The Esslingen Mahzor
Adapted from Discovering Great Treasure:
In the winter of 1290 in Esslingen, a small market town in southwest Germany, a talented Jewish scribe named Kalonimos ben Yehudah completed his one surviving credited work, The Esslingen Mahzor (MS New York 9344), the earliest-dated Hebrew book made in Germany. It is a large-format prayer book created for Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Sukkot.
An iconic image appears on the opening of the morning service for the first day of Rosh Hashanah. A central archway forms a full-page frame around a few enlarged Hebrew words. What catches the eye most is the huge word in the middle of the page, Melekh or King, taken from a liturgical poem (piyyut) for Rosh Hashanah: “O King, girded with might / Great Your name with might / Yours the arm with might.”
King refers to God, but why is this word so large? To understand, we need to consider the prayer hall where this mahzor was used. Synagogues were small, square structures. Few in the room had individual prayer books for the Rosh Hashanah service, but everyone could see what was on the reader’s central table. So, a worshipper’s eye would naturally rest on the largest word, which communicated the theme of the day: God is King. This work captures the reverence of the holiday and demonstrates one of the ways people came together through communal prayer.
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