Sephardi Family Life in the Early Modern Diaspora

Introduction: What Is a Family?

Introduction What Is a Family? When we talk today about“the family,”we mean something very different than the concept that existed in the medieval and early modern periods . The Latin term familia, which was adopted in many European languages to designate a set of parents and their children (for instance, as in an “English family”), originated in Roman times and culture, and it was used to refer to various overlapping concepts. One of the meanings of familia was a derivative of famulus, the cohort of slaves and servants that constituted part of the patrimony owned by the master of the domus or house. It was later extended to include descendents living under the authority of one person, the paterfamilias; and, finally, domus also denoted the family members living in it.1 Similarly, in the Hebrew Bible, the term“family”also was a word with more than one meaning : “The family was aptly termed bet av, ‘house of a father’ (Gen. 24:38; 46:31). To found a family was ‘to build a house’ (Deut. 25:10). The bayit (‘house’) was a subdivision of the mishpahah (‘clan, family [in the larger sense],’ Josh. 7:14).”2 At the center of the family, both in its Latin and Hebrew original meanings, the figure of the paterfamilias or the father stands out as the owner of wealth and power over all of the people dependent on him, although not all of them were related by blood or kinship.3 In Spanish the term familia (family) was defined in the medieval legal code, Las Siete Partidas, as a word referring to “the master, his wife, children, and servants.”4 Four centuries later, in 1611, the dictionary Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española gives a similar definition under the entry familia: [family means] the people that a master feeds [nourishes] in his house, and from this he took the name of father of families; it derives from the Latin name familia . . . [which] among the ancients it only included slaves, having originated from the Oscan famel . . . But now this name [familia] not only includes the 2 sephardi family life in the early modern diaspora parents, grandparents and other descendents . . . but also the master and his wife, his children, servants, and slaves.5 This concept of the family, as comprising not only our contemporary view of “a family” (a set of parents and their children), but also other individuals living in the household (not necessarily related by blood), has been amply documented by historians of family as evident in the past. In the words of David Gant, for centuries the word family was used to designate “a relationship not of a biological nature, but one of belonging and dependency to the superior individual who was legally termed the paterfamilias,” and although by the end of the Middle Ages the term “family” began to appear on some documents as referring to the conjugal family, even in the mid-eighteenth century the term family often included all “those living in the same household.”6 Research on the History of the Family The history of the family is a relatively new field of research that started only in the 1950s but has advanced significantly in recent decades. Interest in exploring family life of the past was initiated by a small group of French historians who, in the 1940s, founded the new branch of historical research that became known in the 1950s as historical demography. Among the most important of these French pioneers interested in the history of the family was Louis Henry, who was credited with devising the technique known as family reconstitution. By studying data provided by French Catholic registers, demographers were able to calculate birth, marriage, and death rates, as well as to advance their study of fertility. To the credit of these pioneering studies, the lives of ordinary people, including women and children of all socioeconomic backgrounds, became a subject of historical study, instead of the previous focus on only male elites.7 In addition to the demographic approach to the study of the family, other historians followed the approach known as the history of mentalities or attitudes (mentalités). This approach was initiated by the French historian Philippe Ariès in his Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family, originally published in 1948.8 By studying a variety of cultural artifacts—paintings and portraits of children, toys and games, as well as written documents, such as manuals of etiquette...