Practicing Piety in Medieval Ashkenaz. Elisheva Baumgarten
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in flux during the thirteenth century, as manifested by both internal Christian turmoil and transitions in key elements in Jewish-Christian relations. I have explored the intersection of gendered conventions and concepts with the fervor for piety to detail some of these changes.99
An added benefit of comparing medieval Jewish and Christian societies for the purpose of this study is the information contributed by the substantial literature on piety—especially lay piety and gender—in the Christian world, which has further elucidated the settings in which medieval Jews practiced piety. One significant finding from recent work on gender and piety among medieval Christians in northern Europe is the remarkable encouragement of lay piety by Church authorities that increased during the Middle Ages.100 The centrality of confession, a hallmark of medieval Christianity, affirms this interest in the pursuit of piety by clergy and parishioners alike. Recent studies have also focused on the composition of popular guidebooks for lay practice during the thirteenth century.101 This work has led me to ask new questions of contemporaneous Jewish sources, by way of contrast and comparison.
Admittedly, the routes available to Christians who wished to pursue religious life were more numerous and far broader than the options that existed among Jews. Beyond lay piety, additional alternatives were open to medieval Christian men and women, including formally joining established orders (that lived among the laity or within cloistered communities) and privately exercising chastity at home. These paths often entailed taking vows of celibacy and adopting an ascetic life. Jewish society, with family life as the expected norm, had no equivalent structures. However, on average, medieval Jews may have had higher levels of participation in communal rituals and prayers than Christian laity; and the modest size of Jewish communities may have, at times, softened the disparity between leaders and members.
Jews and Christians differed not only in the available choices in spiritual life, but in their performance of analogous deeds. Each religious group had its own vocabulary, reasoning, and concepts associated with their actions. The differences in language go beyond translation, for “piety” and “pious” emerge from the Christian context, but they are not synonymous with the Hebrew terms “hasidut” and “hasid” or “hasidah” of Jewish parlance. Likewise, tzedakah (charity) is not identical to alms (elemosyna) or caritas, and each religion had its own definition of ritual purity. Furthermore, the artifacts for expressing devotion to God differ between the two religions, such as tefillin (phylacteries) and Torah scrolls among Jews in contrast to Christian relics and rosaries, despite the resemblance found among rituals related to some of these objects.102 I enlist these distinctions to illustrate how Jews nurtured and accentuated their separate religious identity. That is to say, similarity does not imply sameness, nor does comparison serve to equate or simplify distinctions between the two religions; rather, these nuances contribute to the clarification of these intricate relationships.
On a certain level, the dual focus on piety as seen and defined within the Jewish community and as understood in cross-religious dialogue results in some slippage between the notions of piousness and Jewishness in this book. While this may at first seem incongruous, I would argue that this ambiguity reflects the complexity of medieval Jewish life, since members of Jewish communities were constantly involved in reinforcing their stance in the eyes of fellow Jews and in their Christian environment.
Practicing Piety
The practices herein include classic deeds that express devotion to God with an emphasis on how they were practiced in medieval Jewish communities and how their performance changed during the Middle Ages. Anthropologists have discussed the challenge of finding a consistent meaning in any given practice or ritual behavior over time. Indeed, I am interested in the ritualization of daily activities rather than the absolute coherence of symbols.103 The acts of piety that were performed on a regular basis are myriad, and they took place in a range of settings. This study includes home-based and public practices, including the synagogue, at home, and on the street.104 These activities offered avenues for the expression and production of religious identities for all community members, be they learned or not.105
Medieval Jewish men and women could have practiced one or many of the customs discussed in the chapters that follow. They could have been exceedingly devout or hoping to conform to the conduct that their society considered appropriate. From that perspective, even without earning the label pious, one could still perform pious observances that were considered not only good but virtuous, fulfilling one of many religious obligations. Moreover, piety meant different things in different settings. Yet as meaningful as these actions could be for an individual, being classified as pious reflected on the community at large and its members’ shared values.
Medieval epitaphs reflect varied degrees of piety. Some of the deceased were called pious (hasid/ah), whereas others were termed righteous (tzaddik/ah). Yet others were said to be upstanding (hagun/ah) and important (hashuv/ah).106 While the first two adjectives suggest devoutness and the latter two status, they often combined with one another, implying that these traits were seen as more intertwined than discrete. In my eyes this entanglement is suggestive of the range of pious practices and beliefs that were expressed within the medieval community, a spectrum rather than a predetermined set of practices.
Each chapter in this book concentrates on a core topic through which piety was expressed, presented from a specific angle that highlights the key issues of this study. Three central attributes that have characterized many religions since ancient times—prayer, fasting, and charity—are conveyed in the first three chapters. In the Jewish tradition, these observances are explicitly linked to atonement on Yom Kippur: tefillah, teshuvah [lit., repentance], and tzedakah in the corresponding Hebrew terminology.107
In the case of prayer, the subject of Chapter 1, I concentrate on how synagogue attendance and avoidance correspond to corporeal purity as a prerequisite and impurity as an impediment to participation in communal prayer. By comparing the roles of men and women alongside Jewish and Christian concepts of purity and impurity, I track changes in synagogue practice during the medieval period.
Chapter 2 concentrates on fasting as a form of repentance, describing the development of Jewish fasting from late antiquity to medieval Europe with particular attention to its medieval features, and contextualizing Jewish fasting practices in their medieval Christian context. The comparison of these Jewish rituals with Christian observance focuses on patterns of daily life by detailing the distinctions and similarities between Jewish and Christian activities.
Charitable giving is the focus of Chapter 3, using data from the Nürnberg Memorbuch to present a case study of donations that were contributed as gifts for the soul (pro anima) in the Nürnberg Jewish community during the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Here I explore gender distinctions by examining tensions between the control of resources and the desire to make contributions as evidenced in this extraordinary record.
Chapter 4 studies the well-known practice of Ashkenazi women performing positive time-bound commandments that are typically considered in the realm of exclusive male praxis. This discussion reflects on the scholarly attention that this topic has received in earlier studies of women’s history and piety in two ways: first, by locating the evidence of women’s deeds within the context of conventionally male observances; and, second, by demonstrating how these practices developed and were transformed during the medieval period. I argue that class rather than gender played a role in the initial practices adapted by women, and I document the cultural trends in the thirteenth century pertaining to male practice that led to further changes in women’s practice.
In Chapter 5, I consider piety as displayed via hair, dress, and appearance and ask how Jews established themselves within and in contradistinction to the majority culture. Here I underline the importance of what medieval Jews and Christians noticed on the streets of their cities, a topic that has largely