Elisheva Baumgarten, PhD

Professor Yitzhak Becker Chair in Jewish Studies
Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry
History Department
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

“I study the social history of the Jews of medieval Ashkenaz, seeking not only to further the integration of Jewish history within that of greater Europe, but also to develop theoretical tools that allow for a deeper understanding of the way medieval Jews were both a distinct group and an integral part of medieval European culture.

I began my career with a strong interest in two issues: the place of women in medieval Ashkenazic culture and the comparison between Jewish and Christian life. My first book, Mothers and Children (Princeton University Press, 2004), addressed Jewish family life with a strong focus on the place and roles of mothers, considering a gendered comparison between men and women. As part of this project, I became very interested in ritual theory as well as in mechanisms of appropriation. My second book, Practicing Piety (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), expanded my focus from family life to religious life at large, comparing men and women, both Jewish and Christian, through that ritual prism. Whereas my first book underlined the many similarities between Jews and Christians, my second book built on their embeddedness and sought to highlight the ways in which Jews demonstrated their differences. I wrote both these books as a faculty member at Bar Ilan University, where I taught in the Department of Jewish History and in the Gender Studies Program, a program I had the privilege of being one of the founding members.

In 2013, I started teaching at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and embarked on my first large-scale project funded by a European Research Council Grant “Beyond the Elite: Jewish Daily Life in Medieval Europe” from 2016–2022. The work of the Beyond the Elite team combines a deep knowledge of Jewish traditional texts and manuscripts with systematic training in Latin and vernacular sources integral to the field of European history, as well as theoretical grounding in a variety of disciplines. The strength of this team is that members bring different expertise to the discussion, allowing fruitful collaborations.

Leading a team of 8–10 students at any given time from Israel, Europe, and North America (postdocs, doctoral, and master’s students), I sought to expand a new front in medieval Jewish studies, that of everyday life and an interest in the lives of members of the community who were not part of the rabbinic elite. Having demonstrated how the traditional historiographical tendency to read surviving texts penned by the medieval Jewish elite as representative of entire Jewish communities all too often excludes many members from historical discourse, we expanded the range of documents through which historians can study how Jewish life was lived on the more common, even ordinary level. Working as a team, we organized multiple international conferences and published extensively, including four volumes of joint articles, a collection of edited essays is in press, and another collective volume is currently being prepared. We have also created a sourcebook for undergraduate teaching (forthcoming Western Michigan Univ. Press), in addition to each member of the project’s individual work that includes four monographs and over 40 articles to date. During this period, I wrote my third book, Biblical Women and Daily Life in Medieval Ashkenaz (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022), in which I suggest a new methodology for historians of Jewish history who must grapple with the limitations of the extant sources.

Our project has not only contributed to academic endeavors. We have been called on to advise museums and cultural institutions, especially in Israel and Germany. We produced a virtual and physical collaborative project with artists (prepared with Ido Noy, In and Out, Between and Beyond: Jewish Daily Life in Medieval Europe) that has been featured in Jerusalem and is about to open in Erfurt, Germany. We have also created a teaching website.

As of winter 2023, I am embarking on a new research project, Contending with Crises, with some current team members and new ones who will join, funded by the new Breakthrough Research Grant of the Israel Science Foundation. The project will focus on the Jews of 14^th-century Europe with a goal to integrate this century – more commonly explored in more lachrymose narratives – within the framework of Jewish-Christian entanglements that I have sought to further, without detracting from the hardship, animosity, and hatred that was part of the period.

Mentoring, an area that has always been important to me, has flourished in my recent work of leading my ERC team. I am especially proud that my graduate students and postdocs are winning prestigious prizes in Israel and abroad, finding jobs, and developing into fine scholars. Leading my team has been the most exciting and intellectually satisfying experience of my academic life to date. It has allowed me to develop models for intellectual collaboration that are rarer in the Humanities than in other fields. I have learned some of these models over the years from stays at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies (1999–2001; 2012–2013) and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2008–2009; 2017–2018) and in my roles at the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel School for Advanced Humanities that I currently direct. It is these skills and abilities that I am eager to further over the coming years as I progress with my own personal research, within the framework of my research team and as part of the Jewish Studies and Medieval Studies community.  

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