Documenting Medieval and Early Modern Jewish Women

Session Submission Type: Panel Session

Abstract

In recent years, scholars interested in medieval and early modern Jewish women have gained important information and insights about Jewish social history in particular times and places by investigating gender-related themes in a variety of Jewish and non-Jewish primary documents. Some of the sources that inform this research, including Latin notarial contracts, marriage and birth registers and other Jewish and gentile communal records, and accounts of cases brought by Jewish women to non-Jewish courts, have been neglected by earlier students of the Jewish past. This panel features innovative scholars whose explorations demonstrate what such documents can reveal about the lives, dilemmas, and agency of individual Jewish women. Each of the three papers in this panel reveals how diverse and previously untapped sources can show how women navigated both Jewish and gentile legal venues to resolve difficult situations in ways favorable to themselves. The research locales range from Sicily, at the moment of the 1492 explusion, to communities in early modern Ashkenaz, to the Chamber Court of the Holy Roman Empire during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The three papers address topics including divorce, children born out of wedlock, and women’s business endeavors, and each demonstrates how their sources, even if only partially, can illuminate the ways in which knowledgeable women, including midwives, shaped effective strategies for themselves and other women. The Respondent will discuss important unities and differences in these papers and offer comparisons based on similar issues found in documents from the Cairo Genizah and the Spanish Inquisition.

Sub Unit

• Medieval and Early Modern Jewish History, Literature, and Culture

Chair

• Judith Baskin, University of Oregon

Individual Presentations

• Divorce in the Time of Expulsion: Documenting Jewish Women in Palermo, 1492 - Sarah Ifft Decker

• Illegitimate Births, Socioeconomic Status, and Questions of Agency among Early Modern Jewish Women - Jordan Katz, University of Massachusetts Amherst

• Records of Agency: Uncovering Jewish Women in the Archives of the Imperial Supreme Court - Tamar Menashe, Emory Univeristy

Respondent

• Renee Levine Melammed, Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies