quatrains forming a composite
poem of praise for an unidentified friend.14
Scholars have been unable to identify Meir b. Elijah with any certainty, and no
Jew by that name seems to have lived in Norwich during the later thirteenth century.
Relying on a variety of legal and financial records, Lipman identified four thirteenthcentury Jews named Elijah (or, in English form, Elias) from Norwich who might
have been Meir’s father. At least one of them is documented in London in 1275,
which could mean that Meir used the term ‘of Norwich’ to refer to his place of
origin and not his place of residence.15 A.M. Habermann, who first transcribed Meir’s
persecution poem, ‘Oyevi bim’eirah tiqqov’ [Put a curse on my enemy], for his
appendix to Lipman’s history of the Norwich Jews, assumed that the grim events to
which the verses referred were the persecutions culminating in the expulsion of
1290.16 He based this conclusion on his reading of the incipit to the poem, which
in translation reads:
12
On Berachiah, see Roth, 48–50. If Berachiah truly was living in England in the twelfth century, Hyams
considers his work evidence for ‘the Jews’ role in the transmission of southern ideas into England’.
Hyams, 285.
13
The three hymns of Jacob b. Judah of London survive almost by sheer accident, in the single manuscript of
this author’s halakhic compendium, the ‘Etz Hayyim. As David Kaufmann noted over 90 years ago, the
liturgy embedded in the text of the ‘Etz Hayyim provides our only real knowledge of the medieval English
Jewish rite. See D. Kaufmann, ‘The Prayer-book according to the ritual of England before 1290’, Jewish
Quarterly Review [henceforth, JQR], 4 (1892), 20–63; and also ‘The Etz Chayim of Jacob b. Jehudah of
London, and the history of his manuscript,’ JQR, 5 (1893), 353–374. The entirety of the work (more than
900 folios in small, close print) was finally published by Israel Brodie, ‘Etz Hayyim of R. Jacob Hazan of
London [in Hebrew] 3 vols. (Jerusalem, 1962–67); the poems appear in vol. I, 130–132. They have received
no scholarly attention to date. A fourth poem, Adonai adonai evionei – ‘amkha [My God, my God, the
wretched of your people], 127–128, cannot be attributed, as it contains no identifying acrostic. However,
the poem survives only in this manuscript and there is thus a good probability it is also of English origin.
As it includes a number of references to persecution, it is of interest for our discussion.
14
For the sources of Meir’s poetry, see note 1 above. The persecution poem is found in Lipman/Habermann,
appendix, 13–15. A lament for R. Menahem Vardimas was attributed to Meir of Norwich by A. Neubauer,
who first published the text of the lament under the caption ‘Notiz: Menahem Vardimas’, in the Monatschrift
für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judenthums, (1887), 372–373, and then in emended form, again under
‘Notes et Mélanges: Menahem Vardimas’, in the Revue des etudes juives, 17 (1888), 151–154. The emended
vesion was followed in the same issue by a commentary and partial translation into French by David Kaufmann; see ‘L’élégie composée sur Menahem Vardimas’, 304–306. However, as Norman Golb realized, the
subject of the lament was not Roth’s hypothetical great rabbi of London but Menahem Vardimas of Rouen
(d. 1224). Moreover, according to Golb, the author of the lament is Yehoshia haLevi, an otherwise unknown
poet. See Norman Golb, The Jews in Medieval Normandy (Cambridge, 1998), 387–395. The source for the
poem is Vat. Heb. 402, f. 23b. Habermann describes poems found in two different manuscripts, Vatican
Hebrew 402 (no folio listings) and Parma Da Rossi 454, f. 85b. It is not clear if this accounts for all 21
poems. I am awaiting access to microfilm copies of these manuscripts.
15
Lipman, 157.
16
Habermann/Lipman, appendix, p. 13.
