Pious and Rebellious: Jewish Women in Medieval Europe

by Avraham Grossman

This volume, an amazing act of historical recovery and reconstruction, offers a comprehensive examination of Jewish women in Europe during the High Middle Ages (1000–1300). Avraham Grossman covers multiple aspects of women’s lives in medieval Jewish society, including the image of woman, the structure of the family unit, age at marriage, position in family and society, her place in economic and religious life, her education, her role in family ceremonies, violence against women, and the position of the divorcée and the widow in society. Grossman shows that the High Middle Ages saw a distinct improvement in the status of Jewish women in Europe relative to their status during the Talmudic period and in Muslim countries. If, during the twelfth century, rabbis applauded women as "pious and pure" because of their major role in the martyrdom of the Crusades of 1096, then by the end of the thirteenth century, rabbis complained that women were becoming bold and rebellious. Two main factors fostered this change: first, the transformation of Jewish society from agrarian to "bourgeois," with women performing an increasingly important function in the family economy; and second, the openness toward women in Christian Europe, where women were not subjected to strict limitations based upon conceptions of modesty, as was the case in Muslim countries. The heart of Grossman’s book concerns the improvement of Jewish women’s lot, and the efforts of secular and religious authorities to impede their new-found status. Bringing together a variety of sources including halakhic literature, biblical and talmudic exegesis, ethical literature and philosophy, love songs, folklore and popular literature, gravestones, and drawings, Grossman’s book reconstructs the hitherto unrecorded lives of Jewish women during the Middle Ages.

Genres: History, Jewish, Nonfiction, Judaism, Medieval History, Medieval, Judaica

329 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2004

Reviews

[Shomeret]

I learned a great deal that I hadn't even imagined about Jewish women during the medieval period. This paragraph lists what were the highlights for me. Matchmakers only existed in the Ashkenazi community. There was a mikvah revolt in Egypt. There were separate women's synagogues. Rabbi Meir of Rothenburg anticipated the Conservative and Reform movements by ruling that women could be called to the Torah and read from the Torah. The catch was that it had to be in a community of Cohanim. In other words, the women would be the wives and daughters of the descendants of the priests in the Jewish temple. Nearly all the communities in Ashkenaz allowed women to circumcize infants, and nearly all the communities in Spain also allowed it if there was no qualified man available.

Although the content of this book was very interesting, there was a great deal of redundancy which I would have preferred not to see. It reminded me of textbooks that are designed for students who only have time to skim. So there is repetition in each chapter to enable students to get the gist of the entire book even if they only read a chapter or two. You could also actually skip the entire book, and only read the summary and conclusions at the end. I don't read like that. I read every single page. I even do that with textbooks.

[Miles · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a comprehensive historical study of Jewish women in the 10th through 13th century, in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Magreb, and Egypt. Chapter headings include:

* The Image of the Woman: Partner or the "Other"?
* Age at Marriage
* Engagement, Betrothal and the Choice of a Marriage Partner
* Monogamy and Polygamy
* Feminine Modesty and Women's Role in Supporting the Family
* Woman as Wife and Mother and Her Economic Status
* Women's Culture and Education
* The Role of Women in Religious Life and in Family Ceremonies
* Women's Role in Jewish Martyrdom in Europe in the Eleventh to Thirteen Centuries
* Violence Toward Women
* The Divorcee and the "Rebellious Wife"
* The Widow and the "Murderous Wife"

If you have questions about these issues in these times and places, then I think you will find that this is an amazing, fulfilling, scholarly history.

I learned about the Egyptian mikva rebellion of the 12th century.

I learned that women readily and frequently initiated divorces with the support of Rabbinic courts, beginning in the 7th century CE, and continuing for about 500 years, until a retrenchment occurred in the 12th and 13th centuries.

I learned that divorce was quite common in this period

I learned about the complex history of "the murderous wife", the twice widowed woman, and how in different periods there were enforced restrictions against third marriages, or social leniencies to allow such women to marry again.

I learned about all sorts of surprising examples of female agency in religious practice, halachic/legal matters and economic life, notwithstanding the countervailing restrictions that framed such agency.

I learned everything, it seems, that it is possible to know about the relationships between men and women of the Jewish communities of this period, refracted through the texts that remain, and the evidence that can adduced from the surrounding Christian and Muslim cultures.

One is reminded in all of this of the non-linearity of history. Periods of relative liberalism were sometimes followed by periods of greater restriction, as Christian and Muslim society changed, as sex ratios changed, and as modes of economic life evolved.

The period of the 10th to 13th century is vast - 400 years of living and struggling, centuries of plagues and pogroms and business ventures and joy and marriage and husbands and wives who argued and loved and raised children and divorced or disappeared or died. They brought their questions to the Rabbis of their time, and through the accidental details in those cases, we try to glimpse the world that was. And what we find there, all of it, was just a prelude to the 14th and 15th centuries, vast reaches of time in themselves, each of which are strange to us in whole other ways. This is the history to which we are heir.

[Michael Lewyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book addresses a wide variety of issues related to Jewish women in medieval Europe. Generally, the author views the Middle Ages positively, as a time when Jewish women gained status. His discussion of the following issues is especially interesting:

*The Ashkenazic ban on polygamy. Grossman suggests that Ashkenazic tradesmen often traveled from country to country, and some had the proverbial “girl in every port”. Rabbis sought to limit this practice because of the high risk that one of the wives would be abandoned, or at least be poorer as husbands spent limited assets on multiple spouses.

*Levirate marriage – the Torah-endorsed practice of childless widows marrying a brother-in-law in order to keep the dead husband’s name alive. I had thought that as Jewish sages always discouraged this practice and endorsed substitute rituals. But in fact, medieval Ashkenaz was quite divided on the issue. In some communities, levirate marriage occurred as long as either the brother-in-law or the wife wanted it; however, this led to negative results, such as brother-in-laws using the threat of levirate marriage to extort concessions on inheritance issues. As rabbis awoke to this problem, they began to discourage levirate marriage.

*Women’s higher economic status than in Muslim lands. In Christian Europe, Jewish women were active participants in family businesses (especially moneylending and other commercial pursuits), and thus achieved high status. By contrast, in Muslim nations both Jewish and Muslim women suffered due to cultural obsessions with modesty; for example, Maimonides wrote that a married woman should go out “once a month or a few times a month.”

*Women were sometimes active in religious life; some sources refer to “women’s synagogues” next to male synagogues; apparently, women’s minyans (which even today are controversial) were allowed in some communities. Although medieval literature is highly anecdotal, Grossman seems to think that Jewish women were less willing to convert to other religious than men, and perhaps more likely to seek martyrdom during pogroms.

*In one area, Jewish law may have been more progressive than it is today in some Orthodox communities. The Torah, if read literally, seems to refer only to divorce by males. However, medieval rabbis held that men could be forced to divorce women in a variety of situations- for example, if the man was impotent. In some places (especially the Muslim world) a woman could force a divorce by refusing to perform household tasks; however, as divorce became more common in the 1300s, Ashkenazic rabbis became more strict.