​​Über die frühe Beerdigung der Juden – On the early burial of the Jews

Markus Herz, Über die frühe Beerdigung der Juden, Zweyte verbesserte und vermehrte Auflage. Berlin 1788. German. |Call Number: Jud. 511 | Digital copy via Frankfurt's Digital Judaica Collections.

By the 1790s German Jewish Society was engaged in a widely discussed controversy on ritual burial in which Maskilim, physicians, rabbis, communal leaders, and Prussian government officials were involved. The controversy quickly evolved into a head-to-head clash between the ideology of the Haskalah and traditional Judaism, with the tone of the debate becoming particularly bitter and unrelenting. The Maskilim, who advocated to defer the ritual burial, followed scientific and medical opinions that the certainty of death could not be established for at least three days. As evidence they used horrifying stories of people being buried alive and the press describing people being declared hastily dead. The physician and philosopher Marcus Herz (1747–1803) employed this tactic. In his influential work Über die frühe Beerdigung der Juden, he asked readers to imagine a man awakening in his dark, narrow grave, unable to make his way out, remaining there until he died a horrible death. In the 1790s, an astonishing amount of Maskilic texts related to this issue. Members of the Gesellschaft der Freunde (Society of Friends) in Berlin and Breslau went to great lengths to establish an alternative burial society, to enable enlightenment Jews in favor of delayed burial to assure themselves and their families that they would never run the risk of such a horrifying death. The issue of ritual burial marks a significant milestone within the Haskalah revolution because it created a social split within the communities and for the first time questioned whether it was possible to continue a common way of life as a united community.