was that a woman and her body would distract men and give them impure thoughts during prayer. Due to this rabbinical interpretation, scholars have seen the women's role in the synagogue as limited and sometimes even non-existent. However, recent research has shown that women actually had a larger role in the synagogue and the community at large. Women usually attended synagogue, for example, on the Shabbat and the holidays. Depending on the location of the women in the synagogue, they may have followed the same service as the men or they conducted their own services. Since the synagogues were large, there would be a designated woman who would be able to follow the cantor and repeat the prayers aloud for the women. Women had always attended services on Shabbat and holidays, but beginning in the eleventh century, women became more involved in the synagogue and its rituals. Women sitting separately from the men became a norm in synagogues around the beginning of the thirteenth century. Women, however, did much more than pray in the synagogue. One of the main jobs for women was to beautify the building. There are Torah ark curtains and Torah covers that women sewed and survive today. The synagogue was a communal place for both men and women where worship, learning and community activities occurred. The rise and increasing popularity of Kabbalah, which emphasized the shechinah and female aspects of the divine presence and human-divine relationship, and which saw marriage as a holy covenant between partners rather than just a civil contract, had great influence. Kabbalists explained the phenomenon of menstruation as expressions of the demonic or sinful character of the menstruant. These changes were accompanied by increased pietistic strictures, including greater requirements for modest dress, and greater strictures during the period of menstruation. At the same time, there was a rise in philosophical and midrashic interpretations depicting women in a negative light, emphasizing a duality between matter and spirit in which femininity was associated, negatively, with earth and matter. The gentile society was also seen as a negative influence on the Jewish community. For example, it seems that Jews would analyze the modesty of their non-Jewish neighbors before officially moving into a new community because they knew that their children would be influenced by the local gentiles. After the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, women became virtually the only source of Jewish