150
Susan L. Einbinder
A me’orah [to be sung] according to [the preceding] melody, on the heaviness
of exile, the slayings in prison and financial ruin.17
By reading the expression ‘slayings in prison’ [haregot hakela] as a numerological
clue, Habermann took the numerical equivalent of the Hebrew word for ‘prison’ as
an allusion to the year 1291.18 However, as Lipman observed, there is no indication
that the poet intended any such allusions, and it is more likely that the events
described in the poem refer to ‘a more local expulsion – e.g., the orders to the Jews
to leave Cambridge, Gloucester, Marlborough, and Worcester in 1275’.19
As Lipman noted, Meir’s poetry is stylistically ‘involved’, a description he briefly
elaborated to explain that while the poems ‘show the characteristics of the German–
Northern French Piyyut, they also show the influence of Spanish Hebrew poetry’.20
This is indeed a striking feature not only of Meir’s poems but of Jacob b. Judah of
London’s, and suggests the relatively open embrace of Spanish styles by insular
Jews.21 The legendary sojourn in England of the Spanish Jewish exegete, philosopher, mathematician and poet, Abraham Ibn Ezra, may have fostered a taste among
the English Jewish elite for the forms and sounds of Andalusian verse. In addition,
the relative distance of the English communities from the great northern French and
Rhenish Jewish centres of scholarship and culture may have contributed to a greater
freedom from the cultural norms and conventions of northern continental Jewish
poetry.
The Tosafist poets of northern France and Ashkenaz were familiar with the poetic
styles developed in Spain; we find examples of the quantitative metrics and strophic
composition typical of Spanish verse in the writing of Rabbenu [Jacob] Tam,
Ephraim of Regensburg and Meir of Rothenberg. Meir of Norwich’s persecution
poem is in fact similar in form to that used by Ephraim of Regensburg in his poem
Eli eli lamah anhati mimkha ne‘elemah, also influenced by Spanish Hebrew verse.
Ephraim’s poem uses tripartite lines, and Meir’s hemistichs, but both poems are built
of six-line stanzas in which the third and sixth lines are refrain lines that remain
unchanged throughout the poem.22 Likewise, Meir of Rothenberg’s famous lament
for the burning of the Talmud in Paris in 1242 is modelled on the well-known Zion
poem of Judah haLevi. Other examples of liturgical verse written by French and
17
Me’orah beniggunah ‘al koved hagalut veharegot hakela vekillayon hamamon. A ‘me’orah’ is a type of
liturgical poem inserted in the liturgy in the first of the two benedictions surrounding the Shema’. However,
Meir’s poem is also designated as the sequel to a havdalah poem, which would of necessity be recited on
Saturday night. As the poet’s name is split in acrostic over both poems, one should follow the other. See
my discussion in this essay.
18
K-l-‘=51, and the Hebrew year 5051=1290/1.
19
Lipman, 158.
20
Lipman, 157.
21
See the poem beginning Agadlah shimkha tsur by Jacob b. Judah, ‘Etz Hayyim, ed. Brodie, 130; and Roth,
Intellectual Activities, 51. The verse introductions to the various sections of Moses ben Isaac haNesiah’s
Sefer haShoham also use quantitative meters.
22
Ephraim of Regensburg, Eli eli lamah anhati mimkha ne‘elemah’ [My God, my God, why don’t you notice
my sighing], in ‘The piyyutim of Rabbenu Ephraim berabbi Isaac of Regensburg’ [in Hebrew], Yedi‘ot
haMakhon leheqer haShirah ha‘ivrit vol. 4 (1938), poem no. 5, pp. 135–136.
Meir b. Elijah of Norwich: persecution and poetry among medieval English Jews
151
Rhenish Jewish poets suggest a larger awareness of Spanish poetics than is generally
assumed. Indeed, the whole question of Spanish influence on the Tosafist poets merits
further consideration.23
Nonetheless, the Spanish styles do not seem to have ‘taken’ among the learned
writers and audiences of France and Ashkenaz to the degree the extant literature
suggests they did in England. Meir’s poem is at once imitative and a stubbornly
individualistic blend of two distinct traditions. Had the English Jewish communities
thrived a bit longer, this hybrid style might have evolved into a unique type of
Hebrew composition. As it turned out, however, the conditions under which Meir
wrote in the latter half of the thirteenth century were neither conducive to poetic
excellence nor to perpetuity. As Neubauer and Lipman observed, Meir’s persecution
poem preserves references to a variety of assaults on English Jews, ranging from
heavy fines to imprisonment and exile. The poem also depicts a community that
has been economically broken, whose leaders have taken refuge in messianism and
predictions of the End of Days, and whose people feel increasingly hopeless, helpless
and deserted, both by God and the empty prophecies of their rabbis. Curiously, Meir
has chosen to set this poem as the sequel to a para-liturgical hymn for the close of
the Sabbath, where the liturgical theme is of transition from sacred to profane and
from light to darkness. This highly unusual use of a persecution poem has received
little comment, although such poetry on the continent was invariably designated for
use in penitential liturgies and fast days.
