The Writing on the Wall: A Mahzor, a Bimah, and a Privilege. A Look at Social Processes in the Thirteenth-Century Jewish Community of Cologne

In this chapter, I take the text of a halakhic responsum that R. Meir of Rothenburg addressed to his disciple R. Asher ben Yehiel of Cologne as a point of departure in an attempt to link several events that took place in Cologne in the late 1260s and the 1270s. The initiative on the part of several highly influential and very wealthy individuals in the Cologne Jewish community to embellish its sacred space with a magnificent new Baumberg sandstone bimah and the commissioning of a lavish festive prayer book with coloured illuminations met resistance from rabbinic circles, which considered that such efforts were in violation of the Second Commandment. I explore the social, political, and inner communal circumstances that served as the backdrop for these events and suggest that materiality and artistic decorations of liturgical objects and sacred spaces were at the heart of a communal controversy between the rabbinic authorities and lay leaders.