Appealing to the Senses: Finding Artistic Expression through Medieval Jewish Studies

by Avery Gosfield and Neta Bodner

“Ritual Echoes”, filmed from May 9-11 2022 and recently published on YouTube, is the result of the 2022 ShUM (Hebrew acronym for Speyer, Worms, and Mainz in the Rhineland) cities Artistic Residency program. The project features artistic reconstructions of 12th and 13th century piyyutim (Hebrew liturgical poems) as well as songs dedicated to joyous occasions. The idea to perform medieval music and poetry within the mikve (the Jewish ritual bath) and the ruins of the women’s synagogue at Speyer came from conversations in pre-covid Oxford between Avery Gosfield, specialist in medieval and Renaissance music, and Neta Bodner, Lecturer and art historian at the Open University of Israel working on medieval mikvaot. The idea of enlivening the Speyer mikve with a performance of medieval music and poetry came in answer to a call for ‘artists in residence’ in the ShUM cities (which soon thereafter were granted UNESCO World Heritage Status) which, with Neta’s help, Avery applied for and received.

The setting of the Speyer mikveh seemed perfect for the musical project: the name “Ritual Echoes” refers, first of all, to the unique and powerful acoustic(s) of the Speyer Mikve, an exceptional and almost perfectly preserved piece of 13th century architecture. But it also refers to the sensations that can overtake one upon entering the structure: the echoes of the rituals, and of the presences that inhabited the space many centuries before. The very nature of the mikve – a narrow entryway, steep steps that lead down to a first landing, a gathering space below with Gothic and Romanic windows that look out over the bathing pool below and finally, the descent, via low, narrow, curving steps to the pool itself –force the structure’s visitors onto the same path that would have been taken by the Jewish inhabitants of medieval Speyer. The benches along the steps and around the gathering area, a round changing room on the left, the niches for lanterns carved into the wall are all concrete and detailed reminders that the space was a well-used, practical place for community gathering.[1]

Copyright Neta Bodner

While researching the performance we tried to tap into the functional ambience of the space to re-create the experience of the medieval Jews who once filled it with their presence. To do this we met in March 2022 to think together about the space, read sources that attest to medieval immersion ceremonies, look over plans and sections and read together the history of the Jewish community in Speyer. No less importantly we spent many hours in the mikve: singing, recording how the natural light within changed according to the sun and moon, listening to the birds and church bells ring above, immersing ourselves in the chillingly cold water. Although the project was originally conceived as a live performance in the mikve, Covid (and fire department) restrictions rendered this impossible. Because the space, and its acoustics, were an integral part of the concept Avery decided to create a video. Here, she was lucky to have a great team: Benjamin Dreßler, who was able to capture the acoustics of the spaces within the mikve and the Frauenshul, and Matthias Barthel, who was able to translate its unique qualities into visual terms.

The musical part of the project is a continuation of a research project that began many years ago, together with Avery’s early music group, Lucidarium, with the discovery of a Purim play in Judeo-Italian written by Mordechai Dato. The play was written in ottava rima, a poetic form which has been performed vocally since Boccaccio’s time (if not before) and is, almost incredibly, still sung today in the small towns and cities of Central Italy. This led to many other discoveries: 16th century poems in Yiddish, Hebrew, Judeo-Spanish, Judeo-Catalan, in poetic meters that we know were sung but all were transmitted in text-only form, void of any musical notation. This led to a “best-guess” journey, using both written historical models and tunes and practices drawn from the oral tradition (Jewish and not) for performances based on study combined with creativity and speculation.

Copyright Neta Bodner

Three of the pieces in “Ritual Echoes” come from this program: “Evel a’orer aninuth agarer,” “Matsor ba’atha ha’ir,” and “Mout sont meschief Israel”. For the first, we used a recording from the National Library of Israel’s piyyut collection, a haunting tune that is not out of place in a program of medieval music, sung [by Mordechai Schwartz Shimon] according to the Frankfurt and Hungarian traditions, so from Western Ashkenaz, and therefore appropriate geographically. For the second and third, it was a long operation where the foremost priority was, as always, effectively expressing the text: “prima la parola”. After analyzing the meter and rhythm of each poem, a troubadour or trouvère song with a same or similar meter was sought: the cultural links between France and Germany being close enough to make this a justified procedure. Then the pieces were evaluated on aesthetic grounds and for how well they fit the text. For “Matsor ba’atha ha’ir,” which is based on “Ma’oz Tzur”, a setting was found that repeated the first two lines of the melody with another text, just like in almost every traditional setting of “Ma’oz Tzur”. Fitting text to melody and melody to text is a process carried out in cooperation with the singers. For “Mout sont meschief Israel,” a song written by the Trouvère Guiot de Provins entitled “Molt me Mervoil de ma dame et de Moi” was chosen as a melodic model. Not only is the incipit similar, it was also widely known, and parodied in numerous other poems from the era. Furthermore, the alternation between Bb and B in “Molt” are echoed, musically, in the cadence of “Evel a’orer.”

