4

Childhood and Family among the Western Sephardim in the Seventeenth Century

JULIA R. LIEBERMAN

This chapter focuses on family life in three Western Sephardi communities—Amsterdam, Hamburg, and Livorno—with an emphasis on children. These merchant communities, populated by former New Christians originally from Spain and Portugal, were founded at the turn of the seventeenth century. I will begin this essay by exploring the Western Sephardi household and the roles assigned to husbands and wives. Next, I will explore how life-cycle events that involved children were celebrated; these events include birth, circumcision, naming the children, redemption of the first born, and, as well, the bar mitzvah, which Western Sephardim then referred to as a child “entering the guild of commandment observers.” I am also interested in parents’ attitudes toward their children from birth to adolescence, as well as the attitudes toward breastfeeding and religious education. The sources I have gathered consist of printed books and manuscripts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; these include sermons, prayer books, family memoirs, genealogies, ethical wills, and archival sources such as communal registers. My study also builds on demographic data about family life that has been collected by other researchers. Although the majority of the sources come from Amsterdam, I also have studied materials from Hamburg and Livorno, where Jewish life was permitted, and I touch upon Antwerp, where, under Catholic Spanish control, Judaism was practiced under the pretense of Catholicism. It was not uncommon for these merchant families and their children to live in places where they could not openly practice Judaism and then later move to places where they could. Thus the line separating converso life—with Jews pretending to be Christians—from Jewish life was at times rather thin. I will address two questions throughout my essay. First, to what extent did Sephardim view their children as individuals different from adults; in other words, in what way were children recognized as having their own specific needs? Second, to what roles were children assigned in the Sephardi family? If we consider childhood as an idea formed in the minds of adults, then what was the relationship between the idea of childhood among the ex-conversos and their own collective Jewish identity, an identity that was also in the process of being reconstructed? I believe that exploring Sephardi attitudes toward children will also shed light on how their Jewish identity took form.

The Structure of the Western Sephardi Family as Reflected in the Thesovro dos dinim by Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel (Amsterdam, 1647)

To get close to the experience of children, we must begin by understanding how the Western Sephardim organized family life once they returned to normative Judaism. Our most important and, to my knowledge, only rabbinic source for the structure of the family among the Western Sephardim is the book by Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel, Thesovro dos dinim (Treasury of Jewish Laws), which was published in Amsterdam in 1647.1 This important book has not received much attention by historians, perhaps because, as its title indicates, it has been considered merely a derivative explanation of halakhah (Jewish law and tradition). Nonetheless, and as I will demonstrate, the book is a unique source of information, because its primary focus is family life; it teaches readers how to celebrate life-cycle events in accordance with halakhah, and prescribes proper and expected behavior among family members. In addition, it addresses not only the Amsterdam community but also the scattered network of Western Sephardi communities. Menasseh also mentions aspects of his own family and professional life, such as the marriage of his daughter Gracia Abarbanel, which took place while he was writing the Thesovro, and he relates the difficulties he encountered finding time in his busy schedule to write it. Thus the book is not merely a set of prescribed rabbinic rules, but rather it seems to represent Menasseh’s own teachings and lifestyle.² More importantly, in the introduction Menasseh also addresses women as potential readers, calling them the very “noble and honest Senhoras of the Portuguese Nation,” and expresses his desire to persuade them to read his book on the laws (dinim) that pertain to good governance of the household. Although he does not quote specific contemporary sources, as he addresses women he evidently is motivated by a desire not only to emulate other writers, who have produced comparable works in Italian and in Yiddish (which he calls lengua tudesca), but to surpass them. Menasseh tells his female readers:

if the reading of good books, is the most honest entertainment that one could spend time on, . . . [you ought to] put down the other secular books, if you are reading them, and read the sacred ones, . . . mainly on Shabbat and festivals . . . [as] if you do so, and you follow what I am telling you here you will enjoy the glory of the matriarchs, Sara, Rivca, and Rachel . . . Because if other Hebrew nations entertain their households daily with a [new] book, it is only expected that among us [of the Portuguese Hebrew Nation] in your honor something [comparable] should be written . . . as befits to [your] wit and virtue.3

Menasseh’s sensitivity to the importance of women in the domestic world is rather unusual among his contemporaries, and his statement that “no other [writer] has preceded me”⁴ has some validity. A search for what was done or written to educate New Christian women reveals the lack of attention given to them. One wonders how rabbis and other communal leaders expected women to make the transition from life in Portugal or Spain, which lacked direct contact with normative Judaism, to the complexities of running a Jewish household after re-embracing Judaism.⁵

Nevertheless, it is important to clarify what I believe Menasseh implies by saying that the Thesovro is partly an unprecedented novelty. The book is not original, if by that we mean it was written with ideas conceived by Menasseh. He borrows from Maimonides’s medieval work Mishneh Torah (Repetition of the Torah); from the more recent work by Joseph Caro, Shulkhan Arukh (The Prepared Table), which was published in 1565; and from Talmudic sages and the Bible. Menasseh’s originality is that he selected and gathered all these sources to end up with a book that is quite accessible to the average reader, and that focuses solely on domestic daily life.

Although Menasseh does not openly acknowledge non-Jewish sources, he refers to a “gentile philosopher”⁶ who is, in fact, Aristotle. The Thesovro presents a view of the household rooted in contemporary Iberian social values. This is evident in the intertwining of certain terms and concepts that Menasseh borrows from non-Jewish sources together with others from the Jewish tradition. For example, the subtitle of the book informs the reader that it includes all the laws (dinim) necessary to (the governing of) a perfect economy. The word economia (as in the English word, economics) is of Greek origins,⁷ and in classical Greek and Latin texts it always referred to the proper management of the household. In contemporary Iberia, the term economics was frequently used to refer to the management of the household and its rule by the paterfamilias, and there was a tradition of moral texts written for the purpose of advising men on how to marry and on the proper way to conduct themselves as paterfamilias. In Lisbon in 1651, a publication titled Letter to Guide Married Men8 offered advice and guidance to men in a style very similar to that used by Menasseh in the Thesovro. Similarly, in Spain there was a tradition of Catholic priests authoring catechisms to instruct the paterfamilias on how to conduct himself in his role as head of the household. The similarities among such catechisms, the Letter, and some sections of the Thesovro are striking.⁹ The term economics was also applied to the management of more complex forms of social relationships. According to James Casey, a historian of the Spanish family and history, “Economics was considered essentially as a branch of [Christian] theology whose responsibilities it was to set out the guidelines of a ‘moral commonwealth.’”¹⁰

The Thesovro is organized into three domains that coincide with the three parts of the classical household and come from the tradition originating with Aristotle and other classical authors, which continued as a legacy in the Iberian tradition. The first domain is the “Conjugal Part,” which consists of two parts—one on marriage and one on women—including the laws of niddah (family purity).¹¹ The second domain, or the “Paternal House,” is one that includes all the commandments relating to a father and son, such as circumcision and redemption of the firstborn son, as well as the laws of inheritance (Menasseh never refers to unmarried daughters, except in reference to marriage).¹² Finally, in the third tractate, “On Ownership,” Menasseh includes commandments dealing with domestic possessions: slaves, animals and birds, and material possessions.¹³ Menasseh’s understanding of economics, or the proper rule of the household, was not an isolated example among the Western Sephardim, as can be demonstrated by another Portuguese work written about forty years later by Rabbi Selomo de Oliveira (also of Amsterdam), where a very similar concept of the household is presented: “the [physical] place that serves to provide bread, fire, protection from rain, wind, cold and heat, is called the house and it is made up of four people: husband, wife, son, and servants.”¹⁴ Writing in 1689, Rabbi Isaac Aboab da Fonseca expresses a similar understanding of social organization. “Moral philosophy,” he says, “consists of three regiments or governments: ethics, to guide the individual; oeconomics, to govern the family; and politics, to govern the republic.”¹⁵ This view of social organization coincides partly with the recent findings by the historian Yosef Kaplan, which led him to conclude that when ex-New Christians became “New Jews” they tried to preserve their previous Iberian family structure, such as their practice of endogamy, in order to safeguard their social order; otherwise it would have endangered their economic resources, mainly among the well-to-do families.16

