Description
This presentation explores the changes of attitudes toward illicit sexual relations within the ghetto societies that occurred in Italy between the late seventeenth century and the middle of the eighteenth century, with a specific focus on young Jewish maidservants. It analyzes how Italian Jewish leadership, both lay and rabbinical, acted in regard to the vicissitudes of Jewish women who faced seduction, sexual exploitation, and pregnancy under the Jewish roof. This analysis uses archival sources from both Jewish courts and civic magistracies in the cities of Venice, Mantua, and Modena during the years 1691-1751. Through a combination of paternalism, cohesiveness, innovation, and surveillance, Italian Jewish communities were capable of containing destabilizing behaviors within the society, and reintegrating women who otherwise would have been tragically lost by obliging the seducers to marry them, or to take care of them as well as their illegitimate children. As recent scholarship has demonstrated, in both contemporaneous Italian Christian contexts and other European Jewish communities women in similar conditions were often rejected and left alone, along with their illegitimate offspring.
Start Date
17-8-2015 12:00 AM
Location
Ohio State University, Columbus
Included in
Cultural History Commons, European History Commons, History of Religion Commons, Jewish Studies Commons, Social History Commons
Illicit Sex and Law in Early-Modern Italian Ghettos
Ohio State University, Columbus
This presentation explores the changes of attitudes toward illicit sexual relations within the ghetto societies that occurred in Italy between the late seventeenth century and the middle of the eighteenth century, with a specific focus on young Jewish maidservants. It analyzes how Italian Jewish leadership, both lay and rabbinical, acted in regard to the vicissitudes of Jewish women who faced seduction, sexual exploitation, and pregnancy under the Jewish roof. This analysis uses archival sources from both Jewish courts and civic magistracies in the cities of Venice, Mantua, and Modena during the years 1691-1751. Through a combination of paternalism, cohesiveness, innovation, and surveillance, Italian Jewish communities were capable of containing destabilizing behaviors within the society, and reintegrating women who otherwise would have been tragically lost by obliging the seducers to marry them, or to take care of them as well as their illegitimate children. As recent scholarship has demonstrated, in both contemporaneous Italian Christian contexts and other European Jewish communities women in similar conditions were often rejected and left alone, along with their illegitimate offspring.
