1. Israel Abrahams,Jewish Life in the Middle Ages (1896; reprint, New York, 1969), 340.
2. The growth of urban life after the First Crusade greatly enlarged the need for literacy as commercial enterprises increased and bureaucracy expanded. In medieval towns and cities the number of institutions offering an elementary education, usually under Church sponsorship, rapidly increased. See James W. Thompson,The Literacy of the Laity in the Middle Ages (Berkeley, 1939). See, more recently, Brian Stock,The Implications of Literacy (Princeton, 1983), 13.
3. Jewish girls probably acquired such skills several centuries before the widespread expectation of their mastery by Christians with the rise of the medieval urban bourgeoisie after 1100. See below, nn. 7–8.
4. Joan M. Ferrante, “The Education of Women in the Middle Ages in Theory, Fact and Fantasy,” inBeyond Their Sex. Learned Women of the European Past, ed. Patricia H. Labalme (New York and London, 1980), 9–42, 10. See Eileen Power,Medieval Women (Cambridge, 1975), 85, who writes that “women in the families of ordinary gentry and bourgeoisie seem often to have been able to read and write,” and cites, among other evidence, wills of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries showing that women possessed books, “most often psalters and other service books, but sometimes romances and other books as well.”
5. An intensive educational program was proposed for boys inHukkei ha-Torah, a compilation probably composed in twelfth-century Germany or France. See Simha Assaf,Sources for the History of Jewish Education [in Hebrew], 4 vols. (Tel Aviv, 1925–42), 1:6–16; the text is translated in part in Irving A. Agus,The Heroic Age of Franco-German Jewry (New York, 1969), 318–22. On the education of Jewish men in the Ashkenazic Middle Ages, see Agus, “Rabbinic Scholarship in Northern Europe” and “Rashi and his School,” inThe World History of the Jewish People. Second Series:Medieval Period, vol. 2,The Dark Ages, ed. Cecil Roth (Tel Aviv, 1966), 189–248; Ivan Marcus, “Jewish Schools in Medieval Europe,”The Melton Journal (Winter 1987): 5–6; and Ephraim Kanarfogel, “Attitudes Toward Childhood and Children in Medieval Jewish Society,”Approaches to Judaism in Medieval Times 2 (Chico, CA, 1985), 1–34.