ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My debts, institutional and personal, material and spiritual, are great. Finan-
cial support for the project came from a variety of institutions. The Nathan
Rotenstreich Fellowship at the Hebrew University, the Memorial Foundation
for Jewish Culture, and the American Association of University Women pro-
vided support for the first stages of this project and made possible the disserta-
tion from which this book has grown. A postdoctoral grant from the Yad
Hanadiv Rothschild Foundation as well as funding from the Braun Chair at
Bar Ilan University allowed the revision and completion of this manuscript.
My work would have been impossible without the help of librarians at the
National Library, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, in the General Reading
Room, the Hebrew Manuscript Institute, and especially in the Judaica Read-
ing Room. I also thank the library at the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies
at the University of Pennsylvania, and especially Judith Leifer and Etty Lass-
man, for all of their help.
My interest in the Jewish family and in medieval Ashkenaz began as a stu-
dent in the Department of Jewish History at the Hebrew University. I wish to
thank my teachers in the department and especially in the medieval section,
for their encouragement and support over the years. Professor Robert Bonfil,
my dissertation advisor, has been a model of superb scholarship and judicious
criticism. His generous support and critique have accompanied all of my work,
and words cannot express my debt to him. Other teachers and colleagues in Is-
rael, first and foremost Avraham Grossman and Shulamith Shahar, accompa-
nied this project from its inception, and I wish to express my deep thanks to
them for their advice. Special thanks go to Robert Brody who read an early draft
of the manuscript and saved me from many mistakes. I also benefited from the
critique and suggestions of Gadi Algazi, Yoram Bilu, Harvey Goldberg, Mena-
hem Ben-Sasson, Ora Limor, and Israel Ta-Shma and I thank them for their
comments and advice. In addition, I wish to express gratitude to my colleagues
at Bar Ilan in the Department of Jewish History and in the Gender Studies Pro-
gram for their support and encouragement, and for making my transition into
full-time teaching so comfortable.
It is a pleasure to acknowledge my tremendous debt to two additional schol-
ars. My thanks to Emanuel Sivan with whom I took my first steps in social his-
tory and gender studies and who has accompanied my work throughout the
years. It was in his class, as a first-year student, that I first became acquainted
with the work of Natalie Davis. I met with Natalie Davis in Jerusalem in the
spring of 1998. Her helpful suggestions and assistance at that time and since