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Prof. Elisheva Baumgarten | History Department

Prof. Elisheva Baumgarten

Prof. Elisheva Baumgarten
Prof.
Elisheva
Baumgarten
Rabin Building, Room 4006. Office Hours: Wednesday, 10:00-12:00

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 Jewishher third book, Biblical Women and Jewish Daily Life in Medieval Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania press, 2022) focuses on how we can learn about daily life from biblical stories. Baumgarten has edited ten collected volumes/journal issues. Her recent research project is Beyond the Elite: Jewish Daily Life in Medieval Europe and was funded by a European Research Council Grant.