Taqqanot Qehillot Šum

About this book

Under the name "Taqqanot Qehillot Šum", the common legal statutes of the mother communities of Ashkenazi Judaism in Mainz, Worms, and Speyer (Šum) have become known in the Jewish legal tradition and in historical research. The legal statutes (Taqqanot) of the parishes (Qehillot) stand in a special Jewish legal tradition, which addresses current contemporary problems of communal living or family law and brings them to a solution. As in the case of the Rhenish communities, Taqqanot can be authorized by individual Jewish legal scholars as well as by the executive committee of individual communities. The text of the Rhineland legal statutes is therefore a document of the special bond between these three municipalities. In the first part of the study, the historical relationships between the municipalities of Mainz, Worms and Speyer are analyzed in a detailed introduction and the history of the origin of the joint statutes is examined. The second part contains the complete edition of the nine known versions of the legal statutes, as they emerged from the 13th to the 15th centuries, in a synoptic form and as separate texts in the Hebrew original and in German translation with extensive commentary.