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.
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): * Communal Decision of June 8, 1606 in Pisa * Petition of Jewish Merchants of Pisa to Grand Duke of Tuscany, Cosimo II
The following is a translation of Todros Kozuchowski's will. Originally written in Polish, then translated into Hebrew, the will was translated into English by Moshe Rosman.
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 deals with a Christian description of early modern Jewish marriage rituals. The text is a translation of a chapter on Jewish marriage from Johannes Buxtorf's "Synagoga Judaica" or "Jewish Synagogue" (1603).
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. ### **This presentation is for the following text(s):** - Havvot Yair, Responsum 66 - Havvot Yair, Responsum 73
**This presentation is for the following text(s):** - A Comedy of Betrothal - The Glory of Youth
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.
In eastern France Jewish marriages are well documented in the eighteenth century. Following a decree by Louis XIV in 1701 that Jewish marriage contracts had to be deposited with notaries within 15 days of marriage, these documents were registered with increasing frequency in the entire French-German region. Registration became generally obligatory in that time, so that we have large amounts of documents both for Christian as for Jews. Historians have never fully analyzed these files. Jean Fleury, who was prompted by genealogical interests, surveyed the 8500 items in the Metz archive, and compiled 2021 marriage contracts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that were signed before the rabbinical authorities and deposited with a royal notary. Sometimes we have the Hebrew original, more often a translation or a shortened version of the whole text either in French or in German. The same applies to Alsace: More than 5000 Jewish marriage contracts and last wills have been deposited with royal notaries.
R. Jephthah Joseph Yuspa HaLevi Manzbach (1604-1678), usually known as Juspa Shamash of Worms wrote one of the most extensive descriptions of the marriage rite known to us from early modern Jewish sources. In his Minhagim de Kehilat Kodesh Wormeisa, Juspa sets out to describe the daily rituals and the specific variations of them practiced in Worms. As can be seen in the text below, he goes into minute details of practice concerning dress, procession, food and social order. My presentation will discuss his description of the marriage rite from two perspectives. The first will be a brief comparison to earlier German texts from the thirteenth-fifteenth century and a discussion of some of the novel emphases and elements in Juspa’s account. The second focus will be an analysis of family and gender hierarchies based on these novelties in light of recent research on early modern Christian families. I will read the text seeking to expose the gender divisions and attitudes towards families as they emerge through the extensive wedding ritual observed by the Jews in Worms.
The following excerpts from JTS ms. 10772 represent a tiny fraction of the hundreds of densely written entries in this pinkas. The material presented here does not appear in one discrete unit, it is scattered throughout the manuscript. For purchasing this ms. at my encouragement and for untrammeled access to it, I am deeply grateful to the Library and its staff. Until 1864, Altona was a busy fishing port under the hegemony of Denmark. Today it is a suburb of Hamburg. At the time the pinkas was recorded, the configuration of Jewish communal governance was complex. In some matters, each community was autonomous, but in many others, such as the rabbinate and the cemetery, the triple community, Altona, Hamburg and Wandsbeck, shared the appointment and the financial responsibility. This sets the framework for the material that follows. This structure allows us to glimpse an aspect of Jewish life that usually remained obscured. Illegitimate children born to Jewish domestic servants, and the servants themselves, held very marginal status in the community. If they died the responsibility for buying them was contested between many different parties.
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):** - Reasons for the Commandments concerning “Be Fruitful and Multiply” - The Gate of [Contemplative] Intentions, Concerning Sabbath Eve
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 SouthWestern 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
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.
## **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)