Practicing Piety in Medieval Ashkenaz. Elisheva Baumgarten
of Baraita deNiddah, declaring women’s avoidance of settings for prayer and study to be excessive.48
Whether Rashi and his students were familiar with Baraita deNiddah remains a question of scholarly debate; however, it is likely they did not. None of the writings from Rashi or his school refer to Baraita deNiddah and it is notably absent from the passage cited above.49 Moreover, our citation from Rashi indicates that the custom of distancing oneself from the synagogue was not widespread among menstruants in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries and was an exception rather than the rule.50
This practice is mentioned again in several texts from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Its next appearance, about a century after Rashi, is in Sefer Ra’aviah by Eliezer b. Joel haLevi (1160–1235, known as Ra’aviah). In a discussion concerning men who were impure as a result of seminal emissions, Ra’aviah reports:
Women exercise stringency and piety (nahagu silsul be’atzman u’perishut) when they are impure (niddah) by not entering the synagogue. Moreover, when praying, they do not stand behind women who are impure. I have also seen this written in the words of our Ge’onim, in the language of a baraita that is not found in our tosefta. This custom is indeed valid, just as I have heard of men who behave more and less stringently when they are impure due to nocturnal emissions: those who are more stringent live longer days and years.51
This passage demonstrates that Ra’aviah was familiar with Baraita deNiddah via a ge’onic source, albeit an unnamed one.52 One outstanding aspect of this text, as with the selection from Rashi,53 is Ra’aviah’s statement that women initiated this practice, unprompted by rabbinic authorities, even if this custom received formal approval post-factum. Ra’aviah discusses two restrictions that women took upon themselves: the first reflects the observance noted by Rashi, linking ritual purity to entering the synagogue; the second relates to how women positioned themselves during public prayers. This further constraint regarding location in services does not appear in the versions of Baraita deNiddah that have reached us, but similar limitations appear in thirteenth-century sources (as discussed below).
Both of these texts raise a theme that has received negligible attention to date:54 Rashi and Ra’aviah compare the actions of these women to the practices of men who were ritually impure.55 Although the text attributed to Rashi does not report any special customs related to men, it comments on male and female impurity, noting that men, who were also impure by definition, attended synagogue seemingly without reservation.56 In contrast, Ra’aviah remarks that particularly pious men took care to wash before entering the synagogue after experiencing nocturnal emissions. This male observance is repeated in other twelfth- and thirteenth-century medieval texts as well, usually in connection to preparations for Yom Kippur, when many men immersed57 Although most sources state unequivocally that men participated in prayers in all states of purity and impurity, texts such as Ra’aviah’s acknowledge the existence of stricter approaches. More exacting standards are also articulated in Sefer Hasidim, where men are instructed to wash58 after sexual relations before praying.59
In sum, irrespective of their status with regard to purity, men participated fully in communal prayers throughout the medieval period, as textual evidence from northern France and Germany demonstrates with a few suggestions of singular exceptions. In the case of women, the sources attributed to Rashi and Ra’aviah indicate that a segment of especially pious women placed a self-imposed exclusion on synagogue participation during their menstrual cycles, and that this stringency could extend to physically distancing themselves during public prayers from their peers who were menstrually impure.
This idea is further developed by Eleazar b. Judah of Worms (d. 1230), who notes: “[A menstruant] is not permitted to enter the synagogue until she immerses in water because [even] her saliva [has the power to] contaminate.”60 This statement represents a major shift: Eleazar is not referring to a cohort of pious women who chose this custom; rather, he describes a prohibition that could keep all menstruants from entering the synagogue. Eleazar attributes this exclusion to Ma’aseh haGe’onim, an early Ashkenazic composition, but no such ruling appears in that book as we know it today.61
Sefer Likutei haPardes (attributed to the Rashi school, dated to thirteenth-century Italy) reports an intensification of this restriction that mirrors the language of Sefer Ra’aviah: “And there are women who abstain from entering the synagogue when they are menstruants and from seeing the Torah, and from touching the book (the Torah scroll). This is an unnecessary stringency … but it is a holy place and they are acting appropriately. May they be blessed in this world and in the World to Come.”62
Isaac b. Moses (d. ca. 1250), the author of Sefer Or Zaru’a and a student of Ra’aviah and Eleazar of Worms, also writes about this practice. He paraphrases Ra’aviah almost verbatim.63 His son, Haim b. Isaac, wrote: “She should not say the name of God when she is menstrually impure; furthermore, she is forbidden from entering the synagogue on any day when she sees [blood] until she is white [not bleeding].”64 Haim altered some of the details: rather than depicting pious women praying at a distance from impure peers, he suggested that menstruating women should stay away from the synagogue entirely. Moreover, his tone varies substantially from that of his father. Haim does not differentiate between pious women who choose to keep a distance from the synagogue and other women. Rather, following Eleazar of Worms, he recommends that all menstruants be proscribed from entering the synagogue.
By the late thirteenth century, this prohibition seems to have become an accepted standard as indicated by Isaac b. Meir haLevi of Düren (a student of Meir b. Barukh from the second half of the thirteenth century), who wrote what can be considered the earliest manual pertaining to the laws of menstruation, Sha’arei Dura. His instructions echo the words of Isaac b. Moses (who, as we have seen, cited and built on teachings from Ra’aviah):
A woman who is menstruating should not wear fine clothing or adorn herself, comb her hair or cut her nails. Neither should she say the name of God on the days when she menstruates nor should she enter the synagogue on any day when she sees [blood] until she is white. For it says: “And she shall not touch the holy and she shall not come to the Temple” (Lev. 12: 4). That [is to say,] she should not bring a sacrifice until seven clean days [have been completed]. This is what it says in Sefer haMiktzo’ot, but Rashi permitted her to come to synagogue.65
Isaac b. Meir does not specify that this course of action is that of pious women. Rather he suggests that this is the custom at large.
Over a century later, in his Sefer haAgur, Jacob b. Judah Landau (fifteenth century) mentions only a prohibition against menstruants seeing the Torah,66 whereas Isaac b. Meir of Düren noted a dual warning against both entering the synagogue and saying God’s name during menstruation. Landau’s account also introduces a new prooftext from Sefer haMiktzo’ot, a mid-eleventh-century source that transmits many rulings from Babylonian Ge’onim and is often quoted in late medieval Ashkenazic writings.67 Simcha Emanuel has recently proposed that, in this particular case, thirteenth- and fourteenth-century rabbis were constructing a source rather than citing directly from the corpus available to them.68 He proposes that this “construction” was correlated to innovative practices that were introduced at that time and the consequent search for precedents to validate them.69
Thus not only had the motivations for these customs changed, but the norms were in flux. The instructions provided in the sources cited above are ambiguous with respect to intended duration of these restrictions, for Jewish women’s menstrual impurity consisted of two distinct parts. The first encompassed the days when blood was seen. After bleeding ceased, women counted seven days, known as the “clean” or “white” days (because of the white clothing worn on those days);70 not until that second set of days was complete would women immerse in the mikveh (the ritual bath) and resume sexual relations with their husbands.71 Did women refrain from going to synagogue and saying God’s name throughout their entire time of ritual impurity, or only when they were bleeding? Both Haim b. Isaac and Isaac b. Meir specify that