3 
Religious Space, Gender, and Power in the Sephardi Diaspora
The Return to Judaism of New Christian Men and Women in Livorno and Pisa
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 status, as an oral and domestic religion. These rituals helped maintain the bond with Jewish tradition but, conversely, also transformed and adapted Marranism to new demands and functions.20
In the 1630s in the Mexico City home of Duarte de León Jaramillo, a crypto-Jew, a significant, albeit extreme, expression of Marrano religiosity took place.21 The day after inquisitors arrested his wife, Duarte took his three daughters and, in the presence of their brothers, undressed them to the waist, bound them and tied their wrists, and cut a piece of flesh “as big as a mezzo reale” (a coin) from their shoulders to “signify they were Jewish.” Then he roasted the pieces of flesh and together with his son Francisco, who, according to Jewish custom, had been circumcised at birth, ate them.22 Francisco related this extraordinary episode to the Inquisition in Mexico City in 1646, as did his sisters when they were arrested in 1657. Duarte’s son stated that his father had said that “their mother was imprisoned and punished because the sign of the Law was not on her children.”23 According to the inquisitors of Mexico City, Duarte was not alone in practicing this “particular ceremony”: It was widespread among crypto-Jews who lived there in the 1630s and 1640s. It represented a type of “female circumcision” performed on daughters “in recognition of Mosaic Law.”24 Although we cannot find other examples of this practice, it is certainly plausible that “a life of secrecy . . . and the obsession with transmitting an uncertain identity”25 led some crypto-Jewish groups to believe that circumcision, the symbol of a complete and irreversible attachment to Judaism, should be extended to women as well, especially in groups led by “dogmatists,” as was the case of Duarte and his followers.26 As we will see, circumcision, a crucial rite of converso reaffirmation of Judaism, continued to be a source of salvation and authentic affirmation of faith and identity, becoming more important in Marrano culture than it had in traditional Judaism.
Europa, Willem Jansz, Blaeu, Amsterdam, seventeenth century. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Amsterdam.
Crypto-Judaism revolved around the dichotomy of pure/impure, which, in Judaism, is primarily the concern of the domestic sphere, and the rituals of which are overseen by women. Crypto-Jewish culture attributed a new importance and meaning to the care of the body (the ritual bath after menses and childbirth, the cleaning of clothes and undergarments) and to diet (the observance of fasts and dietary laws, the preparation of food for the holidays). To maintain the purity and cleanliness of one’s body, bed, clothes, and food meant more than merely practicing Judaism and respecting the rites that permeate daily life, a time and space that is foreign to that of Christians. For the crypto-Jew it signified ridding oneself, one’s family, and one’s home of the contamination of forced conversion, a consequence of continual contact with Christians, their sacred objects, and their space.
All crypto-Jews, men as well as women, lived in state of perpetual niddah (impurity). By analogical extension, their continual apostasy rendered them as impure as a Jewish woman’s body during her menstrual period and after childbirth.27 Accordingly, crypto-Jews conferred new significance and power to the rites of purification connected to the state of niddah, particularly to the ritual bath (mikveh) that purifies the female body: In the confusion and despair that characterized the crypto-Jewish culture, the continued observance of family purity may have assumed special significance as rituals of cleansing and purification became contextualized by the sin of apostasy.28
Observance of the holidays also assumed special significance, especially those that recalled purification, atonement, salvation, or return, or celebrated people and moments of Jewish history comparable to the crypto-Jewish experience. Two such holidays were Yom Kippur and Purim. The latter, in particular, acquired centrality and meaning unknown to traditional Judaism.29 Purim represents a kind of carnival with its masked disguises, games, and banquets. Moreover, it is preceded by a fast, a cornerstone of Marrano religiosity.30 Purim is also called the Festival of Esther because it celebrates a woman who saved the Jewish nation in the time of King Ahasuerus. The story tells of how Esther convinced her husband, the king, to stop a planned massacre of the Jews ordered by his minister Haman, whom the king then condemned to death. Esther was a Jew who had hidden her true identity from her husband. Through prayer and fasting she was able to receive God’s favor and save her people. Purim is a “masked” holiday in every sense of the word: One wears a mask, Purim tells the story of a Jew who hid her real identity, and the spiritual and divine aspects of the story remain hidden. Indeed, the name of God does not appear in the Book of Esther, making it unique among all the books of the Bible. Moreover, the name Esther derives from the Hebrew word haster, which means to hide.31
Although the story of Esther, a secret Jew, revisits the crypto-Jewish experience, it is her role as protagonist that accounts for the centrality that she and Purim have acquired in crypto-Jewish religiosity. Moreover, the so-called Scroll of Esther (megillah), the text read on Purim, was traditionally the only Jewish book that women could read in public.32 Therefore, the festival of Esther is not only important in crypto-Jewish life, it is also imbued with a double valence: It contains all the basic elements of Marranism (salvation, secrecy, simulation, fasting, women protagonists) while simultaneously legitimizing women, allowing them to read a sacred text and be the carriers of religious knowledge.
The myth of Esther assumed so much power in crypto-Jewish culture that she became one of the key figures in syncretic crypto-Judaism.33 In his recent book La fede del ricordo, Nathan Wachtel recounts the story of Theresa Paes de Jesus, a crypto-Jew arrested with her two children by the Inquisition of Rio de Janeiro in 1718. To the inquisitor’s question about whom she prayed to, she replied:
When I was observing the law of Moses, I recited the Our Father and the Ave Maria, commending myself to queen Esther because they told me that she was Our Lady, that Moses was our God and she his mother. I thought that Jesus Christ was the same person as Moses, son of queen Esther, that he was king of the Jews, adored by Jews and Christians alike.34
In Theresa’s prayers, Queen Esther was the mother of Jesus/Moses: The two figures had merged into one. This identification appears to be the result not only of a formidable syncretism, the consequence of imbibing for centuries a culture that developed on the fringes of two identities, but it also provides the answer to a profound dilemma that characterizes crypto-Judaism. Esther was a crypto-Jew who married a gentile. Her marriage to King Ahasuerus symbolized the fate of many conversos. New Christians who were without a solid network of relationships in the crypto-Jewish community were left with only one possible choice—marriage to an “Old” Christian. The story of Esther, however, provided conversos with an example of a crypto-Jewish woman who, although married to a gentile, kept her faith and her loyalty to the Jewish people intact. She was not only a good Jew, but a veritable heroine. Still, the story of Esther did not clarify a crucial point of crypto-Jewish life. Were the children of mixed marriages between New and Old Christians Jewish, and were they Jewish if both their mother and father were New Christians?
Rabbis have spent untold hours discussing the problem of the religious affiliation of the descendents of conversos. Are they Jewish or not, given that they were uncircumcised, baptized, the offspring of Catholic marriages, and raised in such a way that they were only vaguely acquainted with their true origins and the Jewish faith? Should their reentry into Judaism be considered a reintegration or a conversion? Were they apostates or “repentant” Jews “who have come to find refuge under the wings of the Shekinah or the divine presence to observe again the laws of the Torah?”35 In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries most rabbis agreed with Maimonides that the conversos, that is, the anusim (those who have been forced) and their descendents, were Jews because, although forced into conversion, they remained secretly faithful to Judaism.36 However, with the massive diaspora of Iberian Jews in the beginning of the seventeenth century, rabbis more and more frequently voiced the opinion that the descendents of Marranos were not real Jews because they had lost respect for Mosaic law and, moreover, it was impossible to establish with certainty their Jewish roots.37
The public return to the Jewish faith of conversos coming from Iberia was called “coming to Judaism.” It signified a restoration of blood ties uniting the “children of Israel” and the public acceptance of Jewish law under rabbinic control. As we shall see, conversos were reconverted in different ways according to gender, and this led to a redefinition not only of space and religious power but of identity.
