Professor Elisheva Baumgarten (Hebrew University) delivers Keynote Lecture at the Leiden Jewish Studies Network Conference “Care and the Jewish Experience"
On Tuesday, September 16, Professor Elisheva Baumgarten delivered the keynote speech entitled “The Kindness of Others: Jews, Christians and Early Childhood Care in Medieval Europe” at the “Care and the Jewish Experience” Conference at the Faculty Club in Leiden.
Keynote lecture video on Youtube
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Watch the video on the original website orBefore her talk, Prof. Dr. Sarah Cramsey introduced Prof. Baumgarten with the following words.
Why do we study the past? I ask myself this question implicitly every day, when I sit down to write “history”, when I enter my classroom and draw on my historical training, and when I explain to my daughters why people speak, act, and believe in different ways. But when I ask myself this question explicitly, it’s not as obvious as I would like it to be. Why do we study the past?
It's not because the past repeats itself, although people often harness that justification for studying history. It’s not because studying the people of the past inherently teaches us about “us”. I am not so sure that the connections between “them” and “us” are stronger than the disconnections between “them” and “us”, but I suppose this is open for debate. It’s certainly not because studying the past is easy or profitable. The recent attacks on historians and budget cuts at universities here in the Netherlands and around the world disprove that “easy” answer. Why do we study the past, and to bring us closer to our guest speaker tonight, we do study the medieval European Jewish past here in Leiden in 2025, when so many other “things” weigh on us?
Let me begin a more meaningful answer to this question by introducing our guest speaker. Professor Elisheva Baumgarten is the Yitzhak Becker Professor of Jewish Studies and teaches in the Department of Jewish History and the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she also serves as the Academic Head of the Mandel Scholion Interdisciplinary Research Center in the Humanities and Jewish Studies. Recently, she became the Dean of the Faculty of the Humanities at Hebrew University. She is a notable researcher. Most recently, she led the research project entitled “Beyond the Elite: Jewish Daily Life in Medieval Europe”, which was funded by the European Research Council between 2016-2022. Beyond the Elite, according to the project website, was a “multifaceted research project that explored what daily life was like for the Jews of Northern France and Germany (Ashkenaz) from 1100 to 1350”. It looked past the upper echelons of Jewish society to understand and describe the textures and constructs that made up the lives of the “ordinary” members of these communities. This is the broader theme of many of her books and writings, and podcasts (I should note that Prof. Baumgarten delivers great podcast interviews!).
Some of her edited and single-authored books include “Jewish Daily Life in Medieval Northern Europe, 1080-1350”, “Practicing piety: Men, Women and Everyday Religious Observance (Jewish Culture and Contexts)”, “Biblical Women and Jewish Daily Life in the Middle Ages”, and her first book, the prize-winning “Mothers and children: Jewish Family Life in medieval Europe”.
Let me briefly talk about “Mothers and Children (…)”.I fell in love with this book twice. First, when I read it in a seminar with Dr. Deena Aranoff at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, and second, when I had my own children and started asking questions about how I would keep my baby alive, how breastfeeding worked and didn’t work, and how I thought about who would care for my children. Each year, I teach and assign her work at least once, specifically the chapter which charts how Jewish women with financial means would hire non-Jewish women to wet-nurse their children in medieval Europe. Rabbis advising these women were anxious about these encounters and crafted rules about where the baby could sleep, how long the baby could stay with the non-Jewish caregiver, and how long the non-Jewish caregiver could stay in Jewish spaces. We learn in this book about the enmeshment of Jews and Christians in a very intimate, home space, around a universal concern: how to keep children alive. We also learn about the persistence of Jewish otherness around this topic and get a better sense of how the minority and the majority interacted. All of this is explained to us using rabbinic sources that do not necessarily give voice to the women they talk about - and yet Elisheva creatively and masterfully makes these nameless, voiceless women come alive and reach out to us with dirtied and tired hands from a deep, deep past.
I think that her work gives us answers to this timeless question: why do we study the past? To situate ourselves in a thin but persistent string of humanity. To give voice to the voiceless, to probe the limits of what we can really “know,” to feel a connection with human chronologies, to value life and lives lived, to situate ourselves in a thin but persistent string of humanity.
The majority of those who have lived have left us little specific evidence of their living. Instead, we have contributed to the vague progression of humanity, the accumulation of ritual, culture, and knowledge that enriches us as a human species. Combined, this evidence positions us as being, as Psalm 8 says, a “little less than angels,” crowned by God with glory and honor and ready to have our own small but electric existences analyzed by others in a future far distant from here.
I only hope that we get to learn more from her and the many students she has trained.
In closing, when I invited her here to Leiden to help us launch my European Research Council Starting Grant Project “CareCentury” and the Leiden Jewish Studies Network, she was very enthusiastic - because she feels it is important to support Jewish Studies in Europe - and she fit us into her busy schedule in this uncertain time, to support our endeavor here at Leiden. With that ending note, I’d like to welcome Elisheva to the podium and thank her for being a great scholar and being a true mensch.