ABSTRACT
One of the reasons medieval Ashkenaz readily accepted as valid the new customs of local communities was the assumption there that the Jewish people per se are pious and righteous. As a result, in their commentaries on Jewish legal texts, even masters of talmudic law and decision making such as Rabbenu Jacob of Ramerupt took for granted that customs that contradicted talmudic texts were valid because the people were righteous and pious in their daily living habits. Ironically, the ambivalence is also seen in writings of the Jewish Pietists of medieval Germany in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The persistence of the Amnon story in later Ashkenazic Jewish culture suggests that Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur in Ashkenaz were not just days of individual religious self-examination and atonement. Rather, the Amnon story persisted as a collective memory in counterpoint to the earlier Midrash of the Ten Martyrs, that was incorporated into the Yom Kippur service itself in a poetic form.