The ceremonial marking of the Sabbath’s end has its own traditional liturgy, called
havdalah.24 The ‘prequel’ to Meir’s persecution poem, Me‘onah elohah shamayim
[God’s dwelling place is in the heavens] is also his own composition. It, too, is in
stanzaic form, with a refrain line serving as the third and sixth verses of each six
verse stanza. This refrain line – ‘You are mighty and full of light, You separate the
darkness from the light’ – will echo in the persecution poem, in which Meir rephrases
the refrain to read ‘You are mighty and full of light, You turn the darkness into
light’. The theme of the first poem is conventional to the havdalah liturgy, celebrating
God’s creation of the universe and the division (‘separation’) of original chaos into
the ordered existence of the planets and stars, the various forms of life on earth and
finally the Jewish people ‘separated’ from all others.
As Habermann noted, the me’orah belongs in the morning, not evening, liturgy,
and it would be peculiar for a piece designed for morning recitation to be constructed
23
Abraham Grossman, citing the work of Ezra Fleischer, refers to the phenomenon. See Abraham Grossman,
Hokhmei Tsarefat haRishonim (Jerusalem, 1993), esp. chapter 10 (Northern France: Between Ashkenaz and
Spain), 539–586. R. Tam applied his awkward mastery of Spanish prosody to his correspondence with
Abraham Ibn Ezra, who was less than impressed with the results. See Ephraim Urbach, Ba‘alei haTosafot
(Jerusalem, 1955), 94; see also R. Tam’s liturgical poem for Sukkot, ‘Yegoni umar hikki’ in the Mivhar
haShirah ha“ivrit, ed. Haim Brody and Meir Wiener (Leipzig, 1922), 226. The Maharam’s lament for the
Talmud has been published in many places; see, for example, A. Habermann, Sefer Gezerot Ashkenaz veTsarefat (Jerusalem, 1945), 179–186, and for a reliable English translation, David Roskies, The Literature of
Destruction: Jewish Responses to Catastrophe (Philadelphia, 1989), 85–87. For the poems of Ephraim of
Regensburg, who also used quantitative metrical forms, see the preceding note.
24
Havdalah means ‘separation’, and the liturgy celebrates the acts of God who ‘separates’ between sacred and
profane, the Sabbath day and the work week, and light and dark.
152
Susan L. Einbinder
as a sequel to an evening composition. The scribe’s incipit may have mistaken the
poem’s original use, or may refer to a me’eirah (curse – and not me’orah) as indicated in the poem’s opening line. Either way, the cognate refrains and the way Meir
has split his acrostic signature over both poems argue for sequential recitation. If
indeed it was read in the evening, the poem’s repeated call for the mighty God of
light must have sounded dramatically in the descending darkness that marked the
end of the Sabbath day. Moreover, the messianic yearnings of the liturgy concluding
the Sabbath would have provided an excellent setting for this particular poem, which
makes several references to this theme.25
Both this poem and ‘Put a curse on my enemy’ would have been recited to the
same melody, which is indicated before the havdalah poem as ‘the melody of Meholelet…’.26 Habermann guessed that the instruction referred to yet another medieval
liturgical composition, beginning with the words Meholelet mehullelet. This poem
is by Moses b. Isaac, another poet about whom little is known.27 Moses b. Isaac’s
poem has been preserved in several sources.28 Unfortunately, it has not been preserved well, and its stanzas are irregular in length, with an erratically placed refrain.
However, Fraenkel’s reconstructed version produces a poem of four six-line strophes
in which the sixth line functions as a recurring refrain. Fraenkel was unaware of
Meir’s double imitation of this poem, which preserves a format that must have
characterized the original. Meir’s poem thus confirms his hypothetical reconstruction,
at least with regard to stanza length and refrain.
The relationship among the poems raises other questions, however. One concerns
prosody. Technically, each verse of Moses’ poem is tripartite, forming segments of
three, three and six syllables per line. This structure is not unfamiliar in liturgical
composition from Ashkenaz, where it was inherited from eastern styles. In contrast,
Meir’s poems are formed of hemistichs, half-lines of six or seven syllables apiece.
