Myth, Metaphor, and Gender Performance: Medieval Ashkenazi Wedding Rites Reconsidered

Avital Davidovich-Eshed (Tel Aviv University)

 

Abstract
This research explores how mythic and allegorical models – above all the metaphor of Sinai as a divine wedding – reshaped medieval Ashkenazi marriage rites. It identifies a conceptual reversal in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, whereby the divine–human union became the template for human marriage rather than its analogue. This shift from the earlier Edenic myth to Sinai reconfigured gender relations, communal self-understanding, the ritual imagination, and the cultural dynamics between Jews and Christians. The research examines halakhic literature, ritual manuals, and piyyut (liturgical poetry) in order to illuminate the mechanisms through which myth operates.

Redner
Avital Davidovich-Eshed ist Senior Lecturer am Department of Jewish Philosophy and Talmud sowie im Programm für Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung an der Tel Aviv University.

Teilnahme
Geschlossene Veranstaltung. Kontakt: Beate Sutterlüty; E-Mail: b.sutterluety@forschungskolleg-humanwissenschaften.de

FKH Kolloquium

Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften der Goethe-Universität