As a result of all of this, synagogue buildings frequently served many purposes beyond worship. They provided classroom and meeting space, and they frequently incorporated community facilities such as a mikvah or bath house and ovens. Backing the oven up against the wall of the mikvah was a good idea in areas where the winters were cold! Some mikvos even appear to have had Roman style hypocaust heating systems. Given that the Jewish community in the Rhineland dates back to Roman times, this should not be surprising, but of course, each time a community was expelled or slaughtered, such complexities tended to be simplified or lost.
Because ten adult men (age 13 or older) were required for a full religious service, the presence of a synagogue in a town generally implied the presence of around ten families. Similarly, two synagogues implied the presence of around twenty, although unless there was an ideological or liturgical dispute, it would usually take a much larger population before a second synagogue was founded. The Christian authorities generally regulated the foundation of synagogues, but where there was no legally constituted synagogue, congregations frequently met in private homes.
The sanctuary of the synagogue or schul would always contain an ark, or cabinet along the eastern wall to hold the Torah scrolls. The ark would have both a cloth curtain and a wooden door, so you must open both to expose the Torah. When these are open, tradition demanded that the congregation stand as they would in the presence of royalty because the Torah is the word of God. It takes a Torah scroll to hold a full service, but a synagogue would hope to own at least two because many services had readings from different parts of the Torah that would require long pauses to wind and rewind the scroll if there was only one. The larger wealthier synagogues of the seventeenth century usually had many Torah scrolls.
The Torah scroll was handwritten on parchment, and it was wound around two posts, called the eitz chiam or trees of life. No other Jewish scroll was ever wound on two posts. The complete Torah scroll was big, with pages about two feet tall sewn side by side, with text written in columns about eighteen inches tall by six inches wide. Posts and all, a Torah scroll weighs ten to fifteen pounds, depending on how thin the parchment was scraped. Lighter scrolls on thin parchment with smaller lettering would cost more than big scrolls on thick parchment with big lettering. When stored in the Ark, Torah scrolls are always stored vertically, resting on their eitz chiam and leaning back against the back of the ark.
Torah scrolls were dressed differently in the Sephardic and Ashkenazic world, but the Amsterdam Sephardic world followed Ashkenazic customs. Sephardic scrolls were typically permanently bound into a wooden clamshell case with a silver cover. These cases are cylindrical, and when opened, they expose just enough of the scroll to be read. Ashkenazic scrolls were dressed in a cloth cover, typically the most expensive cloth available, with lots of fine embroidery, and then armed with a breastplate and crown. The crown, if there is just one, would look like what you expect a king to wear. If there were two, they would be called rimonim, and would be tall and narrow, sometimes resembling gothic spires, with one set over each of the eitz chiam. The armament for a Torah scroll would typically weigh several pounds, and it would be made of silver as befits royalty. The fact that the Frankfurt Jewish community had to sell its synagogue silver in the winter of 1631-32 is evidence of how desperate that community was, since this is close to the last thing a community would sell off in hard times.
Synagogues of the seventeenth century were generally built in the round, with a central reading table large enough to unroll the Torah scroll for reading and still have space for several open books on each side. This was necessary because, during the Torah reading, the reading table needed to accommodate not only the reader and the person called up for the honor of saying the blessing over the reading, but also two checkers who follow along in their printed copy of the text and correct the reader when he makes mistakes. The reading table sits on a raised platform in the center of the room, called the bimah, and it faces the ark. In the seventeenth century, it was very rare to put the bimah anywhere but the center of the room.
During the Torah reading, everyone would typically sit facing the Bimah, and many would follow along with the reading if they had a copy of the Chumash, the printed text of the Torah. Except during a few special prayers, notably the standing prayer or Amidah, it was not unusual to find quiet conversations while the service was in progress. During the Amidah, everyone was expected to stand and face east.
With extremely rare exceptions, women and men never prayed together in the seventeenth century. The Talmud states that the voice of a woman is indecent, and where some interpreters held that this applied broadly, it was generally agreed that this applied in the context of prayer. A notable exception to this rule is that after successfully giving birth, a woman was required to stand before the congregation to say a thanksgiving blessing. What would become a standard synagogue layout, with women's galleries above the main level, was developed in Amsterdam around 1639. Prior to this, for many centuries, many synagogues had included a women's gallery off to the side or in back. The minimum separation between the women's gallery and the main sanctuary was a railing, but many synagogues had lattices. Technically, women had no obligation to pray in the synagogue, but there is ample evidence that many did.
Jewish Religious Practice
In general, observant Jews would pray three times a day; in Jewish communities of the seventeenth century, one of the jobs of the synagogue shamus (sometimes translated as sexton or beadle) was to bang on shutters in the morning in order to rouse his congregation for morning prayers. The longest prayer of the day was the morning prayer, which was traditionally said before breakfast and could take an hour. There were traditional short forms of this prayer that could be said if work was pressing, and in a real pinch, it could be reduced to just the Shema, "Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One" (Deuteronomy 6:4). There was a strong emphasis on saying the morning prayers with the congregation if at all possible. The Shema was also said in the evening, and traditionally, Jews hoped that the Shema would be on their lips as their last breath.