The result is a rhyme scheme that resembles a Spanish ‘girdle-like’ stanza more than
an Ashkenazic block stanza, an impression reinforced by the refrain, which Meir
has doubled to intersect the stanza as well as conclude it. In other words, Meir seems
to have adapted a traditional Ashkenazic form of verse composition to a modified
Spanish form, while retaining the original (Ashkenazic) melody.
Meir’s language reflects the influence of Spanish models as well. It is for the most
part clear and elegant, and avoids obscure allusions or turns of phrase. In contrast,
25
I thank my colleague, Richard Sarason of the Hebrew Union College (Cincinnati), for his observations on
this thematic link.
26
Habermann/Lipman, appendix, p. 9.
27
See Landshuth, Sefer ‘Amudei ha‘avodah (Berlin, 1857; reprinted in Israel in 1968), 227; L. Zunz, Literaturgeschichte der synagogalen Poesie (Berlin, 1865), 333. From these entries, whose accuracy cannot be
guaranteed, the poet would seem to have lived somewhat earlier than Meir.
28
See Jonah Fraenkel, Mahzor le-regalim: Pesah (New York, 1993), 453–454. Fraenkel lists three manuscript
versions, two from western and one from eastern Europe. As he indicates, there are ‘lacunae and confusion
in the (few) manuscript and printed versions’. In printed form, the poem seems to have survived mostly in
the Polish rite. I have consulted the (identical) versions in Mahzor keminhag Pihem Polin Ungarin Ma’harin,
vol. 2 (Prague, 1799), 229–230; the Sefer Qerovot hu Mahzor le Yom Shevi‘i uShemini shel Pesah
(Rodelheim, 1821), 86ab, and the Mahzor ‘Avodat Ohel Mo‘ed (also called, in English, Service of the
Synagogue), ed. Jacob b. Isaac Davis (London and New York, 1908) Passover volume, 254–255.
Meir b. Elijah of Norwich: persecution and poetry among medieval English Jews
153
the Ashkenazic poem that served as his direct model delights in the obscure allusive
style of Ashkenazic sacred poetry. Moreover, Moses b. Isaac’s composition is an
ofan, a type of liturgical verse inserted in the first benediction before the Shema‘ in
the morning liturgy of the festivals and special Sabbaths (here it is inserted in the
service for the eighth day of Passover). Thematically, Moses’ poem deals with the
awesome might of the Holy One who redeemed His people from Egypt. However,
partly as a result of the three-syllable limits the poet has set himself for two of three
segments of each verse, the language is extremely elliptical and the meaning of the
verses enigmatic. The commentaries of two printed editions of the poem illustrate
how wide a range of meaning could be imposed on the text. The first line amply
demonstrates the problem. One commentary assumes that meholelet/mehullelet/
ne’dari ‘al moqdam refers to Egypt, praised and vaunted among the nations and now
punished by the fire of divine wrath. Another commentary reads the verse as referring
to the hand of God, which, praiseworthy and mighty, has been raised to redeem
Israel ‘on the fire’ – bishvil qiddush haShem, i.e., the fire of martyrdom.29 Fraenkel,
who undoubtedly came closest to the intended meaning, read the verse as a description of the hand of God hewing down Egypt and consuming them by fire.30
Nonetheless, in this case, even the ‘misreadings’, particularly those with martyrological echoes, are suggestive of echoes the text might have had for Meir as well.
The ofan continues to describe the mystical vision of the angels singing before the
divine throne and Israel, struggling to escape its oppressors and ultimately redeemed
by God.31 From this setting and theme, it is striking that Meir has fashioned, first a
poem based on a creation motif that emphasizes God as the bringer of light, and
then a sequel poem that traces an arc from persecution and darkness to the hope for
redemption and revenge. Significantly, Meir has split the acrostic of his full name
across the two poems, weaving ‘Meir’ (literally the ‘one who brings light’) through
the first poem and ‘Elijah’ (the precursor of the Messiah, summoned at the end of
each Sabbath in song) through the second.
