“You Have Saved Me from the Judgment of Gehenna”: The Origins of the Mourner's Kaddish in Medieval Ashkenaz

Abstract

This article traces the origins and rapid spread of the Mourner's Kaddish, a liturgical custom first attested in late twelfth- early thirteenth-century Ashkenazic halakhic texts. While scholars have traditionally linked it to the martyrological needs of post-1096 Ashkenazic communities, this article suggests that the rise of the Mourner's Kaddish was one manifestation of a broader shift in medieval Jewish conceptions of the afterlife. An analysis of the exemplum that provided the new custom with a “myth of origins” reveals carefully inserted allusions and symbolism, which together propound a coherent theology of eschatology, divine recompense, and intercessory prayer. This theology closely mirrors doctrinal developments underway in Christian Europe—specifically the “birth of purgatory” and its accompanying commemorative and intercessory practices. The exemplum, moreover, couches its message in subtly polemical terms, criticizing and ridiculing those very elements of Christian belief and practice that were being covertly incorporated into the Jewish liturgical realm.

Congregation Etz Chayim and Its Ghosts

“…29 A related idea had developed in twelfth-century rabbinic literature that the descendants of the dead could redeem their ancestors from the sufferings of ghenna, a place which can be loosely described as purgatory, by reciting the kaddish prayer and engaging in the customs surrounding it. 30 Yizkor means to remember, and the act of remembering the dead became one of the primary reasons for post-World War II North American Jews to attend synagogue. Writing in Commentar y magazine in 1953, Theodor Gas ter obser ved: "During recent years, the appeal of the Yizkor service has come to exceed any other element of the traditional liturgy in its hold, except, perhaps, the seder on Passover."…”