“Coming to Judaism,” or the Return to the Synagogue
Juan Pacheco de León, alias Salomon Mochorro, a Spanish crypto-Jew who had reverted to Judaism in Livorno and was later arrested by the Inquisition of Mexico City in 1642, described the Jewish community of Amsterdam to his cellmate after the latter asked what kind of life the Jews there led:
It’s a big city with a Jewish quarter of more than 12,000 married men belonging to the Nation. Nothing similar to what we’re subjected to here takes place there; everyone lives as he wishes.
Don’t they have a church for their ceremonies? [asked his cellmate]
Yes, of course, it is very beautiful, big and well appointed. During our holidays the men and women sit separately, and the children, both male and female, have their own area because the young are instructed, shown what they must observe, and are read the Law.38
For Juan, alias Salomon, being a Jew no longer constrained by secrecy and persecution meant that he could return to being a man among men, counted again among his “Nation,” and at last show his true identity in the synagogue, the heart of the community. The synagogue in question was a magnificent place where men and women sat separately, not together as they did in the secret temple of the crypto-Jewish house. Children learned Jewish law in the synagogue, listening to the Torah portion and to the rabbi’s teachings. As Yosef Kaplan, who is among the first to study the social impact of the return to Judaism of conversos in Amsterdam, has stressed, “The synagogue of the organized community took the place previously occupied by the crypto-Jewish home, which had served as a ‘clandestine temple’ for secret converso ceremonies.”39
The synagogue was where Jewish identity was constructed. It was so central to the crypto-Jewish return to Judaism that during the seventeenth century, conversos who did not publically re-embrace the Jewish faith were called “Jews without synagogue,” an expression that was added to those of “Jews without halakhah”40 and “Jews without Judaism.”41
As the Sephardi communities from Iberia were in the process of reclaiming their Jewish identity, one of their first initiatives was to define religious and public space. The synagogue again became the center of community life, taking the place of the crypto-Jewish home, the secret temple of the conversos. In Livorno, as in Amsterdam or London, the establishment of the community coincided with the construction of the synagogue. Unlike the places of worship in medieval Jewish settlements,42 a prayer room in the house of a rich merchant, the synagogue of Livorno, as the crypto-Jew Juan Pacheco remembered it, was a grandiose, sumptuous, and visible edifice. With its “monumental, imposing dimensions and beauty,” the Livorno synagogue became, in terms of size and importance, one of the principal buildings in the city and the second synagogue in Europe after that of Amsterdam.43 The latter, in particular, drew its inspiration from Solomon’s Temple of ancient times, a biblical revisiting dense with meaning because, as Daniel Swetschinski wrote: “In building the Esnoga based on the model of Solomon’s Temple, the Jews of Amsterdam created for themselves a place of collective memory, a concrete link to biblical history.”44
The Esnoga of Amsterdam, a model for the Livorno synagogue, revolutionized synagogue architecture.45 The synagogues of Livorno and Amsterdam were the first to have galleries in the sanctuary, a design probably borrowed from Christian churches. “Unlike what was typically found in other countries, and especially Italy, the galleries on the second floor accommodated both men and women.”46 Thus the women’s section was not on a higher floor but in a part of the sanctuary facing the center aisle, separated from the men’s area by a mehitzah made of wood.47
In addition to the synagogue, other spaces and institutions bore witness to the construction and subsequent public display of Jewish identity: the cemetery, the religious school, and the tribunal. Sacred space once again became public space, visible to all and controlled by men. The creation of a synagogue and of community spaces and institutions returned men to a position of authority and visibility, whereas it drastically reduced domestic and private space and resulted in a reevaluation of women’s place and power in the sacred sphere. The return to the public avowal of Judaism was characterized not only by respect for religious orthodoxy, of which the crypto-Jews had been completely ignorant, but also by the removal of some important religious functions from the home to the synagogue and from the family to the community. The process by which ex-conversos established Jewish communities is diametrically opposed to the one that had allowed crypto-Jews to survive and transmit a sense of belonging to Judaism to their descendents. This created strong tensions between the new Jewish families and the community because “the family . . . was not willing to renounce its previous functions and the Sephardi Jewish congregation . . . was intent on the institutionalization of Jewish life within the community.”48
In fact, all the Jewish communities originating in Iberia issued dispositions with the goal of institutionalizing religious life and marking precise boundaries between the sacred/public/male sphere and the private/domestic/female one. The same community statutes of the Sephardi Jews of Livorno and Pisa that guaranteed the uniqueness and centrality of the synagogue as a place of religious practice and life also prohibited synagogues with rites other than the Spanish,49 as well as praying in yeshivot and private homes on holidays.50 Education, too, was taken from the domestic space and out of the hands of women. In fact, from as early as 1664 all male children from six to fourteen years old were required to attend the Talmud Torah, the religious school of the Livorno Jewish community. Moreover, engaging private tutors was prohibited until “the Talmud Torah reached the perfection required of it and the children progressed in their learning of God’s law.”51 The importance of an institution such as the Talmud Torah can been seen in the preamble to the school’s statute, approved in 1676, in which the leaders of the community wrote that “we are unanimous in our desire to maintain and advance the Talmud Torah so that it will be one of the main bulwarks of our preservation.”52
Marriages, births, and deaths were also subject to community control: In order to be considered valid and binding, marriage and birth certificates had to be registered with the community registry even if they were previously drawn up by a Christian notary.53 When couples from Iberia first arrived in Livorno, they had to remarry according to the Jewish rite. During the wedding ceremony the husband had to place “under his tallit his wife and any male or female children who were born in the country of his persecution, and from that moment he declared his children legitimate, because it was believed that if he failed to perform this ceremony, the children would be considered bastards, not heirs.”54
The quote is from the rabbi of Constantinople, Moshè Benveniste, who describes and explains the ceremony in a responsum he issued in 1655.55 The responsum is particularly interesting because it squarely faces the thorny issue of converso matrimonial practices, which provoked discussions and tensions throughout the Sephardi diaspora during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.56 In fact the Livorno Jewish authorities asked Rabbi Benveniste whether it was possible to force a man who had married his widowed sister-in-law to divorce her because she had children with his brother (in defiance of the rules of levirate marriage).57 The woman in question had left Spain and arrived in Livorno several years earlier with her husband and two daughters in order to “put herself under the wings of Divine Providence,” that is, to return to Judaism. After her husband died she married his brother, contravening the Jewish law that allows a man to marry his sister-in-law only if she is a childless widow. The heads of the community wrote the rabbi of Constantinople that the issue was crucial because: “if one were to accept the principle that after the Marranos placed themselves under the protection of the Divine Presence, their wives, including those with children, were permitted to remarry even their husbands’ brothers, it could only lead to our destruction.”58
As the governor of Livorno, to whom the married couple appealed, observed, this case was not atypical in Livorno and other Jewish communities of Iberian descent. Marriage between blood relatives has always been a hallmark of Sephardi matrimonial practice. The crypto-Jewish experience served to reinforce the need to allow women and patrimony to change hands only within the clan, and encouraged an amplification and intensification of marriages between relatives, and therefore, of some marriages that Jewish law had not anticipated, such as to an uncle’s widow or to a brother’s widow even though she had children. The need to reestablish respect for orthodoxy and to ensure that such illegal marriages did not continue led the Livorno Jewish community to not only excommunicate and exile said couple but also to approve a deliberation in 1659 that threatened the same punishment for whoever entered into marriage with a brother’s widow, if that marriage had produced children, or with the widow of an uncle, whether maternal or paternal.59
Other measures were aimed specifically at delegitimizing female religious practices that had developed in crypto-Judaism and invaded traditional male spaces and learning. Accordingly, in 1655 the Jewish community of Livorno prohibited recitation of prayers for the dead at home in memory of a deceased woman “as it was the custom to do,” especially the so-called hashkavah60 and prayers recited on the seventh day, the first month, and the first year of a relative’s death.61 The ordinance stated precisely that these prayers were to be recited in synagogue or at the community cemetery. As Renzo Toaff highlights, the ordinance pertained only to deceased women: Prayers to commemorate the death of a man were permitted at home. This would suggest that the aim of the prohibition was not to remove a religious ritual, specifically the commemoration of the dead, from the domestic sphere, but rather to keep it under male control by not allowing its execution outside the community. Most likely the real concern was that women in mourning might participate in funeral services—which were traditionally the purview of ten adult men—and recite prayers like the kaddish.62 The duty to commemorate the dead in synagogue or at the cemetery, or in public and institutional spaces, excluded women from rituality, and therefore, attacked all female religious forms that undermined orthodoxy and, concomitantly, male authority.
