Rabbi Amnon of Mainz רבי אמנון ממגנצא

The account is known from Or Zarua of Rabbi Isaac ben Moses of Vienna, thirteenth century, citing Ephraim of Bonn; there is no mention of it earlier.

As it is told, the archbishop of Mainz pressed Amnon insistently to be baptised. He asked three days to consider, then was ashamed of the delay itself—that he had given cause to think him wavering—and did not appear at the appointed time. He was brought by force and his hands and feet were cut off. On Rosh Hashanah he was carried into the synagogue, recited Unetaneh Tokef, and died. He then appeared in a dream to Rabbi Kalonymus and asked that the prayer be sent through the communities.

Against. Rabbi Amnon appears in no other source: no document, no gravestone, no contemporary mention. The account is built like a legend—a flawless hero, a pointedly cruel persecutor, an apparition in a dream; a resemblance to the Christian legend of St Emmeram of Regensburg is also noted. The greatest difficulty is a find: the text of Unetaneh Tokef appears in early layers of the Cairo Genizah, well before the eleventh century—so the prayer cannot have arisen as the tradition tells. Yaakov Spiegel, on the language of the text, assigns it to the payyetan Yannai, in the Land of Israel of early Byzantine times.

For. The tradition has been handed on in the communities without a break, together with the prayer itself; the absence of documents about an eleventh-century man is not proof that he did not exist, but a measure of how little of that period's documentation survives at all.

We do not settle this dispute. The prayer is said on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and the account of Rabbi Amnon is read together with it—as tradition, which is how it was handed down.