Sephardi Family Life in the Early Modern Diaspora HBI Series on Jewish Women Shulamit Reinharz, General Editor Sylvia Barack Fishman, Associate Editor

Sephardi Family Life in the Early Modern Diaspora HBI Series on Jewish Women Shulamit Reinharz, General Editor Sylvia Barack Fishman, Associate Editor The HBI Series on Jewish Women, created by the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, pub- lishes a wide range of books by and about Jewish women in diverse contexts and time periods. Of interest to scholars and the educated public, the HBI Series on Jewish Women fi lls major gaps in Jewish Studies and in Women and Gender Studies as well as their intersection. The HBI Series on Jewish Women is supported by a generous gift from Dr. Laura S. Schor. For the complete list of books that are available in this series, please see www.upne.com Sonja M. Hedgepeth and Rochelle G. Ruth Kark, Margalit Shilo, and Galit Saidel, editors, Sexual Violence against Hasan-Rokem, editors, Jewish Women in Jewish Women during the Holocaust Pre-State Israel: Life History, Politics, and Culture Julia R. Lieberman, editor, Sephardi Family Life in the Early Modern Diaspora Tova Hartman, Feminism Encounters Traditional Judaism: Resistance and Derek Rubin, editor, Promised Lands: Accommodation New Jewish American Fiction on Longing and Belonging Anne Lapidus Lerner, Eternally Eve: Images of Eve in the Hebrew Bible, Carol K. Ingall, editor, The Women Who Midrash, and Modern Jewish Poetry Reconstructed American Jewish Education: 1910–1965 Margalit Shilo, Princess or Prisoner? Jewish Women in Jerusalem, 1840–1914 Gaby Brimmer and Elena Poniatowska, Gaby Brimmer Marcia Falk, translator, The Song of Songs: Love Lyrics from the Bible Harriet Hartman and Moshe Hartman, Gender and American Jews: Patterns in Sylvia Barack Fishman, Double or Work, Education, and Family in Nothing? Jewish Families and Mixed Contemporary Life Marriage Dvora E. Weisberg, Levirate Marriage and Avraham Grossman, Pious and Rebellious: the Family in Ancient Judaism Jewish Women in Medieval Europe Ellen M. Umansky and Dianne Ashton, Iris Parush, Reading Jewish Women: editors, Four Centuries of Jewish Women’s Marginality and Modernization in Spirituality: A Sourcebook Nineteenth-Century Eastern European Jewish Society Carole S. Kessner, Marie Syrkin: Values Beyond the Self Sephardi Family Life h in the i Early Modern Diaspora Edited by julia r. lieberman brandeis university press Waltham, Massachusetts Published by University Press of New England Hanover and London Brandeis University Press Published by University Press of New England www.upne.com © 2011 Brandeis University All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Designed by Katherine B. Kimball Typeset in Minion by Integrated Publishing Solutions This book was published with the generous support of the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation. University Press of New England is a member of the Green Press Initiative. The paper used in this book meets their minimum requirement for recycled paper. For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book, contact Permissions, University Press of New England, One Court Street, Suite 250, Lebanon NH 03766; or visit www.upne.com Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sephardi family life in the early modern diaspora / edited by Julia R. Lieberman. p. cm. — (HBI series on Jewish women) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-58465-916-7 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 978-1-58465-957-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Jews—Turkey—History—16th century. 2. Sephardim —Turkey—History—16th century. 3. Jewish converts from Christianity—Italy—History—17th century. 4. Jewish women — History —16th century. 5. Jewish women —History—17th century. 6. Sephardim— Social conditions—Europe, Western. 7. Jewish children—Social conditions—Europe, Western. 8. Family life—Europe, Western. I. Lieberman, Julia Rebollo. II. Title. III. Series. ds135.t8s426 2010 305.892'40560903—dc22 2010035171 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Foreword vii Preface xi Introduction: What is a Family? 