It was common for women in crypto-Jewish communities to prepare male and female corpses for burial, and to recite prayers during the period of mourning and on the anniversary of deaths because they could do so inside their home without creating suspicion, whereas, had men interrupted their daily routine it would not have gone unnoticed.63 Therefore, crypto-Jewish life necessitated women’s participation in funeral services, a practice that with time became so established that it survived, at least in part, in ex-converso communities. The return to Judaism transformed the Marrano tradition and adapted it to normative Judaism, reestablishing the division between the sexes. Women were only allowed to take part in services for the dead when the deceased was a woman. In 1661, a woman was actually designated to recite kaddish by the deceased herself. In her will, Ricca Mochora Santigliana, a Livornese Jew of Iberian origin, requested that her aunt Sara recite kaddish at her funeral instead of, as custom dictated, a male family member.64
Why didn’t the heads of the Livorno Jewish community explicitly forbid women to pray for the dead? Evidently such a prohibition would not have found unanimous rabbinic acceptance in the community, or, for that matter, in communities outside Livorno. In the late seventeenth century the Jewish community of Amsterdam asked the German rabbi Yair Bakhrakh (1639–1702) whether a daughter of a deceased man could say kaddish for him. An Amsterdam Jew who died leaving only daughters had, in fact, asked that for twelve months after his death a group of ten men meet in his house and listen to his daughter recite kaddish. Rabbi Bakhrakh replied that, based on Jewish law, there were no grounds for preventing her from reciting kaddish, provided it was in the presence of a minyan, but that it would be better to deny the man’s request so as not to weaken the communal observance of tradition.65 Today this responsum is still cited by supporters of women’s right to recite kaddish, and also by those who, quoting the rabbi’s last remarks, would limit that right to the home, denying women the right to say kaddish in synagogue.66
Thus, if an important community like Amsterdam discussed the possibility of a daughter saying kaddish for her father, how could the Livorno community forbid a woman to recite it for another woman, especially when it had become commonplace, as the ordinance of 1655 would have us believe, and, moreover, when Jewish law itself doesn’t explicitly forbid it? As Ricca’s will of 1661 demonstrates, the Livornese Jewish authorities preferred to adopt an indirect measure that was not at first effective in combating a practice steeped in Marrano culture.
Cutting all ties with crypto-Judaism and adhering to normative Judaism was expected of all conversos, both men and women, if they wanted to be integrated into communal life. But the majority of communal attention and control was focused on men and their journey back to Judaism. Indeed, for a converso, returning to Judaism meant exhibiting his faith in a public, male space. Only then could he enjoy the privileges and powers bestowed on him by his religion and his community. Seventeenth-century Sephardi communities all passed dispositions that, in addition to punishing Marranos who were not distancing themselves from Marranism and making the definitive passage to Judaism, tended to institutionalize and sanctify religious life, particularly those rituals that marked the converso’s entrance into the community.
In Livorno, as in Amsterdam, whoever went to Western places where Judaism could not be practiced (namely Spain and Portugal), that is, where one could not openly practice Judaism, could not, on his return, hold public office, be called to read the Torah in synagogue, or pronounce the ha-gomel, the blessing pronounced in public for someone who has escaped from danger.67 Although the prohibition doesn’t explicitly and exclusively pertain to men, it was clearly intended to punish them, since it targeted powers and functions reserved for them. In Amsterdam the transgressor actually had to take part in a ceremony in which he asked “forgiveness from God and the Holy Torah while standing at the aron in front of the entire congregation.”68
The statutes of the Hebrà para Cazar Orfas e Donzelas, the confraternity responsible for supplying dowries for the Jewish women of Livorno,69 also decreed expulsion for any member who stayed in Iberia for longer than a year, considering him “as if he were dead.”70 In the nineteenth century the governor of the community was more forthcoming about the reasons for such treatment: The confraternity’s statute of 1833, although noting that “today the public display of our religion is permitted and established in the Kingdom of Portugal,” stated that “it would be the equivalent of an absolute, albeit informal apostasy” to establish one’s domicile in countries where “the Jewish religion is absolutely forbidden, not only in public but in private and where there is no nearby city with an established kehillah [community] that holds services and has a cemetery to be buried in.”71
The community authorities were not alone in requesting that their members practice Judaism openly and ritually. Often men made it a provision of their testaments that male relatives residing in Iberia “come to Judaism,” that is, openly declare their faith, or, should they already live as Jews, not convert to Catholicism if they hoped to receive a share of the inheritance.72
Similar conditions were, on the other hand, never imposed on crypto-Jewish women, whether from the community or the family. The return of women to Judaism was not marked by special forms of control or ritual, with the exception of the ritual bath (tevilah), which was, however, also contemplated for men and which will be further examined shortly. The religious practices and functions that women were expected to perform remained substantially the same ones they had performed for generations, but as the crypto-Jews returned to Judaism these practices and functions lost the centrality ascribed to them by their former life. The institutionalization of religious life, the return of men to the public religious arena, and the regulation of domestic religiosity led the New Christian women who reverted to Judaism to again respect orthodoxy and to definitively abandon the crypto-Jewish experience of which they had been the protagonists.
For men, “coming to Judaism” had a precise meaning. It referred to a “ritual of return” spelled out in a series of rituals and formal acts, first among which was circumcision (milah), “the portal of the Lord through which enter the righteous and the sign of the pact with the people of God,” as Rabbi Aboab wrote.73 For conversos, circumcision “was a particularly crucial rite of passage—not merely an act of compliance with Jewish law, but a ritual replete with powerful symbolic meaning. In the converso imagination, circumcision took on a transcendental transitional significance, perhaps akin to that of a Christian sacrament.”74
When speaking of circumcised Jews, a converso of Portuguese origin who lived in Florence in the first decades of the seventeenth century said, “[Y]ou have experienced a joy that we have not, and for this you are better than us.”75
Circumcision represented not only an act of sincere adherence to Judaism and an open break with crypto-Judaism,76 it also conferred a greater status on the converso than that suggested by Jewish law. In London, Jews who were not circumcised could not be buried in the community cemetery and, as in Amsterdam, were not allowed in the synagogue.77 An uncircumcised man could not touch the scrolls of the Torah in Livorno, even though Jewish law allowed it, because “such were the times that it was considered inappropriate.” In fact, the rabbis of Livorno deemed it necessary to distinguish between circumcised and uncircumcised Jews in order to prevent the latter from touching sacred objects, because only in this way would they submit to the “Covenant with Abraham.”78 On the other hand, this attitude toward the uncircumcised and their concomitant exclusion from the sacred sphere, particularly from reading, even touching, the Torah, found justification in the Zohar (Book of Splendor), the principal text of Sephardi mysticism and the most important work of Jewish kabbalah.79 In the Zohar there is, in fact, an obvious connection among circumcision, vision of God, and Torah study, deriving from the concept that “the mystical experience involves a type of sexual union between the initiate and the divine.”80 The Zohar clearly states that only the circumcised can study the Torah because “the Torah is the name of God, and the study thereof involves unification with the name. Only one who is circumcised can be united with the name, and hence only such a person can study Torah.”81
The secrets of the Torah, similar to the vision of God, are not accessible to the uncircumcised since
the opening of circumcision is an opening of the flesh that is, at the same time, an opening within the divine. When the foreskin is removed and the phallus uncovered, then the corresponding limb above, the divine phallus or Yesod, likewise is uncovered. In this uncovering the secret of God is disclosed. The hermeneutical process is a structural reenactment of circumcision, involving as it does the movement from closure to openness.82