And what of the content of Meir’s poem? ‘Put a curse on my enemy’ refers to
the afflictions suffered by English Jews, who have been exhausted by crippling fines
(l. 10), bloodshed and popular hatred (ll. 10, 13–14, 44), imprisonment (ll. 40–41)
and exile (l. 37). The second half of line 10 and line 23 evoke the swell of hatred
and religious defamation that erupted in violence against Jews as individuals and as
a collectivity during the thirteenth century. This violence and defamation took various forms: blood libels; the denunciation, seizure and destruction of Jewish sacred
books; the pillage of Jewish communities during the barons’ revolt of the 1260s and
the accusations of coin-clipping that resulted in the execution of several hundred
29
Compare the Rodelheim edition, 86, and the Prague edition, 229.
Fraenkel, 453.
31
These are characteristic themes of the ofan in central Europe; see Ezra Fleischer, Shirat haQodesh ha‘Ivrit
bimei-habeinayim (Jerusalem, 1975), 454.
30
154
Susan L. Einbinder
Jews over the years 1277–78.32 The great tallages beginning in 1244, and culminating
in the successive impositions of 1274, 1278 and 1287 did succeed in financially
breaking an erstwhile prosperous Jewish community.
The tightening vice of anti-Jewish policies, and certainly outbreaks of physical
violence, also succeeded in winning converts (willing and unwilling) to Christianity.
Jewish conversion apparently reached its height in the 1240s–1250s and then waned,
as the resistance of the community stiffened.33 Meir alludes to this phenomenon,
too.34 In line 8, he describes the Jews, mocked continuously by their enemies ‘until
they don’t know which path is the one that gives off light’. In line 26, he again
evokes the image of people battered and stunned by their troubles, who despair of
redemption and ‘of Your ways of radiant light’. The implication is that the grinding
reality of persecution has turned some Jews away from ‘the light’ of their faith;
moreover, the battering of the enemy is polemical as well as physical, and plays
precisely to the psychological vulnerability of men and women broken by violence,
poverty and the death of hope. Why not interpret these signs as indications that God
has abandoned His old covenant with the Jews for a covenant of greater promise?
This polemic, also a topos of continental martyrology, is not tapped as explicitly by
Meir as it is in French or Rhenish writing. Yet it surfaces in his images of a people
overwhelmed by despair, whose faith has been shaken by their experience.
Meir’s language reflects the English reality of small Jewish communities whose
educated leaders were few and scattered. Intriguingly, the anonymous poem preserved in Jacob b. Judah’s compendium, the ‘Etz Hayyim, also describes the blow
dealt Jewish scholarship by ‘the seed of Edom, my contender and foe’:
Those who meditate on Your Torah have become fewer and the synagogues are
abolished (l.20)
32
Winchester in 1225 and 1232, London in 1244, Hugh of Lincoln in 1255. I have listed examples of thirteenthcentury libels only; there are a number of twelfth-century incidents, beginning with the case of William of
Norwich in 1144. See Mundill, 52; Gavin Langmuir, ‘The Knight’s tale of Young Hugh of Lincoln’, Speculum, 47 (1972), 459–482, and ‘Thomas of Monmouth: detector of ritual murder’, Speculum, 59 (1984), 820–
846, reprinted in Toward a Definition of Antisemitism (Berkeley, 1990). The denunciation of the Talmud
promulgated by Gregory IX in his letter of 1239 led to the official condemnation of the Talmud in England.
Seizures of Jewish books, some undoubtedly Talmuds and some undoubtedly close enough for Christian
purposes, are recorded on different occasions. According to Tovey, in the 1260s, Simon de Montfort’s troops
marched through Lincoln and ‘broke open the Jewes Synagogue, and rifled it of great Treasures, laid up
there for Security’. See D’Blossiers Tovey, Anglia Judaica, or the History and Antiquities of the Jews in
England (Oxford, 1738), 166. Mundill describes this as the desecration of scrolls and the burning of ‘bonds
and charters’, but surely sacred books were also consigned to the flames. See Mundill, 42. In a letter written
in the 1280s to the archbishops of Canterbury and York, Honorius IV condemned the study of the Talmud
as a major source of Jewish corruption and perfidy; see Mundill, 272; and The Church and the Jews in the
XIIIth Century (1254–1314), ed. Kenneth Stow (New York, 1989), 155–164. A confiscation of the ‘Talmud’
was enacted in 1286, Mundill, 32. On the coinage charges, see Z. Rokeah (1990). Other noteworthy incidents
of violence include the Jewish casualties of the barons’ revolt, for instance the 1264 massacre of 500 Jews
(according to Mundill) in London by followers of Simon de Montfort, see Mundill, 41.