The afternoon prayer had to be said before sunset, and the evening prayer had to be said after sunset. When these were said communally, particularly in the winter, they were frequently said in quick sequence, one after the other at sunset.
A central element of all three daily prayers was the Amidah or standing prayer, a sequence of bruchas or blessings said while standing. In the morning and afternoon prayers, the tradition for communal worship was to recite the Amidah privately, silently, in a whisper or in a quiet voice, and then have the chazzan, the cantor, chant it aloud when everyone had finished their private recitation. As a general rule, when a Jew heard someone say a blessing, he was required to respond Amen, or Omain, as an Ashkenazi Jew would likely have pronounced it. It follows that the congregation would respond with an Amen after each of the blessings in the Amidah. The evening Amidah was said privately, without a cantoral repetition. During the Amidah in particular, but while standing at prayer in general, Jews traditionally sway back and forth. This practice is ancient and well documented in medieval sources.
All services contained psalms. One psalm in particular is said as part of every service, Ashrei, which is Psalm 145 expanded with a few borrowed verses of other psalms. The preliminary segment of the morning service included a block of psalms ending with Psalm 150 before the introduction to the Borochu, the call to worship.
After each section of each service, some version of the Kaddish would be said. This prayer is in Aramaic, not Hebrew, and there is the short or half Kaddish, the long Kaddish, and the mourner's Kaddish. The Sephardic community has a slightly different version of the long Kaddish than the Ashkenazic, and some Jews speculate that the Lord's Prayer of the Christian world began as yet another version of the Kaddish. The mourner's Kaddish, it should be noted, is said by those who have lost a spouse, parent, child or teacher in the past year, or on the yartzeit (anniversary) of t
he death. All other Kaddishes would be said by the Chazzan. Different communities had their own traditons about standing or sitting, but in general, in the seventeenth centuries, most communities would stand during the Kaddishes.
Every Jew had the legal right to stop the service in the synagogue immediately before the Torah reading in order to present a grievance and demand justice. While this right was never widely exercised, it provided an important check against injustices being perpetrated by the community leadership.
Readings from the Torah Scroll would be included in the morning and afternoon services on Shabbos, the Sabbath or Saturday, as well as on Mondays and Thursdays, but only when a minyan of ten men is present. The readings are traditionally chanted to a rather complex trope, so the practice has long been to have a expert in Torah trope do the readings. Because the Torah scroll contains no vowels, it is also traditional to have two others at the bimah (lectern) to check the reading and offer corrections to any error. During the reading, members of the congregation are called up to the Torah, nominally to read their portion, but in fact, merely to say the blessings before and after their portion while the reader does the actual work. The Shabbos morning reading is the longest, broken into eight sections, while the other readings are shorter, with only three. After the Shabbos morning Torah reading, the final person called up reads the Haftorah, a selection from the prophets selected to complement the Torah reading. By the seventeenth century, the Haftorah readings and the text used by the checkers would both come from printed copies of the Chumash, not from scrolls.
As a rule, was is not possible to conduct a full worship service without a minyan, a quorum of ten men over age 13. If a minyan was not present, the Chazzan could not repeat the Amidah, the Kaddishes could not be said, and the Torah and Haftorah could not be chanted. These parts of the service were simply omitted, both in the synagogue, if less than ten were present, and in private prayer. If ten men were present, whether or not they were in a synagogue, these parts of the service would become obligatory, although if there was no Torah scroll available, obviously it could not be read.
A rabbi was not required for the conduct of any Jewish worship service. Any knowledgeable Jew could lead services. Of course, as the most knowledgeable member of the community, the rabbi was likely to be called on to lead services. Synagogue services in the seventeenth century rarely contained anything resembling a sermon. In general, public preaching was dangerous because an attempt to explain the Torah in a context where a Christian might be listening could contradict some biblical interpretation of the Church, bringing down the wrath of the Christian authorities on the Jews.
Whether in public or private, the worship service was supposed to be read and not recited from memory. Every observant Jew hoped to own a copy of the Siddur, or prayerbook, along with a Chumash, an annotated copy of the Torah. Typically, many students would complete their own handwritten copy of the Siddur as part of their schoolwork in premodern times, but by the seventeenth century, printed prayerbooks were common. The standard printed form of the Chumash in the seventeenth century included Rashi's commentary along with the Aramaic translation of Onkelos; some editions of the Chumash and Siddur were available that offered Judische Deutsch translations as well.
