Structure of the Jewish Prayer Service - Intro to Tefillah with Rabbi Wendi Geffen

The humble hat keeps you cool on a hot day and, as if that's not enough, is often a symbol of personal identity. In the Jewish community, there are certainly many such identifying hats to choose from. Unique. Charming. Dramatic. This goes a long way back. In medieval Europe, you could tell someone was Jewish because they wore this unique hat. Or did they? How did this strange hat come to be the identifying symbol of Jews for hundreds of years in some places? Around the year 1000, Jews started to be depicted in Christian art as wearing versions of this hat. In the newly illuminated manuscripts and in church stained glass windows, these hats were the very first image of, quote, It was called a Jew's hat, or a Judenhut, for 500 years. And then it all but vanished. Was this a Jewish hat? Well, it's complicated. Known as the Phrygian hat, which you might recognize from the Smurfs, it was originally a marker of Eastern learning, antiquity, and authority. In the late 11th century, a brother Gedernes from Belgium took a version of the hat and used it in his illuminated Bibles. These Bibles contained overlarge illustrated initials, many with images of Jewish prophets. You might notice a pattern here. But also there were other prophets without that hat. It's likely the good brother used the Phrygian hat to respectfully signify the authority and antiquity of these prophets, and not specifically their Jewishness. But the image of Jews wearing the pointed hat now began to spread across medieval Europe. It showed up in stained glass church windows, on an English plaque, it got to Russia, it showed up in illuminated prayer collections and books of Psalms, and then it took a dark turn. It began to portray the Jews as violent. Depictions of the piercing of Jesus' side were originally illustrated like this, at the hand of a Roman centurion. By 1166, the scene had changed to this. Now, a Jew identified by this hat is stabbing Jesus, while other Jews look on and smile. And again here. It soon became a default image in Catholic iconography. And this hat now became associated with the deicide charge, the idea that Jews killed the Christian God, and that all Jews throughout history bear that guilt. In the meantime, this pointed hat was still, in fact, the fashion among 12th century aristocracy, and the population at large had been wearing them. We don't know for sure if Jews were actually wearing the hat at this point, or if it was simply how they were depicted in Christian manuscripts. But after it became associated with the Jews, and then with the deicide charge, both Jews and non-Jews stopped wearing it. Toward the end of the 13th century, what once defined the Jews with pictures in a book leapt off the page and became law. In 1267, a church council in Breslau concluded that since Jews have stopped wearing the pointed hat they used to wear, now a hard hat with a knob on it would be made mandatory. They claimed to definitely know Jews wore them because they'd seen all those pictures. The demarcating Jews hat, the Judenhut, was now law. It went from a symbol used to represent Jews in art, to a required piece of clothing that then haunted the Jewish community for the next 400 years. This knobbed hat then started to show up in representations of contemporary Jews, not just ancient ones. Here it is in 1340, Emperor Heinrich VII grants the Jews permission to live in his lands. Here, a famous Jewish poet engages in a recitation. Here is a religious dispute. Surprisingly, the knob hat now starts showing up in Jewish manuscripts, not just in Christian ones. Here it is in a festival prayer book from Germany around the year 1300. The Israelites wear conical hats, Aaron wears a bishop's mitre, and Moses wears the knob hat, with the knob perhaps deliberately blocked. Later in the same book, a man clearly wears the mandated hat. And this, at last, brings us back to the image we started with, what is arguably the most famous book to feature the Judenhut, The Bird's Head Haggadah. This puzzling Haggadah raises more questions than it answers. Was the hat now considered formal dinnerware? Were the Jews of Rhineland Germany now proud of their demarcating hat, embracing it on their own terms? Were they sometimes ashamed of it? Why would Jews draw themselves this way? Some speculate that Jewish books in Germany were governed by censors who oversaw the drawings. Others suggest that the drawings are just documentation. Like it or not, they were wearing these hats. And of course, there's the question, what's the deal with all the bird's heads? Honestly, we're not sure. It remains a mystery. A hat that began as imagery in old manuscripts eventually became the mandated marker for the Jewish population of Rhineland Germany, later stigmatized the Jews of Italy as well, before fading from popularity around the 17th century. Now the imagery of the Jewish hat is in the historical dustbin. Very few would even recognize it. And yet, there is that dreamy hamlet today in Austria. A quaint town called Judenburg, meaning Jew's Castle. You can't blame a town for its historical name. But their town logo and coat of arms, it's all over their city website. Yep, there it is. The Judenhut, with a clear Jewish nose thrown in for good measure. It's a testament to the power of imagery, whether in the distant past or today. It was a humble hat, but it managed to define Jews and Judaism for so many centuries, before finally being all but forgotten. We use many resources here at Unpacked to create our videos, but we do want to give a special shout out to Professor Sarah Lipton, who focused our attention on this story and whose research was instrumental in helping us put this together. You can find a link to her website and to her books here in the description below.