Yemima Hovav, Maidens Love Thee: The Religious and Spiritual Life of Jewish Ashkenazic Women in the Early Modern Period

Abstract

This fascinating and insightful book, based on an impressive array of material of different genres, aims to describe and characterize Jewish women’s religiosity within the Ashkenazi cultural realm in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. The book’s chapters address several key topics: women’s images in various Jewish sources, the life cycle, modesty, women’s religious role in the domestic sphere, their place in the synagogue, charity and women’s education. I found Chapter 2, on the life cycle (childhood, marriage, childbirth and death), the most interesting. It offers numerous details about the lives of girls and young women, as they marry, give birth, are surrounded by friends, interact with the community and infuse various ceremonies with emotional and spiritual content. Chapter 3, on modesty, is perhaps the most straightforward section of the book; mainly descriptive, it supports the instinctive image conjured up by the term “religious women”—God-fearing, virtuous and modest. Indeed, the primary requirement of women in the period is that of modesty, which was of utmost importance in the society’s religious reality (pp. 225–252). Beyond this strict duty, so we read, Ashkenazi women also displayed extraordinary spiritual behavior, such as sexual abstinence and pietism. Such phenomena usually characterized widows or older women, who were not preoccupied with child-raising and aspired to holiness, either via their own acts or by cleaving to Torah scholars (pp. 256–267). Such “virtuous women” sometimes took upon themselves extremely strict ritual observances, above and beyond the demands of the rabbis and sometimes to the latter’s discontent. This was especially apparent is their practice of the “women’s” mitzvot (commandments) of ḥallah (setting aside a portion of the dough) and niddah (the practices associated with menstrual impurity), but it occurred in other areas as well. Elsewhere in the book (pp. 323–325), other women’s customs are mentioned, such as abstaining from work on Rosh Ḥodesh (the New Moon) and while the Hanukkah candles burned.