"When Jews literate in Hebrew (a group that until recently was mostly men) wanted to learn from traditional Jewish sources how to behave in their conjugal bed, what did they find? Did the guidance differ between generations, places, or cultural contexts? How did thinkers in a tradition based on supposedly binding texts deal with changing sensibilities, needs, and realities in this intimate domain? This study explores sources from the Bible to contemporary publications, showing both stability and change in what Jews were instructed to do, or to avoid doing, when having sex with their spouse."

[From the cover]

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My very first book (Niddah. Lorsque les juifs conceptualisent la menstruation, Belles Lettres, 2003) has this image, an illustration found in a Jewish manuscript from the 15th century (Ms Hamburg, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, cod. Heb. 37, fol. 79v), on its cover:

It shows a man in bed, and a woman in a body of water. The accompanying text in that manuscript explains that this body of water is a well, miraculously created by God under the houses of Jews, to enable Jewish women to perform in secret their post-menstrual ritual bath, during a time in which a supposedly evil Greek ruler forbade the practice. Intimate relations without such a bath are forbidden according to Jewish law.

We can suppose that the artist who created this magnificent small painting imagined that after the woman performed her bath, the couple met in bed, and, well, had sex.

That book from 2003, Niddah, dealt with issues related to menstruation, and the ideas, practices, and prohibitions related to it in rabbinic Jewish culture of various times and places. This more recent book from 2022, Traditional Jewish Sex Guidance: A History, is a study of the regulations that Jewish couples, in various times and places, were told to follow while having marital sex. In other words, it tries to understand what was supposed to happen, according to the Jewish rabbinical elite, in the next scene, not depicted in the 15th century manuscript.