For many conversos circumcision was akin to an authentic rebirth in which one found salvation and the remission of all sins. This belief, although extraneous to traditional Judaism, found some support even among rabbis, who hoped to encourage men to be circumcised. On the other hand, rabbis strongly condemned the “false idea . . . that until a man was circumcised he was not a part of Israel, that his sins were not sins and his transgressions had no weight.”83
According to the Venetian rabbi Samuel Aboab, this idea was dangerous as well as “wrong and contrary to the principles of our blessed faith, because it is clear that even if one has sinned, one remains a Jew” regarding all the punishments and prohibitions, “because circumcision is a commandment of the Torah like all the others . . . therefore whomever belongs to the people of Israel and is not marked by this sign cannot, because of its absence, consider himself free from obeying the other commandments of the Torah.”84
Circumcision was the culminating act on the path to reconversion, though other steps had to be taken. In fact, in addition to submitting himself to the milah, the converso had to regularly attend both synagogue and yeshivot, read the sacred texts under the guidance of a rabbi,85 and perform the tevilah, the ritual bath for those wishing to convert to Judaism.86 Most rabbis, at least until the sixteenth century, agreed that only conversos whose maternal line contained Old Christians and were, therefore, not Jewish according to Jewish law had to undergo the tevilah.87 Nevertheless, during the seventeenth century the rabbinic authorities began to impose the tevilah on all descendents of conversos who returned to Judaism, because they held that it was impossible to establish descendence with certainty and therefore the conversos had to undergo a formal conversion.88 This was the result of the long debate on the religious identity of conversos that engaged rabbis for more than two centuries and that in time became part of a wider attempt to redefine the identity of those who took part in the Sephardi diaspora. To consider conversos apostates rather than penitent Jews was to make more definitive the difference between those “inside” the community and those “outside” it. Additionally, it conferred on the latter a specific religious identity that was other than Christian.89
The tendency to sanctify circumcision also led to increasing control over the most profane and popular celebrations that, since medieval times, had been held on the eve of a baby’s circumcision, such as the vigils in the parents’ home, great parties at which women played a key role.90 During these vigils (called hadas or villas by Spanish Jews,91 Wachnacht by central European Jews, and veglie by Italian Jews) relatives and friends, particularly women, visited the newborn and mother and then wiled away the night dancing and singing, eating sweets and fruit.92 Giacob Sulema, a Pisan Jew, held a memorable vigil in his home in 1666 that was attended by a large number of Jews and Christians, some of whom wore masks.93 The guests danced until late in the night to the accompaniment of a spinet and guitar and partook of bottarga, cardoons, celery, olives, capers, and almonds.94 However, as Elliott Horowitz has observed, in the course of the seventeenth century, and especially during its last decades, the vigils acquired more sanctity and solemnity, and the role of mothers, and of women in general, was progressively reduced. Jewish authorities in Italy and other European countries sought to eliminate profane and joyful aspects from the vigils, transforming them into events with a more sacred and masculine character.95 As the statutes of the Jewish community of Livorno of 1673 and of 1687 demonstrate,96 the vigils gradually became evenings of study and Torah reading;97 limits were set on food and drink as well as on music and dancing.98 Over time the number of participants was also reduced:99 Christians could no longer attend,100 and the only people admitted, besides the circumciser and rabbi, were the godfather, close relatives, and neighbors living on the same floor. The day after the vigil, the circumcision took place, followed by a dinner celebrating the fulfillment of the precept that only men attended. Women did not partake of the dinner and were offered instead only fresh and candied fruit.101
The passage from the secrecy of crypto-Jewish life in the Iberian Peninsula and the Hispanic New World to the public practice of normative Judaism in Livorno, Pisa, and other “lands of Judaism” resulted in the restructuring of boundaries between the sacred/public/male sphere and the private/domestic/female one. The home and the family, the domestic sphere where crypto-Jewish women had been in charge, and the only place where conversos could secretly practice Judaism, was replaced by the synagogue, the religious schools, the confraternities, and other spaces and institutions that were subject to community control. “Coming to Judaism,” as the return to the Jewish faith of conversos was called, was experienced differently by men and women. For men, “coming to Judaism” had a precise meaning; it referred to a “ritual of return” spelled out in a series of rituals, the first of which was circumcision. Women who reverted to Judaism continued to perform the same functions they had performed for generations, but these practices and functions lost the centrality ascribed to them by their former crypto-Jewish life.
Notes
This essay was previously published as “Spazi religiosi, genere e potere nella diaspora sefardita. Il ritorno all’ebraismo dei Cristiani novi e delle Cristiane nuove di Livorno e Pisa,” in Donne nella storia degli ebrei d’Italia, ed. Michele Luzzati and Cristina Galasso (Firenze: La Giuntina, 2007), 233–262. I thank the editors for permission to translate the article; trans. Andrea Grover.
1. Cf. Renzo Toaff, La Nazione Ebrea a Livorno e Pisa (1591–1700) (Firenze: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 1990), 109 passim. For an overview of principal studies on the Jewish community of Livorno and its development, permit me to refer the reader to: Galasso, Alle origini di una comunità. Ebree ed ebrei a Livorno nel Seicento (Firenze: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 2002), 15–25. Also see Galasso, “Une porte ouverte sur la Méditerranée, La comunauté juive de Livourne entre le XVII et le XVIII siè cle,” in La Méditerranée des Juifs, Exodes et enracinements, ed. Paul Balta, Catherine Dana, and Regine Dhoquois (France: L’Harmattan, 2003), 147–56.
2. Nathan Wachtel, La fede del ricordo. Ritratti e itinerari di marrani in America (XVI–XX secolo) (Torino: Giulio Einaudi, 2003), xii.
3. On the meaning of the word “religiosity,” with particular reference to the Marrano experience, I refer to Nathan Wachtel: “With this word (religiosity) I do not intend to suggest a religion with a clearly defined theology, but instead a group of concerns, practices, and beliefs that come together in a composite of variable, even contradictory, elements, and whose diversity does not exclude a kind of unity, a generic style that allows one to identify it with a term of its own, specifically Marrano,” Wachtel, La fede, xii.
4. Cecil Roth, A History of the Marranos (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1932), 175; see Cecil Roth, “The Religion of the Marranos,” JQR 22 (1931–32): 1–33, 12.
5. Cf. Renée Levine Melammed, “Crypto-Jewish Women Facing the Spanish Inquisition: Transmitting Religious Practices, Beliefs, Attitudes,” in Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Medieval and Early Modern Spain: Interaction and Cultural Change, ed. Mark D. Meyerson (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999), 197–219; Renée Levine Melammed, Heretics or Daughters of Israel? The Crypto-Jewish Women of Castile (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); J. Edwards, “Religiosità maschile e femminile presso i ‘nuovi cristiani’ spagnoli fra il 1450 e il 1550,” Rassegna Mensile di Israel I–II (1992): 13–22; 16. For a more generalized discussion of the religious forms and practices of crypto-Jews, see David Gitliz, Secrecy and Deceit: The Religion of the Crypto-Jews (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1996).
6. The unleavened bread made with flour and water that Jews eat on Passover and that recalls their slavery in Egypt and their precipitous exodus, when there was no time for the bread to rise.
7. Melammed, Heretics, 32.
8. Cf. ibid. As Joseph Hayim Yerushalmi has shown, conversos received most of their post-biblical knowledge of Judaism from Christian sources and from the sermons that accompanied autos-da-fé. According to Yerushalmi, in fact, “the problem was not they knew nothing of Judaism, but that what they knew was often a pastiche of fragments inherited from parents, gleaned haphazardly from books, disorganized, with significant gaps, sometimes distorted.” Joseph Hayim Yerushalmi, The Re-education of Marranos in the Seventeenth Century, The Third Annual Rabbi Louis Feinberg Memorial Lecture in Judaic Studies, Judaic Studies Program, University of Cincinnati (1980), 1–16, 7; Joseph Hayim Yerushalmi, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto: Isaac Cardoso. A Study in Seventeenth-Century Marranism and Jewish Apologetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), 64.
