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.
Nonfiction
Biblical Women and Jewish Daily Life in the Middle Ages
January 3, 2022
Discussion Questions
How can we learn about the spiritual lives of ordinary Jewish women in medieval northern France and Germany when their words were so rarely preserved? For Elisheva Baumgarten, the Bible provides the key, since basic knowledge of biblical characters and events was a given for women and men at all levels of Jewish society. This familiarity enabled women to invoke biblical models to explain their domestic and religious practices and to connect themselves to a larger cosmic narrative. Baumgarten employs many sources, including liturgy and poetry, illuminated manuscripts, tombstone epitaphs, handbooks of customs, and biblical commentaries, as well as comparisons to contemporary Christian documents. Her beautifully illustrated volume shows how women’s biblical expertise linked their marital, maternal, and communal lives to Jewish collective memory. Through references to Eve and the matriarchs, women imbued their domestic and ritual experiences with meanings beyond the immediate moment. Similarly, the figure of Abigail came to exemplify charitable giving and financial agency, while invocations of Deborah honored women who functioned in the communal domain as teachers and merchants and were also modest and supportive wives.
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