In principle, the Western Sephardi family was a nuclear family composed of a husband, wife, and their children (what we consider a “family” today), but other individuals living under the same roof, at that time, also were considered “family.” In a seventeenth-century letter written by Rabbi Immanuel Aboab to a friend at La Bastide, Aboab referred to a Portuguese family that escaped, in 1614, from the Inquisition to Bordeaux (in southern France). The family consisted of the entire household—the parents and their children, the husband’s mother, a wet nurse, two servants, and one slave.¹⁷ In recent studies, historians have amply documented the prominent presence of African slaves and servants among contemporary Spanish and Portuguese families, including converso families, as well as among the Western Sephardim. In Livorno, slaves originating from North Africa and Turkey were owned or, more often, temporarily rented by Jewish families. In addition to their functional service (they did all forms of housework), slaves also were used as symbols of socioeconomic status.¹⁸ The Sephardi household also included servants, females and/or males. In the Hamburg community, household servants were Ashkenazim, while in Amsterdam servants were a more varied population, including Dutch non-Jewish girls but also blacks, moriscos, and mulattos, as well as Ashkenazim.¹⁹ Apparently, it was only in Livorno that domestic servants were young girls of Iberian origin (often children as young as eight or nine years of age), who arrived with their families and ended up serving in the homes of other Iberian Jews; however, some servants were Christian girls. The social difference between domestic slaves and servants among the Western Sephardim was rather subtle, but female servants, in general, had a greater chance of marrying at a relatively young age than did slaves. Rather often, slaves were donated as part of the patrimony from parents to their children.²⁰ The presence of young males serving outside their homes as apprentices and learning business skills was also common, which we will demonstrate later.²¹ Finally, there is also ample evidence of other individuals, usually adult males, lodged in private homes, sometimes for extended intervals.²² Therefore, we may conclude that a Sephardi household in the Early Modern Period consisted of a nuclear family, parents and their young children, as well as other individuals—some related by blood but others not so related. This type of household was hierarchical, with the paterfamilias at its center and all other individuals dependent on him for survival. Although the Western Sephardi household may have had parallels with the contemporary Ashkenazi one, it was much more similar to the contemporary Iberian Christian one. Compelling evidence for this similarity with the Iberian counterpart is found in Sephardi wills where, quite often, legacies are left to domestic servants and other individuals who had been part of the household for a long time.

Germaniae, Frederick de Wit, Amsterdam, ca. 1690. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Amsterdam.

Marriage and the Conjugal Household

Menasseh describes four possible types of marriage, rejects the first three, and concludes that only the fourth is the ideal marriage.23 The first type is motivated by greed (avaricia) on the part of the groom, in order to obtain wealth by marrying a wealthy woman. “This type of marriage [he says] is the most common in our times,”²⁴ but it cannot end well as wealth can disappear and, with its disappearance, the love between wife and husband will also end. Marriage between members of the same socioeconomic class is therefore recommended by Menasseh: “It is a prudent commandment to look for comparable quality in a marriage.”25

The second type of marriage is one based on honor; that is to say, when a man marries a woman because of the fame and reputation that he will gain from her relatives. This marriage also has little chance of success as inequality in nobility and birth (nobreza e nacimento) will soon lead to disagreements.²⁶ The third type of marriage is one based on the beauty of the body; that is to say, the woman’s beauty. He quotes the rabbinic treatise Ta’Anit: “Young man . . . do not fix thine eyes upon beauty, but consider the family.” This marriage, says Menasseh, is called a marriage of pain (dor) because of the sure pain it will bring to the life of the husband—given the transitory nature of beauty, it will soon end as a result of a possible illness, disaster, or natural aging. Finally, the ideal marriage, according to Menasseh, is one based on prudence; that is, the marriage to a woman who possesses qualities such as virtue, honesty, and prudence.²⁷

Menasseh explains the biblical and rabbinic traditions that give parents legal rights to marry off their children and select their partners, with the consent of their sons and daughters.²⁸ In fact, parents and community leaders in Western Sephardi communities had a great deal of control over the marriage of their children. In Amsterdam, throughout the seventeenth and part of the eighteenth centuries, a marriage that took place without the knowledge of the bride’s family was penalized with herem (a ban) by the lay leaders of the community.²⁹ Menasseh also recommends that marriage take place at about age eighteen for men and age thirteen for girls, as customary in Jewish tradition. To compensate for the girl’s young age—that is, not yet being mature enough to govern a household—Menasseh recommends that the newly married couple reside in the parents’ home until they are ready to set up their own household.³⁰ Allusions in the text suggest that an early age of marriage, as well as a relatively small difference in age between the partners, was mostly an ideal that did not necessarily reflect reality. Furthermore, the text also indicates that marriage often was decided on the basis of financial interests relevant to both families, and that these marriages frequently did not end well. According to Menasseh, when a young man marries an older woman because of financial reasons, he runs two risks: (1) that a short time later, what originally seemed appropriate would turn into hatred, and (2) he might never have children, who would reinforce conjugal love and carry on his legacy. Vice versa, when an older man marries a young woman, there also are risks associated with the age difference. In the same manner that the planets Saturn (the Roman god of harvest or time) and Venus (the goddess of love and beauty) are widely separated, two partners having widely different ages could not find compatibility. Menasseh says, “Proportional age will help preserve longer the love, purity and loyalty that wellmarried people need to proffer.”31

The evidence available to us demonstrates that there was a wide range for the age at first marriage. Some marriages indeed took place while the girl was very young and the man older, and in some cases much older.³² On average, though, marriage at a relatively late age, for both men and women, seemed to have occurred often. Recent demographic studies dealing with age at first marriage for Jewish men and women in Amsterdam in the seventeenth century have found that, during the period 1625–1649 (and throughout the seventeenth century), the mean age at first marriage was 29 for men and more than 24 for women, and that most newly married couples set up their own households and did not remain in their parents’ home.³³ Nevertheless, even after marriage, family ties remained very important. Menasseh also alludes to the importance of family ties when he says that children should commonly follow the customs and virtues of their maternal uncles.³⁴ He recommends marriage between blood relatives, as Jacob in the Bible did;³⁵ in fact, uncles very often married their nieces, and marriage between two cousins was also very common. These endogamous practices added to the intertwined family relations characteristic of the Western Sephardim.

Some details of intimacy between parents and children are given as mitzvot (commandments), such as avoiding sexual relations between husband and wife in the presence of children from the time a child begins to talk. We learn contemporary customs in passing, such as when Menasseh instructs men how to say the Shemah while in bed, and he refers to the possibility of fathers sleeping in the same bed as their sons and daughters if they are past the age of thirteen.³⁶

When Menasseh addresses the specific responsibilities of the husband toward his wife,³⁷ he does so by referring to emotions traditionally associated with males and females. He says uncontrolled use of force and power (mental or physical), on the part of the husband, will result in tears and resistance on the part of the wife; given that a woman easily cries; thus, a man who provokes his wife to tears can expect divine punishment.³⁸ Instead of rigor and force, which will result in resistance from his wife, a man who rules over his wife with reason may see a positive result—that is, she will voluntarily accept his orders. According to Menasseh, a man ought to control his wife not as a master who controls his slave, but rather as one with the soul of a wise man who controls his body. Menasseh does not question the right of a man to “dominate” his wife, but rather the manner of using such a “right.”39 Governance of the household should be shared by the husband and wife, and the husband should invest the wife with authority (to be used whether he is absent or present), over everything that is appropriate and convenient to her gender (seu sexo), so that she will be respected by her children and servants.

Menasseh starts his comments on the obligation of the wife toward her husband by discussing the power of a woman to turn a marriage into either one of happiness for the husband, by being the accomplished woman described in Prov. 31:10, or into one of unhappiness, by being the “more bitter-than-death” woman mentioned in Eccl. 7:26. A woman who wants to have a good marriage and fulfill her responsibilities ought to love, honor, and appreciate her husband as her master. Her husband’s customs, says Menasseh, should be like laws to rule her life. When her husband is good, she ought to imitate him, and when he is bad she ought to tolerate him.⁴⁰ These admonitions to wives were, in all probability, based more on real experiences than on abstractions. On at least one specific occasion (June 1, 1633), Menasseh witnessed the release of a husband who had been incarcerated for badly beating his wife. The case merits attention, because it concerns well-known and respected members of Portuguese families, both in Amsterdam and in Hamburg. Jacob Justo (in Hebrew, Jacob ben Abraham Zaddiq) was a cartographer known for a map he created of the Holy Land that included a moving introduction in Hebrew dedicated to his own people. He was married to Gracia da Costa (Hebrew name, Rica Zaddiq), and both had resided in Hamburg before arriving in Amsterdam. The case documents show that Justo had had a history of ill-treating his wife, well before May 1633—when he was finally thrown in jail, condemned for one year, but then released a week later as requested by his wife.⁴¹ Although this is only one case of wife-beating, and probably an unusual one, Menasseh’s reminder to husbands, on at least one occasion, not to lay hands on their wives seems to indicate that wife-beating was not an unusual occurrence.⁴²

Some women are, according to Menasseh, like the moon—in that, the further it is from the sun, the brighter its light is, but as it approaches the sun, its light shines less. In the same manner, some women appear happy in their husband’s absence but melancholy and absentminded (“suspensas”) in their presence, although it should be the opposite.⁴³ Among the tasks Menasseh assigns to women is feeding animals owned by the household, as an act of charity. So saying, he reveals the popular belief that animals could serve the purpose of diverting death upon themselves when it arrives to take a human being.⁴⁴

Hamburg, Frederick de Wit, Amsterdam, ca. 1694. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Amsterdam.