9. Hebrew word for “to sit down” (pl. yeshivot) that describes a rabinnical school for young men where they study the Talmud.
10. Melammed, Heretics, 166; cf. Mary Elizabeth Perry, “Behind the Veil: Moriscas and the Politics of Resistance and Survival,” in Spanish Women in the Golden Age: Images and Realities, ed. Magdalena S. Sánchez and Alain Saint-Saëns (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996), 37–53.
11. The crucial role of women in the observance of crypto-Jewish rituals recurs in the trials held by the Holy Office of Venice between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries against New Christians accused of Judaizing, cf. Pier Cesare Ioly Zorattini, “Derek tesuvah: la Via del Ritorno,” in L’identità dissimulata. Giudaizzanti iberici nell’Europa cristiana dell’età moderna, ed. Ioly Zorattini (Firenze: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 2000), 249–279. Maddalena Del Bianco Cotrozzi, “‘O Señor guardara miña alma.’ Aspetti della religiosità femminile nei processi del S. Uffizio veneziano,” in ibid., 263.
12. Archivio Arcivescovile di Pisa (subsequently referred to as ADPi), Inquisizione, n. 15, c. 55r. On the interesting figure of Sara, alias Eleonora Nuñez, and her long inquisitional trial, see Lucia Fratarelli Fischer, “Ritratti di donne dai processi dell’Inquisizione: Rachele e Antonia portoghesi, Caterina schava morisca e Sara Nuñez donna et Rabina,” in Sul filo della scrittura. Fonti e temi per la storia delle donne a Livorno, ed. Frattarelli Fischer and Olimpia Vaccari (Pisa: PLUS-Pisa University Press, 2005), 343–375, 354–375.
13. Ibid., 354.
14. ADPi, Inquisizione, n. 15, c. 77v.
15. ADPi, Inquisizione, n. 15, c. 55r.
16. Wachtel, La fede, 62–63.
17. Ibid., 63 and passim.
18. Melammed, Heretics, 45 and passim.
19. Wachtel, La fede, 158, 263–264. It was a widely held opinion among crypto-Jews that the Messiah would be one of them, a converso. Sabbatai Zevi’s followers used this argument to justify his conversion to Islam. As the noted Sabbatian, Abraham Cardoso, whose brother Ishac authored Excelencias de los Hebreos, wrote, “the Messiah is destined to become a Marrano [‘anus’] like me!” because “the essence of the mystery is that we are all obliged, according to the Torah, to become Marranos before we go out of exile, because as it is written in the Torah: You will serve foreign gods, gods of wood and of stone.” Yerushalmi, From Spanish Court, 281–282.
20. Cf. Yerushalmi, From Spanish Court, 52–54.
21. Wachtel, La fede, 153–154. Duarte had arrived in Mexico City from Spain sometime in the beginning of the seventeenth century, and in the 1620s married Isabel Nunez, whose mother was the famous Marrana, Justa Mendez. The Inquisition arrested him in 1634–35, along with his wife and other crypto-Jews, and condemned them to a few years in prison. His brother, Abram Antunes de León lived in Pisa in the first half of the seventeenth century, made his will there in 1646, and died the following year. Abram alluded to his brother in his will, saying that he had sent him goods to Mexico but Duarte had not yet paid him all he owed. In the event that Abram died before Duarte settled his account, he wanted half of the money to remain with Duarte and the other half to go to the daughters of his sister, Isabel Rodrigues. Abram’s will revealed a tight network of family ties and economic interests stretching from Italy to Spain, from the Low Countries to France, and all the way to the New World. This network consisted, in part, of conversos who, like Duarte’s brother, never openly re-embraced Judaism, but had relatives and business contacts in the Jewish communities of the Sephardi diaspora. Abram’s wife, Sara Antunes, made her will in Pisa in 1648 when she was already a widow. Both wills are in the archive of the Livorno Jewish community. See Archivio della Communita Israelitica di Livorno (subsequently ACIL), Wills, n. 39.
22. The circumcision Duarte performed on his daughters is also mentioned elsewhere, see Seymour B. Liebman, Fede, fiamme e Inquisizione: Gli ebrei nella Nuova Spagna (Firenze: Cultura della pace, 1993), 63–64. Some crypto-Jewish groups in Spain and the New World performed circumcisions on male children in the first days of life or even later. However, in some instances the foreskin was cut longitudinally instead of in a circular manner, in order to trick future inspectors in case of arrest, cf. ibid., 66–63; Ioly Zorattini, “Derek,” 205–209; Wachtel, La fede, 100–101.
23. Liebman, Fede, 64.
24. Wachtel, La fede, 152.
25. Ibid., 154.
26. Duarte’s wife was, in fact, the daughter of Justa Mendez, who, together with Leonor Nuñez, offered spiritual guidance to the crypto-Jews of Mexico City in the first decades of the seventeenth century, cf. ibid., 154.
27. Cf. Rahel R. Wasserfall, ed., Women and Water: Menstruation in Jewish Life and Law (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999).
28. Janet Liebman Jacobs, “The Return of Sacred. Ritual Purification among Crypto-Jews in the Diaspora,” in Women and Water: Menstruation in Jewish Life and Law, ed. Rahel R. Wasserfall (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999), 217–231, 226.
29. Cf. Roth, “The Religion,” 19–28; Liebman Jacobs, The Return, 225–226; Ioly Zorattini, “Derek,” 231–233; Liebman, Fede, 49 and passim.
30. Cf. Wachtel, La fede, 84 and passim; Ioly Zorattini, “Derek,” 232–234; Liebman, Fede, 46–48.
31. Cf. Roberto Della Rocca, “La Megillat Ester, Lo svelamento del nascosto,” in Hebraica. Miscellanea di studi in onore di Sergio J. Sierra per il suo 75o compleanno, ed. Felice Israel et al (Torino: Istituto di studi ebraici-Scuola rabbinica “S.H. Margulies-D. Disegni,” 1998), 219–224; Yarona Pinhas, La saggezza velata. Il femminile nella Torà (Firenze: Giuntina, 2004), 39–41. For an analysis of the myth of Esther in Marrano culture that reaches conclusions that are, in my mind, debatable, see Shmuel Trigano, “Le mystè re d’Esther et de Joseph. La mystique politique du marranisme,” Pardes, 29 (2000): 11–21.
32. Cf. Judith Hauptman, “Some Thoughts on the Nature of Halakhic Adjudication: Women and Minyan,” Judaism XLII/4 (1993): 396–413; Avraham Weiss, “Women and the Reading of the Megillah,” The Torah u-Madda Journal VIII (1998–1999): 295–317; Aaron Cohen, “Women Reading Megillah for Men: A Rejoinder,” The Torah u-Madda Journal XI (2000): 248–263.
33. The myth of Esther appears again in the story of Sabbatai Zevi, one of the most important messianic movements of the Sephardi Diaspora. Abraham Cardoso, in fact, likens the figure of Zevi to that of queen Esther, since she was “condemned for having married an idolatrous gentile, which the Torah severely prohibited, but the sages who knew her secret and recognized the truth of the problem, did not consider her a sinner,” Yerushalmi, From Spanish Court, 320. On the relationship between messianism and Marranism, in addition to Gershom Scholem’s fundamental study, Sabbatai Zevi, The Mystical Messiah 1626–1670, trans. R. J. Zwi Werblowsky (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973); see Matt Goldish, “Patterns in Converso Messianism,” in Jewish Messianism in the Early Modern Worlds, v01.1, ed. Matt Goldish and Richard H. Popkin (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001), 41–64.
34. Wachtel, La fede, 206.
35. Simon Schwarzfuchs, “Le Retour des Marranes au Judaïsme dans la littérature rabbinique,” in Volume 1 of Xudeus e Conversos na historia, Mentalidades e cultura, ed. Carlos Barros (Santiago de Compostela, 1994), 339–348, 34. Cf. Yosef Kaplan, “Gli ebrei portoghesi ad Amsterdam. Dalla conversione forzata al ritorno all’ebraismo,” in E andammo dove il vento ci spinse. La cacciata degli ebrei dalla Spagna, ed. Guido Nathan Zazzu (Genova: Marietti, 1992), 141–160; 142–146.
