Practicing Piety in Medieval Ashkenaz. Elisheva Baumgarten

      Jewish Fasting and Atonement

      in a Christian Context

      I knew that Jews and Christians did not observe the same rules of fasting.

      —Herman-Judah, A Short Account, 92, ll. 1128–29

      As the previous chapter demonstrated, pious practices were often linked to precise times and places. This chapter further examines pious practices as they related to eating and abstaining from food, with a specific focus on fasting. Just as culinary norms—what is eaten; when, where, and with whom; and, of course, how food is prepared—constitute individual and communal understandings of belonging, belief, and status, so too fasting serves to signify social and religious identity in all cultures.¹

      During the past century, anthropologists have assessed the many roles that food plays in communal and self-definition,² and they have also demonstrated the dynamic nature of these symbols.³ The phenomena that have been elucidated by this research are hardly limited to modernity; they were manifested in pre-modern life and religion as well. Jewish dietary laws offer a prime example of practices whose constant elements and changing factors have been studied in great detail. These precepts were initially set forth in the Bible and continued to develop through late antiquity and the Middle Ages according to each era and location, ever integrating local realities while preserving ancient traditions. Within the Jewish community, dietary practices cultivated a preoccupation with food and bound the acts of preparing and eating meals within the group.⁴ In each generation and setting, these instructions effectively separated Jews from their non-Jewish neighbors.

      The significance of fasting for medieval Jews was not dissimilar to the meanings imbued in culinary practices, and in many ways refraining from food and drink complemented dietary regulations. The roles of food and fasting in daily rituals and in rhythms of commemoration and celebration are among the primary building blocks of any religious community, fostering a shared sense of purpose and belonging.⁵ These patterns affected relations between medieval Jews and Christians, who observed individual and communal fasts at different times of year.⁶

      The practice of fasting connected the body and its physical needs with less tangible values, such as self-denial and repentance.⁷ Rituals performed by individual bodies are often attributed to the social body as well, thus reflecting the community as a whole.⁸ By definition, fasting was conducted on a personal level by each individual who practiced this ritual; in the case of collective fasts, hunger and self-denial were simultaneously individual and communal experiences. Since communal fasts were accompanied by public rituals (e.g., prayer services with related liturgical content), these experiences were internally and externally based for a community and its members. Fasting can thus provide a window onto individual and collective practice.⁹

      This chapter seeks to outline Jewish fasting practices in medieval Ashkenaz in terms of communal and personal piety alongside notions of repentance and atonement (teshuvah) that developed during the High Middle Ages. In this analysis of sources on fasting, close attention is given to the particularities of the practice itself, including the treatment of both men and women, as well as to gender as a determining factor in the significance ascribed to fasting.¹⁰ In light of the abundant scholarship on fasting and penance in medieval Christian Europe,¹¹ this study assesses Jewish fasting practices in the context of fasting among medieval Christians.¹²

      My discussion of medieval Jewish fasting within Christian contexts is founded on three assumptions. First, although fasting has held a central role in nearly all religions and confidence in its efficacy has remained cogent over time, the precise modes of fasting are particular to each religion and vary relative to the others. In fact, religious communities distinguished themselves from one another in many ways, most notably here via their distinct ritual calendars and their interpretations of fasting as reflected by their own ideals and beliefs. These differences honed the identities of those who fasted even when they participated in a general practice that transcended the particularities of their own community (e.g., by fasting during a drought).

      Secondly, no special designation or officially conferred status serves as a prerequisite for pious fasting. This point has far-reaching implications for the accessibility of this pious practice in its medieval context: fasting did not require specialized knowledge or publicly recognized stature, nor was it hierarchically controlled or determined, although rabbis and Christian clergy had a role in instructing when and even how fasts should be conducted. Each individual, whether learned or uneducated, could fast as an act of devotion. Neither was this custom geographically or logistically restrictive: one could fast at home, in the church, or on the road. These qualities render fasting a readily accessible expression of piety.