Gender, Family, and Social Structures

A Challenge to Sexual and Marital Propriety and Communal Reaction

Kenneth Stow — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 17:00:00 PDT

The selection of sources from the early 1550's Rome deal with the question of honor of young women and their fathers.

The Jewish Community of Rome was unimpressed. It wanted it made clear that one did not make accusations that could harm the well-being, in fact, mostly financial, but also the honor, of young women. Indeed, the bride Ricca was herself awarded what amounted to a hefty fine; we know that among Christians, it was the father’s honor that was considered impugned, and any monetary sanctions would go to him. Not here.

Finally, we learn something about sacred and profane. Shem Tov approached a Christian for the rather crude cure. Christians in similar situations normally went to priests, considering the curse and the surrounding issues matters of holiness. We also learn that on everyday levels, there was considerable interchange between Jews and Christians. The events take place just five years before Rome’s ghetto was instituted by Pope Paul IV, but even in the ghetto period—which endured for three hundred years—such interactions would have been highly probable.

Two Cases of Apostasy in Dubno in 1716 Jews, Christians, and Family Life

Magda Teter — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 16:00:00 PDT

This text relates a trial of two Christian women who accepted to Judaism that took place in the city of Dubno in eastern Poland in 1716. The text presented here comes from a collection of primary sources published in Kiev [now Kyiv] in 1869, as part of effort by scholars at the time to collect and publish primary source materials about Ukraine. The collection is called Arkhiv Iugo-zapadnoi Rossii, or The Archive of South-Western Russia, and contains documents from the South-Western part of Ukraine.

This presentation is for the following text(s):

Two Cases of Apostasy in Dubno in 1716

Juveniles in Early Modern Jewish-Italian communities Between Family Control and Kabbalistic Piety

Roni Weinstein — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 14:00:00 PDT

The presentation discusses conceptions of childhood, youth, and marriage in Italian Jewish Culture.

The text reproduced is an excerpt from a mid-seventeenth century work by Pinhas Baruch Monselice.

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The Role of Marriage and Marital Sexuality in Lurianic Kabbalah

Lawrence Fine — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 13:00:00 PDT

The presentation situates the development of Lurianic Kabbalah in its context of sixteenth-century Safed. Focusing on two texts by Hayyim Vital, Lawrence Fine discusses sexuality and marital relations in Lurianic Kabbalah and among the Kabbalists themselves.

This presentation is for the following text(s):

Ta'amei Mitsvot, Parshat Bereshit (Reasons for the Commandments concerning “Be Fruitful and Multiply”) by Hayim Vital (1570s)
Sha'ar Kavvanot (The Gate of [Contemplative] Intentions, Concerning Sabbath Eve) by Hayim Vital (1570s)

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“The first duty of nature is to preserve life” A Jewish Woman’s Plea for Divorce in Late 18th-century Trieste

Lois Dubin — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 11:00:00 PDT

The presentation discusses a letter from Relle [Rachele] Morschene (1770-1844) of Trieste to Chief Rabbi Raffael Natan Tedesco, written in the throes of her three-year long effort to extricate herself from her marriage to husband Lucio Luzzatto (1755-1801). From 1793 to 1796, Morschene pursued separation and civil divorce through the Habsburg courts at the same time as a Jewish religious divorce. Indeed, she was one of the first European Jewish women to seek and obtain a civil divorce. Her legal situation was novel because Jews in the Habsburg Monarchy were among the first to be subjected to civil marriage regulation by a modern state. In medieval and early modern Europe, Jews had generally followed their own religious law (Halakhah) for matters of marriage and divorce. With the Marriage Patent of 1783, the Habsburg Monarchy was the first European Catholic state to define marriage as civil and to apply civil law and state jurisdiction to the marriages of all its subjects. However, it did not thereby create purely civil marriage procedures: marriage ceremonies were still only religious, and civil divorce was permitted only to those who were allowed to divorce by their own religion. Thus, Morschene could not get divorced civilly until Rabbi Tedesco assured the civil court that she was permitted a Jewish religious divorce.