36. Cf. Moisés Orfali, “Maimónides ante el problema de las conversions simuladas: tolerancia y ‘halajá,’” in Sobre la vida y obra de Maimónides, ed. Jesús Peláez del Rosal (Córdoba: Ediciones El Almendro, 1991), 375–393; Orfali, “La cuestión de la identidad judíca en el Maamar ha-annusim (Tratado sobre los conversos forzados) de RaSHbaSH,” Pensamiento Medieval Hispano, 2 (1998): 1267–1287.
37. Cf. Schwarzfuchs, “Le Retour,” 345–346; S. Regev, “The Attitude Towards the Conversos in Fifteenth-Sixteenth Century Jewish Thought,” Revue des ètudes juives 156/1–2 (1997): 117–134.
38. Wachtel, La fede, 131. Juan Pacheco de Leòn, alias Salomon Mochorro (Machorro), is a fascinating figure. After having been raised as a Jew in Livorno, he chose to return to crypto-Judaism, following the example of his father. He was, in fact, born in Antequera, Spain around 1609, and when he was two his father, David, alias Antonio Farfan y Navaez, brought him to Pisa and then to Livorno (indeed in 1616 a David Machorro resided in Pisa, see Michele Cassandro, Aspetti della storia economica e sociale degli ebrei di Livorno nel Seicento [Milano: A. Giuffrè, 1983], 66, 160; Toaff, La Nazione, 145). Around 1629 he sailed for Mexico, seemingly in search of his father, who he had no news of since his arrival there several years before. Once in Mexico, Salomon discovered that his father was dead, and he began to associate with the famous crypto-Jewish merchant Simon Vaez Sevilla, whose mother-in-law, Blanca Enriquez, cleared the way for his entrance into the local crypto-Jewish community. In 1642 he was arrested by the Inquisition, reconciled in 1650, and condemned to eight years in prison. Salomon was accused of being a “rabbi and dogmatist” who “taught the said Law of Moses so that he would show off his knowledge of it” having grown up in Livorno “where those who practice the Law of Moses do so publicly and circumcise themselves.” See Boleslao Lewin, Singular proceso de Salomón Machorro (Juan de León) israelita liornés condenado por la Inquisición, México, 1650 (Buenos Aires: n.p., 1977), 154, 158. As he stated during his trial, Salomon had left his mother, a brother and a sister in Livorno. Indeed, one finds in the State Archive of Livorno his brother Jacob’s 1641 petition to inherit their father’s estate despite being only seventeen and a ward, because he is married. Jacob’s petition states that his father died intestate when Jacob was a little more than one, cf. Archivio di Stato di Livorno (subsequently ASLi), Governatore e Auditore, suppliche civili, n. 2604, c. 133.
39. Yosef Kaplan, “Familia, matrimonio y sociedad. Los casamientos clandestinos en la diáspora sefardí occidental (siglos XVII–XVIII),” Espacio, Tiempo y Forma 6 (1993): 129–154; 135.
40. The word used to indicate the juridical tradition of Judaism.
41. Cf. Yosef Kaplan, “La diáspora judeo-española-portuguesa en el siglo XVII. Tradición, cambio y modernización,” Manuscrits. Revista d’història Moderna: Barcelona 10 (1992): 77–89; 84.
42. Cf. Michele Luzzati, “Alla ricerca delle sinagoghe medievali di Pisa,” in La sinagoga di Pisa. Dalle origini al restauro ottocentesco di Marco Treves, ed. Michele Luzzati (Firenze: Edifir, 1997), 11–21; 11–12.
43. Cf. Michele Luzzati, “La sinagoga a Livorno monumento ebraico monumento pubblico,” in Le tre sinagoghe. Edifici di culto e vita ebraica a Livorno dal Seicento al Novecento, ed. Michele Luzzati (Torino: U. Allemandi, 1995), 9–27, 14–15; Ewa Karwacka Codini and Milletta Sbrilli, “La sinagoga di Livorno. Una Storia di oltre tre secoli,” in Le tre sinagoghe, ed. Michele Luzzati, 47–82, 49 and passim. In Pisa the tribunal of the Inquisition accused the Jews in 1601 of having moved the synagogue from Palazzo Lanfranchi to via Palestro—where it remains today—with public solemnity, cf. Toaff, La Nazione, 104–105 (n. 24); Frattarelli Fisher, “Ebrei a Pisa fra Cinquecento e Settecento,” in Ebrei a Pisa (secoli IX–XX), ed. Michele Luzzati (Pisa: Pacini Editore, 1998), 90–110, 102–103.
44. Daniel M. Swetschinski, “Un refus de mémoire. Les Juifs portugais d’Amsterdam et leur passé marrane,” in Mémoires Juives d’Espagne et du Portugal, ed. Esther Benbassa (Paris: Publisud, 1996), 69–77; cf. Daniel M. Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans. The Portuguese Jews of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam (London: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2000), 321.
45. In August 1675 the new synagogue of the Amsterdam Sephardi community was inaugurated with a solemn and sumptuous ceremony in which leading citizens of the city took part, cf. Lajb Fuks, “The Inauguration of the Portuguese Synagogue of Amsterdam in 1675,” in Aspects of Jewish Life in the Netherlands: a selection from the writings of Leo Fuks, ed. Renate G. Fuks-Mansfeld (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1995), 81–89, 87 and passim.
46. Karwacka Codini and Sbrilli, “La sinagoga,” 53. Note from Julia R Lieberman, editor of this volume: Galasso’s essay here and below is unclear and regretfully I was unable to consult her. In the Amsterdam synagogue inaugurated in 1675, the women’s gallery is supported by columns, on a higher level than the main sanctuary.
47. Cf. ibid.
48. Kaplan, Familia, 135. Kaplan underlines how the criticisms that the conversos acted against the Jewish authorites of the Sephardi communities “reverberated against Judaism itself, which became the prevailing object of their doubts. The anusim’s preference for private, interior identification, in contrast with public display, created a fertile ground for anatomical doctrines like sabbatianism or deism and rationalism.” Yosef Kaplan, “Devianza e punizione nella dispora sefardita occidental del XVII secolo: I portoghese ad Amsterdam,” Rassegna Mensile di Israel 58/1–2 (1992): 161–202, 165; cf. Asa Kasher and Shlomo Biderman, “Why was Baruch de Spinoza excommunicated?” in Sceptics, Millenarians and Jews, ed. David S. Katz and Jonathan I. Israel (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 1990), 98–141; Yosef Kaplan, “Karaites in early XVIIIth century Amsterdam,” Zion 52 (1987): 196–236.
49. Toaff, La Nazione, 500. In 1599 the Livornese Jews of Italian and German origin tried to open another synagogue, provoking a strong reaction form the heads of the Sephardi community, who asked the Grand Duke to intervene. The Duke denied their request, and from then on the singular nature of the Sephardi synagogue was never in doubt. In Siena and Florence, where Sephardim were in the minority, Jews of Iberian extraction made a similar request. However, it took until 1636 for them to obtain permission to establish their own synagogue in Florence, cf. Cristina Galasso, “‘Nasce questa avversione da un punto di religione per una parte e di superbia per l’altra.’ Ebrei italiani e sefarditi a Livorno tra Sei e Settecento,” Annali dell’Istituto Storico Italo-Germanico in Trento 29 (2003): 119–153.
50. Toaff, La Nazione, 500, 568. A similar ordinance is in the hashkamot of the London Jewish community of 1664, see ibid., 283.
51. Ibid., 338. The children from six to fifteen in the Pisa Jewish community also had to attend religious school ibid., 517–518.
