Jewish Questions: Responsa on Sephardic Life in the Early Modern Period by Matt Goldish (review)

REVIEWS 297 Matt Goldish, Jewish Questions: Responsa on Sephardic Life in the Early Modern Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2008) lxiii + 180 pp. In this engaging and accessible sourcebook of responsa, Matt Goldish introduces the English-reading public to the world of Sephardic Jewry. Responsa literature—the legal questions that Jews addressed to prominent rabbis, and the rabbis’ replies—reveals a vibrant social history. Jews from cosmopolitan and provincial areas alike, spread from North Africa to the North Sea and across Ottoman lands, wrote detailed accounts of their situations when they requested rabbinic counsel. Goldish presents forty-three dynamic testimonies of everyday life written between 1492, when Jews were expelled from Spain, and the mideighteenth century. The title, Jewish Questions, reflects Goldish’s interest in the queries themselves more so than the rabbinic judgments appended to them. Both questions and answers were collected, edited, and published in the early modern period in order to produce manuals of case law and precedents. However, Goldish directs readers to focus on “the narratives embedded in the questions—the stories people tell when they come to a rabbi with queries” (xii). Goldish selects a tantalizing series of responsa, loosely divided into five chapters: Sephardi relations with Christians and Muslims (chap. 1), professional , communal, religious and family life (chaps. 2–5). Each responsum features colorful characters attempting to manage complicated situations. Goldish shares the humorous episodes with great relish, often tagging them with clever titles. “The Melancholic Monogamist,” for example, relates the woes of an Ottoman bureaucrat, transferred from Istanbul to Egypt without his wife, who requests permission to marry a second wife because the lack of sexual contact has made him gravely ill. Yet Goldish does not shy away from more disturbing narratives. He includes a document about an entire community that was incarcerated and beaten en masse in retaliation for the murder of a Turkish girl. These Jews were only released from prison after paying an exorbitant bribe, and they ask whether their neighbors who happened to be out of town during the event are required to contribute funds. The linguistic registers of the responsa are as diverse as their subject matter. Some of the most compelling narratives involve eyewitness testimonies, recorded verbatim in Arabic, Hebrew, Spanish or Turkish. These documents enable the voices of early modern Sephardim to “permeate the curtain of time” (35) with an immediacy that still resonates through Goldish’s translation. Other responsa adopt an artistic sensibility, honing the narrative through layers of careful editing. In this way, the delightful adventures of a Jewish vizier who promotes his clothier to chief financier demonstrate the “potential of the responsa as a conduit for biography and storytelling” (42). Goldish encourages the reader to consider broader trends in the Sephardic experience as they are reflected in individual responsa. He draws special attention to the malleability of identity, a hallmark of modernity that elicited particular anxieties in Sephardic culture. Decades of conversionary pressure in Spain led to the emergence of a distinct class of conversos: Jewish converts and their descendants, who were considered neither fully Jewish nor fully Christian. Further, widespread relocation to escape persecution or seek out business opportunities divided families between continents and confessions. These ruptures REVIEWS 298 of identity created urgent legal and social problems, such as how to handle marriage, divorce, and inheritance when family members did not belong to the same community. Goldish traces the growing Sephardic concern with identity through a series of responsa narratives. One asks whether the son of a converso and his Flemish concubine is entitled to inherit from his father, who has returned to Judaism and produced Jewish heirs. Another asks whether a widow must follow the rabbinic ordinances about marrying her deceased husband’s brother if he is a Karaite. Even apparently idiosyncratic personal histories tie in to broader cultural concerns about identity. In one strange case, an aguna—an abandoned wife who is barred from remarriage until her husband consents to a divorce or dies in known circumstances—hires an agent from India to track down her husband in Tiberias and secure a divorce. The agent makes short work of finding the errant spouse, validating his identity and drawing up the...