Sephardi homes, at least the homes of well-to-do families, were busy places where many communal activities took place and where there was probably little chance for quiet and privacy. For example, in Hamburg at the time Menasseh’s book was written, the three small congregations in existence still met daily in private homes, probably in attics.45 Communal meals also took place in the homes of lay leaders of the community, and frequently life-cycle family celebrations, such as weddings and circumcisions, filled the houses with adult guests. Finally, the house was also quite often a place to conduct business.

The conjugal household among the Western Sephardim was charged with various competing tasks, at least from our modern perspective of what constitutes family life. The house or physical space had to be shared with household members, such as servants, slaves, and other temporary residents or visitors who today would not be considered “family.” The house was also a place to conduct business, and a number of communal affairs and celebrations also took place in private homes. Furthermore, in the midst of the household, there was also the nuclear family—parents and their children with their own specific emotional and physical needs.

The Paternal Household

The title of the second part of the Thesovro, the “Paternal Household and the Responsibilities of the Father of the Family,”46 probably was inspired by the biblical Hebrew term “House of the Father,” but it also coincides with one of the three divisions of the classical household with its paterfamilias and his exclusive right or potestas (patria potestad) over his children. This is also characteristic of Iberian and other Mediterranean households. The first chapter is dedicated to the paterfamilias, whose centrality in the household is described with the metaphor of the human brain as the center of perception and movement of the human body. Menasseh may have borrowed this metaphor from Galen’s medical concept of the human body. This metaphor was frequently used, at that time, to express the idea that men were naturally suitable for leadership.

In the same way that the brain, through the nerves, sends out the vital essence to all parts of the human body . . . so also does the paterfamilias as the head send customs and conditions to all members of the household.⁴⁷

After the chapter on the paterfamilias and his responsibility to set a good example for all members of the household, Menasseh includes commandments addressed to males as fathers: the rite of circumcision, the naming of the newborn boy, the redemption of the firstborn son, and the laws of inheritance.⁴⁸ In Maimonides’s Mishneh Torah these commandments are part of the section on marriage; in Caro’s Shulkhan Arukh, they are scattered here and there but shortly after the laws of parenting. Menasseh’s ordering of the household underscores the paterfamilias and his central role in the domestic world, similar to Aristotle’s concepts. The father’s responsibility to teach his son Torah is also mentioned in this section; the teaching of the Law (Torah) takes precedence over teaching a trade, as a trade will serve the son only for this world while Torah will serve him for this and the world to come. Nonetheless, Menasseh gives a far more detailed discussion on the education of [male] children in the Thesovro published in 1645. In so doing, Menasseh delegates the responsibility of teaching male children to the community at large, with the father only responsible for initiating the education of his son and for sending him to school.49

Childbirth

Due to the high rate of mortality associated with birth for both mother and child, the birth of a child in the seventeenth century was both a time of great joy and of great concern for the Sephardi families that are the focus of this study, as well as for contemporary Christian families. Medicine, as a science in the seventeenth century, was clearly of little help in saving the life of either the mother or the child, as demonstrated by some of the folk remedies used to (supposedly) shorten delivery time, ease labor, and protect both mother and child. In the “Tratado sobre medecina,” which was written by the physician Abraham Zacuto (known as Zacuto Lusitano, who died in Amsterdam in 1642) and subsequently copied by the calligrapher Benjamin Godines in 1690, some of these charms are listed: white diamonds from the Indian kingdoms of Monsul and Moabar were recommended to protect pregnant women and to ease labor; a mixture of green jasper bundled on the inside of the left thigh was believed to shorten labor; stones from eagles (found in their nests), if bundled on the woman’s left thigh, were supposed to ease labor, and the mixture was considered protective if bundled on the left arm of the baby.⁵⁰

Two baroque poems by Daniel Levi de Barrios (1631–1701), which are dedicated to a father whose wife had died in childbirth but whose baby survived, give an idea of the contrasting feelings families might have felt when dealing, in short order, with the experience of birth and death. Barrios describes childbirth with the metaphor of the sea (el mar del parto [the sea of labor]), and the pain of the father as he watches the mother swim [for her survival] but instead reaches the end of the land [Finis Terra] and comes to the end of her life, while the child navigates and reaches hopeful land [the Cape of Good Hope].⁵¹

Among the laws for observing Shabbat, Menasseh included one chapter dealing with childbirth, the title being “On the Woman who has Given Birth and the One who is in Labor.”⁵² The woman in labor was considered a person whose life is endangered, and taking care of her had priority over the celebration of the Shabbat: “It is permitted to call the midwife to come from another town, to light the fire [to keep the woman warm], and to light a candle for her, even if she is blind.”⁵³ According to Menasseh, the time of delivery began from the moment the woman broke water and was taken to the birthing chair by other women, and it ended three days later. From the third day to the seventh, it was up to the woman to express to others whether or not attending to her had priority over observing the Shabbat. From the seventh to the thirteenth day, Shabbat took priority over the health of the woman, even if she expressed her needs; she was considered an ill person whose care should not take priority over observing the Shabbat. In at least one occasion in 1631, in Amsterdam, the Mahamad (seven lay leaders of the community) made a decision not to allow visits to women who just gave birth until fourteen days after delivery.54 From this ranking of priorities, one can conclude that the actual delivery and the three following days were considered the most critical for the health of the mother. If, during Shabbat, a woman died of childbirth, right before delivering the baby, Menasseh’s instructions to husbands about saving the life of the child included horrifying details for our twenty-first century sensibilities: The husband was expected to open her up with a knife and take out the baby in order to save its life.⁵⁵ There are personal accounts of a birth in another contemporary document, the memoirs written by Isaac de Pinto, alias Manuel Alvarez Pinto (born in Antwerp, 1629; died in Amsterdam, 1681). He was born and raised in a family of New Christians, returned to Judaism in Rotterdam, and then moved his household to Amsterdam. He relates the events surrounding the birth of his first son on August 18, 1652 in Rotterdam. Amid the joy and celebrations of the birth of the child, the young mother, Rachel de Pinto Henriques, (referred to by her husband as being of “tender age”), died on the seventh day after giving birth, and her burial took place right after the circumcision of her newborn son.⁵⁶ Her death, as a result of childbirth, is representative of the vulnerable situation mothers and newborns had to endure in the Early Modern Period.

In other families, the mother survived the experience of childbirth but the child did not. In fact, babies frequently were stillborn, died right after birth, or before they reached their first birthday. A baby born prematurely, in the seventh or eighth month, without nails or hair was considered as if it were dead. If the birth took place on Shabbat the mother was instructed to lie down beside the newborn and to try to feed it, by breast or by hand, perhaps with the hope that it might survive on its own, without any medical help.⁵⁷ Sara Curiel (1652–1691), who married her uncle, Isaac de Matatia Aboab (1631–1707), on October 23, 1666, in Amsterdam, became pregnant six times, but only two of her sons, Matatia and David, reached adulthood. Her first two pregnancies ended in miscarriages; the first was a male stillborn between the third and fourth month of her pregnancy (September 23, 1669), and the second, a full-term baby girl, was also stillborn (April 19, 1671). One son, Moshe, born on September 24, 1678, lived only eighteen days, and another, Immanuel, born on September 18, 1679, died eleven months later on August 1680.58 We do not know details of how families coped with the mixed emotions that the birth of a child and its proximity to death must have imposed on them, but perhaps their sense of vulnerability led them also to appreciate the joys of the celebrations surrounding a normal birth.

Some fathers recorded their children’s births, girls as well as boys, with indications of the immense personal significance that these births had. Yehuda Maccabeo, the well-known calligrapher of Amsterdam, recorded the birth of two of his children at the end of a miniature handwritten book. When his daughter, Sara Machorrro, was born at 4:00 p.m., May 27, 1638, he wrote: “May God make her his servant, amen.” Later, a son, Mosseh, was born on October 8, Shabbat, 1639 (coinciding with Yom Kippur); he then wrote: “May God make him his servant and allow him to grow up.”⁵⁹

Rituals of Childbirth

THE VEGIA

The eve before the circumcision, the vegia in Portuguese, was celebrated following the medieval custom known as the “hadas” in Spanish or “fadas” in Portuguese (fairies), a mixture of religious and superstitious beliefs associated with the fear of evil spirits. The practice of the hadas had continued on the Iberian Peninsula among converso families, who celebrated it even under the threat of the Inquisition.⁶⁰ The vigil or vegia, as celebrated in the seventeenth century by Sephardi families, seems to have retained most of its medieval characteristics, in spite of the efforts by religious and lay communal leaders to turn it into an exclusively religious celebration. It took place at night, on the eve of the circumcision, in the home of the newborn, where guests (men and women), were welcomed with fresh fruit, honey, and fruit compotes.