The two new pieces for the Ritual Echoes project included “Elohim zedim qamu ‘alenu,” for which a similar process to “Matsor” and “Mout” was followed. The last, “Eloha ha kol” is made up of a series of short lines with text reiterations. Although there were no plausible medieval models, “Ma’chei U-masei” (as sung by Mordechai Breuer) on the National Library of Israel’s site shared a similar poetic meter, set to a simple, modal melody which, furthermore, came from the Frankfurt tradition. There is much more to be said: how the texts go from deepest tragedy (the first three pieces) to triumph, ending on a joyous note as if before a wedding. Or the reversal of significance of two elements tied to the mikve: water, traditionally a force for purification, becomes “evil” in the context of forced baptism, while blood is treated as a cleansing agent when shed in defense of the Faith. The chief goal in this project, relevant also to both Avery and Neta’s individual research, was to enliven the medieval space and remind visitors, viewers (and listeners) that it was a place built for ceremonies, made for people, and used by people. It was a space with specific sound resonance, air- and water-temperature, natural light, and beautifully clear ground water in which immersion (until this very day) remains a breath-taking experience.[2]

From left to right: Svetlana Kundish (voice), Carla Nahadi Babelegoto (voice), Élodie Poirier (voice, medieval fiddle) Copyright Avery Gosfield

[1] Neta Bodner, ‘Romanesque Beyond Christianity: Jewish Ritual Baths in Germany in the 12th and 13th Centuries’, Jewish Studies Quarterly 28, no. 4 (2021): 369, https://doi.org/10.1628/jsq-2021-0021.

[2] Although it is impossible to create a work worthy of such a compelling space, time, and such beautiful poetry, it was a great privilege to work on this project. Sincere thanks to Élodie, Carla, Sveta, Matthias, Benjamin, and Peter Sh. Lenhardt for the talent, skill, heart and soul that you brought to this adventure. Thanks to the male members of Lucidarium, especially Enrico Fink who worked on the original versions of Evel a’orer and Matsor. Thanks to Matthias Nowack, Günther Minas, David Mayer, and Sabrina Koobs, the ShUM cities, the City of Speyer, the Rheinland Palatinate and the committee for #JLiD2021, and Jaclyn Granick for bringing me and Neta together!

Avery Gosfield is the co-director of Ensemble Lucidarium and has served as lecturer on topics pertaining to historical Jewish music at various colleges, such as the Jewish Studies departments at the University of Oxford, Pennsylvania, and Antwerp, as well as the Venice Center for International Jewish Studies. She has also been commissioned to develop pedagogic programs designed to introduce children and adolescents to early and traditional music by the La Maîtrise de Paris, the Royaumont Foundation and the Department of Music of Geneva and the Val d’Oise. She has performed thousands of concerts and recorded six award-winning CDs devoted to little-known and previously unrecorded medieval and Renaissance repertoires.

Dr. Neta Bodner holds a position as lecturer at the Open University of Israel in the department of Literature, Languages and the Arts. She is an architectural historian working on a book project on Jewish ritual baths in Germany, a project she began as a postdoctoral fellow in Elisheva Baumgarten’s ERC project ‘Beyond the Elite: Jewish Daily Life in Medieval Europe’. She has published in the journals Jewish Studies Quarterly, Viator, and Zion (with Ariella Lehmann) and is the co-editor of two volumes. Over the last year she has been part of a Massada Foundation network on Purity, Sexuality and the Body with Conrad Leyser, Alice Raw and Laura Quick from the university of Oxford’s Worcester College. In October 2022 she began a collaborative project with Tzafrir Bazilay, Tanja Pothoff, Michael Wiehen and Christiane Twiehaus supported by the Israeli Science Foundation (ISF) on the Jewish ritual bath of Cologne.   


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Hannah Teddy Schachter (February 19, 2023). Appealing to the Senses: Finding Artistic Expression through Medieval Jewish Studies. medievalJewishStudiesNow! Retrieved April 17, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/rhzd


About Hannah Teddy Schachter

I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a Doctoral Fellow of the Israel Science Foundation-funded research group "Contending with Crises: Jews in Fourteenth-Century Europe" led by Prof. Elisheva Baumgarten. While my doctoral research explores the relationships between Jews and royal women--specifically queens--in 13th-century France, my other research projects consider Jewish-Christian encounters in medieval processions, dance and song, as well as costume in France and the German Kingdom during the Middle Ages.