According to the inscription written on the front of the Worms Machzor, it was written by “Simchah ben Yehudah the Scribe for his uncle Baruch ben Yitzchak.” A machzor is usually a prayer book which contains the specific prayers for the High Holidays. Some machzorim have been produced for other major festivals: Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot. This machzor is unique as it contains prayers for all of the festivals, as well as for Shabbat, and it is, as a result, particularly heavy, containing 224 folios.
The Worms Machzor contains what is thought to be the first written Yiddish text. It can be found on page 55 and is written inside the large letters of the text of part of the Passover prayer services. It reads:
גוּט טַק אִים בְּטַגְֿא שְ וַיר דִּיש מַחֲזוֹר אִין בֵּיתֿ הַכְּנֶסֶתֿ טְרַגְֿא A good day will be available (or lit up) for he who carries this machzor to the synagogue
Would You Like to Know More?
Yiddish – Yiddish is a historic Jewish language originating in the Ashkenazi communities in the ninth century. It is based on a combination of German together with elements taken from Hebrew and Aramaic and is written either in Hebrew or English letters. Yiddish was the common language of the Ashkenazi Jewish communities for both for religious and secular use in Europe and, later on, in the United States. Much of the famous Jewish literature of Eastern Europe and the United States was written in Yiddish by writers such as Shalom Aleichem, I. L. Peretz, and Isaac Bashevis Singer (who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978). The desire to integrate into mainstream society and the decimation of European Jewry during the Holocaust brought a great decline in the number of Yiddish speakers. Today this language is almost only spoken in ultra-Orthodox communities.
Worms Machzor - Although the machzor became known as the Worms Machzor, it was originally used in the Wurzburg community in Bavaria. It is thought that the machzor was brought to Worms by refugees from Wurzburg after the community’s destruction in the Rindfleisch persecutions of 1298. It was used for centuries in the Worms Synagogue until its destruction on Kristallnacht, November 1938, when the city’s archivist hid the machzor in the cathedral. In 1957, the manuscript was transferred to the National Library in Jerusalem.
