2025 Theses Doctoral

Disability in Medieval Ashkenaz, 1150-1500

Ellenbogen, Yakov

This dissertation, “Disability and Identity in Medieval Ashkenaz, 1150-1500,” addresses the experience of and communal responses to bodily and mental disability in medieval European Jewish society. By examining a diverse range of historical sources, including Hebrew responsa, legal commentaries, moralistic literature, and exempla, as well as Latin and vernacular medical literature and chronicles, it explores the complex tapestry of beliefs and practices surrounding disability in this period.

Drawing on modern disability theory, this study accepts that disability is in part a social phenomenon and investigates its interaction with other social forces. These forces include rabbinic status, socioeconomic and familial standing, religious identification, and gender. Rather than disability serving as a wholly marginalizing phenomenon, this dissertation shows that there were complex factors that shaped the experience of disability for individuals and the reception of disability in communal settings, often based on social circumstances.

These intersecting social phenomena could heighten the effects of disability, as disabled people could fall short of medieval Jewish expectations of the ideal Jewish body and mind. However, they could also mitigate the social fallout from disability, specifically because disabled people were not completely defined by their disability, but also by their position in relation to other features of their identity.

By exploring how disability functioned as a site of social negotiation between individuals and their surroundings, this study demonstrates that medieval Jewish approaches to disability offer critical insights into the broader structures of social inclusion and the mechanics of marginalization in the medieval world.

It traces how theoretical legal, philosophical, and medical discourses on impairment intersected with the actual experience and treatment of people with disabilities, positioning disabled individuals as both vulnerable subjects and active participants in Jewish communal life. And by focusing on a wide temporal period, it demonstrates how the historical transformations that took place in Ashkenazic society impacted the experience of disability and the ways people spoke about disability. In doing so, it sheds new light on how incorporating disability as a category of analysis reshapes our understanding of Jewish identity, legal culture, and the medieval experience of embodiment.