Mothers and Children. Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe - Elisheva Baumgarten

affinity than they would have otherwise, while the restrictions that applied to
this feeling of kinship helped supported the broader social hierarchy.
Over the past decade, another historian, Bernhard Jussen, has also dealt ex-
tensively with medieval sponsorship and baptism. Jussen has suggested that the
ties of co-parents were not meant to reduce violence so much as to promote
friendship. While his explanation is not very different from that of Bossy, he
concentrates on how co-parenthood served political and strategic needs. He
compares the understandings of co-parenthood and biological parenthood in
medieval sources, suggesting that co-parenthood was both an expression of
friendship and a means of gaining social status. As he says: “Sponsorship could
either provide an official framework for useful relationships that already existed
in practice or create such practically useful relationships in the first place.”^119
The work of Bossy and of Jussen is based to a large extent on Wolf’s and
Mintz’s work on co-parenthood (compadrazgo) in Puerto Rico. Wolf and Mintz
revealed different methods for distributing the honor of co-parenthood. Wolf,
who studied middle-class society, found that parents chose to honor others of
a higher social status. In this way, they hoped to protect themselves from fu-
ture mishaps with more powerful persons, while furthering their relationships
with people of higher social status. Mintz studied a poorer social group and dis-
covered that they tended to honor close friends and even relatives (despite the
religious restrictions), in order to strengthen their ties with their immediate sur-
roundings. This poorer group believed that, in times of difficulties, only im-
mediate family and friends could be trusted.^120
Let us now apply these insights to the specific context of the medieval Jew-
ish communities. As other research has shown, the small communities Jews
lived in were often fraught with tensions. Honoring another member of the
community might have been a declaration of allegiance or an attempt to make
contact with a future partner. In a close-knit minority society, such as the me-
dieval Jewish communities, the pattern outlined by Mintz, in which the im-
mediate family and neighbors were most valued, seems to best explain the so-
cial practice.
Nevertheless, the differences between Jewish and Christian practices con-
cerning the honoring of family members do raise questions concerning the
function of ba’alei brit and problematize the borrowing of the anthropological
interpretations suggested for medieval Christian society. While one could per-
haps argue that the honoring of friends as ba’alei brit was part of the biological
parents’ networking and social-contact strategies, what was the social meaning
of the honoring of grandparents and especially grandfathers as ba’alei brit?
What function did honoring parents serve within the Jewish framework?
Bossy and Jussen pointed to the importance of co-parenthood in promoting
goodwill and friendship in the often tense and violent urban environment. If
we ignore the subject of violence within the Jewish community (which re-
quires further research) and concentrate on the locus of families within the

82 CHAPTER TWO