Dolce of Worms: The Lives and Deaths of an Exemplary Medieval Jewish Woman and her Daughters Judaism in Practice: From the Middle Ages through the Early Modern Period, ed., ed. Lawrence Fine. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000, 429-437. Judith R. Baskin The small Jewish communities of medieval France and Germany, an area Jews called Ashkenaz, lived in an atmosphere of religious suspicion and legal disability. By the beginning of the thirteenth century, Christian rulers and Church ordinances had barred Jews from virtually any source of livelihood but moneylending. They were often compelled to wear distinctive clothing and badges to distinguish them from Christians; toward the end of the Middle Ages, Jews were either expelled from areas where they had long lived (including England in 1290 and Spain in 1492) or forced to live in crowded ghettos. Despite their political insecurity, medieval Jews enjoyed a high standard of living and were significantly acculturated. Women's status was higher than among Jews in the Islamic milieu as indicated by the larger dowries they brought into marriage and their freedom of movement. The eleventh-century rabbinic ruling forbidding polygyny for Jews in Ashkenaz, attributed to Rabbi Gershom ben Judah, who also ruled that no woman could be divorced against her will, are further evidence of women's positive situation. In this milieu Jewish women were active participants in the economic survival of their families; independent businesswomen, including widows who controlled significant resources, traveled alone on business, possessed property, and appeared in court on their own behalf, despite talmudic regulations to the contrary. Dolce of Worms, the remarkable woman on whom our documents center, came from the elite, leadership class of medieval German Jewry, the daughter of a prominent family and the wife of a major rabbinic figure, Rabbi Eleazar ben Judah of Worms (1165-1230), also known as the Roqeah