ABSTRACT
THE attitude of the medieval Jew towards his House of God was characteristic of his attitude towards life. Though the Jew and the Greek gave very different expressions to the conception, the Jew shared with the Greek a belief in the essential unity of life amidst its detailed obligations. It is not enough to say that the Jew's religion absorbed his life, for in quite as real a sense his life absorbed his religion. Hence the synagogue was not a mere place in which he prayed, it was a place in which he lived; and just as life has its earnest and its frivolous moments, so the Jew in synagogue was at times rigorously reverent and at others quite at his ease. In this respect no doubt the medieval Church agreed with the Synagogue. 'Be one of the first in synagogue,' writes a fourteenth-century Jew in his last testament to his children. 'Do not speak during praye.rs, but repeat the responses, and after the service do acts of kindness .... Wash me clean, comb my hair as in my lifetime, in order that I may go clean to my eternal resting-place, just as I used to go every Sabbath evening to the synagogue J.' This writer's sensitiveness was by no
means exceptional. Medieval Europe was insanitary and dirty, and the Jewish quarters were in many respects the dirtiest. Epidemics made havoc in the Jewries just as they did in the other parts of the towns. The ghetto streets were the narrowest in the narrow towns of the middle ages. But all these disadvantages were to a large extent balanced by a strong sense of personal dignity. It was not until three centuries of life in the ghe,ttos had made their Jewish inhabitants callous to the demands of fashion, indifferent to their personal appearance, careless in their speech and general bearing, that this old characteristic of the Jews ceased to distinguish them. In the middle ages, however, the Jews justly prided themselves on their regard for the amenities of cleanly living and gentle mannerliness 1.
