Staff

Elisheva Baumgarten’s research focuses on the Jewish communities of medieval Germany and northern France. She is a social historian who uses gender methodology and comparative methods to examine the daily life of medieval Jews within their Christian surroundings. Her work has examined family life, life-cycle rituals, education, midwifery and piety

Her first book was Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe (Princeton University Press, 2004; Hebrew publication: Zalman Shazar Center, 2006).

Her second book, Practicing Piety in Medieval Ashkenaz: Men, Women and Everyday Religious Observance (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) focuses on how the daily activities of medieval Jews expressed their gendered and religious identities. She has edited several collections of essays on medieval Jewish life and on gender and Jewish studies, and she is currently writing a social history of medieval Jewish marriage in northern Europe.

Beyond The Elite- Jewish Daily Life in Medieval Europe: https://beyond-the-elite.huji.ac.il