33
Stacey, ‘Conversion’ (1992), 269; Hyams, 276. According to Stacey, at its peak, this meant ‘as many as 300
[converts] in a total Jewish population that did not exceed 5000 and that may have been as low as 3000’.
The number ‘reflects the corrosive effect of Henry III’s excessive royal taxation of the Jews during those
years and a resulting breakdown in the internal solidarity and cohesion of the Jewish community’, 270.
34
An indication, perhaps, of an earlier date of composition?
Meir b. Elijah of Norwich: persecution and poetry among medieval English Jews
155
Be zealous for Your Awesome Name, be zealous for the Sanctuary and for the
Torah
See how her students have grown fewer, for want of bread and silver35
Have pity on the people who walk in darkness with no teacher36
Israel’s hope is the Lord, who will save her in time of trouble. (ll. 37–40)37
‘Put a curse on my enemy’ repeatedly condemns the ‘seers’ who have incorrectly
led the Jews to believe that their troubles are about to end. Presumably, the poet
refers to messianic predictions of the End of Days. His reproach to the false prophets
of the End is mingled, however, with a yearning to know when that End will truly
come. Thus, ‘the words of the seer are garbled’ (l. 7), and the vision of God’s
‘intimates’, those versed in mystical knowledge who make predictions of the End,
has proven inaccurate; its time has come and gone (l. 28). The people continue to
hope desperately ‘in hidden prophecies’ (l. 37), but the men who have the authority
to make them have retreated to hermetic utterances, revealing (says Meir) that they
‘do not know the light’ (l. 38). At the same time, oppression has crushed the people,
who in silence ‘wait for the light’ (l. 11) and for someone to interpret their sufferings
justly and assign them an end. ‘All his days, he [Israel] has surely hoped; day after
day [he awaits] consolation’, Meir proclaims to God (l. 46). If God has given His
people over to their enemy in order to punish them for their sins, surely the time
has now come to ‘rise up to plead my cause’ and ‘establish the Messiah’s reign’ (ll.
49–50).
The false prophecies and messianism Meir decries cannot be attributed to any
specific figures. Nonetheless, his criticism must on some level be directed to other
learned men of authority whose claims had circulation and credibility among the
English Jews. In other words, this is an internal critique, and one that confirms the
sense of modern scholars that the last years of medieval English Jewry were characterized by a breakdown of internal leadership and cohesion.38
The messianic yearnings of the poem include the wish for the people to be brought
‘home’ again. ‘Let the King bring home His banished one’ (l. 22), the poet says,
asking God to show mercy to Israel, who ‘has despaired of [regaining] his dwelling’
(l. 26). Habermann would presumably have read these lines as additional evidence
for the poem’s post-1290 composition. Nonetheless, I think they express the wish
for redemption and restoration to Israel’s ‘home’ in Zion. In 1211, we know, the
French rabbi Joseph of Clisson arrived in England prior to his emigration to Palestine
later that year. Along with his French companions, Joseph acquired a number of
35
Kikar ve’agorah: this is a tricky expression, as both words can refer to coinage (I Kgs. 20:39, e.g., for
kikar, and I Sa. 2:36 for agorah), although kikar can also refer to a district, marketplace, or loaf of bread
(kikar lehem).
36
Belo moreh – with no teacher, or with no guide.
37
Moshi’o – lit., save him. The poem, Adonai adonai evionei ‘amkha yeqavuka, is found in the ‘Etz Hayyim
of Jacob b. Judah of London, ed. Israel Brodie, I, 127–129.
38
Stacey, ‘Conversion’ (1992), 270. During the second half of the thirteenth century, with the intervening
barons’ war, the coin-clipping charges, and successive tallages, this process could only have accelerated.
156
Susan L. Einbinder
English Jewish recruits.39 By the second half of the century, such travel from England
may have ended, although a stubborn trickle of Jews continued to head to the Holy
Land from France. R. Yehiel of Paris, who headed the Jewish delegation of French
rabbinic scholars summoned to defend the Talmud in the famous trial of 1240, emigrated with a number of French Jewish sages to the Holy Land around 1260. By
then, the disastrous consequences of the condemnation of the Talmud in France were
probably clear.40 Whether or not these later travellers included kinsmen and women
from England, the memory of those who took the journey must have lingered in a
blend of history and redemptive possibility, a messianic anticipation that reality could
only have made a more vivid desire.
