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

Jewish society, the postponement of the observance of the commandments to
this age reinforced and renewed the importance of age thirteen as the age of
religious obligation. These developments demonstrate the social and religious
changes taking place within Jewish society.^2 The thirteenth and fourteenth
century were, however, also the period in which Jewish women were excluded
from ritual practices in which they had participated previously. Thus, future
research can combine an understanding of the changes in ceremonial prac-
tices of adolescent and preadolescent boys with those encompassing women
and examine how the ideal Jewish participant had now become the adult male.
The examination of the larger family framework in which women and chil-
dren were members demonstrates what may be gained from such a perspec-
tive. We come to see that the changing place of Jewish women and children
in religious ritual was not primarily the result of a new attitude toward women
or a changed understanding of childhood. The changes in Jewish ritual that
have been outlined here and in other studies over recent years demonstrate
changes in women’s and children’s places in religious ritual both public and
private. By examining the changes as an ensemble, we may come to under-
stand the function of these changes within the Jewish community at large.
One possible explanation for the changing place of women and children in
religious ritual is connected to the Jewish community’s self-image. Scholars
have demonstrated that, as a result of the difficult events that communities en-
dured during the late eleventh and twelfth century, the Ashkenazic Jewish
communities came to see themselves as a holy community.^3 In the descriptions
of these events, women and children are strikingly portrayed as active partici-
pants; some have suggested that this inclusion heightened the image of the en-
tire community as a holy entity.^4 More recently, this self-image has been called
into question, particularly in the work of Susan Einbinder, who has shown that
the place of women in the depiction of the community and its events changed
tremendously over the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.^5 While
a fuller explanation for the changing place of women and children in medieval
Jewish society requires further research, some answers have been provided in
this book. When discussing religious ritual we have witnessed the sacralization
of the circumcision ritual, as well as a new trend describing circumcision as a
sacrifice. We have seen a growing importance attributed to men’s fulfillment
of certain roles—that of circumciser and ba’al brit—as well as an increased
need to define male and female spheres of action, as witnessed by R. Meir of
Rothenburg’s response concerning women who served as ba’alei brit.
If we now move from the focus on the processes within the Jewish commu-
nity to an examination of Jews within their broader cultural context (as we have
tried to do throughout this study), we find that the changes within Jewish so-
ciety were to a great extent characteristic of the majority society within which
Jews lived. Here we see that some of the conclusions of my study correspond
with those of scholars of medieval Christian society. Recent research has shown

CONCLUSIONS 187