Introducing a Little-known Medieval Mahzor in Houston

Last year the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, acquired a fascinating, richly illustrated medieval maḥzor, that is, a prayer book used for special Sabbaths and festivals. This manuscript is virtually unknown, in large part because it remained in private collections for centuries. A large communal maḥzor, originally one of a pair, it was produced in the Rhineland, ca. 1310, and its peripatetic history can be traced, except for a few centuries. My paper will first explore its provenance and present an overview of its many different kinds of imagery. Then I will examine the manuscript's numerous signs of purposeful damage: censored words, children's writing, roughly ripped folios, razor-sliced pages, carefully removed figural compositions, and an excised chunk of blank parchment from the lower borders of numerous folios, which was probably refashioned into a new manuscript. No surviving codex that I know has suffered so many different sorts of mutilation, and I will try to explain the reasons for each type. I will then explore the relationship of its imagery to the accompanying piyyutim, or poems, and to the liturgy for each holiday. I will conclude with an analysis of how one image, which looks innocent at first glance, communicates subversive ideas about Jewish identity, and how others show evidence of interaction with Christian neighbors. This talk, in short, will introduce this long-neglected manuscript.