About Yizkor (Memorial) Books

The first yizkor book was produced in 1296 in Nuremberg (of all places), for use in the synagogue constructed there that year. The model on which all later yizkor books are based, this Memorbuch of Isaac ben Samuel of Meiningen is a record of communities decimated and individuals slaughtered across Ashkenaz—the old heartland of north European Jewish life, from the Rhine to the Danube—during the two hundred years since 1096, when, one Sabbath in springtime, the knights of the First Crusade murdered the Jews of Speyer.

Just as the function of the synagogue is primarily worship, so the original purpose of the yizkor book was primarily liturgical. Its lists—names, places and dates—allowed congregants to remember in prayer their relatives, and their neighbors' relatives, put to death for being Jews. Each year, on the Sabbath before Shavuot, the spring festival of Pentecost and the anniversary of that first wave of killings, a long and ever-longer litany began: “Yizkor Elohim….,” May God remember….: “May God remember those who were murdered in Coblenz in 1265 on the fifteenth of Nisan [the first day of Passover]; May God remember Ephraim bar Eliezer, broken on the wheel in Kreuznach on the second of Nisan, 1283; May God remember those murdered in Mainz in 1283 on the seventh day of Passover; the 26 killed in Bacharach the same day; in Altnahr in 1287, the six young boys who submitted to baptism….” What became of them is no longer known; the context suggests that they recanted and were killed.

In accordance with ancient Jewish beliefs (and in line, too, with the host culture's preoccupation at the time with the recitation of masses for the repose of the soul), the memory of those “who gave up their life for their faith” was invoked in the hope that through the prayers and charitable donations of the living—in addition to their martyr's death—they might find eternal rest in paradise.

Ashkenazi martyrology thus launched was sustained amply enough by such low points of succeeding centuries as the Rindfleisch massacres of 1298 and subsequent killing sprees similarly justified by the fable of a Jewish penchant for host desecration (the perpetration of sadistic acts on eucharistic wafers); the scapegoating that compounded the horrors of the Black Death (1348-9) and the Cossack-Polish War (1648-9); and the pogroms accompanying the last years of the Russian empire and the return to Zion.

In the wake of the events of 1933-1945, the yizkor book re-emerged as one of the most important elements in Jewish literary endeavor for a whole generation. The rise of this quintessentially medieval genre and its return to the forefront in the twentieth century can serve as a pair of matching bookends for northern Europe's lengthy run as one of the poles of global Jewish civilization.