Law and love: the Jewish family in early modern Italy

2017

This book examines the role of women in Jewish family negotiations, using the setting of Italy from the end of the Renaissance to the Baroque. In ghettos at night and under the scrutiny of inquisitions, Jews fl ourished. Life and learning were enriched by Jews from the Iberian Peninsula, the Ottoman Empire, transalpine Europe, west and east, and Catholic neighbors. Rabbinic discourse represented confl icting customs in family formation and dissolution, especially at moments of crisis for women: forced betrothal; physical, mental and fi nancial abuse; polygamy, and abandonment. In this book, case studies illustrate the ambiguity, drama, and danger to which women were exposed, as well as opportunities to make their voices heard and to extricate themselves from situations by forcing a divorce, collecting or seizing assets, and going to Catholic notaries to bequeath their assets outside traditional inheritance, often to other women. Despite intrusion by rabbis, their ability for coercion was limited, and their threats of punishments refl ected the rhetoric of weakness rather than realistic options for implementation. The focus of this text is not what the law says, but rather how it enabled individual Jews, especially women, to speak and to act.

Jewish History, 2002

Tuscan notarial acts permit the exploration of the often elusive relationship of Jewish practice, Jewish law and the corresponding laws of the state. One issue in early modern Italian Jewish marriage negotiations was the eventual disposition of the dowry of a childless wife who predeceased her husband. Jewish law on the succession of the childless woman was complicated by traditional or regional customs and communal ordinances. Moreover, in sixteenth-century Tuscany there was no official code, court or arbiter of Jewish law. Nonetheless, Christian notaries who wrote pre-nuptial stipulations or pacts for Jews worked with the assumption that Jews were allowed to live according to their own law. This essay argues that individual Jews used to advantage the state's assumption that they could follow Jewish law (despite the absence of any universally-acknowledged or applicable law on this specific subject) by employing notaries to write contracts in disregard of both local statutes and well-known Jewish customs. In the second part of this essay I locate the stipulations in the Jewish marriage system and suggest that the process of negotiation over the fate of the dowry was integrally related to the system's emphasis – in contrast to that of contemporary Christians – on universal marriage and procreation.

Annali d'Italianista, 2022

pubbliche in Italian Bookshelf. "Annali d'italianista". Vol. 40 (2022), pp. 627-629.

Quest , 2024

At the heart of the sodomy trial against Lazarro de Norsa in 1670 before the Modenese Inquisition lies a relationship between the Jewish tailor Lazarro and the son of the household, Cesare Cimicelli. Lazarro sleeps, not in the servants' quarters, but with Cimicelli. There is nothing unusual or sinister about two men sharing a bed, but when two men of different faiths and status do so it gives rise to gossip and suspicion. This essay focuses on enmity, friendship and homo-sociality among Jews and Christians in an early modern Italian Christian household. It shows how men had a primary role within this domestic space and how relationships between servants could be made and unmade. It also reveals an unusual case in which a Jew appearing before an inquisitorial tribunal was successfully defended by a Christian procurator, paid for by the head of the Christian household, Signor Enrico Cimicelli.

An application of social history to one of the major rabbinic figures of early modern Venice: What is marriage? dysfunctional Marriage, the end of marriage, seizure of property by surviving spouses

De la fin du XV e siècle au milieu du XVII e , les communautés juives d'Italie furent le lieu d'un débat halakhique sur les présents du fiancé à sa promise. À l'arrière-plan de ce débat figurait la règle talmudique selon laquelle le fondement du mariage réside dans le don que fait le fiancé d'un bien à sa future épouse. Les aspects légaux de cette question n'expliquent toutefois qu'en partie la durée et l'âpreté de ce débat. La pérennité de cette coutume, parmi les juifs italiens, en dépit des résistances non moins durables des juifs venus d'ailleurs, est liée à la fonction des présents dans les rituels locaux du mariage. L'étude des écrits consacrés à cette question -ouvrages classiques ou actuels d'inspiration anthropologique -confirment le lien étroit de cette pratique avec les divers aspects de la culture locale: conceptions relatives à la richesse et à la propriété, à l'honneur et à l'identité; contrôle communautaire sur les rituels du mariage et sur l'ensemble de la vie familiale.

AJS Review, 1996

researched study of an often-misunderstood period of Jewish history, but also because in this original book he offers a pioneering model of the application of the Annales mentalité model of history writing to the study of Jewish history. It wrestles with two equally stimulating questions: (1) To what extent was the history of the Jews in Italy different during the Renaissance than in the preceding Middle Ages? (2) How can the historian discover the describe the mentality of Jews who lived in different periods of history? These questions, for Bonfil, are more significant than the conventional question of the extent to which Italian culture of the Renaissance influenced the Jews, because for him this question assumes that these were two distinct cultures, and assumption he will not accept.

TRAVESSIA - revista do migrante

Ambix, 2024

This article focuses on a curious manuscript treatise in the British Library, Harley MS 6940, which the learned physician Samuel Bispham composed for the English patron and horseman William Cavendish (1593-1676), most likely in the mid-1640s. Sitting somewhere between a practical medical recipe book and theoretical chymical treatise, while being peppered with traditional causal explanations and Galenic precautions, Harley MS 6940 testifies to the erosion of the entrenched dichotomy between chymical and Galenic medicine in the mid-seventeenth century. Harley MS 6940 also lays bare how a learned physician used (and taught the use of) practice to confirm and sometimes challenge his learning, offering a counterpoint to recent scholarship that underscores the learning that apothecaries used to shore up their practice. Produced at the behest of a leading Royalist who sought both to acquire techniques for distilling and fermenting herbs and to advance his knowledge of chymical conceptions of spirits, seeds, and salts, the manuscript allows us to appreciate that the chymical art animated a broader set of individuals than the historiography often implies.