322 A History of Judaism
Such rulings from common custom did not always result in leniency:
Maimonides noted in his Yad that ‘the Evening Service is not obligatory
like the Morning and Afternoon Services. Nevertheless all Israelites,
wherever they have settled, have adopted the practice of the Evening
Service and have accepted it as obligatory.’^14
The journeys of rabbis such as the Rosh between different communi-
ties elicited awareness of variation in halakhah between the Jews of
different regions. This was nothing new – we have seen that the rabbis in
the time of the Talmud were well aware of differences between Babylonia
and Palestine – but the right to differ was upheld by local rabbinic auth-
orities with increasing vehemence as halakhic complexity increased. In
Egypt, Maimonides held that anyone who broke the Mishnaic prohib-
ition on drinking liquid that had been left exposed, in case a snake had
poisoned it, should be flogged, but in France the prohibition was deemed
by the Tosafists inoperative on the grounds that there were no poisonous
snakes in the country. Already by the early thirteenth century the exist-
ence of different local customs which had solidified into the status of
binding law was celebrated by Avraham b. Natan of Lunel, who travelled
extensively in Provence, northern France, Germany, England and Spain,
and described such customs, particularly with regard to prayer and syna-
gogue rituals, in his Manhig Olam (often called Sefer haManhig, ‘The
Guide’). The book became a useful guide for other Jews on their travels.
Liturgical variations became particularly marked during this period,
with differences between the Palestinian, Romaniot, northern French,
western Ashkenazi, eastern Ashkenazi, Babylonian, Persian and Spanish
rites, some of which have continued to modern times. But the clearest
divide to emerge in the late Middle Ages was between Sephardim and
Ashkenazim. The Jews of France, Germany and Bohemia, whose com-
munities traced their origin from the Rhineland in the tenth century
(hence ‘Ashkenazi’, from the Hebrew for Germany), shared sufficient
traditions by the sixteenth century in language, Hebrew pronunciation,
prayers and poems added to the shared basic structures of the liturgy
that they came to see themselves as distinct from the Sephardim of the
Iberian peninsula (‘Sepharad’ being taken to mean Spain in Hebrew),
who in turn hung on to their traditions with vehemence. When customs
spread from one group to another, they took time to be accepted. So, for
instance, the practice of tashlich, the folk custom of reciting scriptural
verses about repentance and forgiveness of sins on the afternoon of
Rosh haShanah by a river or some other body of water, symbolizing the
casting of sins into the sea (as in Micah 7:19), which is first attested in