Illegitimate Births, Socioeconomic Status, and Questions of Agency among Early Modern Jewish Women

• In Event: Documenting Medieval and Early Modern Jewish Women

Abstract

How did early modern Jewish communities grapple with pregnancy that occurred out of wedlock, and how did pregnant women experience this event? Based on Jewish communal sources, notarial records, and birth registers in which midwives testified or recorded births to unmarried women, we can get a sense of how these cases played out in various early modern legal and social realms. Pregnancy out of wedlock was widespread in early modern Europe, and the Ashkenazic world was no exception to this trend. Children conceived outside of marriage were considered a communal problem, not only with regard to sexual propriety but also because they presented a problem of lineage and inheritance. Despite the prevalence of this phenomenon, women who gave birth out of wedlock could be subject to harsh treatment. These women were often domestic servants or wet nurses, whose employment status and livelihood were thrown into jeopardy by the discovery of a pregnancy at the hands of their employers – the result of coercion, sexual assault, and rape. Although most of cases of illegitimate birth probably garnered little attention, those that were recorded in some form shed light on how early modern European Jewish communal bodies, courts, and municipalities assumed responsibility for controlling deviant sexuality and motherhood. Not only this, but they also unearth the dynamics of class and ethnicity at play in many of these cases, in turn showing that a fuller history of early modern Jewry requires us to investigate the experiences of those whose stories are not always revealed in culturally dominant source materials. At the same time, we must be attuned to how such sources can silence the women whose cases were at the heart of the matter, granting only a partial window into women’s experiences and the turns their lives took in the aftermath of these events.

Author

• Jordan Katz, University of Massachusetts Amherst