Elliott Horowitz has studied the custom as it evolved among Ashkenazi and Italian Jews, from the Medieval to the Early Modern Periods. Horowitz points to the medieval origins of the celebration, when the mixing of ages, genders, and the sacred and profane were parts of daily life; he sees the Early Modern Period as a time when popular religion was being replaced by the morality of the official one.⁶¹ Horowitz's conclusions are confirmed by the findings of Renzo Toaff⁶² and more recently by Cristina Galaso (see her contribution to this volume) in their studies of the Livorno community. As Toaff and Galasso have demonstrated, in Livorno the eve of the circumcision was at first celebrated equally by men and women, including Christian neighbors, in the home of the newborn, with food, dancing, and singing. But by the last decades of the seventeenth century these celebrations had been curbed under the control of the Mahamad. The number of guests was limited, Christian neighbors were no longer present, and women’s roles diminished.

Menasseh discussed the vegia as one of the “customs and ceremonies to celebrate circumcision” and as mentioned in the Gemara and the Zohar: One celebration was a banquet or seudat mitzvah that was given only to males after the circumcision, and the other was the “universal custom to invite guests to the home [of the newborn] on the vegia and with immense jubilation to celebrate the mitsva.”63 The records from the Hamburg community show parallels with the situation in Livorno. The Mahamad limited the number of guests gathering for the fadas celebration (as well as for other popular celebrations) to twenty men and twelve women. This total number referred to the entire house; those who exceeded the number were fined with fifty “risadores” (reichsthalers).⁶⁴

CIRCUMCISION

Although the Shulkhan Arukh, places circumcision and its rituals after the laws of charity, Menasseh places them under the “Paternal House” section, and he explains circumcision in thirty-one steps (or instructions) addressed to fathers on their paternal responsibilities regarding the circumcision of their sons.⁶⁵ Other contemporary documents or family genealogies that have come down to us give the impression that circumcision was indeed a major event in the lives of the Western Sephardim, and that the event strengthened the bonds among members of the extended family and close friends.

Menasseh begins his instructions by explaining that circumcision is the first affirmative commandment given by God to Abraham, the patriarch, so that he could attain wholeness and perfection. As Abraham circumcised Isaac, the father is responsible for his son’s circumcision, but if the father does not fulfill his responsibility, the Senate (meaning the Mahamad) is obligated to do so. It is rather interesting that the lay leaders of the community are given this charge: “and each day that the father or the Senate delays the fulfillment of this mitzvah [the father or the Mahamad] is not observing this affirmative commandment.”⁶⁶ The circumcision can be done by the father or by another person; Menasseh, in accordance with the Gemara, says that a servant, a woman, or a minor, in that order, can do it, but an adult Israelite has precedence over the others.⁶⁷ That is to say, women, at least in theory, could circumcise the newborn if a male is not available. Many circumcisions were performed by a mohel, but, according to Menasseh, performing the circumcision ought to be done as a mitzvah, and not for any other interest.68

We have sources confirming that some fathers circumcised their own sons. Isaac de Matatia Aboab, who we met before, circumcised his three sons: Matatia (born on November 15, 1672), David (born on November 17, 1675), and Moshe (born on September 24, 1678, but who died shortly afterward).⁶⁹ In the genealogical book that was kept by the Belmonte and Fonseca families, where the birth of each child was meticulously recorded by successive generations of fathers, it was noted that sometimes the father circumcised his own sons. Abraham da Fonseca (1638–1711), who had a total of eleven children, circumcised two of his sons; the first of them was Aharon, his fifth son (born on the 13th of Nissan, in the spring, 5435 [1675]). Aharon’s two older siblings, Isaque, about six years old, and Angela, about four, were his godparents—a sign of the endogamy practiced by some well-to-do Sephardi families. Jacob, his ninth son (born on Heshvan, 5444 [November 17, 1684]) was also circumcised by his father.⁷⁰ In this valuable genealogical book, kept for so many generations and by various branches of the original Belmonte family, we learn details of family celebrations associated with the birth of a child.

According to Lawrence A. Hoffman, in the Medieval Period the circumcision rite was moved from the home to the synagogue, and then back again to the home in the Early Modern Period.⁷¹ Menasseh advised fathers to do it diligently in the morning and independently of the time for synagogue prayers.⁷² In Amsterdam, sometimes the circumcision was done in the synagogue, but, at other times, it was done in the privacy of the home. Bernard Picart, in his book, first published in 1723, Les cérémonies et coutoumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde, also describes some circumcisions being performed at home and others in the synagogue; one of his engravings shows the ceremony taking place in a private home and in the presence of the mother, who is reflected in a mirror.⁷³

In Hamburg’s communal registers, references to circumcisions frequently describe attempts by the Mahamad to curb popular customs surrounding the ceremony. In some families it appears that the circumcision was performed in private homes (perhaps the mohel’s home) but not necessarily in the home of the newborn. In such cases, guests (men and women) would accompany the newborn from his home to the home where the circumcision would be performed, and back again to the child’s home. This custom was not viewed favorably by the Mahamad, and frequently they discussed ways to curb the number of people accompanying the newborn. In the spring of 1654, when the community was already allowed to practice Judaism in public and the three congregations had merged into one, the group accompanying the newborn was limited to a total of thirty-two persons: twenty men and twelve women. However, in the same year, in the month of Tammuz (in the summer) Abraham Benveniste proposed to the Mahamad that only thirty-two men be allowed to attend the ceremony. The final decision was that the number of men could not be more than twenty, even if no women were part of the group.74 Several years later, in the summer of 1659, the Mahamad considered the matter of excluding women again, arriving at the same conclusion, which was announced in the synagogue—the group could not exceed a total of twenty men and twelve women. Additionally, in order not to provoke the locals (os da terra) with luxurious public gatherings, the Mahamad imposed a monetary penalty per each person above the allotted number.⁷⁵ It is interesting to observe the arguing back and forth about the total number of guests and the excluding of women. By limiting the total number to thirty-two-persons, the Mahamad, at least in this regard, was not excluding women. The number thirty-two had mystical significance: the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet plus the ten sefirot equals lev (heart) numerically.

In Jewish tradition, if two sons, born of either the same father or the same mother, died at the time of the circumcision, there was no obligation to circumcise a third son on the eighth day; rather, it could be done later, when the child was stronger. This custom was an attempt to prevent the death of the newborn. Circumcision consisted of three steps: milah, or cutting the foreskin with a knife (in Menasseh’s words, “cutting the entire prepuce”); peri’ah, or discovering the flesh; and metsitsah or the circumciser sucking the blood by mouth. In a later siddur, published in Amsterdam in 1687, this last step in the ritual was explained as necessary, and a circumciser who refused to do it would promptly be replaced by another individual.⁷⁶ This observation brings to mind the negative reaction Uriel da Costa had to the circumcision rite, because, in his view, only the first part, milah, was needed.⁷⁷ Perhaps other men also rejected performing the metsitsah part of the ritual.⁷⁸ At the same time, one can only imagine the sense of awe and wonderment that those individuals who were born into Christianity on the Iberian Peninsula must have felt as they personally witnessed, for the first time, the circumcision of their own sons. With incredible attention to details, Menasseh prescribed how to conduct the ceremony, including the blessings to be said in Portuguese by the circumciser and the father, and the responses by all the participants: “In the manner that you [Lord] have permitted him to enter in the covenant, so he may enter in the study of the Law [Torah], marriage and good deeds.”79 Once the metsitsah was performed, the circumciser recited a blessing while dipping his finger in the mixture of wine and blood and putting some drops of the mixture in the mouth of the child.

During the circumcision ceremony, other attendants to the rite, relatives and friends, were given roles of honor. The role of godparents in the sources we have studied was more Iberian than Jewish. The godfather who, according to Menasseh, should be a deserving person, or “persona benemerita,” could be the father or the grandfather of the child. The godmother’s role was to carry the newborn from the crib (or from the mother) to the godfather and then back again to the crib or the mother.⁸⁰ It should be added that the role of the godmother, in Catholic Spain, was to take the baby from the godfather after the baptismal ceremony.⁸¹ At times, the holding of the baby on the lap during the circumcision was done by the godfather, but, at other times, the father or another male relative had this honor while the godfather just stood on the side. These honor roles seemed to have been dictated by the preference of each family. In some families, all the roles remained within the close members of the family. Two chairs were needed for the ceremony: one for the godfather or the other individual holding the baby, and, another to his right, representing Eliahu the prophet, holding a Bible opened to Parashah Pinhas, Num. 25:10–13.⁸² A dish with sand was also provided to bury the foreskin.

