Little attention has been devoted to the singularity of the Sephardic experience within the now well-developed historiography of the Jewish family—particularly not in English. Julia R. Lieberman addresses this lacuna with her focused and thematically unified volume, Sephardi Family Life in the Early Modern Diaspora. This interdisciplinary collection of essays, which brings together scholars from diverse fields, across several countries, is the most recent addition to the Hadassah Brandeis Institute Series on Jewish Women.
Sephardi Family Life in the Early Modern Diaspora is divided into three sections devoted respectively to family life among Eastern Sephardim, Western Sephardim, and judeoconversos in transition from Catholicism to Judaism. One important similarity that pervades family life both in the Eastern and Western Sephardic disaporas is the resilient Iberian cultural heritage that Sephardim took with them into their new communities and which gives the volume its thematic unity. For Eastern Sephardim, arrival in Ottoman lands forced a reassessment of their own family traditions in negotiation with the indigenous customs of the Romaniot. Among nostalgic Sephardic rabbis in Ottoman cities, the resilience of Spanish traditions bolstered their own sense of cultural singularity and superiority. In the West, newly rejudaized Sephardim clung to Iberian cultural precedents as they accommodated to rabbinic norms in ways that permeated all aspects of family life. Not only were life-cycle rituals such as circumcision stamped with salvific significance, but also “family economies,” patterns of inheritance, the public roles of women, and educational endeavors all seemed to be informed by a continuity of Iberian hierarchal family structures and values.
Another important thematic arch running through the essays is a unanimous rejection of Philippe Ariès' pioneering theory that high infant mortality rates in premodern Europe engendered an emotional distance between parents and children. To the contrary, several of the contributors present evidence from both East and West pointing to Sephardic women's emotional bonds with their children. The evidence presented ranges from a sensitivity among rabbinic respondents to the emotional connections forged between mothers and children while nursing, to the legal guardianship of children based on affective concerns. The contributors to this volume have thus begun forging the way toward comprehending the history of emotions for premodern Jews.
Any study of family life in the early modern Sephardic diasporas suffers from a paucity of sources, and as such, there is considerable uniformity in the use of documentation within each section. The two essays devoted to Eastern Sephardim rely almost exclusively on rabbinic responsa. The three devoted to Western Sephardim in Amsterdam, Livorno, and Hamburg, though employing a range of notarial sources, are all indebted to Menasseh ben Israel's compendium of traditions and laws, the Thesovro dos Dinim (1647). The extensive, though not exhaustive, analysis devoted to Menasseh's understudied and undervalued Thesovro is one of the most groundbreaking contributions of this volume.
Hannah Davidson investigates the Sephardic custom of giving sivlonot before kiddushin, an issue that became a point of tension between the immigrant Sephardic community and the indigenous Romaniot community of the Ottoman Empire for whom the receiving of gifts was tantamount to kiddushin (therefore requiring a get if the engagement is broken off). Not only did Sephardic rabbis approach the issue with a sense of nostalgia and communal pride, but also an ethos of cultural and moral superiority. This sense of moral superiority manifested through the calculation that if giving gifts was synonymous with kiddushin, as with the Romaniot, it was because Romaniot women were perceived as frivolous and likely to abandon an engagement. Therefore, Romaniot women are perceived as lacking the same “feminine virtue” for which Sephardic women are seen to epitomize.
Ruth Lamdan mines rabbinic responsa for the otherwise hidden private lives of Sephardic women. Through the writings of men, she uncovers the intimate lives of Sephardic women with discussions of pregnancy, birth, nursing, and child rearing. Her conclusions are multifarious: Sephardic rabbis were extraordinarily flexible in their definition of family (and were particularly open to polygamy), women exercized considerable agency and legal autonomy in matters of family and their own private lives, and that rabbinic responsa, if read between the lines, can be rich sources for harvesting the history of emotions.
Turning to the West, Christina Galasso argues that with the establishment of new Jewish communities in Western Europe came the institutionalization of Jewish life and thus the communal dominance of men. In Iberia, women had been the principal custodians of crypto-Judaism relegated to the domestic sphere. As such, rejudaization and the replacement of the home for the synagogue had a profound limiting effect on the public role of women—a gendered disparity that has been lost in previous studies of rejudaization.
Julia R. Lieberman explores Western Sephardic family culture through the lens of Menasseh ben Israel's Thesovro dos Dinim. Consistent with the overarching theme of the volume, Lieberman writes, “the Thesovro presents a view of the household rooted in contemporary Iberian social values” (131). Systematically unpacking the Thesovro, she deconstructs the Sephardic family, starting with the household. She concludes that Western Sephardim conformed to an expansive premodern definition of household that included the nuclear family as well as extended kin and domestic labor predicated on Iberian-style patriarchal hierarchies. She goes on to discuss Menasseh's presentation of marriage, domestic abuse, child mortality, life-cycle rituals, infancy, swaddling, and illegitimacy. With a specific focus on childhood, Lieberman investigates education and adolescents with the aim of revising Ariès' theories, pointing to a distinctive developmental stage of childhood and adolescence for early modern Western Sephardim.
Tirtsah Levie Bernfeld's contribution, rich in previously unstudied archival sources, uncovers the layers of public identity possessed by Sephardic women of Amsterdam across classes. She seeks to overturn a prevailing narrative whereby the Sephardic women of Amsterdam lived out their lives “withdrawn, silent, and suppressed” (183). She begins by looking at deviancy, such as cases of adultery, as one mode of female self-determination. She uncovers legal proceedings where women, in the absence of a male presence, represented themselves on their own accord. She then looks at professionalized women who engaged in a trade in order to contribute to the family economy or for their own self-fulfillment both among the economic elite and the indigent. Bernfeld also explores women's contribution to Jewish communal life chiefly through their participation in confraternities offering an important point of internal dialogue with Galasso.
David Graizbord, with his usual creativity and lucidity, directs our attention to the methodological pitfalls of using inquisitorial documents to reconstruct family life and the experience of childhood among judeoconversos and “New Jews.” He frames his discussion within the now well-established model of “inward acculturation” or the “Jews' creative appropriation or adaptation of cultural material originating outside their corporate communities to shape unique forms of cultural expression” (226). Through inquisitorial testimonies he shows how judeoconversos in southwestern France nurtured flexible identities that allowed them to cross, with unparalleled fluidity, both national and cultural boundaries. Western Sephardim are therefore the quintessential model of early modern “cultural hybridity” and “inward acculturation.” This cultural hybridity left an indelible stamp on how Western Sephardim perceived family. The resilient Iberian heritage that informed the decidedly rabbinic approach to family life in the Thesovro serves as one example. Graizbord's essay offers a synthesis of the main themes of the volume as a whole, which presents the early modern Sephardic family as one in transition, negotiating their “luso-hispanicity” with the cultural norms of their adopted diasporic environments.
By way of conclusion, one of the greatest benefits of Sephardi Family Life in the Early Modern Diaspora, which is unfortunately so rare for edited volumes, is its consolidated bibliography in addition to notes at the end of each essay. The volume is thus an invaluable resource for both students and experienced researchers studying early modern Jewry, the Sephardic diasporic experience, or Jewish family life.