Read against the background of the surviving evidence, then, Meir’s poem confirms that the custom of preserving and interpreting persecution in commemorative
poetry was a part of Anglo-Jewish life just as it was in France in Germany. ‘Put a
curse on my enemy’ implies also that the need for such poetry to reflect specific
and local incidents of persecution or martyrdom encouraged the adaptation of martyrological conventions to suit local tastes. Although few English Jews could have
been sufficiently skilled to produce the complex forms of medieval Hebrew poetry,
Meir’s attempt attests to a desire for such poetry to express their experience and
identity, just as it did for their French kinsmen and women. If the work of Meir of
Norwich does not quite convince modern scholars that ‘the Hebrew Muse was once
successfully cultivated on English soil’, perhaps it may at least convince them that
the Muse set foot there.41 Had she – and the Jews – remained, there is every indication that her adherents would have served her well. As it is, we must content
ourselves with tracing the elusive glints of a nearly lost literature among the shadows
of medieval Anglo-Jewish life. If this permits us a slightly fuller picture of a world
we have known all too prosaically before, the effort is well spent.
My translation follows; the Hebrew is appended.
‘Put a curse on my enemy’ by Meir b. Elijah of Norwich
1.
2.
3.
4.
39
Put a curse on my enemy, for every man supplants his brother.42
When will You say to the house of Jacob, come let us walk in the light?43
You are mighty and full of light, You turn the darkness into light.44
Tear out their hearts – they who brought harm to those who come in Your
Name45
Roth, Intellectual Activities, 21; Robert Chazan, Medieval Jewry in Northern France (Baltimore, 1973), 86;
Ephraim Urbach, Ba‘alei hatosafot, 265–267.
40
Urbach, 378.
41
D. Kaufmann (1892), 32.
42
Jer. 9:3.
43
Is. 2:5.
44
Ps. 76:5 (=RSV 76:4); Is. 42:16.
45
Hosea 13:8.
Meir b. Elijah of Norwich: persecution and poetry among medieval English Jews
5.
6.
157
When I hoped for good, evil arrived, yet I will wait for the light.46
You are mighty and full of light, You turn the darkness into light.
The words of the seer are garbled, for the foe has mocked Your children47
Until they don’t know which path is the one that gives off light.48
You are mighty and full of light, You turn the darkness into light.
The land exhausts us by demanding payments, and the people’s disgust is
heard 49
11. While we are silent and wait for the light.50
12. You are mighty and full of light, You turn the darkness into light.
7.
8.
9.
10.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
They make our yoke heavier, they are finishing us off.51
They continually say of us, let us despoil them until the morning light.52
You are mighty and full of light, You turn the darkness into light.
Let their victory spatter Your garment/for Your beloved’s heart is distressed 53
But she will be consoled for this; her lord will remain until light.
You are mighty and full of light, You turn the darkness into light.
19. Have You forgotten to be gracious, My God? When will You gather in the
camps54
20. Scattered to the corners [of the earth], like infants that have not seen the light55
21. You are mighty and full of light, You turn the darkness into light.
22. Let the King bring home His banished one, let Him smell his savory offering.56
23. The foes who make his savor stink will never see the light.57
24. You are mighty and full of light, You turn the darkness into light.
25. And if You have continued to afflict him [Israel], be abundantly merciful, be
gracious to him.
46
Job 30:26.
Children – literally, ‘son’, referring to Israel, and more specifically, the English Jewish community, as is
evident from the following line’s use of ‘they’.
48
Compare Gen. 14:15, and note Rashi’s image of a band of thieves that divides and pursues its victims as
they scatter in all directions. (‘Rashi’ is R. Solomon b. Isaac, the famed twelfth-century Jewish exegete in
Troyes. Like all literate Jews of his time, Meir would have been quite familiar with Rashi’s commentaries.)
Meir implies that the predictions of an end to Israel’s tribulations do not seem to make sense, as persecution
continues and even causes some to stray from Judaism.
49
See, for instance, Neh. 5:7, 10, 11.
50
II Kgs. 7:9.
51
Ezek. 43:27. This is certainly true of Henry III’s and Edward I’s policies, which broke the English Jews completely.
