Rhineland

The Jewish communities of Mainz, Worms and Speyer are known together by the acronym ShUM, formed from the Hebrew initials of the three city names. From the tenth century they held the leading rabbinic academies of northern Europe, and what was decided in them shaped Ashkenazi law, liturgy and custom for centuries afterwards. The ban on polygamy attributed to Rabbenu Gershom of Mainz, the commentary tradition that Rashi carried back to Champagne after studying on the Rhine, and the Tosafist habit of reading the Talmud through its own contradictions all belong to this milieu.

The communities were destroyed and rebuilt more than once. In the spring of 1096 armed bands moving east ahead of the First Crusade attacked the Rhineland communities in turn, and large numbers were killed or died at their own hands rather than accept baptism. Jewish chroniclers recorded the events within a generation, and the liturgy absorbed them: penitential poems naming the dead entered the memorial prayers, and Ashkenazi practice acquired a layer of remembrance built specifically on 1096.

What is left on the ground is unusually complete for medieval Jewish Europe. The cemetery at Worms has been in use since the eleventh century, the ritual baths at Speyer and Worms survive as built structures, and the synagogue precincts can still be walked. The three cities' medieval Jewish quarters were added together to the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2021.

The Rhine valley is also where a distinct strand of Christian mysticism developed, written in German as well as Latin and carried largely by people outside the universities.

Hildegard of Bingen, abbess of a house on the Rhine, recorded visions from 1141 in a series of illustrated books, wrote music for her own community, compiled works on medicine and the natural world, and corresponded with popes and emperors. Her authority was unusual for a woman of her period and she claimed it explicitly on the basis of the visions rather than of office or of formal learning.

Two centuries later Meister Eckhart, a Dominican who taught at Paris and preached at Cologne and Strasbourg, developed a theology of the ground of the soul and of detachment, much of it delivered in German sermons to lay audiences and to women's religious houses. A papal bull of 1329, issued after his death, condemned a list of propositions drawn from his work. His pupils Johannes Tauler and Henry Suso carried the same current into the following generation in a less speculative form, and the loose networks around them, called the Friends of God, spread it further among lay people.

The line runs on into the devotional literature of the later Middle Ages and into the Reformation's reading of it, since Luther published an anonymous text from this milieu, the Theologia Germanica, early in his career. Whether these figures are best read as one school or as separate people a modern category has grouped together is disputed.