The word “Mahzor,” means “cycle" and is familiar to most Jews as the term used for the prayer book for the High Holidays and festivals. However, in medieval times, the term Mahzor was used to refer to prayer books that contained the complete cycle of prayers for the entire year.

The Mahzor Vitry is an 11th-century composition by Rabbi Simcha of Vitry (just south of Paris), a disciple of Rashi, which incorporates texts and directions pertaining to daily prayers, as well as prayers for the holidays and other special days on the Jewish calendar. It also includes liturgical poems, descriptions of messianic times, and legal sections on marriage, holidays, and ritual slaughter, among other topics. The work is the earliest comprehensive record of the practices of Jews in Ashkenaz (at the time, northern France and the Rhineland). 

This manuscript, completed in 1204 is the oldest, most complete surviving manuscript of this work. 

The scribe of this manuscript was very skilled, writing a dense but very clear text. Like other scribes, he understood that a sacred book—even one with a legal focus—should be beautiful, so he often enhanced the page by creating eye-catching patterns. Here he does so by tapering the last part of Avot (“the Chapters of the Fathers”).

You can also see a rather primitive sketch of a knight, sword drawn, on horseback, added to the page early but by an unknown source. The sketch is labelled in Hebrew as a “galloping horse.” The image is a reference to the culture where the manuscript was produced, evidence of the comfort of the “artist” in that setting. The Hebrew “Judaizes” the otherwise irrelevant image.