In 1688, as in every year, there were two moments in the ritual year, at the end of the service on Yom Kippur and at the end of the Passover Seder, when Jews turned to one another and said, “L’shanah haba-ah b’yerushalayim. . . . Next year may we be in Jerusalem.” One was in public, at the end of the deep self-searchings of the Day of Atonement; the other was around the family table, questioning the children, teaching them to remember.
There were Jews in Jerusalem and elsewhere in the homeland they called the Land of Israel, but for most, this ceremonial phrase was the expression of a deep longing that was not at all likely ever to be fulfilled. In fact the paradoxes of exile and nonfulfillment were especially deep in Jerusalem. There, on the solemn fast of the ninth of Ab (August 5 in 1688), Jews gathered at the Western Wall of the Temple of Solomon to commemorate the destruction of the temple in 586 B.C.E. and the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 C.E; both were supposed to have taken place on this date. Jerusalem in 1688 was not rigidly divided into ethnic or religious quarters, but the most important center of Jewish residence was a bit to the west of the Western Wall, and the Jews had to make their way through a neighborhood crowded with North African Muslims to get there. There also were quite a few Muslim schools and pious foundations in the area, but some of these may have been shifting to use as private residences by this time. Worst of all for the Jews, the site of the temple, above the Western Wall, was occupied by the splendid Muslim shrines of the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock; Jews might be chased away if they even tried to look through the gates. Thus, even though they were in Jerusalem, it was altogether appropriate that they should mourn the destructions of the temples with a fast as strict as that of Yom Kippur, that the morning service on this day should be the only worship in the year when men did not wear their prayer shawls and tefillin (small boxes containing scriptural passages), and that everyone wept and cried in distress.
In exile, as understood by main line rabbinic Judaism, there was little prospect of a breakthrough, a radical healing and returning, within one’s lifetime. Careful adherence to tradition became, as it does for many other kinds of émigrés, a prime means of remembering, of keeping faith with one’s origins. For all Jews, the community, its annual round of observances, its adherence to law remained fundamental to personal and cultural survival in exile. In addition, family values and observances were somewhere near the center of what it meant to be a Jew.
In the summer of 1688 Glikl bas Judah Leib* watched with deep pleasure as her son Mordecai stood beneath the wedding canopy with the daughter of Moses ben Nathan, an eminence in the Jewish community of Hamburg. Mordecai was a fine young man and, young a,s he was, already a great help to his father, Haim Leib, in his business; recently he had gone with his father to Leipzig and had nursed him devotedly when he fell ill. Haim had given the bride a dowry of one thousand Reichsthalers, and Moses ben Nathan had given her three thousand Reichsthalers in Danish currency. The two families had shared wedding expenses of more than three hundred Reichsthalers, and the groom’s parents had agreed to give them free room and board for two years, as was often done, especially since many Jewish couples were married quite young. Glikl had been married at the age of fourteen and had celebrated the first wedding of a child when she was twenty-six or twenty-seven. Mordecai, aged nineteen or twenty, was the fourth to be married; there were eight to go.
Glikl was the daughter of Judah Joseph or Judah Leib, a prosperous Hamburg merchant, and Beila, daughter of Nathan Melrich of Altona. Her father’s treating his widowed mother-in-law “with all the honor in the world” was an important lesson in the values that remained central to her life. Hamburg was a major port and commercial center, a good location for a diligent and intelligent merchant, but it was not always hospitable to Jews. The Lutheran clergy were hostile, and sailors and apprentices taunted the Jews in the streets and were always looking for an excuse to attack them and plunder their houses. Nearby Altona, in the lands of the king of Denmark, was less central but more tolerant. Glikl’s family and many others moved back and forth a good deal. Haim traded in gold, silver, pearls, and jewels, traveling regularly to the fairs at Leipzig and Frankfurt am Main and using reliable Jewish agents for transactions elsewhere. Glikl was a full partner in all his business decisions.
With no secure place of their own in the world of war and statecraft, Jews depended on their good names to support their commercial credit. In addition to their troubles with Christian rulers and merchants, they could be ruthless in collecting debts from each other, especially when they feared that the debtor was not a person of good character and credit. Thus it is not surprising to find Glikl much concerned with oysher un koved, wealth and honor. The Yiddish that was her first language is a language rooted in German, written in the Hebrew alphabet and with an abundance of borrowings from Hebrew; the appearance of two Hebrew-rooted words here expresses her seriousness about these matters. Early and good marriages were important components of wealth and honor. Most of the Jewish communities in German-speaking lands were fairly small, and a wide search might be required to find a son-in-law or daughter-in-law of good character and lineage. A kinship network in several trading centers definitely had its uses.
Haim and Glikl had not started out with much; but they were intelligent and hardworking, and their wealth and credit grew steadily. Of the fourteen children Glikl bore, twelve lived to adulthood, a far better proportion than in most noble or royal families. Then in January 1689 Haim fell as he was going to a business appointment and aggravated an old abdominal hernia or other “rupture.” The doctors could do nothing. Glikl had not yet gone to her cleansing bath at the end of her menstrual period. She offered to embrace him anyway. He replied, “God forbid, my child; it will not be long before you go to your bath.” But he died before she could hold him again. The doctor, leaning close to his lips, heard him whisper, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.”
