Culture Adaptations and Jewish Motherhood

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	• Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe (Jews, Christians, and Muslims from the Ancient ... Elisheva Baumgarten Princeton University Press, 2004 - 96 pages average customer review:based on 1 review view larger image
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Culture Adaptations and Jewish Motherhood

The thesis of this book is that medieval Jewish Ashkanazi groups living in northern France and Germany were affected by the Christian communities and culture in which they lived (as one might expect), although they adapted such influences in ways suitable to their own religious sensitivies. One example of this effect is the increase of restrictions upon women in the 12th and 13th centuries. The focus on women as mothers allows the author to explore areas formerly quite thinly covered.

The documentation in the notes is impressive; the bibliography is extensive, providing the usual citations as well as European and Hebrew sources. The heuristic and pedological device of telling what you are going to do, doing it, and saying what you have done made the introductory, interim, and concluding comments to each chapter seem rather mechanical and somewhat stilted. A bit more editorial assistance to eliminate repeated use of words such as "quotidian" would also have been helpful, but taken as a whole, the book is well organized and well written, holding one's interest to the very end. I would emphatically recommend this book.

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This book presents a synthetic history of the family--the most basic building block of medieval Jewish communities--in Germany and northern France during the High Middle Ages. Concentrating on the special roles of mothers and children, it also advances recent efforts to write a comparative Jewish-Christian social history.

Elisheva Baumgarten draws on a rich trove of primary sources to give a full portrait of medieval Jewish family life during the period of childhood from birth to the beginning of formal education at age seven. Illustrating the importance of understanding Jewish practice in the context of Christian society and recognizing the shared foundations in both societies, Baumgarten's examination of Jewish and Christian practices and attitudes is explicitly comparative. Her analysis is also wideranging, covering nearly every aspect of home life and childrearing, including pregnancy, midwifery, birth and initiation rituals, nursing, sterility, infanticide, remarriage, attitudes toward mothers and fathers, gender hierarchies, divorce, widowhood, early education, and the place of children in the home, synagogue, and community.

A richly detailed and deeply researched contribution to our understanding of the relationship between Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors, Mothers and Children provides a key analysis of the history of Jewish families in medieval Ashkenaz.

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