Medieval Hebrew Inscriptions, Case Studies: Paris, Strasbourg and Wurzburg

Sonia Fellous - IRHT-CNRS

France preserves a corpus of 337 ancient (4) and medieval (326 in the publication of G. Nahon, 1986) Hebraic inscriptions. Most of these are funerary steles from 44 communities scattered over the territory of present-day France. The most important one is in Paris - 108 epitaphs dated from 1139-1140 to 1291 and one from 1364 -, the second one in Strasbourg counts more than 49 inscriptions dated from 1240 to 1371. This is a very poor heritage compared to that of Germany, which is rich in thousands of steles, where the Jewish cemeteries have been much better preserved than in France, from which the Jews were definitively expelled in the 14th century. These texts demonstrate the return of the Hebrew language to the life of medieval Jewish communities and allow the study of medieval Jewish onomastic, which contrasts with that of antiquity. They also provide, when they are not too fragmentary, information on the social life of the Jews and their cultural diversity. Unlike the ancient epitaphs, they all refer to the Jewish calendar to mention the date of death and testify the use of biblical Hebrew names, at least for the men, establishing so-doing their attachment to their religious customs and culture. New inscriptions are regularly discovered as a result of work undertaken in French cities or the countryside, revealing each day the richness of a forgotten heritage. This conference proposes a comparative study of some elements of the funerary art of the Jews of Paris, Strasbourg and Würzburg (1147 - 1346).