1 I. Reconstructing Sephardi Family Life in the Ottoman Empire: The Exiles of 1492 1. Communal Pride and Feminine Virtue: “Suspecting Sivlonot” in the Jewish Communities of the Ottoman Empire in the Early Sixteenth Century hannah davidson / 23 2. Mothers and Children as Seen by Sixteenth-Century Rabbis in the Ottoman Empire ruth lamdan / 70 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 / 101 4. Childhood and Family among the Western Sephardim in the Seventeenth Century julia r. lieberman / 129 5. Sephardi Women in Holland’s Golden Age tirtsah levie bernfeld / 177 vi Contents III. Judeoconverso Families in the Diaspora: Cultural Commuting between Christianity and Judaism 6. Researching the Childhood of “New Jews” of the Western Sephardi Diaspora in Light of Recent Historiography david graizbord / 225 Glossary 247 List of Abbreviations 251 Bibliography 253 Contributors 275 Index 277 Foreword This fascinating collection of essays illuminates the diversity of the post- Inquisition Sephardi Jewish experience through the lens of domestic life. Julia R. Lieberman and a team of international scholars explore both daily and dra- matic aspects of Jewishness within diverse types of Jewish families in Italy, Hol- land, and across the Ottoman Empire, breaking new ground on important and often understudied chapters in early modern Jewish social history. During the fourteenth and fi fteenth centuries some Jews—and some crypto- Jews—correctly assessed the bleak future of Iberian Jewish life and set off for whichever locations were currently allowing Jewish immigration. In August 1492, following the Expulsion of “all Jews and Jewesses,” the last professing Se- phardi Jews left Spain. They joined brothers and sisters who preceded them to form new, distinctive, and often vibrant Jewish communities. Sephardi Jewish families who relocated into the Ottoman Empire arrived at their new homes with understandings of Jewishness, gender role construction, family structure, community organization, and relationship with outside cultures that differed substantively from those in many Ashkenazi societies. Many Jews who had lived in Spain and Portugal, for example, had adopted prevalent cultural attitudes toward women’s appropriate roles, which were in general fairly restricted. (In contrast, from the Middle Ages onward Ashkenazi women played important roles as brokers for Westernization; through their marketplace activities, these women helped to move European Jews toward the gradually emerging middle class.) Some of the Sephardi Jews who emigrated immediately before and after the expulsion were deeply religious Jews who lived according to rabbinic dictates in their new homes. Sephardi scholars—who had long been among the intellec- tual stars of rabbinic thinking and writing—continued with their scholarship. The Jewish communities they created continued to develop in particularistic ways, as transplanted Jews interacted with the cultures of their new neighbors. Later emigrants of Jewish background from the Iberian Peninsula to Western countries brought with them yet another approach to Jewishness, profoundly viii Foreword infl uenced by the repressive socio-religious and political conditions they had endured. The years of anti-Jewish riots and cataclysmic persecution that pre- cipitated the conversion of some of the most distinguished, well-educated, and affl uent Sephardi Jewish families—frequently thousands at a time—also had an impact on their relationship to Jews and Jewishness. Those crypto-Jews who remained in Spain and Portugal even after the Expulsion often lost touch with evolving halakhic developments in rabbinic Judaism. Some were suspicious of halakhic rules and norms they encountered when they eventually emigrated and made contact with traditionalist Sephardi Jews whose religious and cultural lives were more established. Confl icts sometimes erupted between earlier and later emigrants. Even for those who shared religious intensity, important cus- toms often differed signifi cantly. Nowhere were those arguments more signifi cant, contentious, and fraught with religious and social signifi cance than those cases that focused on the roles of women, the rites of marriage, and the structure of the family. Court cases, responsa literature, letters, memoirs, sermons, and other sources reveal stories that are compelling, some intriguing, some pathetic, with details of licit and illicit loves, children born and named in the synagogue and those born out of wedlock and deprived of primogeniture, fortunes made and stolen and squan- dered. Status within the Jewish community and peoplehood often hung in the balance for the individuals involved—and communal power hung in the balance for rabbis and leaders who provided confl icting sources of authority. Sephardi Jews were often skilled merchants, and some were involved in trade across national borders. Repeated rupture had created a sophisticated, enter- prising approach to existence. For a segment of the Sephardi population that emigrated from Spain and Portugal, this cosmopolitan lifestyle was a doorway to the gradual infl uences of modernity, and these Jews themselves played indi- rect (and sometimes direct) roles in societal changes. This was especially true in Western European countries, where acculturated Sephardi Jewish merchants were key players, and often had substantial social interactions with their Prot- estant neighbors. The extent of those porous boundaries—and the reason why they

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