Ba’alat haBrit: …[T]he ba’al brit... appears in a number of texts. In one manuscript of the Mahzor Vitry, dated to the first years of the thirteenth century, one extra line appears that tells of another participant, the ba’alat brit, a female ba’al brit. The line reads as follows:
They brought the baby into the synagogue. The father of the son takes him from the ba’al brit and gives him to the ba’alat brit, and the people standing there say, “Blessed is he who comes,” and the ba’al brit says, “In the name of God,” and goes and sits in one of the chairs and takes the baby on his knees and they circumcise him.
This source reveals the existence of a female figure and locates her as part of a synagogue ritual, in which the baby was passed from one person to another.
Additional sources provide further information about the ba’alat brit. One group of sources mentions her washing the baby before the circumcision ceremony. These sources discuss restrictions applying to circumcision ceremonies held on the Sabbath, particularly concerning the heating of water to wash the baby before the ritual. Ordinarily, a woman washed the baby. On the Sabbath, the task was sometimes performed by a Christian servant, supervised by a Jewish woman. In Sefer Hasidim, a story is told about a woman who is called ba’alat brit.
It happened that there was a woman who washed her two sons and one drowned the other and their mother vowed never to wash during the day. Once she was a ba’alat brit and she washed during the day and died…
R. Jacob the Circumciser’s book Klalei haMilah, as well as a number of other later fourteenth- and fifteenthcentury sources, also mention the ba’alat brit. In these writings, however, she is the wife of the ba’al brit. Her role consists of bringing the baby to the synagogue:
And the wife of the ba’al brit carries him with splendor to the synagogue. As soon as the congregation has finished their prayers, her husband comes out of the synagogue to meet her. He receives the infant from her and brings him into the synagogue to be circumcised, and the congregation stands for him [when he enters] and says, “Blessed is he who comes.”
…In my opinion, the paucity of information and the variety of details in each source stem from the evolution of the role of the ba’alat brit…
The changes in female involvement in the ritual may account for the wide variety of roles linked with the ba’alei brit in the fragments that have reached us. … In addition, the fourteenth-century sources’ insistence that the prerogative of bestowing the honor of the ba’al brit was that of the men, testifies both to women’s desire to be part of the ritual process and the struggle around the appointing of a ba’al brit.
From Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe by Elisheva Baumgarten. Princeton University Press, 2004, pp. 70–71. Reprinted with permission of the publisher.