In well-to-do families, the child received expensive gifts at the time of his circumcision. When David Franco Mendes was born on August 11, 1713, and was circumcised by his father, Abraham Franco Mendes, he received a gem set in gold from his godfather, who was his uncle Issaque.⁸³ And when Abraham, son of Daniel da Fonseca, was born on November 11, 1714, his uncle and godfather, Aron da Fonseca, gave him a gem set in gold with diamonds, and his grandmother gave him a gold ring with diamonds.⁸⁴

NAMING OF THE NEWBORN, SON AND DAUGHTER

The ceremony of naming the newborn boy is mentioned by Menasseh as part of the circumcision rite, and this may have been the time when male children were named in some families. But in the Belmonte and Fonseca genealogy book, the ceremony of naming the child was frequently mentioned as being done in the synagogue, on the Shabbat after the birth of the child, when the father was given the right to the shurah; that is to say, the father had the right to distribute mitzvot (honors such as rolling up the Torah scroll or dressing it) among relatives and friends. The father was called up to the Torah, announced the name of the newborn to the congregation, and, in some cases, read appropriate biblical verses. For example, on November 12, 1648, the Shabbat after Mosse Querido was born, his father, Aron Querido, was called up to the Torah and read Gen. 28:4 (part of that week’s parashah, Toledot), where Isaac blessed his son Jacob. In this instance, we learn that three other fathers also were celebrating the birth of their sons that day. Naming their children in the synagogue seems to have been a proud moment for fathers, as it was frequently recorded in family genealogies.85 In Hamburg, the shurah was also given to the father, who would bring the daughter to be named to the synagogue, but only close relatives (son or brother) were allowed to go up to the tebah (elevated area in the synagogue).⁸⁶

The naming of a daughter is not mentioned by Menasseh, but the blessing said by the father is included in the 1687 siddur mentioned before; it appears under two names—in Hebrew, zebed ha-bat, and in Portuguese, fadas.⁸⁷ This last name, fadas (hadas in Spanish), or fairies, points to its medieval connection with the fear of evil spirits harming the newborn that we have seen in connection with the vegia. In the synagogue, where the naming of the newborn daughter took place, the father carrying the daughter was called “abi ha-bat” (in Hebrew, literally, “father of the daughter”). Fathers were in the habit of recording the naming of their daughters as part of their family genealogies, at times including expressions of the attendant joy. Abraham da Fonseca named his daughter Raquel Querida on April 21, 1672 in the synagogue “at six of clock in the morning.”⁸⁸ On September 11, 1645, Aharon Querido recorded the naming of his daughter and the fact that she also had a godmother: “After seventeen years of marriage God gave me a daughter . . . may she live to be his servant . . . I named her Semha . . . and her godmother was my aunt Dona Ester Jesurun.”⁸⁹ And when a daughter was born to Abraham da Fonseca on April 24, 1695, her father recorded, “I named her Hana, the same name as my cousin’s; may the Lord of this world allow her to grow for many pleasures and may we and others see her for generations.”⁹⁰

However, at the level of the community, the naming of a daughter, as well as anything related to females, was always subjected to restrictions. In Livorno in 1655, the Mahamad felt the need to add a new haskamah, or regulation, to rank priorities on the right to the shurah, which, in addition to the naming of a son or daughter, was also given to bridegrooms. The members of the Livorno Mahamad were concerned, in their words, “with the common good and the service to God,” and they made a decision to limit the number of people called to the Torah to ten people.⁹¹ They also prioritized celebrations when two or more celebrations coincided. As expected, male celebrations were given priority: A bridegroom’s shurah was given priority over the naming of a male newborn, and both celebrations had priority over the naming of a newborn girl, which, in the best of circumstances, involved fewer persons being called up to the Torah (only seven persons). However, if the naming of a daughter coincided with a male celebration, honoring the bridegroom or the naming of a male, the father was simply allowed to announce the name of his daughter, and no one else was called up to the Torah.

REDEMPTION OF THE FIRSTBORN

In Biblical and rabbinic Judaism, redemption of the firstborn son, Pidyon haben, is a commandment addressed to the father, who is to pay the priest a monetary fee to release his son from service to God so that he will lead the normal life of a Jew.92 But what the Bible defines here as “first born” is in relation to his mother. That is to say, that he is the first child [to open the womb] of the mother.⁹³ Menasseh clarifies that the responsibility to redeem the son is the father’s, not the mother’s.⁹⁴ In another later text by Rabbi David Pardo, hazzan of the London community, the fact that the father, not the mother, is the one to redeem the child is also clarified. Perhaps formerly New Christian Sephardi women had at some time contested this point.⁹⁵

Menasseh describes the rite as taking place in the privacy of the home, thirty days after birth, and requiring the presence of the parents and a priest or Cohen.⁹⁶ No minyan or quorum is needed, but relatives and friends were invited to the ceremony. The ceremony—a speech act—requires the oral participation of the mother, although the redemption is done by the father. Holding the newborn in his arms, the priest asks the mother if the child is her firstborn; she must answer in the affirmative, and the priest then claims the child belongs to him. Then, the father expresses his desire to release his son. The priest takes the monetary compensation offered for the child’s release, and the ceremony concludes with the father’s blessing and the priest’s prayer. In 1714, when Abraham da Fonseca was born in Amsterdam, David ha-Cohen Belmonte traveled from Hamburg to Amsterdam for the redemption ceremony.⁹⁷

Care of Infants

SWADDLING

Sephardi women swaddled their infants just as contemporary Catholic, Calvinist, and Ashkenazi mothers did.⁹⁸ Swaddling of babies for about the first two years of life, the period of breastfeeding, was a common practice. Swaddling clothes, called faja, in Spanish, are described in the Livorno Statutes of 1693 as being customarily embroidered in gold or silver and excluded from the sumptuary laws.99 The child was wrapped from neck to feet, as it was believed that their tender bodies needed to be shaped while their bones were still young. The practice of swaddling has been highly criticized as a barbaric custom of the past, but seventeenth-century references to swaddling indicate that it was considered a sign of maternal care and protection of the infant. Menasseh referred to swaddling in passing, when he spoke about the outcast child (o engeitado in Portuguese or mamzer in Hebrew), referring to abandoned newborns found on the streets. He made a distinction between two possible reasons that a mother might abandon her child. If the child was found in a hidden place and it was suspected that the intention was to let the child die in order to hide an adulterous affair, the child, under halakhic laws was considered a “suspected” mamzer. But if the child was found in a safe place or a public square; or circumcised, partially clothed with a shirt (co[m] algua kehima), or well-swaddled, he says it was probably an indication of his mother’s inability to care for him and her hope that others would take pity on the child and would adopt it; in such a case, under Jewish law he was not considered a mamzer. If this outcast child was found in a public place where there were both Jews and Gentiles, Menasseh adds, the child was considered a halakhically [suspected] mamzer.¹⁰⁰ This reference, above all, tells us that perhaps not all Sephardi children were welcome into this world; some children may have been abandoned by their mothers because of the shame their birth brought to light and others (the expositos) because their mothers did not have the means to care for them. In either case the newborn had very slim chances of survival.

