What Can We Learn About Jewish Communities in Medieval Ashkenaz from the Mikveh Buildings They Left Behind?

The space within which Jewish ritual immersion takes place will be the focus of this paper. While purification in a Jewish ritual bath requires neither a learned intermediate nor a crowd, it is usually carried out in a shared public space. Furthermore, ritual bathing has familial and communal repercussions despite its private, and even intimate, ritual context. Analysis of the location within the city-scape; the visibility of portals or other entrances; the characteristic of the individual walk towards them will all factor in to the examination of ritual bathing spaces in Ashkenaz between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries.

While much of the research on Mikvaot has focused on Halachic aspects, the artistic ones can be just as paramount to the ritual function and spiritual experience. The physical remains of the pools paint a complementary picture of the life and ritual of the medieval communities that founded them. Differences of the material from which the Mikveh is made; the type of light that illuminated it; any ornament, openings or inscriptions within the bath or surrounding space reveal much about the society that built and used the Mikveh, as do practical questions such as the relative location of the Mikveh to other communal structures, or the way it was accessed from the street. In the proposed paper a number of case studies will be presented and analysed, including Worms (1185-86), Cologne (1170), Speyer (c.1200), Cologne (1170) and Friedberg (1260).