MINHAG

In 1891, Avraham Yitzhak Sperling (1851-1921), a shohet from Lviv, published a modest book titled Ta'amei Haminhagim Umekorei Hadinim. The book collects various Ashkenazi customs, a good number of them hasidic, and offers short explanations of each. Its success was overwhelming, and already within the author's lifetime, six editions as well as a Yiddish translation were published. The author added new materials in each edition, most of them enumerating more customs, but some with more theoretical discussions about the general importance of minhag. The book’s popularity grew even more in subsequent years. While it looks "innocent" at first glance, lacking polemic arguments, this work played an important role in the legitimation of hasidic minhag, the development of the hasidic perception of minhag; and the sanctification of minhag in the broader halakhic context – against the modernist forces that sought to diminish its normative status.

Paper presented at conference in Memory of Professor Yaakov Elman.

This is an overview of the topic presented in fuller detail in "'All Law Begins with Custom:' Rabbinic Awareness of Popular Practice and its Implications for the Study of the Jews of Roman Palestine" in From Scrolls to Tradition, a Festschrift Honoring Professor Lawrence Schiffman

Between 1954 and 1959 Leo Levi, a pioneering figure of Jewish ethnomusicologist, conducted one of the most comprehensive surveys over the Jewish religious rituals in Italy. His collection, covering virtually every single Jewish community in Italy soon after WWII, includes a number of recordings of the Jewish community of Venice, mostly the Sephardic/Spanish minhag, but also some recordings of the old German rite, nowadays totally lost. The aim of this volume is to offer a concise but also comprehensive view on Judeo-Venetian music production on the basis of Levi's Venetian recordings, all contained on the 2CD set coming with the book. The first part of the volume offers studies by Donatella Calabi, Francesco Spagnolo, Walter Brunetto, and Piergabriele Mancuso. Published in June 2018 by Squilibri editore in Rome in collaboration with and with the support of Regione Veneto, Fondazione Santa Cecilia (Rome) Comunità ebraica di Venezia and The Medici Archive Project (Florence).

This paper traces the origin of the Ashkenazi custom of the Jewish women to place their hands on their eyes or next to the Sabbath candles on the eve of the Sabbath. It explores in depth the traditional Ashkenazic and Halachic sources and the rationale given therein. It then goes on to reveal an old manuscript that has not been given much attention which may shed light on the true origin of this enigmatic custom.