52
I Sa. 14:36.
53
Yeham, cf. Dt. 19:6 (there, too, with lev), where the expression implies a state of being upset and angry.
Israel Yuval has treated the apocalyptic imagery of God’s blood-stained cloak. See his article ‘Revenge and
curse, blood and libel: from saints’ lives to the blood libel’ [in Hebrew] Sion, 58 (1993), 33–90.
54
Ps. 77:10 [=RSV 77:9].
55
Job 3:15, i.e., like unborn infants that do not see the light.
56
II Sa. 14:13. Note, as in line 1, an image of fratricide.
57
Ex. 5:21; Ps. 49:20.
47
158
Susan L. Einbinder
26. For he has despaired of [returning to] his dwelling, and of Your ways of radiant light.
27. You are mighty and full of light, You turn the darkness into light.
28. The vision of His intimates tarries; the predicted time has passed.58
29. Let their [the enemies’] hold on us weaken, one and all, until the light
[dawns].59
30. You are mighty and full of light, You turn the darkness into light.
31. If his vision shall be hidden, with no interpreter for his dreams60
32. Why should the glory of the crown remain with the filthy one until the light
[comes]?61
33. You are mighty and full of light, You turn the darkness into light.
34. Even if his [Israel’s] sins have really enraged [You], why should his foes wage
war [against him]?62
35. They whose mouths have spoken arrogantly, they are rebels against the light.63
36. You are mighty and full of light, You turn the darkness into light.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
They scattered him with their horns, but he hoped in hidden prophecies64
For the men of visions have sealed [themselves] up and do not know the light.65
You are mighty and full of light, You turn the darkness into light.
Malicious men have cast down his crown, and presumed to annihilate him.66
They put him in prison, where in twilight he hoped for the light.67
You are mighty and full of light, You turn the darkness into light.
43. Bring near his End to raise him up, before he is lost in his exile,
44. For they have boasted to annihilate him; they mistake the darkness for light.68
45. You are mighty and full of light, You turn the darkness into light.
58
Combining Ex. 32:1; Zech. 13:4; Dan. 12:7. The Daniel and Exodus passages both describe situations in
which the people have predicted the end of their waiting but incorrectly. The context of the Zechariah
passage adds images of exile, plunder and physical decimation (until only one-third of the population
remains). Literally, the first half of the line reads ‘the secrets of the vision tarry’ or ‘the vision tarries [in]
its secrets’ although it is grammatically problematic.
59
I Sa. 25:36.
60
Gen. 40:8.
61
I Sa. 25:34 (and compare line 17 of the poetic text). The poet puns on the biblical verse, which reads ‘[nothing
would have] remained for Nabal at daylight’. The ‘filthy one’ is presumably Christianity, which has stolen
the ‘crown’ rightfully belonging to the Jews.
62
Dan. 11:10.
63
Ps. 17:10; Job 24:13. Again, it is not clear if the reference is to Christianity, which has rebelled against the
‘light’ of truth, or if it specifically refers to Jewish converts to Christianity, who now work against the Jews.
64
Zech. 2:2 [=RSV 1:21]; mas’ot as in Lam. 2:14.
65
Job 24:16 and the commentaries of Rashi and the twelfth-century Spanish exegete, Abraham Ibn Ezra, there.
Note also the link to verse 35 of the poem.
66
Nu. 14:44.
67
Jer. 37:4; Job 24:15 (and compare verses 35, 38 of the poem).
68
Compare Is. 5:20, where Rashi comments that what will bring darkness upon them in the future they think
will bring light.
Meir b. Elijah of Norwich: persecution and poetry among medieval English Jews
159
46. All his days, he [Israel] has surely hoped; day after day [he awaits] consolation.69
47. O Awesome and Mighty One in Heaven, who brings His justice into the light70
48. You are mighty and full of light, You turn the darkness into light.
49. If You have given me unto my enemy, rise up to plead my cause.71
50. Establish the Messiah’s reign, [so that] light will be seen in Your light.72
51. You are mighty and full of light, You turn the darkness into light.
69
Ps. 40:2.
Zeph. 3:5.
71
Ps. 74:22.
72
Ps. 36:10 [=RSV 36:9].
70
160
Susan L. Einbinder
Meir b. Elijah of Norwich: persecution and poetry among medieval English Jews
161
162
Susan L. Einbinder