Traveling in the Western Sephardic diaspora often raised questions among their creditors whether the purpose of a travel was really for legitimate business interests or an attempt to abscond with their funds. By analyzing sources from Portuguese Inquisition files, and notarial records from both Amsterdam and Oporto, this presentation examines the tension between legitimate and illegitimate mobility within the diaspora, and widespread surveillance of debtors across long distances.
No description available.
Mirian (daughter of the late Abram Israel Mora) and Rachel (daughter of the late Raffael De Silva and widow of Isach Oliver), the authors of the two testaments published here for the first time, lived in the Venetian ghetto since about the 1630s-1640s. While the former was a Levantine Jew, the latter was a Ponentine.1 In a sense, both belonged to the same family and household, the De Silvas, who lived in the ghetto vecchio: Mirian was a servant while Rachel a matron. When Mirian and Rachel each became aware of their extreme illnesses—we do not know their respective ages—they decided to dictate their wills in 1666 and 1679, respectively, and to bequeath their patrimonies (modest and rich) mainly to the members of the De Silva family. Both testaments introduce us into different and yet, at the same time, complementary ways Jewish women interacted with spatial contexts within the domestic, religious, and public spheres in early modern Venice.
This discussion explores the interactions between Jews and the natural world. The session focuses around Jewish engagement with rivers, and how waterways shaped the spatial dimensions of daily life. The discussion revolves around three sources from Central Europe that examine the ways in which thinking with rivers can lead us to explore not only the human-made spaces of a landscape, but also the natural elements at their outer limits. Each source sheds light on an aspect of the experience of environment and the role of space in Jewish life, and together offer a portrait of the place of water as a zone of physical and cultural interaction.
The inquisitorial prison housed individuals who were accused of crimes of conscience and thus the encounters that a prisoner would have in a secret prison of the Inquisition would often enough center on issues of belief and identity. Manuel Cardoso de Macedo (1585–1652) was an Azorean Old Christian who found his way to Judaism after first embracing Calvinism as a teenager living in London and then discovering “the Law of Moses” in a cell he shared with an accused Judaizer in the prison of the Lisbon Holy Office.
In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, western European cities began to enact robust regulations concerning the training and licensure of midwives. The city of Amsterdam refined its bureaucratic procedures for midwife licensure earlier than other European locales, and all prospective midwives – including Jews – were required to register in the Collegium Obstetricum from 1668 onward. Midwives had to attend anatomy lectures, report their apprenticeships, and pass a comprehensive examination. Although individual Jewish midwives often went through standard municipal procedures to gain admittance to the profession, Jewish communities had their own internal methods of regulating midwives and ensuring that members of the community received appropriate care from them. The event of birth, and ensuring a positive outcome for both mother and child, was of prime concern to the lay leadership, which was responsible for hiring a midwife or midwives to serve the community. Because of this heightened sensitivity towards midwifery in Amsterdam, communal registers from the Ashkenazic (Hoogduitse) kehillah emphatically state that it is the responsibility of the community to supply enough midwives to serve all birthing women. In the following entries from the community’s pinkas, lay officials appoint additional midwives to address the community’s growing population. These entries divide midwives’ roles by street, with each midwife responsible for a discrete area. The inclusion of this rubric suggests the importance of geography among Jews in eighteenth-century Amsterdam as well as the community’s keen awareness of its location within an urban landscape. In addition to this, birth records kept by one Amsterdam midwife in the earlier half of the century frequently record streets or neighborhoods where births took place, reinforcing this sense of place and the importance of a mental cartography for the midwife as she went about her work. This impulse to record geographical information may have taken cues from the midwife records submitted to the Collegium Obstetricum, to which stadsvroedvrouwen (municipal midwives) and their advanced students were required to supply birth lists at least every three months.