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To the uninitiated, a mikvah looks like a plunge pool or
even a designer Jacuzzi. The mediaeval mikvah on
display at London’s Jewish Museum in Camden dates
from the mid 1200s demonstrating the long history of the
Jewish community in England. When it was discovered
on a City of London building site in 2001 it didn’t take
archaeologists long to decide that this was a Jewish ritual
bath or mikvah because the location was in the heart of
the Old Jewry, close to Guildhall, where a Jewish
community existed until they were expelled in 1290.
The mediaeval mikvah had been built in the home of the
Crespin family and may have been used for private
family worship or in preparation for public worship.
Mikvahs are most commonly used by observant married
women after their periods or the birth of a child. Men
may use it before the Sabbath and religious festivals
and on their wedding day. New pots and pans will also
be immersed in the mikvah before coming into service
in the kitchen of a devout Jewish family.
A mikvah must be built into the ground or be a structural
element of a building – a bathtub, Jacuzzi or other
portable receptacle will not do. The mikvah is not a
cleansing bath in the temporal sense it is a ritual form
of purification in the spiritual sense. The user must be
scrupulously clean before entering the mikvah. The
world’s natural bodies of water, the oceans, rivers, wells
and spring-fed lakes are natural mikvahs in their most
primal form whose water is of divine source and thus,
Jewish tradition teaches, these waters have the power to
purify. A built mikvah cannot therefore hold tap water,
it must contain a minimum of 200 gallons of rainwater,
gathered and siphoned into the pool in accordance with a
highly specific set of regulations. If it is not possible to
use rainwater, ice or snow originating from a natural source
may be used. One imagines that for the Crespin family
living in London a shortage of rainwater was not a problem.
In observant Jewish life family purity is a system predicated
on the woman's monthly cycle and the most important and
general usage of mikvah is for the ritual monthly
purification of women. From the first day of menstruation
and for seven days after its end, until the woman immerses
in the mikvah, husband and wife may not engage in sexual
relations. The woman is in
niddah,
which literally means to
be separated. However rather than being a nuisance or
inconvenience many Jewish couples say that this ritual
keeps a bit of a spark going!
The Crespins, Sephardi Jews from Spain, were one of the
leading Jewish families in London in the 1200s and like
most English Jews at that time their presence here and their
livelihood was based on money-lending for profit and other
Mikvahs, Mezuzahs & Bar Mitzvahs