52. Ibid., 339. It was only in 1771 that children were guaranteed a public education, cf. ibid., 340.
53. Cf. ibid., 240–241, 559.
54. Ibid., 701. In 1693 Pietro Antonio Barbarico, alias Angelo da Ancona, a Livornese Jew who had converted to Catholicism, denounced three Livorno Marrano families to the Holy Office. He described this very ceremony to the Inquisition, stating that these New Christians “already married in Spain remarried in Livorno according to the Jewish rite, during which husbands, wives, and children are placed under a large tablecloth that they call the tallit, which signifies the legitimacy of the children, who would be considered illegitimate were it not for this ceremony,” ADPi, Inquisizione, n. 25 (unnumbered cards).
55. The text of the responsum, translated into Italian, is published in Toaff, La Nazione, 700–702.
56. Cf. Yerushalmi, From the Spanish Court, 60.
57. A report from the governor of Livorno to the Grand Duke in 1658 about the responsum refers to the marriage between Jacob Mesquita and his sister-in-law Rachel, the daughter of Esther Nasiera. According to the governor, the marriage created a scandal in the Livorno Jewish community. It was a long and complex matter that ended only in 1658–1659 when the two were excommunicated and exiled, see Archivio di Stato di Firenze (hereafter referred to as ASF), Mediceo del Principato, n, 1816, insert 5 (unnumbered cards). On matrimonial practices in the Sephardi world and particularly on levirate marriage and bigamy, see Cristina Galasso, “‘La moglie duplicata.’ Bigamia e levirato nella comunità ebraica di Livorno (sec. XVII),” in Transgressioni, seduzioni, concubinato, adulterio, bigamia, (XIV–XVIII secolo), ed. Silvana Seidel Menchi and Diego Quaglioni, (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004), 417–441, 429 and passim; Cristina Galasso, “Matrimoni e patrimoni nella comunità ebraica di Livorno (sec. XVIII),” Materia Giudaica 8/1 (2003): 191–197. Another crucial aspect of marriage, which the Sephardi communities often debated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries because it had repercussions in the system of control over marriage patterns, is the one regarding consent. For a more thorough examination of this subject, see, Cristina Galasso, “Autorità paterna, matrimoni e conversioni tra leggi ebraiche, regole canoniche e privilegi della Toscana granducale (secoli XVII–XIX),” in I tribunali del matrimonio (secoli XV–XVIII), ed. Seidel Menchi, Silvana and Diego Quaglioni (Bologna: Società editrice il Mulino, 2007), 289–325.
58. Toaff, La Nazione, 701.
59. Cf. ASLi, Mediceo del Principato, n. 1816, inserto 5; Toaff, La Nazione, 574.
60. A Sephardi term to indicate the so-called hazkarat nesamot, the prayers for the dead. In the Sephardi rite the hashkavah is recited at the cemetery as part of the funeral service and in synagogue on Saturdays and on holidays after the Torah scrolls have been returned to the ark, and when requested by a child of a deceased when he has finished reading the Torah. It is also recited on Yom Kippur, when all those who have died during the past year are recalled by name. In some ex-converso communities a special hashkavah is recited in memory of those who died in the Inquisition’s fires for having “sanctified the name of God,” cf. Alan Unterman, Dizionario de usi e leggende ebraiche (Rome-Bari, 1994), 235–236; Hashkavah, in Encyclopaedia Judaica, CD-Rom Edition, Judaica Multimedia (Israel) Ltd. 1997; Y. Meir, “Hazkarat nesamot,” in Roth, Inquisition; in Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 80.
61. Toaff, La Nazione, 571. The prohibition is inserted in chapter 49 of the community statutes of 1655 that deal with behavior in synagogue and on some religious festivities. The penalty for transgressors was excommunication and a fine of 20 ducats.
62. This is a prayer in Aramaic recited to highlight the end of a part of the liturgy and by those in mourning for a relative’s death or on its anniversary. Reform Judaism allows even women to recite it. On this issue and the related rabbinic debate, see Joel B. Wolowelsky, “Women and Kaddish,” Judaism 44/3 (1995): 282–290, 283; Rochelle L. Millen, “Women and Kaddish: Reflections on Responsa,” Modern Judaism 10/2 (1990): 191–203; Reuven Fink, “The Recital of Kaddish by Women,” Journal of Halacha and Contemporary Society 31 (1996): 23–37.
63. Cf. Melammed, Heretics, 88–90; Wachtel, La fede, 82–83; Liebman, Fede, 71.
64. ACIL, Testamenti, n. 139.
65. Cf. Wolowelsky, “Women,” 283.
66. Cf. ibid., 284 and passim.
67. For the Jews of Livorno the exclusion was for two years (see cap. 25 of the statutes of 1655), whereas for those in Amsterdam is was for four, cf. Toaff, La Nazione, 287, 561; Kaplan, “Devianza,” 175; Kaplan, “Gli ebrei,” 149; Yosef Kaplan, “The Travels of Portuguese Jews from Amsterdam to the ‘Land of Idolatry’ (1644–1724),” in Jews and Conversos: Studies in Society and the Inquisition, ed. Yosef Kaplan (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1985), 197–224. Additionally, Jews in Livorno who went to the port to collect those arriving “from the West,” that is, from the Iberian peninsula, were excommunicated. The goal of the disposition, however, was to safeguard new arrivals from inquisitional control and avoid future accusations of apostasy, Toaff, La Nazione, 563.
68. Kaplan, “Devianza,” 175.
69. On the confraternity, see Galasso, Alle origini, 123–130; Moisés Orfali, “The Portuguese Dowry Society in Livorno and the Marrano Diaspora,” SR 35/2 (2001), 143–156.
70. Toaff, La Nazione, 267 (n. 67). It is interesting to observe that when the confraternity was founded in 1644 the statutes made no mention at all of the possibility that a member might go to Iberia. This only became punishable in statutes written subsequent to 1655, after chapter 25 was added to the community statutes, cf. ACIL, Opera Pia Moar Abbetulot, n.L8.
71. Toaff, La Nazione, 267.
72. Cf. Galasso, Alle origini, 83–84; Kaplan, “Familia,” 133–134; Bodian, Hebrews, 139.
73. Yerushalmi, From the Spanish Court, 200. Among the most recent studies on Jewish circumcision, see the collection of essays in, Elizabeth Wyner Mark, The Covenant of Circumcision: New Perspectives on an Ancient Jewish Rite (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2003); Shaye J. D. Cohen, “Why Aren’t Jewish Women Circumcised?” Gender & History 9/3 (1997): 560–578; Lawrence A. Hoffman, Covenant of Blood: Circumcision and Gender in Rabbinic Judaism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
74. Bodian, Hebrews, 97; cf. Yosef Kaplan, “Wayward New Christians and Stubborn New Jews: the Shaping of a Jewish Identity,” Jewish History 8/1–2 (1994): 27–41, 31 and passim. Baruch Spinoza in his Tractatus theologico-politicus (Amsterdam, 1672) wrote that the Jews “are separated not only because of their external rituals, which are different from those of all other peoples, but also because of circumcision, to which they remain religiously attached . . . I am sure that the importance of circumcision for Jews is such as to persuade me that this ritual alone is enough to guarantee the eternal survival of the Jewish people,” Kaplan, “Devianza,” 196.
75. ADPi, Inquisizione, n.9, c. 479v. (1624). These words were pronounced by Luigi Nuñez da Costa, according to what the noted converso Simon Rodriguez Navarro alias Simon de la Pas alias Samuel Abudiente said in 1624 to the Inquisitor of Pisa. The latter described his passage to Judaism in Livorno: “The way I returned to Judaism was they put a cloth at my neck and tefillin on my head and a book in my hands from which I don’t remember what they read, they made me look at my fingernails and they circumcised me. At my circumcision I didn’t have a godfather because it was done in secret,” ADPi, Inquisizione, n.9, c. 469r. On Simon Rodriguez Navarro, see Toaff, La Nazione, 193, 365.
76. As Yosef Kaplan has observed, the Sephardi authorities considered the circumcision of conversos “on the one hand a sign of the sincerity of their intention to return to Judaism, and on the other hand a means of preventing their return to ‘Lands of idolatry,’ since it put their lives in jeopardy,” Kaplan, “Gli ebrei,” 148.
