Women and Jewish Marriage Negotiations in Early Modern Italy

For Love and Money

Howard Tzvi Adelman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780815348092
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351168069
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia moderna temprana

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 flourished. 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 conflicting customs in family formation and dissolution, especially at moments of crisis for women: forced betrothal; physical, mental and financial 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 reflected 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.

1 Introduction

Jews, Women, and Rabbis in Italy

Introduction: Jewish Life on the Italian Peninsula

After the break-up of the Roman Empire in the fifth century CE, the Italian peninsula and islands fragmented into many political jurisdictions, some of which, especially in the south, came to be occupied by foreign powers, including Muslims, Byzantines, Normans, and Spaniards. In the north, the peninsula was consolidated into four main areas that were at war with each other and with the Hapsburgs, the French, and the Ottomans. These areas consisted of the territory captured by “the warrior popes,” which came to gradually include the major centers of Rome and Bologna, the duchies of Urbino, Piacenza, eventually Ferrara and Modena, and also the significant port of Ancona; Tuscany, with its capital in Florence, extending to the major centers of Sienna and Pisa; Lombardy, with its capital in Milan; and, finally, the Venetian republic, with its center in Venice, and including such cities as Padua and Verona. Still remaining independent were Lucca and Genoa.

Jews settled on the Italian peninsula, especially in Rome and the south, during the later days of the Roman Republic, and remained there during the advent of Christianity. Especially significant were the southern Adriatic Jewish communities of Bari and Otranto and the island of Sicily. In the north, gradually during the Middle Ages, both attracted by opportunity and pushed by increased anti-Jewish measures and incidents, German (Ashkenazi or in Italian, Tedeschi) and French (Tzarfati) Jews migrated from across the Alps into northern Italy, where they met Jews from Rome (Italiani) who were expanding northward. Many of the immigrants were moneylenders, or more accurately increasingly smaller-scale pawnbrokers, who were welcomed by the local authorities because the church officially did not permit Christians to openly lend money on pawns at fixed rates of interest.

In addition, after 1391, Iberian Jews (Sephardim) were persecuted, some were converted either by force or voluntarily (New Christians or Conversos), and some of these continued to maintain loyalty to Judaism in secret (crypto-Jews or Marranos). Some Iberian Jews and converts found refuge in northern Italy where they became known in the later sixteenth century as Ponentine, or western, Jews. Others fled further east to the Ottoman Empire where they joined Jewish natives of the Middle East, called Levantine, Mizrahi, or Oriental Jews, all of whom had developed Jewish practice under Islam, and from there some of these Jews would travel to northern Italy, including Ferrara, Venice, Florence, Pisa, Livorno, and the Papal States.

The flight of Iberian Jews and crypto-Jews accelerated after the establishment of the Spanish Inquisition in 1478, increased in 1492 when Spain expelled all unconverted Jews, and further continued after the 1497 forced conversion of all Jews in Portugal. Then, following the establishment of the Portuguese Inquisition in 1536 and especially after its full operation in 1540, converted Jews intensified their steady trickle-out of Portugal and settled throughout the Mediterranean world, including the Italian peninsula.

Very often, Italian rulers granted Jews charters that spelled out their rights and privileges, including granting permission for them, their families, and other co-religionists to settle in the area for a stipulated length of time. Christian rulers and Church leaders remained committed to separating Jews and Christians, especially in matters of sexual relations, marriages, and religious influence, but were never able to do so completely.

Because the Italian peninsula was on the boundary between various empires, Italian Jewry reflected many different cultures, traditions, and practices. Sixteenth and seventeenth century northern Italian Jewry, from Rome to the Alps, constituted a specific yet fluid grouping of religious, social, economic, and cultural practices. Jews in that region spoke mainly the local Italian dialects with the addition of Hebrew and Aramaic words drawn from Jewish religious life and culture. Recent immigrants mixed local Italian with Judeo-German, Judeo-Spanish, or Judeo-French. If they wrote in Italian rather than in Hebrew, they adopted the Tuscan dialect. Like other members of the Italian elite at this time, some Jews adopted aspects of Renaissance and Baroque culture.

Despite a division of the peninsula into separate states, each with its own government, economy, foreign policy, and army, two unifying factors served to promote a certain sense of Italianitá (Italianness) among those living on the peninsula. One was their struggle to prevent further foreign occupation of the peninsula, and the other was a common loyalty to the religious doctrines and practices of the Catholic Church (although not necessarily to the political claims and aspirations of the papacy). This meant that during the period—known as the Counter or Catholic Reformation—adherents had to accept the Church’s assertions that Protestant views, that Catholics following Jewish rites and ideas, and that even most innovative Catholic reformist trends constituted heresy. To implement this theology, the Church and local rulers adopted three major policies that were also to have an impact on Jewish life: inquisitions, ghettos, and the deliberations of the Council of Trent.

Inquisitions

The word inquisition evokes images of secret Jewish practices, torture chambers, and people being burned at the stake. There is certainly some truth behind these images, especially in Spain and Portugal, but three clarifications add to the complexity of the workings of the inquisitions on the Italian peninsula, which began to operate in the 1520s.