This presentation is for the following text(s):

A Letter to Chief Rabbi Raffael Natan Tedesco of Trieste (1794)

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The Woodstruck Deed The Documentation of Accidental Defloration among the Jews of Early Modern Italy

David Malkiel — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 10:00:00 PDT

The “woodstruck” (mukat ets) deed, a Hebrew document that officially records the accidental defloration of a young girl, appears in sixteenth-century Italy, in a block of deeds recorded by Jewish notaries in Rome, in a rabbinic responsum and in the record book of the Padua community. Prior to that, there is no record of such an instrument anywhere in Jewish history and literature, despite the fact that the frequency of accidental defloration must have been a constant. Moreover, the registers of the Jewish notaries of sixteenth-century Rome contain over a hundred such deeds for the sixteenth century alone. The appearance of the woodstruck deed seems to reflect the formalization and bureaucratization of Jewish life in the early modern era. An early sign of this development is the creation, in the fourteenth century, of a formal process of ordaining rabbis and granting them communal appointments. The early modern era also witnessed the emergence of new public institutions and the records of their regulations and activities. Henceforth public institutions, principally the Jewish community, intruded into the life of the individual, as details of his personal life and activities came into the public purview, and, theoretically at least, became subject to supervision and intervention. The woodstruck deed thus presents another example of the exposure of certain areas of daily life. This trend has been noted with regard to marriage and death. The woodstruck deed differs in that it represents the seizing of the initiative by the family, as it attempts to exploit the new public involvement in personal life to its advantage. Apart from the institutional context, the woodstruck deed offered parents a guarantee that their daughter’s honor would not be impugned if on her wedding night her husband discovered that she was not a virgin. There was nothing to compel the family to publicize the incident or the document, unless on the morning after the wedding the groom complained that he had not found his wife to be a virgin. The woodstruck deed may imply, therefore, that parents had reason to suspect that their daughter might engage in premarital sex, which could lead to an unwelcome scandal.

This presentation is for the following text(s):

Pahad Yitzhak (Isaac’s Fear) by Isaac Lampronti
Minutes Book of the Council of the Jewish Community of Padua 1577-1603
Responsum 137 of Rabbi Azriel Diena (1528)
Shtar mukat 'etz (Woodstruck Deed) by Judah b. Shabbatai (1544)

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Jewish Women and Economic Encounters with Christians

Debra Kaplan — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 09:00:00 PDT

R. Yair Hayyim ben Moses Samson Bacharach (1638-1702) is well-known for his knowledge of halakha and Kabbalah. Over the course of his lifetime, he served as the rabbi in several locations in the Holy Roman Empire. In these two responsa, Bacharach deals with one of the halakhic problems surrounding women’s trade with non-Jews. Such trade inevitably caused women to enter into seclusion (yihud) with non-Jews, especially since according to Jewish law, the presence of the non-Jew’s wife did not alleviate the prohibition of seclusion with a non-Jew.

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Unequal Opportunities The Economic Possibilities Open to Jewish Women in 18th Century Poland-Lithuania

Adam Teller — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 17:00:00 PDT

The following texts present an image of economic opportunities, and gender roles in Jewish society in eastern Europe. The first text is an 18th-century supplication by a Jew, Bunim Szlomowicz, against his wife; the second is a 1751 decree by the Council of Lithuania regulating women's roles in trade.

An Early 17th Century Ketubah from Sefer Tikun Sofrim by Rabbi Itzhak Zabakh

Ruth Lamdan — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 16:00:00 PDT

In Jewish Law, the halakha, there is an extensive importance to the accurate scribing of legal documents (shtarot). Any slight deviation from the standard formula of one word, or even of one character, might invalidate a formal bill or cancel a personal or commercial obligation. The importance bestowed on each word encouraged many famous rabbis to write and edit books of standard legal bills, and Hebrew scribes used to copy samples of bills for their personal use in the future. Qualified scribes made exemplary collections of documents for their students, and young trainees would copy such samples – as well as original bills – in order to practice their profession. Quite a number of early and medieval collections survived, none of them is complete.

This presentation is for the following text(s):

Formulae of a Jewish Maid’s Marriage Contract (ketubah)

Family Ties & Political Structure in Pisa and Livorno

Bernard D. Cooperman — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 15:00:00 PDT

In his presentation of two documents pertaining to Jews in Pisa and Livorno, Bernard Cooperman discusses the link between family connections and the construction of a new formal Jewish community and explores the connection between family and business networks. Cooperman argues here that new communities in early modern Italy were often structured as merchant companies, and it was a family that was a base of trade networks. Family also became a method of joining the community, while at the same time families and individuals used membership in a community to legitimize a family. The presentation further explores interracial marriages and offspring of Sephardic Jews, role of women in the community and in wealth distribution. A larger overarching argument is that it was in the early modern period that the Jewish community was able to create formal structures.

This presentation is for the following text(s):

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