In this panel we explore the ways that different Jewish sources, from different times and places in Jewish history, demonstrate what it means to be in community with the dead. Our papers discuss stories from the Talmud Bavli, burial rituals in medieval Ashkenaz, and a painting cycle from 18th c. Prague to show that across these diverse times and places Jews were concerned with how to be in relationship with the dead, as well as their Jewish and non-Jewish neighbors. In the sources we present it becomes clear that the dead are not simply absent, but rather continue to have an emotional, ethical, religious, or even conscious presence. In these sources the dead are owed some kind of relationship with the living, whether it is with those who care for the body, visit the cemetery, or the larger Jewish and non-Jewish society who observe these various rites and rituals.
What is the social life of a dead person? Who can they hear? To whom can they speak? And with whom can they be in community after death takes place? A legal discussion in the Babylonian Talmud about exemptions from liturgical obligations for individuals tending to the needs of the deceased prompts the sages to question whether the dead have any knowledge of what takes place in the realm of the living. The Talmud explores this question by recounting four stories of purportedly direct exchanges between the living and the dead. By analyzing this story cycle, this paper will argue that the rabbis imagine the dead to maintain the capacity for a robust existence–one with social, emotional, and perhaps even physical dimensions. This conclusion calls into question how we define life and death, and how starkly we define the boundary between the two.
It is impossible to study medieval Jewish life without being interrupted by death. While Jewish quarters were located centrally, the cemeteries were outside the town boundaries: a distance that allowed for unintentionally public performances of Jewish identity. This paper explores how these acts borrowed, commented upon, and subverted Christian understandings of death generally, and of Jewish death particularly. I survey funeral processions and examine gestural practices: pouring out water upon hearing of a death, and tossing earth behind oneself upon leaving a cemetery. Water-pouring was a silent announcement, while earth-tossing indicated the severing of the spirit from the physical world. To Christians, however, these odd-looking gestures fostered confusion and anti-Jewish sentiment. Examining the rituals that brought Jews from the realm of the living to the quiet of the grave, and comparing Christian understandings of them to their Jewish sources, can deepen our understanding of death and mourning practices in Ashkenaz.
What does it look like to be in community with the newly dead? A painting cycle, consisting of fifteen images, created in the 1780s for the chevra kaddisha (burial society) in Prague can provide us with a more robust picture of the community created between the dead, their caregivers, mourners, and laypeople. The paintings were created while the traditional rites of Jewish burial were under threat from hygiene reforms introduced by the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Josef II. The paintings are thus a political and ideological document as well as an account of the embodied intimacy, spatial relations, and inter-communal relationships between the dead and living in late 18th century Jewish Prague. The paintings present a visual document of what it means to be in holy community with the newly dead, and are worth studying, alongside textual sources, for understanding the communal nature of Jewish death obligations when under state pressure.