The Family Table: Rituals, Fatherhood, and Masculinities in Medieval Ashkenaz

In my lecture I will concentrate on fatherhood among Ashkenazi Jews during the high and late Middle Ages. Exploring both written sources and illustrations, I will focus specifically on fatherhood in the context of the family table and will argue that it was not only a central functional space in the home, but also a site saturated with meanings, regulations, rituals and etiquette. Within medieval urban Jewish households, the table often became the central locus of the home, a place for gathering and eating, studying, praying and conversing. It was also a place where business transactions were conducted, and marriage contracts were negotiated. Even though, in many medieval urban homes the table and the dining area were not architecturally separated from other parts of the house, it nonetheless became the heart of the domestic sphere.

Rituals were at the core of Jewish quotidian life during this period, and they were often inseparable from conceptualizations of masculinities and fatherhood. Among the daily rituals conducted around the table were the blessings after meals. Weekly rituals included the Kiddush, the sanctification of the sabbath over a cup of wine, and once a year, during the Passover Seder, it was around the dining table where fathers imparted to their children the unfolding story of the Jewish people. The rituals teach a lot about the daily routine of many Jewish households in the Middle Ages, and especially about the daily life of the scholarly elite. These rituals, I argue, were directly related to the fatherhood and masculinity. Around the table, fathers demonstrated authority, but the table also witnessed paternal love and physical connection between fathers and their children. Thus, the table was one place where identities were shaped, where gender hierarchies and masculinities were manifested, and where fathers performed fatherhood. Moreover, in this lecture I will argue that within medieval Jewish culture, the dining table often represented, not only the alter that once stood at the Temple in Jerusalem, but it was also a symbol of fatherhood itself.