1. The discoverer of the “European marriage pattern” and the originator of the term is John Hajnal. The pattern is described in detail in two articles by Hajnal: “European marriage patterns in perspective,” in D.V. Glass and D.E.C. Eversley, eds.,Population in History (London, 1965), 101–43, and “Two Kinds of Preindustrial Household Formation System,”Population and Development Review, 8, 3 (1982): 449–94.
2. Several Jewish historians have attempted to ascertain overall medieval Jewish patterns of marriage age based on rabbinic sources such as responsa and legal codes. Although they do not agree in their conclusions, a number of them have found that very early marriage was widespread in medieval Jewry. This is the conclusion, for instance, of Abraham Grossman in “Nisuei Boser Behevrah Hayehudit Biyemei Habenayim ad Hameah Hashlosh-esre,” [Early marriage in Jewish society of the Middle Ages up to the thirteenth century],Peamim 45 (Autumn 1990): 108–25. Jacob Katz, inTradition and Crisis. Jewish Society at the End of the Middle Ages, transl. Bernard Dov Cooperman, (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 116. Katz states his conclusion as follows: “There were thus many incentives for early marriage and anyone who could, fulfilled this ideal. Sixteen was considered the proper age for a girl and eighteen at the latest for a boy. Parents were never censured — indeed, they were praised — for arranging a match for daughters of thirteen or fourteen and sons of fifteen or sixteen and even for marrying off their children at such a young age.”
3. David Biale,Eros and the Jews. From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 64. He speaks about the development of patterns of marriage of sons near bar mitzvah age as a creation of medieval Ashkenazic Jews. Biale contrasts this Ashkenazic paradigm with Jewish marital patterns in Muslim countries in which men married in their late teens or early twenties. See also Biale, 127–28.
4. Ibid., 153, 278, n. 13. Biale states that “the typical goal was to celebrate the bar mitzvah and the marriage at the same party.” The Jewish Enlightened writer in nineteenth-century Russia, Abraham Ber Gottlober, said that “everyone he knew was engaged by the age of eleven.”
5. Moses Hadas, ed.,Salomon Maimon. An Autobiography (New York: Schocken Books, 1947), 30–34. When his first son was born, Maimon was 14 years old (p. 33).