Oath More Judaico


The Oath More Judaico or Jewish Oath was a special form of oath, rooted in antisemitism and accompanied by certain ceremonies and often intentionally humiliating, painful or dangerous, that Jews were required to take in European courts of law until the 20th century. More Judaico is Latin for "on/by the Jewish custom." The question of the trustworthiness of the Jewish oath was intimately connected with the meaning that Christian authorities assigned to the Kol Nidre prayer, recited by Jews on Yom Kippur, and the whole of the legislation regarding the oath was characteristic of the attitude of medieval states toward their Jewish subjects. The identification of Church and State seemed to render it necessary to have a different formula for those outside the state church.

Historical development

The disability imposed on a Jew engaged in legal contention with a Christian dates back to Byzantine emperor Justinian I, who declared that neither Jews nor heretics should be admitted as witnesses against Christians; secular courts, however, did not recognize this disability. Thus, in the safe conducts issued by the Carolingian kings in the 9th century, Jews and Christians were treated as equals, and consequently the testimony of the former, whether given under oath or not, was as admissible as the latter. This was distinctly stated in the charter granted by Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV to the Jews of Speyer in 1090. The law of Duke Frederick II of Austria, which served as a model for much other legislation on the Jews, merely required a Jew to swear "super Rodal". Similar laws existed in England, Portugal, and Hungary; Hungary waived the requirement to swear on the Torah in trivial cases.
There were, however, some older laws that prescribed certain practices intended to mock Jews in court. These examples illustrated the kinds of humiliating rituals that accompanied the taking of the oath:
The following formula, originally in Middle High German, was used in Frankfurt on the Main about 1392:

The oath as a Jewish disability

A decidedly aggressive change took place when, in 1555, the German imperial court procedure prescribed a form of oath that, with some alterations, formed a model to subsequent legislation. Horrible were the terms in which the swearer called down upon himself all the curses of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, the ten plagues of Egypt, the leprosy of Naaman and Gehazi, the fate of Dathan and Abiram, etc.
According to a recount in his "Gesammelte Schriften," the great German-Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn of the Enlightenment persuaded the Prussian government to moderate the terms of the oath during the 18th century. The small German states gradually surrendered the most objectionable features of the oath: Hesse-Kassel, in 1828; Oldenburg, 1829; Württemberg, 1832; Saxony, 1839 ; Schaumburg-Lippe and Anhalt-Bernburg, 1842; and Hesse-Homburg, 1865.
Prussia retained the obnoxious formula until 15 March 1869; the Netherlands modified the oath in 1818, and Russia in 1838 and 1860. The Jewish advocate Isaac Adolphe Crémieux won great fame by effecting the abolition of the oath through a case brought before the court of Nîmes in 1827. Lazard Isidor, as rabbi of Pfalzburg, refused in 1839 to open the synagogue for such an oath; prosecuted for contempt of court, he was defended by Crémieux and acquitted. The French Supreme Court finally declared the oath unconstitutional on March 3, 1846. However, as late as 1902, a court in Romania upheld that country's version of the oath.