Practicing Piety in Medieval Ashkenaz. Elisheva Baumgarten
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as in Mahzor Vitry: “Yom Kippur arrives and all Israel fasts. Men, women, and children wear white, like the angels who serve God (malakhei sharet). They stand barefoot, like the dead. [In response,] God is filled with mercy and grants atonement for all their sins.”92
While repentance (teshuvah) is the obvious reason for fasting, numerous medieval sources make explicit the connection between this midrash and purification from nocturnal emissions.93 The most marked among them is a fifteenth-century reference to Judel, son of Shalom of Neustadt:94 “Judel, the son of our teacher Shalom, states that it seems to him that women should not immerse in preparation for Yom Kippur eve because they cannot be like angels.”95 The halakhic topic at issue here is whether immersion in the mikveh on the eve of Yom Kippur was a component of repentance that every Jewish adult performed before Judgment Day,96 or whether this ritual was carried out to release men from impurities related to nocturnal emissions. The latter process could not apply to women since, by definition, the sin of nocturnal emission does not pertain to them.
Judel assumes that immersion prior to Yom Kippur counteracts the impurity caused by nocturnal emissions and, since this matter is uniquely related to male anatomy, women need not perform this ritual. However, this physiological distinction bears no relationship to his rationale: Judel reasons that women need not immerse because, in contrast to men, they cannot be like angels. His words reflect a gendered hierarchy that depicts a world where God reigns, followed by angels, men, and, lastly, women.
Judel’s teaching provides fertile ground for further examination of the main issues that we have seen so far. Male impurity did not present an impediment to entering the sanctuary or participating in prayer; even the men who were most cautious about ritual impurity would wash, then attend synagogue, without immersion in the mikveh. On Yom Kippur, an additional level of stringency was prescribed and, therefore, many men immersed in preparation for that most holy day.97 In the early thirteenth century, Eleazar of Worms suggested that exceptionally pious men (perushim) immersed before Yom Kippur, whereas by the fifteenth century, as we have seen, this practice had become customary for all men.98
As we have already seen, women immersed regularly as a component of maintaining menstrual purity.99 The passage by Judel implies that some women also immersed on the eve of Yom Kippur, and his objection focuses on that practice.100 Although the Yom Kippur eve immersion is mentioned frequently in sources from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries,101 only Jacob Moellin (known as the Maharil, 1360–1427) explicitly describes it as an observance for both men and women:102
Mahari Segal (an acronym for Maharil’s name) says that one can argue that [immersion] is for the sake of repentance since it is customary for men and women, youth and virgins who have reached bar and bat mitzvah [age] to immerse [on Yom Kippur eve]. Clearly men immerse because of seminal impurity or because they touched some impurity, but why do the women immerse, given that they don’t emit semen? The same reasoning applies to elderly (menopausal) women, and to youth and virgins whose bodies are clean from any impurity. Rather [this immersion] is certainly on account of repentance.103
In contrast to Judel, Maharil unambiguously separates this immersion from purity. Although Maharil’s opinion was widely accepted, Judel’s comment allows for further reflection on medieval Jewish notions of corporeal purity.
Judel’s comments cast a doubt on women’s potential to be like angels. This comparison between Jews and angels originated in late antiquity. Texts from that era discuss how men and women could resemble angels, although some late antique sources claim that men are more capable of reaching the level of angels (beings who were considered asexual by their very nature).104 Medieval sources continue to compare both men and women to angels, as, for example, in the thirteenth-century composition Semag:105
When God created the world, he created heaven and earth on the first day and the angels on the second day. [The angels] had no evil inclination but know how to worship and serve their Creator, whereas animals possess evil desires but know not how to serve their Creator. On the sixth day, he created man, who resembles both angels and animals. For that reason, when a human eats, drinks or goes to sleep, it should not be for the sake of pleasure, like an animal. Rather he should eat with the intention of gaining the strength needed to worship God as angels do.106
This passage features humanity—without distinguishing between men and women—as an intermediary category of beings that share certain characteristics with angels and others with animals, respectively.107
However, a close reading of other passages from thirteenth-century Germany reveals that women were often viewed as an impediment to men becoming like angels. For example, Judah the Pious writes: “He who stops himself108 from looking at women and avoids idle talk with them will surpass the angels who serve God.”109 This passage continues by drawing a contrast between angels, humans who are unable to restrain their tempers, and menstruant women:
And also, a man should avoid looking at an angry individual because (in that moment of anger) a bad angel is present [and encourages the angry one] to take swift revenge and [also at that instant, the bad angel] causes him (the one who gazed upon the other’s angry state) to forget all that he has learned. The same is true for one who looks at a woman who is menstruating whose blood is in her.110
Although this selection from Sefer Hasidim does not deny that women could be like angels, it presents women as an obstacle to the fulfillment of male spirituality. The idea presented by Judel in the fifteenth century takes this understanding a step further by portraying women as categorically incapable of resembling angels.
If this trajectory is examined alongside the changing expectations of menstruants in the synagogue during the High Middle Ages that we mapped out above, the contours of a transition become quite evident. Purity regulations for all women became more stringent while men entered the synagogue without restriction. How can these shifting concepts and practices be elucidated? Prior research has generated two lines of reasoning to explain why women stopped attending synagogue during menstruation. Some scholars have termed the emergence of women’s self-imposed constraints in earlier sources and the widespread adoption of those strict beliefs and practices in later sources as “a natural response.” This position has most recently been articulated by Bitha Har-Shefi, who contends that women were preserving a custom inherited from earlier generations of women that concretizes inherent fears and anxieties related to blood.111 However, as feminist scholarship and cultural studies demonstrate, it is hard to define natural responses, since all rituals are products of the cultural milieu where they develop and are performed. Moreover, characterizing a certain behavior as “natural” cannot explain adaptations over time, since stability rather than dynamism would be expected in such a paradigm.112 Thus our search for catalysts behind the transformations that occurred in medieval Ashkenaz between the generations of Rashi and Judel continues.
Figure 3. Entrance to the Garden of Eden. From Birds’ Head Haggadah. Note that only men are portrayed here. © Israel Museum, Jerusalem. B46.04.0912; 180/057 fol. 33r, detail. Southern Germany, ca. 1300.
A more common explanation has linked these changing practices—with respect to menstruation and male impurity—to increasing familiarity with traditions that originated in late antique Palestine and that spread among Ashkenazic scholars from the twelfth century onward.113 This hypothesis concentrates on the elite strata of halakhic authorities as catalysts for new practices and rulings. While this approach may provide convincing background for restrictions concerning the seven “white days” recommended by leading rabbis, in my opinion it does not clarify the dynamic process that we have documented concerning women’s physical presence in the synagogue.114
I opened this chapter with a passage from Rashi’s circle that attempts to explain a custom whose genesis stems from the agency of women. While it may be argued that the belief that menstruating women should not enter a synagogue was based on esoteric sources that gained currency over time, such as Baraita deNiddah,