Sephardi Family Life in the Early Modern Diaspora

Julia R. Lieberman

• Publisher: Brandeis University Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781584659433
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This collection of essays examines an important and under-studied topic in early modern Jewish social history"—the family life of Sephardi Jewish families in the Ottoman Empire as well as in communities in Western Europe. At the height of its power in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Ottoman Empire spanned three continents, controlling much of southeastern Europe, western Asia, and North Africa. Thousands of Jewish families that had been expelled from Spain and Portugal at the end of the fifteenth century created communities in these far-flung locations. Later emigrants from Iberia, who converted to Christianity at the time of the expulsion or before, created communities in Western European cities such as Amsterdam, Hamburg, and Livorno. Sephardi communities were very different from those of Ashkenazi Jews in the same period. The authors of these essays use the lens of domestic life to illuminate the diversity of the post-Inquisition Sephardi Jewish experience, enabling readers to enter into little-known and little-studied Jewish historical episodes. Contributors include: Tirtsah Levie Bernfeld, Hannah Davidson, Cristina Galasso, David Graizbord, Ruth Lamdan, and Julia Lieberman

II

Western Sephardi Households

WOMEN, CHILDREN, AND LIFE-CYCLE EVENTS

3

Religious Space, Gender, and Power in the Sephardi Diaspora

The Return to Judaism of New Christian Men and Women in Livorno and Pisa

CRISTINA GALASSO

In this essay I will present some results in the form of suggestions and hypotheses from a larger study on “New Christian” men and women who arrived in Livorno and Pisa in the seventeenth century and returned to Judaism. The privileges granted by the Livornine induced descendents of conversos to forsake the Iberian Peninsula at the end of the sixteenth century and create, first in Pisa and then in Livorno, important Jewish communities primarily composed of those wanting to return to the public practice of Judaism.¹ Before arriving in Tuscany or in other “lands of Judaism,” where they could profess their faith without fear, the conversos had often remained secretly attached to Judaism, observing traditional Jewish practices and beliefs in the safety of their homes. Over time and the passage of generations, however, the tension between Judaism and Christianity,² which is one of the hallmarks of Marrano religiosity,³ caused these practices and beliefs to undergo transformations, hybridization, and syncretism.

Marranism was not only a complex religious phenomenon but, above all, a social system based on three closely connected elements: the construction of a network based on business relationships, religious complicity, and family ties; endogamous marriage; and the centrality of domestic and family space. With particular emphasis on the latter, I will demonstrate how the passage from the secrecy of crypto-Judaism to normative Judaism and communal life redefined the roles of gender, power, and religious space.

The Home, Temple of Crypto-Judaism

As Cecil Roth observed in 1932 in his renowned The History of the Marranos, in crypto-Judaism it is significant that women took a prominent part in the initiations to Judaism in several known cases, showed an especial familiarity with the prayers, and were in some instances peculiarly meticulous in their observance.⁴

Recent studies on the religiosity and lifestyle of crypto-Jews have shown that as women took on a crucial role in the construction and transmission of Jewish traditions, there was a corresponding privatization of ritual and practice, the development of a domestic religiosity.⁵ As Renée Levine Melammed emphasizes in her study of Castilian crypto-Jews between the fifteen and sixteenth centuries, traditionally the women had kindled lights on Friday evening, prepared Shabbat meal, baked matzah,⁶ and observed the dietary laws and the like: Now these observances would become the major symbols of crypto-Judaism.⁷

According to Jewish tradition, men are obliged to observe the commandments, pray at least three times a day—preferably in synagogue and in the presence of ten adults (minyan)—as well as study the Torah and oversee their sons’ education. The responsibility for principal religious functions and duties as well as the administration of justice also fall to men. The center of male religious activity, therefore, is outside the home and revolves around such institutions as the synagogue, the religious schools, the confraternities, and the courts.