After the Shabbos evening service Friday night, the men would go home to their families for dinner. The women of the household were responsible for having the table ready, with specially baked bread, known as challah, and wine and candles. All cooking was required to be completed and the candles lit about half an hour before sundown, although food could remain in a warm oven or over a banked fire for as long as needed.
Both the Shabbos evening and morning services would end with making kiddush, that is, the chazzan or some member of the congregation would say bruchas over wine and then over the bread. These were said for the benefit of travelers who might be staying and eating in the synagogue, which sometimes served as a community guesthouse. Outsiders may think these bruchas are blessing the wine and bread, but they do not bless the food, they give thanks for it. In some cases, kiddush was expanded into a full meal in the synagogue.
The home was also an important center of Jewish worship. Before eating a meal, it was traditional to say a very brief brucha for the food being eaten. On Shabbat, kiddush was said, even if the men had already said it in the synagogue. The birkas or grace after meals is much longer and in the Ashkenazic world; it was generally read from a bentscher, a small book of prayers for the table, and chanted to a rollicking melody that invites a family sing-along.
In general, the Ashkenazic community had the most developed musical system, while the Ashkenazic stereotype of the Sephardic community was that their melodies for prayer and Torah trope were loud and toneless. Like other stereotypes, this is not entirely fair, but the greatest Sephardic melodies are reserved for hymns and nonliturgical music. Where the Ashkenazic worship service centered on the solo performance of the cantor, with congregational responses, the Sephardic service was more likely to include congregational singing. Some tunes span the Sephardic-Ashkenazic gap and probably date back to the Roman era and possibly before that; these include some of the melodies for the Kaddish and the Song of the Sea (Exodus 15:1-21), as well as the basic melodic framework of the Torah trope.
Kaballah
The greatest controversies sweeping through the Jewish world of 1632 centered on the Kaballah. The term "Kaballah" refers to the received mystical tradition that kabalists insist can be traced back to Moses. Skeptics trace large elements of this tradition to Moses de Leon who lived and wrote in thirteenth-century Spain. Whether Moses de Leon was inventing, creating a new synthesis or transmitting received wisdom, his book, the Zohar, played a central role in the development of Kaballah.
Traditional Judaism imposes strict limits on who may delve into the esoteric world of mysticism. A man was not to study mysticism or metaphysics until he reached age forty, until he was married, and until he had mastered Talmud. In addition, these subjects were never to be studied alone, but were to be studied under the direction of a wise teacher. These restrictions are found in the Talmud.
Rabbi Isaac ben Shlomo Luria Ashkenazi, the son of German Jews living in Jerusalem, changed much of this in the mid sixteenth century. In his early twenties, he studied the Zohar on his own while living in Egypt. While there, he had visions of meetings with the prophet Elijah. These meetings led him to move to Safed, in the Galilee, where he joined the community of Sephardic kabalists there.
Luria became a leader of this community and was hailed as the Ari or the Lion. The Lurianic Kaballah he taught spread like wildfire after his death in 1570 and its publication by Luria's student Chiam Vital. In short, the Lurianic Kaballah teaches an expanded version of the creation story, it gives reasons for prayer and piety, and it teaches that the coming of the Messiah is imminent.
Under Luria, the kabalists of Safed created new liturgy, weaving kabalistic elements into the service, notably the Kabalat Shabbat element of the Friday evening service, which receives the Sabbath with psalms and the beautiful hymn Lecha Dodi that uses imagery from the Song of Songs, likening the arrival of the Sabbath to the arrival of a bride at the wedding.
The kabalistic creation story begins before creation, when God was initially all that there was, indivisible, unchanging and free of all properties. Neither space nor time existed in this state, known as the Ayn Sof, meaning without end. In order to allow creation, God underwent a process of withdrawal, creating the void in which creation could occur, walled off from the divine light so that we in the created universe can have free will.
Kabalists hold that the sephiros were created to channel or contain the divine energy. The Zohar identified ten sephiros, and kabalistic imagery frequently arranges these into a pattern as the tree of life. The word sephiros, pronounced sephirot in Sephardic, has been translated as numbers, from Hebrew, or explained as a borrowing from the Greek for spheres.
The kabalistic creation story continues that the se
phiros were smashed during God's first attempt at creation, scattering divine sparks or shards throughout the universe. The creation story in the book of Genesis must therefore describe God's second attempt. The kabalists go on to explain that the reason God created humanity was to create agents to aid in the repair of a fallen world, bringing about the original intent of creation by finding and liberating the divine sparks. We do this by performing the mitzvot or obeying God's commandments.
Kabalistic mysticism frequently focused on contemplation of the Ayn Sof, but unlike many streams of mystical thought, the emphasis was on action in this world, reaching up to bring the divine down instead of seeking to escape this world into the divine. Kabalists taught that, when a person perfors a mitzvah, a divine spark is released, and that the release is more effective if the person performs that mitzvah knowingly and in the right state of mind.