Firstly, there was not one central Italian Catholic inquisition as in Spain or Portugal, but rather at least fifty local inquisitions of the various jurisdictions, functioning with little coordination. Most famously the Roman Inquisition, established in stages between 1532 and 1542, was in the hands of the papacy and had influence throughout Italy. The Venetian Inquisition, established between 1533 and 1540, impacted on all Venetian territories. Its work is the most well known because of the amount of surviving documentation and the fact that most of the cases involving Christians following Jewish practices, known as judaizing, have been published. Despite the fact that Venice was often in conflict with the Papal States over territory, appointment of clerics within the Venetian state, taxes on Church property, and legal jurisdiction over clerics (which became heated enough to lead to the Church’s excommunicating Venice in 1509 and again in 1606–1607), Venice’s concern for supervising the Catholic faith remained strong.

The second clarification is that the primary target of inquisitions was not Jews, who had the right to practice Judaism as long as they did not try to convert Christians to Judaism or disseminate material against Christianity; rather, the inquisitions’ main focus was Christians accused of heresy, such as judaizing, blasphemy, witchcraft, magic, homosexuality, conversion to Islam, and sympathies for Protestants and Church reform. Of particular interest to our study is the concern that the Italian inquisitions showed for Catholic men making and breaking clandestine marriages under false pretenses and practicing polygamy, practices that the Church wanted to eliminate, at the same time that Jews openly maintained a system that allowed for polygamy.

The third clarification is that on the Italian peninsula, unlike on the Iberian, relatively few people were burned alive or otherwise put to death, but rather received lesser punishments and usually were reconciled with the Church. In Italy, everybody lived under the supervision of an inquisition, but as long as Jews lived as Jews, the inquisitions did not jeopardize their right to live as Jews in Italy.¹

On the Iberian Peninsula and in the Iberian diaspora in Catholic Europe, under extensive surveillance by the inquisitions, the practice of crypto-Judaism was difficult. The public realm of male-run synagogues, schools, and rabbinic courts could no longer function. Instead, much of crypto-Jewish practice involved the private domestic space of home and family supervised by women, especially attenuated forms of dietary, Sabbath, and holiday practices.

The main aspect of the life of crypto-Jews was an individual sense that they were not fully Jewish, nor were they fully Catholic, and that every crypto-Jew was his or her own rabbi. At great personal risk, New Christians chose to practice Judaism on a voluntary basis, without the traditional framework, guidance, and coercion of rabbis and the Jewish community.

As former crypto-Jews eschewed Catholicism and resettled as Jews in permissive locations, especially in the port cities of Amsterdam, Hamburg, Venice, Ancona, and Leghorn, as well as North Africa, the Ottoman Empire, and the Americas, not only did they not possess traditional rabbinic knowledge but some also brought dissenting traditions that could undermine rabbinic authority in Jewish communities. As these refugees joined established Jewish communities, free of the inquisitions and of rabbinic authority, they produced significant changes. This change in Jewish life allowed for new kinds of leadership no longer based on an aristocracy of rabbinic learning but rather one based on risk taking, financial prowess, and individual initiatives, which also opened leadership opportunities for some women.²

Ghettos

The ghetto, understood in its original sense as a compulsory, segregated, and enclosed Jewish area of residence, was an early modern Italian invention. During the Middle Ages, Jews did not live in such ghettos. They often lived together in Jewish quarters, but their choice to do so was voluntary. Before the thirteenth century, a few authorities attempted to compel Jews to live in segregated quarters surrounded by walls and gates, but there is little evidence that they were successful until the fifteenth century, and then primarily on the Iberian Peninsula and, most notably, in the free city of Frankfurt beginning in 1462.

It was only in Venice in 1516 that the term ghetto was first applied to the innovation of a systematically compulsory, segregated, and enforced physically enclosed area for Jews, especially at night when gates were locked and guards posted. The establishment of the ghetto was the result of a series of negotiations and compromises that involved Jews, government officials, and clergy. However, the existence of the ghetto did not guarantee a permanent right to live there, for in Venice as in most places on the Italian peninsula, residency was dependent on charters of limited duration granted to Jewish communities. Thus, during the period of sanctioned residence in a ghetto, Jews had contractual rights; but whether or not the charters were renewed was another matter.

A look at the establishment of the ghettos of Venice is instructive about Jewish life in Italy. In 1509, when, as part of the Italian Wars, the armies of the League of Cambrai (1508–1516) invaded Venice’s mainland, Venice allowed Jews to take refuge in the city. Later, in 1513, in exchange for an annual payment from the Jews, the government issued a charter authorizing the Jewish pawnbroke...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface: “Unwilling to Allow His Wife a Divorce, He Marries Another”
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Jews, Women, and Rabbis in Italy
• 2 Negotiating Engagement: Anticipating Danger
• 3 Breaking Betrothals: Fleeing Danger
• 4 Negotiating In and Out of Marriage
• 5 Anticipating Death: Negotiating Assets
• 6 Remarriage: Negotiations Between Families
• 7 Conclusion
• Index