from the twelfth century: “Once a certain widow lit the Sabbath candles in her home and went to
the synagogue. She left her house sealed, closing the door so that the wind would not blow out the
candle. When she returned from the synagogue she found that the candles had fallen to the
ground. And a gentile woman came over to light the candles because she [the gentile woman] was
extremely knowledgeable of Jewish law.” MS Paris héb. 326, fol. 19a. The same story appears in
MS Oxford Bodl., Hunt. 404, (794), 796b–80a. Other examples of such familiarity appear in the
halakhic literature, for example: R. Meir b. Barukh, Teshuvot Psakim uMinhagim, (Responsa, rul-
ings and Customs), collected, annotated and arranged by Isaac Ze’ev Cahana (Jerusalem, 1960)
2: responsa no. 36.
- William Chester Jordan, Women and Credit in Pre-Industrial and Developing Societies
(Philadelphia, 1993), 35–39; Idem, “Jews on Top: Women and the Availability of Consumption
Loans in Northern France in the Mid–Thirteenth Century.” Journal of Jewish Studies29 (1978):
39–56. - Cohen and Horowitz, “In Search of the Sacred,” 225.
- See chapter 1, pp. 48–49.
44.For example: Leopold Löw, Die Lebensalter in der jüdischen Literatur: von physiologischem,
rechts-, sitten-, und religionsgeschichtlichem Standpunkte betrachtet(Szegedin, 1875, repr. Jerusalem,
1969), 77–80. - Marcus, Rituals of Childhood, 8–13; Robert Bonfil, Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy, trans.
Anthony Oldcorn (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1994), 101–104, 114–16, and in greater
detail in his “Cultura ebraica e cultura cristiana in Italia meridionale,” Tra due mondi. Cultura
ebraica e cultura cristiana nel Medioevo(Napoli, 1996), 3–11.
46.This method has been used and adopted in different ways by many medieval scholars. For
example: Israel J. Yuval, “Two Nations in Your Womb”: Perceptions of Jews and Christians(Tel Aviv,
- [in Hebrew]; Jeremy Cohen, “Between Martyrdom and Apostasy: Doubt and Self-Definition
in Twelfth-Century Ashkenaz.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies29(1999): 431–71.
- Nils Roemer, “Turning Defeat into Victory: Wissenschaft des Judentumsand the Martyrs of
1096,” Jewish History13(1999): 65–80. - His magnum opus, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 18 vols. (Philadelphia, 1952–
1983), contains fifteen volumes that are devoted to aspects of the Middle Ages, yet within this
tremendous corpus there is not a single chapter devoted to women or family. - Jacob Katz, Tradition and Crisis: Jewish Society at the End of the Middle Ages, trans. Bernard
Dov Cooperman (New York, 1993), 113–31, and criticism of his thesis: Chava Weissler, “The
Missing Half and the Other Half: A Feminist and Anthropological Response”; Jewish Social Stud-
ies2:(1996), 98–105, 108–15; Elisheva Carlebach, “Early Modern Ashkenaz in the Writings of
Jacob Katz,” in Pride of Jacob. Essays on Jacob Katz and his Work, ed. Jay M. Harris (Cambridge,
Mass., 2002), 65–83. - For example: Löw, Lebensalter; Adolf Berliner, Aus dem inneren Leben der deutschen Juden
im Mittelalter nach gedruckten und ungedruckten Quellen. Zugleich ein Beitrag für deutsche Kul-
tur-geschichte(Berlin, 1871); Israel Abrahams, Jewish Life in the Middle Ages(Philadelphia, 1896);
Moshe Güdemann, Sefer haTorah veHeH·ayim beArz·ot Ashkenaz beYemei haBenayim.3 vols.
(Warsaw, 1897). - For example, Abrahams, ibid., states: “The Jewish home was a haven of rest from the storms
that raged around the very gates of the ghettos, nay a fairy palace in which the bespattered objects
of the mobs’ derision threw off their garb of shame and resumed the royal attire of freemen,” 129. - This has changed only over the past decade and a half. I have indicated only a partial list of
the research that has flourished during the past fifteen years. On the family and women: Steven
M. Cohen and Paula Hyman (eds.), The Jewish Family: Myths and Reality(New York, 1986); Ju-
dith R. Baskin (ed.), Jewish Women in Historical Perspective(Detroit, 1998^2 ); Lynn Davidman and
Shelley Tennenbaum (eds.), Feminist Perspectives on Jewish Studies(New Haven, 1994); Miriam
Peskowitz and Laura Levitt (eds.), Judaism since Gender(New York, 1997). In Hebrew, such re-