"All that Suffering": A Medieval Dirge and its Early Modern Reception

The fate of the many poetic pieces written in medieval Ashkenaz to commemorate specific persecutions has not been studied systematically to date. While some may have made it into the synagogue liturgy of the respective community, many apparently did not; most local liturgies that had taken hold were then lost in the expulsions of the fifteenth century. When Jewish life returned to the German lands in the course of the seventeenth century, Ashkenazic liturgy, by then available in print, consolidated into two major branches; in the age of emancipation, finally, the few commemorative liturgies that had remained soon fell out of use as well.

Not so in Prague. Et kol hatla’a ("All that Suffering"), the elegy written by Avigdor Kara to commemorate the victims of the 1389 Easter pogrom, is recited in the city’s synagogues during afternoon prayers on Yom Kippur to this day. Yet a look at the early printed tradition teaches that this was not always the case. While it is not entirely clear when the text was recited, it clearly was not on the Day of Atonement. How then did its association with Yom Kippur come about? Based on prayerbooks printed in Prague from the sixteenth through the nineteenth century, my contribution will argue that Kara’s lament became part of the minha service of that day for purely technical reasons. Thus this would appear to be a rare case where the exigencies of early modern printing can be shown to have influenced actual liturgical practice.