Public Lecture – Elisheva Baumgarten: “Legal Knowledge and Everyday Practice in Medieval Ashkenaz”

25th Annual Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Lecture in Judaic Studies. Jewish legal texts are an important source for social history, and scholars have looked to rabbinic responsa and halakhic codes that detail how the law should be observed in order to better understand how daily life was actually lived. Yet, to what extent do these legal sources reflect the lives of all members of the communities within which they were written? Perhaps they convey only the priorities of the elite learned men who penned them. This talk will ask what kind of legal knowledge everyday Jewish men and women had, and ask to what extent the average Jew in medieval Ashkenaz attempted to observe the halakhah of the rabbinic elite.


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Eyal Levinson (February 15, 2022). Public Lecture – Elisheva Baumgarten: “Legal Knowledge and Everyday Practice in Medieval Ashkenaz” medievalJewishStudiesNow! Retrieved April 18, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/rhkz


About Eyal Levinson

I am a postdoctoral research fellow at the Hebrew University in the ERC project, Beyond the Elite: Jewish Daily Life in Medieval Europe, directed by Prof. Elisheva Baumgarten. I completed my PhD in the Gender Studies Program at Bar Ilan University under the direction of Prof. Baumgarten. I research youth, men fatherhood and masculinities in medieval Ashkenaz, and I interweave Jewish-Ashkenazic medieval historiography with gender and masculinity studies. I hold a BA, Summa Cum Laude, in Jewish Studies and Religion from Brooklyn College, and an MA with honors in Gender Studies from Bar Ilan University. My MA thesis is titled: The Conceptualization of the Yetzer and the Male Body in the Masculine Sexual Discourse in Sefer Hasidim. I am also a graduate of The Israel Democracy Institute’s program, "Human Rights and Judaism" (2012-2015) and in 2006 I received a rabbinical ordination from “Aleph: Alliance of Jewish Renewal”. My book, Youth in Medieval Ashkenaz (tentative name), is scheduled to be publish in Feb. 2022 by The Zalman Shazar Center and Leo Baeck Institute of Jerusalem.