Haim had left no executors or guardians for his family. “My wife knows everything. She will do as she has always done,” he said. She simply carried on his business, occasionally traveling herself but more often using trusted agents. But she still had eight children to marry off. The sense of loss and uncertainty kept her awake at night. She began to write out her recollections of her life, for the future benefit of her children. She wrote in Yiddish, but a close reading of her memoirs makes it clear that she could read German and a bit of Hebrew, although it seems that more of her knowledge of Hebrew came from what she had heard from the women’s gallery of the synagogue than from her own reading. It was far from rare for seventeenth-century Jews, men and women, to leave behind ethical testaments and life recollections for their children. Glikl had a real knack for storytelling; today she might have written mysteries. I suspect one of the first full expressions she gave to this talent, as she wrote in those sleepless nights, was an involved tale of how the murders of two Jews for their money had been uncovered in 1687 because a sleepless Jewish wife happened to look out her window in the middle of the night and saw a Christian couple sneaking away with a large, heavy chest. She began her telling of this story with a double-edged quotation of Scripture: “He watching over Israel slumbers not nor sleeps.”
Glikl’s account of her married life occasionally gave way to anguished exclamations of how soon and suddenly it would be over: “But I, foolish one, did not know how well things were with me when ‘my children were like olive trees around my table.’ ” If God never slept in watching over His People, her loss must be explained by her sins, as the Exile was explained by the sins of the Jews. It was not easy to reconcile this with her well-founded sense of herself as a good wife and mother, rich in wealth and honor. Once she speculated that God “had already long ago decided on my doom and affliction to punish me for my sins in relying on people.” She wrote this in describing her troubles after her husband’s death, when a beloved daughter made an unsuitable marriage in Berlin and soon died, and a son turned out to be such a feckless businessman that she had to pay off his debts and make him her employee.
In her widowhood she turned down a number of attractive marriage offers, which she later regretted. One by one her children were married off. Hamburg had not gotten any more comfortable for its Jews. In 1699 she accepted a proposal from the rich Hirsch Levy of Metz, where a prosperous Jewish community sometimes was able to exploit its trading connections across the frontier between France and the Holy Roman Empire. In 1700 she left Hamburg, taking her last unmarried daughter with her. She was impressed by Hirsch Levy’s lavish household, but in less than two years he went bankrupt. The couple had to be helped out of their debts by their married children. Hirsch died in 1712; Glikl lived on in Metz with a married daughter until her death in 1724.
On Friday, April 2, 1688, in the small city of Colorno near Parma in northern Italy, a marriage contract was signed between Samuel Hayyim, son of Yosef Fontanella, and Stella, daughter of Zechariah Fontanella. For the Jews of southern Europe in early modern times, the marriage contract (ketubbah) was not a legalistic preliminary to a marriage but a vital feature of its consecration, to be lovingly prepared and elaborately ornamented, a celebration of the Word and of the deepest sanctities of family and community. In the Fontanella ketubbah a central inscription in Aramaic spelled out the terms of the marriage agreement. All around it, on a sheet of parchment about sixty centimeters square, were elaborate and beautiful decorations. Near the top was a crown, below it a dove carrying an olive branch. Within the outer border were two framed passages, one from Jeremiah—“The Lord named you ‘verdant olive tree,’ fair, with choice fruit”—and the other from the Song of Songs: “Only one is my dove, my perfect one. The only one of her mother, the delight of her who bore her.” Both this outer border and the space between it and the central inscription were filled with an elaborate pattern of vines, leaves, flowers, and fruit, painted in green with a great deal of gold overlay. The Italian wish “May they be fruitful and multiply, full of vigor. May it be granted to them to see their children’s children” began in large letters flanking the crown and continued above the contract text. Interspersed among the vines were the words of Psalm 128: “Thy wife shall be as the fruitful vine upon the walls of thine house, thy children like the olive branches round about thy table. The Lord thy God from out of Zion shall so bless thee, that thou shalt see Jerusalem in prosperity all thy life long. Yea, thou shalt see thy children’s children, and peace shall be upon Israel.” Most remarkably, all the leaves and vines of the decoration were outlined with lines of micrographic Hebrew script, the letters about one millimeter high, repeating the entire texts of Esther and the Song of Songs.
The Jews of early modern Italy did not live entirely cut off from the surrounding Christian society, and many of their ketubbot used elements from that society or from the Mediterranean’s common heritage of Greek and Roman themes. In the contract of Samuel Hayyim and Stella Fontanella, there are only a few such non-Jewish elements. The painstaking beauty of the micrographic script outlining the stems, leaves, and flowers is a distinctive Jewish art form. The tiny letters spell out a story of wifely commitment and steadfastness and a passionate love poem. Sacred text creates a fruitful world.
The marriage contract of Samuel Hayyim Fontanella and Stella Fontanella, Colorno, 1688, with detail
Who, then, were these two young people with the same last name? There were many Fontanellas in Colorno. Presumably the couple’s cousin-hood was distant enough to avoid the prohibitions of Mosaic law. We know of them only because generations of descendants and collectors preserved their magnificent marriage contract, which today is in the collection of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York. Only one of the couple left a personal trace in the historical record; by custom, the groom and a witness signed the marriage contract, but the bride did not sign. Another ketubbah from Colorno has been preserved, from the 1720s; the bride is Grazia, daughter of Samuel Hayyim Fontanella.
*In many works referred to by the German form, Glückel of Hameln,