ILLEGITIMATE CHILDREN

The problem of illegitimate children, born out of wedlock to Sephardi men and Christian women, was rather acute in Amsterdam. Quite often it was the result of sexual relations with gentile maidservants while they were providing a service to unmarried men.¹⁰¹ There were also cases of sexual relationships with wet nurses while they were in service to the man’s family. Cases of illegitimate children came to light often, because the pregnant women wanted the Sephardi men to provide them and their children financial support, and Amsterdam civil laws made fathers accountable for such support. Each case of an illegitimate child presented its own complexities, but, overall, they all seemed to reflect a rather low view of women on the part of the Sephardi men who, more often than not, were in a position of authority over the women. One early case in the life of the community was the one involving Francisco Lopes Pereira and Grietgen Willemsz. Their relationship lasted from at least 1606, when Francisco was about twenty years old, to 1613, when Willemsz was pregnant with Lopes’s second child and he was getting ready to marry another woman, Beatris Rodrigues. The case also involved his father, the Portuguese merchant Gaspar Lopes Homem, who was against their relationship; Lopes provided Willemsz with money to support their children.102

Another case involved Beltige Pelgrom (from Goch), a maidservant to David Abudiente (alias Ruy or Duarte Gomes); he was a member of the Bet Jacob congregation in Amsterdam. In May 1615, Pelgrom was pregnant with Abudiente’s child, and the two were disputing financial arrangements for her last months of pregnancy. Abudiente, it appears, had not denied responsibility for the pregnancy, had found a place to lodge her during the last months of her pregnancy, had provided her with some money, and had promised to pay for her living expenses and clothes for the expected baby. But, from her testimony and perspective, he was not paying as much as Pelgrom needed, and therefore a legal dispute ensued. In order to resolve the dispute in his favor, Abudiente found other men willing to testify that they had also slept with her. After the child was born on July 25, Pelgrom married a Christian man who, it appears, accepted her and her child. Abudiente, then twenty-two years old, found his own way out of the situation with the help of his relatives, as he was quickly married in June to his niece Branca, daughter of Fernão Alvares Melo, then barely a child of about fourteen years.¹⁰³ Although one may argue that our twenty-first century sensitivities should not be applied to the seventeenth century, from a gender perspective it is obvious that these men used women, gentile as well as Jewish, for their own personal interests. Branca died of childbirth in 1624, when her third child was born and she was about twenty-three years old.¹⁰⁴ Another case of a sexual encounter between a Sephardi man and his Christian maidservant resulting in pregnancy was the relationship between Joseph Cohen (alias Jeronimo Henriques) and his maid Janety Mathijs, from Bergen, Norway.¹⁰⁵ In Hamburg, cases of outcast children (engeitados) were sometimes mentioned in the communal registers. Very little information was given in these entries; thus one can only conclude that the problem of outcast children also existed in Hamburg. References to an outcast child, probably a youngster referred to as “rapaz engeitado,” living with a Jewish woman, are two entries dated 18 Tishry and 28 Tishry 5420 [in the fall of 1640]. The Mahamad provided both woman and child with some help (probably food) for the High Holidays, but the entries also make clear that, shortly after the Holy Days, the Mahamad wanted to get rid of the child.106 In another entry, on 25 Elul 5414 [1654], Selomoh Cohen was warned to pay support to “the woman with the outcast (engeitado) child.”¹⁰⁷

In Jewish law there is a clear distinction between an illegitimate child and a mamzer, the latter usually translated as “bastard.” A mamzer is a child whose mother and father are Jewish but are prohibited from marrying one another. Here is the definition given by Ben-Zion Scherescheswsky, in reference to the mother: “If she cannot contract a legally valid marriage to this man, but can contract a legally valid marriage to others, her offspring [from the former] is a mamzer.”¹⁰⁸ Of course, a state of mamzerut carries a great social stigma for the Jewish child, as mamzerim (plural of mamzer) are only allowed to marry other mamzerim. Nonetheless, in the case of a male, his rights to inheritance are not diminished, including the double portion allotted to him, if he is the first born to the father.

In 1650 in Amsterdam, Sara Curiel, single, and a member of a well-known family in the Sephardi community, gave birth to a son she named Abraham. The alleged father was her uncle, Lopo Ramires (alias David Curiel), a well-known merchant who, at the time of the child’s birth, was married to an ailing woman, Rachel Curiel, with whom he had no children. Several months after the child was born, Lopo’s wife passed away, and shortly afterward he announced his engagement to another woman, his cousin Rachel Aboab. The Mahamad sided with Sara and tried unsuccessfully to force Lopo to marry her. Because Lopo denied being the father and refused to marry Sara, the case occasioned a responsa involving rabbis from Amsterdam and Italy who concluded that Lopo could not be forced to marry Sara against his will, and the wedding of Lopo and Rachel took place on June 19, 1651.¹⁰⁹ As for the child, in view of Lopo’s persistence in denying that he was the father, the rabbis declared the child a shetuki or “doubtful” mamzer. Had Lopo admitted paternity, Abraham, the son, would have been his firstborn son and possessed a right to a double portion of Lopo’s immense inheritance. As Abraham grew up, his mother told him that Lopo was his father, but he was rejected by Lopo to the end of his life and explicitly excluded from Lopo’s inheritance. One interesting aspect of this case was that Lopo simultaneously appealed to both Jewish and non-Jewish laws, in order to get the best of both. First he appealed to the rabbis (and succeeded), asking for his right not to be forced to marry against his will. But, unable to convince the Mahamad and some members of his own family, he also appealed to the Court of Holland, which made him pay maintenance to the mother during her lifetime but, based on the opinions of the rabbis, upheld Lopo’s claim denying paternity of the child.¹¹⁰

BREASTFEEDING

In medieval and early modern times, the custom among the well-to-do families was to send babies, shortly after birth, to a wet nurse living in the countryside.111 Arrangements between the family and the wet nurse were made by the father. Menasseh referred in passing to the length of time for breastfeeding by the mother as being at least twenty-four months,¹¹² unless the mother did not have enough milk or, by choice, the child was sent to a wet nurse. It is important to note that not all families relied on wet nurses by choice. In the event of the mother’s death, the newborn had to be breastfed by another woman. When Isaac de Pinto’s wife died of childbirth, his memoirs related that his newborn son was cared for by a wet nurse, under the supervision of the child’s grandmother.¹¹³ A mother might also experience other problems, such as when she did not have enough milk, or, in the case of a premature baby, when she had to feed her baby with milk by hand while she was recuperating from childbirth and had no medical assistance.¹¹⁴ In other cases, Sephardi families relied on wet nurses because it was the custom of the times. In Amsterdam wet nurses lived with the family.

In Livorno it seems that families sent their babies away to a wet nurse. This custom, however, began to concern the leaders of the Livorno community and, at one point, efforts were made to convince young fathers of the need to keep babies at home and have mothers breastfeed them instead. A sermon by José Penso de la Vega, delivered in Livorno, sometime between 1675 and 1679, to a group of young men, and on the occasion of a wedding, was dedicated precisely to parenthood. Penso compared the father’s responsibilities to teach Torah to their sons to the mother’s responsibilities to breastfeed them.¹¹⁵ His sermon was an interesting sign of the emerging concern for the importance of the intimate bonds between mothers and young children. A similar concern for the relationship between mothers and sons was expressed by Menasseh, when he encouraged mothers to personally dress their young sons before sending them daily to school, instead of relying on servants.¹¹⁶

The awakening of the concept of childhood among the Western Sephardim was a positive sign that the emotional and physical needs of young children were taken into account. Nevertheless, it also resulted in a strict separation of their adult parents in public and religious domains, to the detriment of women. This separation was mostly visible in relation to the great importance given to decorum in the synagogue. In Amsterdam, where the concern for order and etiquette in the synagogue was most obvious, males followed numerous rules regarding behavior, and seats were strictly under the control of the Mahamad. In the women’s section, by contrast, seats were not assigned, and it appears that women were left to their own devices. In Hamburg, where more spontaneous forms of behavior seem to have occurred more often than in Amsterdam, the Mahamad set rather strict rules regarding children in the synagogue. Various haskamot specified the conditions under which children were allowed in the synagogue: only those aged five and wearing pants; younger children were allowed only if capable of sitting with other children, and capable of repeating the haftorah. (I assume all children chanted together from their seats, along with the baal-Torah, who chanted from the tebah.) If any adult brought a younger child, an action not expected of a “good Jew,” the Mahamad would tell both adult and child to leave the synagogue.117 This rule, it appears, contradicted the “good custom,” in the words of the Mahamad, of bringing young boys and girls to the synagogue to say the “birkat hagomel.” This prayer, traditionally said by someone called up to the Torah after escaping danger, was said in the synagogue by fathers and their children upon arriving in Hamburg (from Iberia), where they could safely practice Judaism. Also, young girls were named in the synagogue at that moment. But this custom was also restricted by orders of the Mahamad, who allowed them to say the blessing but then expected the children to leave the synagogue.¹¹⁸

Reaching the Age of Religious Majority

Corresponding to the evolution of the idea of childhood in the seventeenth century, religious rituals involving children began to be centered on the child. Among Christians, children began to receive lengthy religious preparation before they were allowed to take first communion, although in the Middle Ages that special preparation had not been required. Although first communion does not fully become a child’s festival until the nineteenth century, the celebration in the seventeenth century was well on its way to becoming the great festival that it is today, with its two-part celebration in the church and in the privacy of the home.¹¹⁹

