© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2023 IMAGES Also available online—brill.com/ima DOI:10.1163/18718000-12340173 For Elisheva Baumgarten on the occasion of her 54th birthday ANDREAS LEHNERTZ AND HANNAH TEDDY SCHACHTER THE JEWS’ HAT IN MEDIEVAL ASHKENAZ: FORMAL ATTIRE FOR EVERYDAY MEN? 1 Ruth Mellinkoff, Antisemitic Hate Signs in Hebrew Illuminated Manuscripts from Medieval Germany (Jerusalem: Center for Jewish Art, 1999). 2 Israel Abrahams, Jewish Life in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1993), 286. 3 Katherine L. French, “Genders and Material Culture,” in The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe, ed. Judith Bennett and Ruth M. Karras (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 197–212, here 203, remarks that the Jews’ hat had “a brim twisted into a pair of horns [!].” Sara Lipton considers it among the visual vocabulary of infamy for Jews in Dark Mir- ror: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Jewish Iconography (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014). See also Robert Jütte, “Stigma-Symbole: Kleidung als identitätsstiftendes Merkmal bei spätmittelalterlichen und frühneuzeitlichen Randgruppen (Juden, Dirnen, Aussätzige, Bettler),” Speculum 44, no. 1 (1993): 65–89, here 80. point to the Jews’ hat as a pejorative marker. Scholars have characterized it as an “antisemitic hate sign,” 1 a forced “distinction in dress which the Jews detested,” 2 and, more recently, a “sign of infamy” in the bestial shape of a horn. 3 This stigmatization of the Jews’ hat appears to have increased in recent years, with schol- ars tending to brand it as an entirely negative symbol of shame and anti-Jewish agitation. 4 But the story of the Jews’ hat is far more nuanced than this dominant historiographical narrative would suggest. A wealth of research has been done over the decades in Hebrew, French, and German, and only a minimal amount of this research has been incorporated into English-language publications. Many of these works have yet to be synthesized in one essay and made available to broader audiences, which is what we aim to do here, briefly surveying the literature to date while also building upon it to arrive at new insights and interpretations. This essay will be distinctive in the way it draws equally on material evidence – including Jew- ish and Christian visual sources, wax seal impressions, and archeological remains of hats worn in medieval urban societies – and a more diverse body of textual evidence – including Hebrew rabbinic, as well as Latin and vernacular legal sources. It will thus provide a suit- able range of examples, provenances, and perspectives. In the following sections, we will first endeavor to underscore and further buttress the notion that, Abstract This article nuances the dominant historiographical narra- tive of the Jews’ hat as an allegedly pejorative iconographic marker of Jewish men in medieval Ashkenaz. Considering the perceptions and functions of the Jews’ hat, this article will offer new conclusions regarding if, when, and by whom it was worn. Drawing from a variety of sources in Hebrew, Latin, and vernacular languages, and on visual sources, the overall argument presented here is that the Jews’ hat was not everyday attire and that it was not likely owned by all Jewish men. Rather, featuring among the variety of hats Jewish men wore based on their socioeconomic or religious status in their communities from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, the Jews’ hat was a costume worn by those of more common status and on formal occasions when distinguishing oneself according to any urban group was required, such as during urban proces- sions, oath-taking, public forms of punishment, or matters of civic administration. The Jews’ hat (pileus cornutus, Judenhut), a conical or pointed hat worn by Jewish men of age, is one of the most pervasive, curious, and illusive objects connected to the history of the Jews in the European Middle Ages. While a vast body of scholarship has attempted to understand this feature of historical Jewish costume, the broader communis opinio has been to expressly 4 On an attempt to change this public view, see the authors’ discussions on the medieval Christian representations of Juda- ism, Jewish men, and Jewish women in the exhibition In and Out, In-Between, and Beyond: Jewish Daily Life in Medieval Europe at the Max and Iris Stern Gallery, Mount Scopus, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (for the additional virtual exhibition, see https://beyond-the-elite.huji.ac.il/virtual-exhibition); and Andreas Lehnertz, “The Jew’s Hat (Judenhut): Beyond Labeling Jews,” in In and Out, Between and Beyond: Jewish Daily Life in Medieval Europe, ed. Elisheva Baumgarten and Ido Noy (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2021), 77–82; as well as Hannah Teddy Schachter, “The Queen and the Jews: Dynamics between Jews and Their Rulers,” in In and Out, Between and Beyond: Jewish Daily Life in Medieval Europe, ed. Elisheva Baumgarten and Ido Noy (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2021), 71–76.