Sephardi Family Life in the Early Modern Diaspora

Foreword

Foreword This fascinating collection of essays illuminates the diversity of the postInquisition Sephardi Jewish experience through the lens of domestic life. Julia R. Lieberman and a team of international scholars explore both daily and dramatic aspects of Jewishness within diverse types of Jewish families in Italy, Holland , and across the Ottoman Empire, breaking new ground on important and often understudied chapters in early modern Jewish social history. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries some Jews—and some cryptoJews —correctly assessed the bleak future of Iberian Jewish life and set off for whichever locations were currently allowing Jewish immigration. In August 1492, following the Expulsion of “all Jews and Jewesses,” the last professing Sephardi Jews left Spain. They joined brothers and sisters who preceded them to form new, distinctive, and often vibrant Jewish communities. Sephardi Jewish families who relocated into the Ottoman Empire arrived at their new homes with understandings of Jewishness, gender role construction, family structure, community organization, and relationship with outside cultures that differed substantively from those in many Ashkenazi societies. Many Jews who had lived in Spain and Portugal, for example, had adopted prevalent cultural attitudes toward women’s appropriate roles, which were in general fairly restricted. (In contrast, from the Middle Ages onward Ashkenazi women played important roles as brokers for Westernization; through their marketplace activities, these women helped to move European Jews toward the gradually emerging middle class.) Some of the Sephardi Jews who emigrated immediately before and after the expulsion were deeply religious Jews who lived according to rabbinic dictates in their new homes. Sephardi scholars—who had long been among the intellectual stars of rabbinic thinking and writing—continued with their scholarship. The Jewish communities they created continued to develop in particularistic ways, as transplanted Jews interacted with the cultures of their new neighbors. Later emigrants of Jewish background from the Iberian Peninsula to Western countries brought with them yet another approach to Jewishness, profoundly viii Foreword influenced by the repressive socio-religious and political conditions they had endured. The years of anti-Jewish riots and cataclysmic persecution that precipitated the conversion of some of the most distinguished, well-educated, and affluent Sephardi Jewish families—frequently thousands at a time—also had an impact on their relationship to Jews and Jewishness. Those crypto-Jews who remained in Spain and Portugal even after the Expulsion often lost touch with evolving halakhic developments in rabbinic Judaism. Some were suspicious of halakhic rules and norms they encountered when they eventually emigrated and made contact with traditionalist Sephardi Jews whose religious and cultural lives were more established. Conflicts sometimes erupted between earlier and later emigrants. Even for those who shared religious intensity, important customs often differed significantly. Nowhere were those arguments more significant, contentious, and fraught with religious and social significance than those cases that focused on the roles of women, the rites of marriage, and the structure of the family. Court cases, responsa literature, letters, memoirs, sermons, and other sources reveal stories that are compelling, some intriguing, some pathetic, with details of licit and illicit loves, children born and named in the synagogue and those born out of wedlock and deprived of primogeniture, fortunes made and stolen and squandered . Status within the Jewish community and peoplehood often hung in the balance for the individuals involved—and communal power hung in the balance for rabbis and leaders who provided conflicting sources of authority. Sephardi Jews were often skilled merchants, and some were involved in trade across national borders. Repeated rupture had created a sophisticated, enterprising approach to existence. For a segment of the Sephardi population that emigrated from Spain and Portugal, this cosmopolitan lifestyle was a doorway to the gradual influences of modernity, and these Jews themselves played indirect (and sometimes direct) roles in societal changes. This was especially true in Western European countries, where acculturated Sephardi Jewish merchants were key players, and often had substantial social interactions with their Protestant neighbors. The extent of those porous boundaries—and the reason why they alarmed devout Jewish rabbinic and communal leaders—is sometimes revealed in discussions about ritual events, such as parties (vegia) the night before the circumcision of a Jewish son, ostensibly a vigil to ward off evil spirits, which were attended by Christian as well as Jewish men, who indulged together in drinking and ribald jokes. The lives of their wives and daughters in Western European Sephardi families , while often quite sequestered, were profoundly affected by the economic [3...