In Jewish Ashkenazi societies, as historian Ivan Marcus has demonstrated, for a Jewish male, reaching age thirteen years and a day only became an elaborate rite of passage (becoming a bar mitzvah) sometime between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries.¹²⁰ But the origins of the bar mitzvah rite go back to the late Middle Ages, when some rabbis began to object to the idea of young children, before age thirteen, putting on tefillin in daily prayer. Up to the thirteenth century, young children were permitted to perform adult male activities—putting on tefillin, being called to read Torah in synagogue, and fasting all day when so required by Jewish law—as soon as they were ready and even before they reached age thirteen. By the late fourteenth century in Germany, for a boy, turning thirteen years of age was increasingly associated with reading Torah in the synagogue for the first time.121 This gradual development of the bar mitzvah rite extended to Poland, Provence, and Italy. By the end of the fifteenth century, reaching religious majority was marked publicly by the thirteen-year-old putting on tefillin for the first time and being called to read Torah in the synagogue on the Sabbath immediately following his thirteenth birthday. The bar mitzvah rite of passage, as a moment when a child was recognized as an adult, reflected an evolving concept of childhood as a separate period of time when a child was permitted to be a child and not required to perform activities required of adults. Furthermore, according to Marcus, in Ashkenazi societies the bar mitzvah rite replaced the medieval custom of initiating a child to read the Hebrew alphabet.¹²²

Among Western Sephardim we can observe, throughout the seventeenth century, an evolving trend to create a distinction between a minor boy, one not obligated religiously to fulfill the commandments, and a boy of age thirteen, one who was counted as part of a minyan or quorum and expected to fulfill his Jewish obligations as a male adult. Menasseh referred to meninos (young boys) and their religious education on various occasions. On explaining to adults how to say the Amidah, he addressed fathers and told them “and when boys reach nine years of age, their fathers are obligated to teach them [their sons] to say [the Amidah prayer].”¹²³ The making of vows, promises, and swearing to the Lord entailed a specific age: twelve years and a day for a boy, and eleven years and a day for a girl (but not before). This specification depended on the child’s readiness (his or her understanding). On reaching thirteen years and a day, for a boy, and twelve and a day, for a girl, swearing and promises would count as those made by adults.¹²⁴

Finally, regarding how to conduct Shabbat morning Torah services in the synagogue, Menasseh indicated that a menino (young boy) below age thirteen was permitted to chant the maftir (last portion of the parashah, or weekly reading of the Torah) and the haftorah (weekly reading from the Prophets) if he knew how to read it.¹²⁵ Menasseh stated, “The Sefer Thorah is taken out and seven men read [their portion], then the maphtir [portion] is read by the same one who reads the haftarah, who could be a boy who knows how to read it.”¹²⁶ The evidence, then, seems to indicate that up to the time Menasseh wrote the Thesovro, between 1645 and 1647, young boys chanted Torah in the synagogue as soon as they were ready to do it, and not necessarily upon turning thirteen years of age. By the 1680s, turning thirteen years of age had become the focus of attention and was clearly marked as an important time in the lives of boys, and the event was celebrated in the synagogue in the presence of the community and in the home among relatives and friends. The father’s public blessing thanking God for ending his responsibility for his son’s sins, not initially mentioned by Menasseh, was eventually included in the siddur of 1687 with the following instructions: “The . . . [father whose son] has reached thirteen years of age and has entered the responsibility to fulfill the commandments will say the [following] blessing: ‘Blessed be you Adonay our God who have freed me from the punishment of this one.’”127 In addition, rabbis or other adults began to write derashot (sermons) to be read by the boys turning thirteen, or the boys themselves began to produce their own derashot.

Two derashot by Rabbi Abraham Cohen Pimentel of Hamburg, published in 1688, each included, after the introduction, a brief discourse in which the boy talked about reaching religious majority. It is unclear who wrote the discourses inserted in the sermon, but the sermons were “composed” or written by Rabbi Pimentel.¹²⁸ The first derashah was delivered the day his son, Isaac Cohen Pimentel, entered the “gremio dos observantes dos preceytos divinos” (literally, the guild of [commandant] observers), which coincided with the first day of Pesach. After introducing the theme of the sermon on the redemption from Egypt, the boy said:

Even if I fear to be judged for the daring act of putting myself on this divine altar, a place that does not concern me, given my tender age, all of the same there are reasons for disregarding these apprehensions; first of all I am responsible for giving thanks to God for the grace he is giving me to reach this day when I am turning 13 years of age and I enter the guild of those who observe his divine commandments; and at the same time that I am required to obey my elders who have asked of me to give this discourse, I will begin asking the required permission from the lords of the Ma’amad, and from the Hakham [rabbi] of this kahal [congregation], and from the [other] hakhamim [rabbis] and the baale Torah . . .¹²⁹

The second sermon was delivered on the day a nephew of Rabbi Pimentel turned thirteen (his first name was not given), and it also included a very similar discourse, where the child expressed his innocence and timidity to be in “this divine altar” and where he thanked God for reaching thirteen years of age (the term “bar mitzvah” was never used) and entering the “guild of those who were obligated to observe the commandments.”130 This image, of a child entering a guild where he will be trained to be a master of a trade, brings to mind the connections between guilds, where young males were trained by a master in a trade or profession, and Catholic brotherhoods in Spain and Portugal.

One sermon from Amsterdam, from 1690, indicated a similar setting, but, in this case, it was when a group of classmates turned thirteen years of age. The sermon was written, at least partly, by Rabbi Isaac Aboab da Fonseca, and read in front of the congregation at the afternoon Shabbat Minkhah service on the occasion of his grandson Isaac de David Aboab’s “entering the guild of those who observe the divine commandments.”¹³¹ The sermon was preceded by a short “oration” by the grandson. As was the custom with other contemporary sermons delivered on Shabbat, it was based on that day’s parashah or biblical portion, Re’eh (Deut. 11:26–16:17); the theme of the verse was “See, I present you today a blessing and a curse,” and included a rabbinic commentary on the meaning of the Hebrew verb “re’eh” or see. After a brief interpretation, the child recited the following blessing: “Blessed be you, Adonay, God of Israel that gave me life and nourishment and have let me reach this moment.” Then the boy addressed the congregation, which consisted of the members of the Mahamad (lay leaders), the Talmud Torah School parnassim (lay school leaders), the hakhamim (rabbis), teacher, parents, uncles, and others attending the ceremony. At the end of the sermon, Isaac de David addressed his classmates and made a connection between the choice of “a blessing and a curse,” and he compared it to their stage in life—reaching religious majority:

Now, talking to my companions, my classmates, I notice the same verse [a blessing and a curse] as we ought to consider that until today we were not subject by obligation to the yoke of the commandments, but from now onwards, as we have turned thirteen years old, we are subject to the reward and the punishment, to the blessing and to the curse.¹³²

Two sermons were delivered in the Amsterdam synagogue by the brothers Isaac Baruch Louzada (in 1686) and Shlomoh Baruch Louzada (in 1691).¹³³ It is quite evident that, in these cases, both brothers had received a thorough and personal preparation at home from their tutor, the well-known Hakham David Nunes Torres, who may have helped them write the derashot. The title of each sermon, Sermam de graças (Sermon of Thanks), referred to offering thanks to God for reaching the age of thirteen and for taking charge of their new responsibility to serve God.¹³⁴ The theme of the first sermon, by Isaac, emphasized youth (mocedade) as an in-between stage—no longer childhood but still not yet adulthood. In the second sermon, by Shlomoh, he made a distinction between parents’ responsibilities to educate sons before and after the age of thirteen: “Until today [he said] my elders, had my education under their care (a seu cargo), but from today onwards, by request (por encargo).”135

The last derashah that we will refer to was written in Amsterdam by David Franco Mendes (1713–1792) and delivered in the synagogue in the summer of 1726, as he went “from the age of innocence to a state of responsibility upon entering the guild of those who are obligated . . . to observe [God’s] commandments and follow his divine rites . . .”¹³⁶ We have previously referred to David in reference to his circumcision. Later, as an adult, he became a well-known and influential member of the community and a prolific Hebrew poet and writer. The sermon has no obvious signs that adults helped with its composition, although perhaps he was guided by his teacher. The preserved manuscript was entirely handwritten in Portuguese using beautiful calligraphy (a craft that young boys had to master in the past), and it included frequent quotations of biblical and rabbinic Hebrew. Although the parashah of the day was Re’eh (Deut. 11:26), the theme of the sermon was based on the verse “What more can David say to you; You know your servant, my Lord, Hashem/Elohim” (II Sam. 7:20), and the rabbinic commentary was on the verse Yebamot 8, “An Israelite must possess these three virtues: compassion, modesty, and charity.” The theme was rather well developed, even to the end of the long sermon, and yet there were frequent spontaneous references to David’s personal life, his illness during childhood, and his brothers and close relatives—as one may expect of an adolescent, one no longer a child but not yet an adult.

