250 A History of Judaism
Moses, of whom it is said ‘He persisted in executing the righteousness of
the Lord and His ordinances with Israel’ (Deut 33:21) ... Rabbi Azariah,
citing Rabbi Judah bar Rabbi Simon, said, ‘Whenever righteous men do
the Holy One’s will, they enhance the strength of the Almighty.’^13
The community for whom all this public liturgy existed was primar-
ily male, and whether women attended synagogues at all in late antiquity
is uncertain. But a woman’s courtyard, partitioned from the men’s sec-
tion by a formal divider (mehitsah), was not uncommon in medieval
synagogues. In Provence, in the late Middle Ages, women listened to the
service through a grille in the ceiling of a room underneath the syna-
gogue. In Germany, women prayed in separate rooms parallel to the
men’s synagogue. In communities in Muslim lands, women generally
had no separate space reserved to them but might listen to the service
through a window from outside the synagogue building.^14
The communities which erected these buildings for public prayer
often took on also the provision of shared facilities for other religious
needs, such as purification after ritual pollution. There is no way to tell
who owned and constructed the numerous ritual baths (mikvaot ) which
were to be found in Jewish settlements in Palestine in the fourth to sixth
centuries ce. Many, perhaps most, may have been private. But in many
parts of medieval Europe such ritual baths were communal property
and were treated as an essential prerequisite for the religious life, esp-
ecially for the purification of women after menstruation and childbirth.
In some European communities, such as Speyer in the twelfth century,
considerable funds were expended to provide a grand architectural set-
ting for the ritual bath.^15
By the early medieval period communities also came to see the pur-
chase and upkeep of a Jewish cemetery as a religious duty. The Mishnah
in third- century Palestine envisages the community as responsible for
marking graves to avoid accidental defilement. But it is in the Babylo-
nian Talmud that the principle is first found enunciated that burial next
to a righteous person, and therefore a fellow Jew, is desirable:
For R. Aha b. Hanina said, ‘Whence is it inferred that a wicked man may
not be buried beside a righteous one?’ – From the verse, ‘And it came to
pass as they were burying a man that behold they spied a band and they
cast the man into the sepulchre of Elishah, and as soon as the man touched
the bones of Elishah, he revived and stood up on his feet.’ ... And just as
a wicked person is not buried beside a righteous one, so is a grossly
wicked person not to be buried beside one moderately wicked. Then