As more people are living longer, it seems like everyone is talking about aging. But we are hardly the first generation to think about it.
Ageing in Medieval Jewish Culture, by Prof. Elisha Russ-Fishbane from New York University’s Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, opens a fascinating window on medieval attitudes toward many of the issues that we now confront, and to others that perhaps we should.
Russ-Fishbane takes an interdisciplinary approach, analyzing poetry, legal documents, works of Halacha (Jewish law), and philosophical treatises, mostly from the 10th to the 14th centuries. He makes extensive use of the treasure trove of Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic documents that is the Cairo genizah. Among the documents are personal letters and communal records that reveal much about the economic and cultural lives of medieval Jews.
Learning about medieval Jews
Russ-Fishbane explains the stark difference between the medieval Jews’ conception of aging and their perception of its reality. “Many Jews viewed old age as the crown and culmination of a blessed life” and sometimes even argued that it provided people intellectual and/or spiritual opportunities unavailable to younger people. Some thinkers believed that only when the appetites and desires of the youthful years abated were people able to dedicate themselves to what really mattered.
At the same time, medieval Jews also faced grim reality, describing starkly the sometimes debilitating “ailments and indignities so frequently visited on the aging body.” In a poem that became part of the Sephardi Yom Kippur liturgy, Judah Halevi, who died in 1141 at age 66, wrote that if a man “lasts until 70 no one pays attention to his words. He is but a burden on his peers.” If he lives until 80, “his mind and eyesight [are] no longer intact,” he should expect only “scorn and disdain from children and neighbors. After this, he is reckoned as dead.”
In the writings of Moses Maimonides, who also died at age 66 (in 1204), we find both approaches. For Maimonides the thinker, Russ-Fishbane writes, old age was “an idealized period for the cultivation of the mind.” Nevertheless, Maimonides poignantly describes his own deterioration in the last years of his life:
“I am not today the same as I was in the days of my youth, but my strength has declined and my heart is weary and my spirit has diminished and my tongue is heavy and my hand trembles.”
BUT WHAT was life actually like for aging medieval Jews?
One thing is clear: It was generally expected that the elderly would live with younger family members. Usually, the oldest son was responsible for providing assistance and a home to an aged parent.
Russ-Fishbane cites two different kinds of marriage contracts found in the genizah, both apparently designed to avoid future disputes. In the first, a condition of the marriage was that the parent would not move in with the couple who were marrying. In the second, responsibility for the elderly was explicitly accepted by the spouses.
Quite a few documents reflect tensions related to multi-generational living, but as Russ-Fishbane reasonably writes, when this living arrangement is working smoothly, an absence of documents that say so is not surprising. While these documents cannot provide hard statistics, the incidence of multi-generation homes was significantly higher then than now.
Another gap in the evidence might be more significant. Russ-Fishbane points out that we have no records of the community taking responsibility, financial or otherwise, for the elderly. The Bible and later Jewish texts often put “the widow and the orphan” in the same category. As the documents prove, medieval Jewish communities often appointed an agent (apotropos) to protect the interests of a specific orphan, and the fact that they did not do this for widows or widowers is telling. No evidence exists of a communal “budget line” for elder care, nor of communal nursing homes.
As Russ-Fishbane explains, this could be because the community took steps to ensure that children of the elderly would be the ones to bear the burden, financial and otherwise. This is despite the apparent conclusion in the Babylonian Talmud (centuries before the documents this book examines) that obligations to parents do not include accepting financial responsibility for them. Whether the medieval documents show a change in understanding of Halacha since the time of the Talmud or simply a pragmatic community decision to pass the financial burden back to the family is hard to say.
Many adults today bemoan being in the “sandwich generation,” worrying about elderly parents while also caring for children and/or grandchildren, but we see that this dilemma is not new.
Russ-Fishbane presents an excellent example of how a good historian can garner a wealth of information from seemingly humble primary sources. Perhaps the book will also provide lessons from our medieval ancestors for contemporary Jews of all ages.
Ageing in Medieval Jewish CultureBy Elisha Russ-Fishbane Littman416 pages; $64.90