From Noble Dress to Jewish Attire: Jewish Appearances in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Holy Roman Empire

Abstract

This article examines the different styles of attire that had emerged by the eighteenth century among Jews in Poland and German-speaking lands. It argues that Jews in both regions developed their attire from older styles of dress that had fallen out of fashion among German burghers and Polish noblemen, respectively. Nevertheless, the distinguishability of Jews and Christians and distinctions among Jews according to social status, gender, and geographic origin were never clear-cut issues. Picturing a Hasidic Jew in Jerusalem or New York today, with a long black coat, a silk or satin caftan on Sabbath, and a black (fur) hat, many believe that this or similar attire has been the typical dress of (East European) Jews throughout time. However, dress and appearance have always undergone continual change and are a rather fluid marker of identity and belonging. Though Jewish law traditionally prescribes that Jews be distinguishable from their non-Jewish neighbors, and Christian and Jewish authorities have since the thirteenth century explicitly stipulated distinctive dress, such normative prescriptions do not allow for the conclusion that Jewish men and women have always been recognizable by their dress. Likewise, the fact that Jews were sometimes forced to wear distinctive signs does not mean that they were otherwise invisible as Jews or could pass as Christians when not wearing a discriminatory sign. Nevertheless, by the end of the eighteenth century there seems to have been a clear sense of a “Jewish attire”. 1 On today’s Hasidic dress see: Eric Silverman: A Cultural History of Jewish Dress. London 2013, 112–131. 2 On discriminatory signs in late medieval Italy see: Flora Cassen: Marking the Jews in Renaissance Italy. Politics, Religion, and the Power of Symbols. Cambridge 2017. For passing as a non-Jew see for a modern example: Kerry Wallach: Passing Illusions. Jewish Visibility in Weimar Germany. Ann Arbor 2017. Open Access. ©2019 Cornelia Aust, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110635942-006 In this article, I trace some developments concerning the dress and appearance of Jews, mostly men, of the early modern period in German-speaking lands, with a particular emphasis on Fürth (near Nuremberg) in Middle Franconia and Frankfurt am Main, and compare them with similar developments in early modern Poland. I ask how and when such a general term like “Jewish attire” emerged and what it meant for those who wore so-called “Jewish attire” or “Jewish dress”. Did they even conceive it as “Jewish dress”? Where and when did visual difference play a particular role? Looking at such different sources as sumptuary laws, inventories, “ethnographic” descriptions, and costume books, I sketch out a highly complex picture in which perceived differences intersected, not only between Jews and Christians, but also among Jews themselves, concerning, for example, socioeconomic status, gender, and geography. The External Perception of Jewish Dress The insistence of Christian and Jewish authorities that Jews and Christians should be easily distinguishable in their outward appearance points to the possibility that, by the thirteenth century, Jews and Christians could often not be easily told apart. Both the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 and the thirteenth-century takkanot Shum – the ordinances of the three Jewish communities of Speyer, Worms, and Mainz in the Rhineland – insisted that Jews had to be visually distinguishable from their Christian neighbors. Regulations of religious, royal, and urban authorities following the Fourth Lateran Council usually insisted on distinctive signs, including different forms of yellow (or red) patch, or specific hats, while rabbinical and communal Jewish ordinances insisted more generally that Jewish men not cut their hair and beard like Christians, that Jews observe the biblical prohibition of sha’atnets (the mixing of wool and linen), and that they generally not dress like Christians. As Flora Cassen has shown, this 3 On the dress of Jewish women in the early modern period see: Cornelia Aust: Covering the Female Jewish Body. Dress and Dress Regulations in Early Modern Ashkenaz, in: Central Europe 17 (2019) [forthcoming]. 4 In antiquity, however, Cohen argues that Jews were not visibly distinctive from their environment: Shaye J. D. Cohen: The Beginnings of Jewishness. Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties. Berkeley 1999, 27–28, 31–33. 5 Alfred Rubens: A History of Jewish Costume, 2nd ed. London 1973, 80–97. On the medieval Jewish hat see: Sara Lipton: Dark Mirror. The Medieval Origins of Anti-Jewish Iconography. New York 2014, 21–54; Naomi Lubrich: The Wandering Hat. Iterations of the Medieval Jewish From Noble Dress to Jewish Attire 91