In such cases, the wine was saved until after the fast. This points to an accepted
practice of drinking the wine, even if not necessarily in conjunction with the
ceremony. It is hard to choose between this reconstruction of the situation
and the possibility that the mother was present and drank the wine in the
synagogue.^102
Another issue related to the question of the mother’s presence at the cir-
cumcision ceremony is that of ritual purity. Parturient women were ritually im-
pure after birth. Some comments made in the literature that has reached us
from Rashi’s students mention that ritually impure women chose not to attend
synagogue. Rashi himself, however, emphasizes that women who act in this
way are especially pious and, moreover, that there is no reason for women who
are ritually impure to refrain from coming to the synagogue.^102 In addition,
the impurity of birth is different from other ritual impurities. Certainly, until
the end of the thirteenth century, women who gave birth to a son were not con-
sidered ritually impure after a week. As Rashi explains, the circumcision cere-
mony was held on the eighth day because on that day the mother was no longer
impure and could rejoice with her husband.^103 This custom changed at the
end of the thirteenth century, when women started observing a longer period
of impurity—forty days in the case of a boy.^104 Thus, purity practices preva-
lent until the late thirteenth century would have posed no barrier to mothers’
attendance at synagogue circumcision ceremonies.
The evidence reviewed here is not conclusive, and it is impossible to deter-
mine the whereabouts of the mother with certainty. I would suggest that it is
probable that mothers were present at the ceremony in many cases, at least
until the end of the thirteenth century or the early fourteenth century. At that
time, a number of changes took place: The ba’alat brit lost her active role, and,
according to some of the sources, the giving of wine to the mother at the cer-
emony became a less integral part of the ritual; in some cases, it was not even
mentioned. These developments correspond to a growing observance of a
longer period of impurity after birth^105 as well as to a medical trend that ad-
vocated lengthening the lying-in period.^106
In conclusion, our search for the mother during the ceremony revealed that
the end of the thirteenth century was a time of change. Viewed together with
the change in the role of the ba’alat brit, as well as in the permissibility of
women acting as circumcisers that we saw earlier in this chapter, these issues
seem to point to larger changes occurring in medieval Ashkenazic society.
the communityThe only participants in the ceremony that have not yet been discussed are the
members of the community, the kahal, who took part in the ritual. As scholars
have noted, the congregation was extremely important in the medieval ritual,
and the ceremony usually took place immediately after the morning prayers.
One can assume that the congregation was composed of the same group of peo-