The Oisterwijk Memorbukh: An Age-Old Memory for a Young Kehilla

Abstract This article is an analysis of the memorbukh of the Jewish community in the Dutch village of Oisterwijk, Brabant. The manuscript was written in 1770 as part of a protocol book by the community’s rabbi Yekutiel Ziskind Rofe, who had come to Oisterwijk in 1757. The genre of memorbikher started as a response to the large-scale persecutions of Jews at the time of the First Crusade in 1096, the Rindfleisch persecutions of 1298, and the persecutions at the time of the Black Death. In the late medieval and early modern period, the genre was incorporated into the liturgy of Ashkenazic synagogues. The memorbukh from Oisterwijk is an example of an early modern memorbukh. The author of this particular memorbukh wrote it in order to bind together his new community, which was still a young community upon his arrival in 1769, as Jews had only begun to settle in Oisterwijk in the 1750s. The author therefore wanted to create a new communal memory that would bind together all the members, despite their different backgrounds.