If so, two birth rituals—one for the baby and one for the mother—took place
on the same day.
The parturient’s ritual has received scant attention in research over the years.
Leopold Löw is one of the few scholars who devoted attention to this custom
in his book Die Lebensalter in der jüdischen Literatur published in 1875. He
suggested that this ritual was connected to both the biblical custom (Lev. 12)
of bringing a sacrifice to the temple after birth and to the medieval Christian
ritual known as churching (in German: Aussegnungor Kirchengang), in which
the parturient went to church for the first time after birth. Löw argued that the
late medieval Jewish ritual was an adaptation of the Christian churching rit-
ual, which, in turn, was an adaptation of the biblical rite.^43
My analysis will investigate Löw’s suggestion concerning the connection be-
tween the Jewish parturient ritual and the Christian ritual of churching. After
comparing the two, and the different interpretations attributed to the church-
ing ritual by a variety of scholars, I will suggest an interpretation of both the
Jewish and the Christian customs in a comparative perspective.
The Jewish RitualWhile the parturient ritual is mentioned in fifteenth-century sources only in pass-
ing, it is described in greater detail in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
sources. The only Jewish source that includes a long description of the custom
is the seventeenth-century book of customs written by Juspa the Shammes of
Worms (1604–1678).^44 R. Juspa outlines the different stages of the lying-in pe-
riod. He describes a ritual process, in which the Sabbath ritual was the last of
three stages. For the first two and a half to three weeks after birth, the parturient
lay in bed and was tended by her friends. Some of the information we have about
this stage comes from descriptions of the circumcision ceremony. Although the
mother did not attend this ritual, she helped prepare for it. Juspa reports:
Three days before the circumcision, just before minh·a[afternoon prayers], the
shammescalls: Zu der jüdisch Kerze [to the Jewish candles] up and down the street.
And the women come to the parturient’s house, and they wash the child and they
throw coins into the bathing water, which are for the servant who is helping the
parturient.^45 And they make the jüdischen Kerzenand twelve small wax candles
that are lit during morning prayers on the day of circumcision in the synagogue.^46
And every time the baby is being bathed they call some women to come to the
commandment [miz·vah] of washing the baby and they throw money into the bath-
ing water for the maid.^47The preparation of candles mentioned here is not an early modern innovation.
As we saw in the previous chapter, other sources discuss the preparation of
twelve candles for circumcision but do not provide details on who prepared
them or where they were prepared.