"YELED ZNUNIM:" Gender, Illegitimate Births and Untapped Rabbinic Sources

• In Event: Listening for #MeToo in the Archives

Abstract

On the pages of Isaac Frank’s 1766 communal register from Altona, one finds the tragic tale of a maidservant named Devorah. Becoming pregnant while serving in the home of an illustrious community member, Devorah gave birth to a son. But like many Jewish maidservants, she was scared and fled her master’s home, leaving her son to die. While she appears in the communal register over questions concerning how to bury her son, this document conveys a total lack of empathy for her difficult situation: “She is a harlot as she had been a servant and a wet nurse in the home of Jacob ben Moses Heksher from which she fled, [leaving] behind the child of her harlotry (yeled znunim).” No mention of the likely rape that left her pregnant or any concern for her safety in that home. As responsa literature and other communal registers suggest, Devorah’s situation was far from exceptional. Many impoverished Jewish women surface in Jewish rabbinic sources either pregnant or having borne an illegitimate child. Attention to their children’s status and not the circumstances that left these young, poor women pregnant suggest communal priorities did not see the rape of Jewish women working in Jewish homes as a matter of concern.

My paper will examine the experiences of Jewish maidservants as a means to uncover issues raised by the #metoo movement in archival sources. Female vulnerability and sexual exploitation are not particular to the present moment. But how can we identify such circumstances in the past? By allowing silences to speak for themselves and mining rabbinic and communal sources crafted to address other issues, this paper aims to insert Jewish maidservants back into the center of a Jewish history sensitive to the challenges raised by the #metoo movement. Their predicaments and the numerous children they brought into the world not only shaped the social institution of the Jewish family but also altered how we think about welfare, power, class and gender in Jewish history.

Author

• Rebecca Amy Kobrin, Columbia University