rabbis in the west (1000– 1500 ce) 323
the early fifteenth- century writings of the German rabbi Yaakov b.
Moshe haLevi Molin, known as the Maharil, a renowned exponent of
Ashkenazi custom, is not mentioned in any Sephardic source until well
over a century later.^15
Some festivals were very local indeed, such as the local ‘Purims’ of
Narbonne (instituted in 1236) and of Cairo (instituted in 1524) to com-
memorate local deliverance from danger with celebrations analogous to
Purim. In Narbonne, a brawl between a Jew and a fisherman, which
ended in homicide, had set off an anti- Jewish riot which was suppressed
by the Viscount Amauri, and the event was remembered annually on 29
Adar. Such local liturgy was more formalized than the folk custom of
revering the tombs of saints, which in much of the medieval Near East
Jews shared with their Muslim neighbours. The objections of the Karaite
theologian Sahl b. Matzliah, a resident of Jerusalem, in the tenth cen-
tury, to Jews who ‘visit the graves, perfume them with incense, believe in
spirits and request fulfilment of their needs from the dead and spend the
night at the tomb’ were not successful in suppressing such customs: we
have seen (Chapter 10) that the alleged gravesite of the prophet Ezekiel,
for instance, located inside a synagogue in Iraq, attracted pilgrims from
afar, Muslim as well as Jewish.
A custom which gradually assumed the force of law in some commu-
nities but not others in the medieval period was the requirement for men
to cover their heads. There is no evidence that this practice was wide-
spread in the talmudic period, but covering the head during prayer
became common in Babylonia in later centuries and spread particularly
among Jews in Islamic countries. The justification for the practice was
the claim of R. Huna b. Yehoshua, as reported in the Babylonian Tal-
mud, that he would never walk 4 cubits without his head covered because
‘the Divine Presence is above my head’. Covering the head became a sign
of pious acknowledgement that God is everywhere, and the practice was
strengthened by the common use of head coverings during prayer by
Muslims. Yitzhak Alfasi in eleventh- century Fez considered male head-
covering mandatory. But in the thirteenth century there were still some
male Jews in France who read the Torah bare- headed, eliciting the dis-
approval from Vienna of Yitzhak b. Moshe, author of Or Zarua, an
account of halakhah and religious customs and observances in France
and Germany: ‘The custom of our rabbis in France of reciting blessings
with uncovered head does not meet with my approval.’^16
Many variations in custom and practice, such as veneration of tombs,
had clearly been influenced by the different surrounding cultures among