77. Cf. Bodian, Hebrews, 113. There was even a converso in Amsterdam between 1617 and 1618 who was circumcised after he died and consequently buried in the Jewish cemetery, cf. ibid., 113, 192 (n. 71).
78. Cf. ibid., 112; Toaff, La Nazione, 101–102 (n. 13); Yerushalmi, The Re-education, 3–4. The Pisa Jewish community forbid non-circumcised Jews from laying tefillin, but the rabbi, Jacob Senior, was in favor of it, cf. Toaff, La Nazione, 103–104 (n. 20). In 1693 the previously cited neophyte Pietro Antonio Barbarico (cf. ibid., n. 53) denounced a converso to the Inquisition of Paris stating that the said converso lived in Livorno with his family “as a Jew, taking part in all Jewish ceremonies except reading the sacred Scripture, which he is forbidden to do because he is not circumcised,” cf. ADPi, Inquisizione, n. 25 (unnumbered cards).
79. Cf. Gershom Scholem, “Zohar,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica CD-Rom Edition, Judaica Multimedia (Israel) Ltd. 1997; Robert Bonfil, “Lo spazio culturale degli ebrei d’Italia fra Rinascimento ed età Barocca,” in Corrado Vivanti, Gli ebrei in Italia, in Storia d’Italia. Annali, vol. 2 tome 1, 412–473, 433–438.
80. Elliot R. Wolfson, “Circumcision, vision of God and textual interpretation: from midrashic trop to mystical symbol,” History of Religions 27/2 (1987): 189–215,190.
81. Ibid., 211.
82. Ibid., 214.
83. Yerushalmi, From the Spanish Court, 200.
84. Ibid., 190; cf. Kaplan, “Devianza,” 172; Bodian, Hebrews, 98, 189 (n. 9).
85. This is how Moshe Raphael, the rabbi of Amsterdam described the return to Judaism of Abraham Israel Pereyra: “First he began to regularly frequent the yeshivot to listen attentively to the instruction and to study the books of his faith.” Instead, this is how Pereyra addressed a converso intending to return to the Jewish faith: “The moment you leave the synagogue and arrive at home you must take the Bible and read it . . . fix an exact time in one of the yeshivot, since this is the real remedy and you will learn this way . . . and thus you will enjoy the perseverance and attention you dedicate to reading the Bible and studying other books, and I studied like this at yeshivah Torah or under the guidance of our faithful minister of religion, the noble hakham Ishac Aboab,” Kaplan, “Gli ebrei,” 154.
86. The origin of the tevilah is unclear but it appears to have become part of the conversion ceremony of both men and women around the second century. Shaye J. D. Cohen has hypothesized a link among the appearance of the ritual bath in the conversion ritual, women’s ability to convert to Judaism autonomously, that is without having to marry a Jew, and the development of the matrilineal principle in Judaism, cf. Shaye J. D. Cohen, “The Origins of the Matrilineal Principle in Rabbinic Law,” Association of Jewish Studies Review 10 (1985): 19–53.
87. Cf. Bodian, Hebrews, 113; Schwarzfuchs, “Le Retour,” 341. In 1624 the Jews of Amsterdam issued a disposition denying burial in the community cemetery to anyone whose maternal line “tenha raça de goy,” descended from a gentile.
88. Ioly Zorattini, “Derek,” 210–211; Schwarzfuchs, “Le Retour,” 345–346. The bibliography on institutionalized conversion in the Jewish world is imposing, but permit me to refer to just a few of the most recent Italian studies and their bibliographies: Silvia Pasquetti, “L’istituto della conversione nell’ebraismo,” Quaderni del Centro di Alti Studi in Scienze Religiose 1 (2002): 107–146; Silvia Pasquetti, “Ebreo per nascita, ‘apostata’ per scelta,” Daimon. Annuario di diritto comparato delle religioni 1 (2001): 11–51; Riccardo Di Segni, “Problemi culturali delle conversioni: aspetti del rapporto delle fonti ebraiche medievali con i convertiti,” Dimensioni e problemi della ricerca storica 2 (1996): 15–24.
89. Carsten Lorenz Wilke, “Conversion ou retour? La métamorphose du nouveau chrétien en juif portugais dans l’immaginaire sépharade de XVII siècle,” in Mémoires juives d’Espagne et du Portugal, ed. Esther Benbassa (Paris: Publisud, 1996), 53–67, 60. According to Wilke, even the Sephardi apologists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries interpreted converso adherence to Judaism as a conversion rather than a return to the faith of their ancestors. In fact, these apologists continually invoked a biblical precedent in Abraham, who rebelled against his father and recognized the oneness of God, refusing idolatry and, when already an old man, undergoing a circumcision to mark his pact with God. For Wilke the figure of Abraham, who replaced that of Esther in the converso imaginaire, indicated a break with the Marrano past.
90. Cf. Elliott Horowitz, “The Eve of the Circumcision: A Chapter in the History of Jewish Nightlife,” in Essential papers on Jewish culture in Renaissance and Baroque Italy, ed. David B. Ruderman (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 555–588. Horowitz observes that this institutionalization and sanctification of nighttime celebrations on the eve of a circumcision coincides with a progressive sanctification of popular religiosity in the Christian world, especially in Catholicism, cf. ibid., 556.
91. The custom of holding a nighttime vigil seven days after the birth of a child survived in Marrano culture, but the crypto-Jews transformed it into a celebration of the mother and the newborn, or the labor and the birth, not of the circumcision. The descendants of conversos rarely circumcised their sons, and even when they did it was too difficult to perform at birth. Thus, some crypto-Jewish groups held a hadas even when a girl was born, cf. Melammed, Heretics, 24; Horowitz, “The Eve,” 558.
92. Traditionally this was the way to ward off demons, particularly Lilith, from the baby, cf. Horowitz, “The Eve,” 561, 580 (n. 37).
93. On the custom of holding masked vigils, such as, for example, those that took place in the Ancona Jewish community, see ibid., 566.
94. Cf. ADPi, Inquisizione, n. 19, cc. 1224r–v.
95. In the seventeenth-century ordinances that controlled these vigils mentioned the father’s house, whereas earlier documents spoke of the “mother’s house,” an indication of the greater visibility afforded to men, particularly fathers, in these celebrations, cf. Horowitz, “The Eve,” 559–560, 571. See also the statutes of the Livorno Jewish community in Toaff, La Nazione, 559, 589.
96. Cf. Toaff, La Nazione, 298, 589, 629.
97. As Horowitz stresses, the Zohar was the source of the tradition of holding study vigils on the eve of a circumcision. The Kabbalist Aaron Berechia de Modena, Leone Modena’s cousin, specifically referred to the Zohar when he proposed in his ma’avar Yabboq (1626) that some rituals, including nighttime vigils before a circumcision, be reformed. Horowitz, “The Eve,” 558, 562–563.
98. Cf. Ibid., 560–562, 569–570; Toaff, La Nazione, 298–299. The lengths to which the Livorno Jewish authorities went in containing the earthly aspects of the vigils is evident in a 1677 ordinance declaring that in order to avoid unpleasant accidents during the dancing, the floors of houses holding vigils and marriage feasts must be shored up. Additionally, a 1694 disposition on games made particular reference to games that men and women played at home during vigils, Toaff, La Nazione, 606, 634.
99. Cf. Toaff, La Nazione, 298; Horowitz, “The Eve,” 569–570.
100. As some seventeenth-century depositions from the Inquisition of Pisa show, Christian men and women attended not only vigils but circumcisions as well, cf. ADPi, Inquisizione, n. 16, cc. 452r–v. (1656); n. 18, cc. 173r (1663), cc. 1224r–v. (1666); n 19, c. 152r., 153r–v., 208r. (1667). This caused great consternation among ecclesiastic authorities in Pisa and Livorno, who often presented the problem to the Holy Office of Rome, cf. Archivio della Congregazione per la dottrina della Fede, Stanza Storica, HH, 2d, cc. 739r, 879r.
101. Cf. Toaff, La Nazione, 298.