After 1492 these spaces, and, consequently, most religious functions and customs men traditionally oversaw, disappeared. Even their sacred books were taken from them. The People of the Book became a people without books, and oral transmission came to be the principal carrier of Jewish knowledge.⁸ Accordingly there was a drastic contraction of public and institutional religious life in converso communities that continued to remain attached to Judaism. The spaces where men could exercise their authority and display their religious identity dried up, resulting in a diminution of male power. The domestic sphere, where women had always been in charge, became the center of crypto-Jewish life. Those Jewish customs and norms that had traditionally been in the domain of women (such as diet, Shabbat, the ritual bath) became crucial in crypto-Jewish life because they were the only ones that could be maintained and transmitted to the next generation—or to anyone, for that matter—who had never entered a synagogue or received a Jewish education in a yeshivah.⁹ A similar phenomenon can be found in another community of New Christians, the Moriscos of Spain. The Morisco home was, as was the Marrano home, “a bastion of cultural resistance where women played leading roles in preserving tradition and resisting Christian hegemony.”¹⁰

The long clandestine existence of crypto-Jews and their descendents brought an end to the public display of Judaism and a corresponding increase in the importance of home and family: The house replaced the synagogue, becoming the temple of crypto-Judaism. Domestic space became the only space where conversos could construct—both physically and spiritually—live, and transmit their religion. The family, especially the woman in her role as mother and wife, provided the motive and strength for the maintenance of and connection to one’s faith. Home and family were the spaces of unveiling, where men and women could reveal their true identity and practice the faith of their forefathers, sheltered from prying eyes and protected by the family bond.

Domestic rituals performed on Shabbat and the major holidays were the heart of Marranism, and the responsibility of celebrating them fell to women. They prepared food, washed clothes and dishes, and lit candles.¹¹ Crypto- Jewish women learned to observe the Laws of Moses as children from their mothers and other female relatives. Sarah, alias Eleonora Nunez, a Marrana arrested by the Holy Office of Pisa in 1671, told the inquisitor that when her parents died she was taken in by a maternal aunt who taught her at twelve “how to behave and what to do in order to be able to observe Mosaic law.”¹² Sarah demonstrated not only a fervent belief in, but also a profound knowledge of, Jewish law when she appeared before the Inquisition of Pisa, which described her as “Woman and Rabbi.”¹³ To the inquisitor’s question of what constituted Judaism for both men and women, she replied: “Mosaic law demands that men be circumcised, observe the Sabbath and all the commandments. Of women it demands cleanliness, the timely lighting of Sabbath candles, and the blessing over flour for bread.”¹⁴

When she reached adulthood, Sarah married her cousin and moved from Murcia to Osuna. There she met Francesca di Melia, a widow originally from Portugal, who introduced her into the company of crypto-Jews, to whom the widow opened her home and “advised as to . . . the days on which they were to fast [e.g. Yom Kippur].”¹⁵ After her husband’s death at the hands of the Inquisition, Sarah and her three children moved to Livorno. Her two daughters married and successfully integrated into the Livorno Jewish community, whereas her son chose instead to convert to Catholicism, a decision that led him to confess his crypto-Jewish past and resulted in his mother’s arrest.

As Sarah testified, some authoritative crypto-Jewish women in both Iberia and the New World governed communities as “women rabbis” (or “dogmatists,” as inquisitional sources occasionally referred to them) who “were at one and the same time initiators, officiants, and spiritual guides.”¹⁶ These women led prayers and fasts, delivered benedictions on holidays, indoctrinated the young, prepared the dead for burial, and advised group members on how to conduct themselves in daily life.¹⁷ Some of them even had leading roles in the messianic movements sweeping the crypto-Jewish world during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Indeed, at the end of the fifteenth century and in the early years of the sixteenth, two conversas in Castille, Inés de Herrera and Mari Gómez de Chillón, announced the coming of the Messiah and the return of conversos to the Promised Land.¹⁸ Later, in the 1640s, crypto-Jews living in Mexico believed that Juana Enriquez, the wife of Simon Vaez Sevilla, whose house the inquisitors called a synagogue, was the Messiah’s mother because it was rumored that his arrival was imminent and that he would be born on American soil to a woman of the Enriquez family.¹⁹

Crypto-Jewish religiosity was “other” vis-à -vis rabbinic Judaism, which the descendents of conversos almost entirely ignored. It developed as a result of the concentration of traditional Judaism into a few essential rituals that were transmitted by word of mouth, in conjunction with a concurrent Catholic upbringing and attendance at Christian sites and rituals (although conversos often tried to resist by means of simulation). Marranism was profoundly stamped by Catholicism and Iberian folklore, and by rituals that developed from its stat...