Publications

This book examines youth culture in Ashkenaz, mainly in northern France and Germany, during the eleventh to fifteenth centuries, within the context of mainstream Christian majority culture. By examining adolescence and youth culture in medieval Ashkenaz and the values that shaped the Jewish young men’s gendered identities, this book is an initial attempt to fill a lacuna that the historian Michael Satlow recently pointed at, the absence of critical studies on medieval Jewish masculinities.

The book surveys sources from different genres, which allows for a complex and wide-ranging examination of Jewish adolescence, the social ideals that adults tried to impart to young people, the cultural images in which adults described the youth of their communities, and the daily lives of young men and women. These sources include responsa and halakhic literature, moral treatises, biblical and talmudic commentaries, custom books, folk tales and legends, Crusade chronicles, epitaphs, illustrations in medieval Hebrew books, archaeological findings, and frescoes.

The vibrant youth culture of medieval Ashkenaz that this book brings to light, features young men and women who enjoyed drinking together in taverns, who loved dancing in mixed company at weddings, dressed in their finest clothes for the occasion. There were Ashkenazic young men who participated in pseudo–tournaments at weddings, some joined real tournaments, and many protected their cities alongside their Christian neighbors.

The book argues that the lives of Jewish adolescents were not so different from those of their Christian peers. Jewish and Christian youth interacted with one another as part of their daily lives, shared values related to gender, dressed in similar fashions, danced to the same melodies, and knew the same stories and legends. Like their Christian neighbors, young Jewish men liked to run wild, behave violently, enjoyed competitions, and demonstrated their physical strength and fighting skills. And like their Christian neighbors these young Jewish men held masculine knightly ideals and were influenced by chivalric culture, esthetics, and values. Concurrently, these same men were shaped by halakhic norms and the values of rabbinic masculinity.

All in all, this study allows a path to better understanding of not only medieval Jewish culture and everyday life during this period, but also medieval urban culture at large. Readers interested in the history of childhood, adolescence, sexualities, and formations of gendered identities will also benefit from this study.

In Biblical Women and Jewish Daily Life in the Middle Ages, Elisheva Baumgarten seeks a point of entry into the everyday existence of people who did not belong to the learned elite, and who therefore left no written records of their lives. She does so by turning to the Bible as it was read, reinterpreted, and seen by the Jews of medieval Ashkenaz. In the tellings, retellings, and illustrations of biblical stories, and especially of those centered around women, Baumgarten writes, we can find explanations and validations for the practices that structured birth, marriage, and death; women's inclusion in the liturgy and synagogue; and the roles of women as community leaders, givers of charity, and keepers of the household.

Each of the book's chapters concentrates on a single figure or a cluster of biblical women—Eve, the Matriarchs, Deborah, Yael, Abigail, and Jephthah's daughter—to explore aspects of the domestic and communal lives of Northern French and German Jews living among Christians in urban settings. Throughout the book more than forty vivid medieval illuminations, most reproduced in color, help convey to modern readers what medieval people could have known visually about these biblical stories. "I do not claim that the genres I analyze here—literature, art, exegesis—mirror social practice," Baumgarten writes. "Rather, my goal is to examine how medieval Jewish engagement with the Bible offers a window onto aspects of the daily lives and cultural mentalités of Ashkenazic Jews in the High Middle Ages."

In a final chapter, Baumgarten turns to the historical figure of Dulcia, a late twelfth-century woman, to ponder how our understanding of those people about whom we know relatively more can be enriched by considering the lives of those who have remained anonymous. The biblical stories through which Baumgarten reads contributed to shaping a world that is largely lost to us, and can help us, in turn, to gain access to lives of people of the past who left no written accounts of their beliefs and practices.

Natural Materials of the Holy Land and the Visual Translation of Place, 500-1500, focuses on the unique ways that natural materials carry the spirit of place. Since early Christianity, wood, earth, water and stone were taken from loca sancta to signify them elsewhere. Academic discourse has indiscriminately grouped material tokens from holy places and their containers with architectural and topographical emulations, two-dimensional images and bodily relics. However, unlike textual or visual representations, natural materials do not describe or interpret the Holy Land; they are part of it. Tangible and timeless, they realize the meaning of their place of origin in new locations.

What makes earth, stones or bottled water transported from holy sites sacred? How do they become pars pro toto, signifying the whole from which they were taken? This book will examine natural media used for translating loca sancta, the processes of their sanctification and how, although inherently abstract, they become charged with meaning. It will address their metamorphosis, natural or induced; how they change the environment to which they are transported; their capacity to translate a static and distant site elsewhere; the effect of their relocation on users/viewers; and how their containers and staging are used to communicate their substance.