Regulating Emotion: Burial and Mourning of Children in Early Modern Ashkenaz

This article addresses a lacuna in scholarship: the burial and mourning rites for premodern Jewish children’s deaths. I explore three genres of sources from western and central Europe: bylaws, custom books, and epitaphs. I argue that communal leaders regulated the process of grieving one’s children, marking those deaths in ways that are different from how an adult is memorialized. Nevertheless, by creating additional rites or by permitting parents to circumvent certain norms, communal leaders acknowledged and even facilitated more intense expressions of parental loss.