Another aspect of the celebration, at home and with parents and relatives, was reflected in two sermons by Isaac de Sola, both published in 1704. The first sermon was delivered in the house of the affluent merchant Yacob Nunes Henriquez, a relative of thirteen-year-old Isaac Henriquez Damesquita, a pupil of the preacher. The second sermon was delivered in the home of the bar mitzvah boy, Abraham Fereira, coinciding with Simhat Torah and with the honor of Abraham’s uncle having been the Groom of the Law. In the presence of relatives of the thirteen-year-old boys—grandparents, parents, uncles, aunts, brothers and cousins—the preacher, who had taught both boys, praised the parents and relatives who bore the cost of preparing the children, and of the celebrations.¹³⁷

In conclusion, in the sources I have just studied, there is no evidence that these boys were called up to the Torah as they turned thirteen years of age. Nevertheless, turning thirteen was preceded by a thorough preparation that culminated in a formal ceremony in the synagogue, in front of the congregation; the occasion was also celebrated at home, with a feast, with parents, relatives and friends. It is unclear, though, how widespread were these celebrations, as the only surviving sources are from boys from well-to-do families.

Religious Education

Among the Western Sephardim, an important manifestation of their evolving concept of childhood was reflected in the founding of the Talmud Torah schools that were characteristic of the communities in Hamburg, London, Livorno, and, of course, Amsterdam. The founding of Talmud Torah schools took place as soon ex-conversos began to organize communal life. For boys, the concept of childhood entailed a long period of time, when their first priority was to attend school with other children of about age five to fourteen. However, it is rather surprising that this concept of childhood did not extend to girls, as none of these communities provided them communal schooling. Taken from a pedagogic perspective, the attitude toward children, which favored boys and the upper social classes (such as merchants), coincides with Ariès’s thesis that, in the seventeenth century, male moralists and pedagogues, such as the Jesuits, were the ones to impose “the modern concept of childhood and the modern concept of schooling.”138 As I have demonstrated elsewhere,¹³⁹ the Western Sephardim brought this pedagogic sensitivity to their new places of residence from their original Iberian background, and it transferred successfully to their newly forming collective Jewish identity. There is also some evidence that some families provided girls with private tutoring at home.¹⁴⁰ Solomon Saruco, of Amsterdam, was hired in 1743 by the Suasso family to educate Don Aron Suasso’s eight children, four males and four females, at their home in The Hague.¹⁴¹ It is worth asking why the Western Sephardim did not have the insight to provide girls with a communal education. Both sides of their collective identity, Iberian and Jewish, would have permitted them to do so. Schools for girls existed in Spain and Portugal, and in some Jewish Ashkenazi communities girls also were educated by the community in both religious and secular studies.¹⁴² This question remains unanswered, but, to me, seems important as a reminder of the male-centered focus on family and communal life.

By the time Menasseh published the last part of the Thesovro, in 1647, the Talmud Torah School had been in existence for more than thirty years, and, in fact, Menasseh was a product of such. In the Thesovro, Menasseh does not include the education of sons under the “Paternal House.” Instead he dedicates a chapter to boys, from about age three to six, who are under the Jewish responsibility to study Torah.143 “Every male Israelite,” he says, “is obligated to study Torah, no matter whether he is poor or rich, young or old,”¹⁴⁴ but “women, slaves and children [meninos] are ‘free’ from it.”¹⁴⁵ A father is responsible for teaching Torah to his son as soon as he is able to speak, specifically, the following biblical verses: Tora ziva lanu Mosseh (Deut. 33:3) and the first verse of the Shemah (Deut. 6:4–9). The father is also responsible for teaching his son, at age three, the Hebrew alphabet. But, as the son reaches six years of age, Menasseh says, “the father is obligated to send his son to school.”¹⁴⁶

The responsibility to provide schooling to male children is addressed collectively to the community. “In any city or town where Israelites gather,” Menasseh continues, “the community is obligated to hire teachers, and refusal to do so should be punished with herem [ban], or even more, with the destruction of such city, as a community is [morally] sustained by the innocence of its pupils.”¹⁴⁷

Menasseh discusses the ideal teacher (an individual who fears God, is diligent and patient with his pupils); the ideal class size (twenty pupils, and no more than forty per class); when a new teacher is needed; the right of young children to attend school as taking priority over work and the right of young children to weekly rest (he recommends not introducing new teaching material on Shabbat but rather “to repeat previously studied lessons”); a full-time schooling schedule, with the exception of free Friday afternoons, Shabbatot, and festivals; and the right of children to a teacher who is not too harsh a disciplinarian, as affection between teacher and pupil is needed in order for learning to take place.¹⁴⁸

Adolescence and the Period of Apprenticeship

As the above sections have demonstrated, childhood among the Western Sephardim was a well-defined period that was enjoyed by many Sephardi children; for boys who were educated in the community’s Talmud Torah schools, it lasted until the time they reached religious majority at age thirteen. For the more affluent, as well as those who went on to become rabbis, their formal education lasted longer. It is more difficult to determine how the Sephardim viewed adolescence, and what happened to boys between the time when they finished school and the moment when they became financially independent and set up their own households. To become independent adults, adolescents needed to learn a trade, profession, or business. In the Early Modern Period this was done in the form of an apprenticeship, when an adolescent worked under the supervision of an adult who took charge of teaching him a trade.

The best-known pioneering study of the system of apprenticeship (in England) in the Early Modern Period is included in the book The World We Have Lost by the historian Peter Laslett.149 Apprenticeship began for a boy at about thirteen or fourteen years of age and lasted for an average of seven years. He was sent from his family to the home of a master of the trade his family wanted him to learn, and there he was “clothed, educated and fed, obliged to obedience, and forbidden to marry.” In the words of Peter Laslett “[the world we have lost] was not paradise, no golden age of equality, tolerance or of loving kindness.”¹⁵⁰

Recent studies on two different regions of Spain, Murcia and Almería, have shown that the system of indenturing a youth as an apprentice was not much different in the Iberian world than in England.¹⁵¹ For many adolescents, apprenticeship turned into a period of abuse by the adults responsible for them. In Spain the best known example of this type of abuse appears in a work of fiction, in the picaresque novel Lazarillo de Tormes (published in 1554), whose protagonist is sent away by his poor mother, when nearly a child, to serve as a guide to an abusive blind beggar. Although this case is fiction, the reality was often not much different. It is hard to conclude which trade or profession was the harshest for such young children. The merchant profession, for example, required that the child travel great distances alone, quite often to other countries where he had to learn a new language. This was the situation for children of Portuguese converso families, who rather often, it seems, sent their young males to the homes of other converso merchants in Spain at a rather young age.¹⁵²

Among the Western Sephardim, various sources inform us about apprentices. First, there are several seventeenth-century manuscripts whose protagonists are apprentices. These works seem to be mostly based on reality but with a narrative somewhat fictional. The Spanish work known as “Danielillo,” part narrated, part dialogue, is a polemic work between Christianity and Judaism on the topic of the Messiah. The dialogue takes place in a Jewish merchant home, in Livorno, between Don Antonio de Contreras, defending Christianity, and “Daniel de Livorno,” a young apprentice defending the Jewish position. Danielillo is described by the narrator as a youth who, between the ages of fifteen and eighteen, was in the back of a store writing in an accounting book, and who became involved in the polemic defending the Jewish position that Christ is not the Messiah.¹⁵³ This document tells us that young people were at times involved in disputes among adults of different faiths, in this case Catholics and Sephardim. These youths subscribed to the militant view of religion that they were taught by their masters, a view taught to dissuade conversion.

Another manuscript, in the form of a memoir, is “Vida de Abraham Pelengrino” (The Life of Abraham Pelengrino, or Abraham the Wanderer).154 It is the story of a Portuguese Old Christian who converted to Judaism and eventually became a member of the Amsterdam Sephardi community. The protagonist seems to come from the pages of the book The World We Have Lost, as well as from a Spanish picaresque novel. The story begins in 1599, in Ponta Delgada in the Azores, and in the family of the Portuguese merchant Antonio Cardozo de Macedo. There, Antonio decides to send his elder son, Manuel, fourteen years old, to England in the care of a stranger, Mestre Gerden, to learn a trade related to dyeing woolen clothing.¹⁵⁵ Manuel is first taken to Scotland, where, for two years, he attends school and learns English while observing others—as he says, practicing “their rites and ceremonies.”¹⁵⁶ After Scotland he goes to London, where he purchases books on various religions and finally converts to Calvinism, as it appears to him to be the most rational religion. He serves four years in the home of a well-to-do master who treats him as one of his sons, until his real Portuguese father calls him home. When he returns to Portugal, as a young man of about twenty, he is jailed by the Portuguese Inquisition. In prison he meets others accused of Judaizing and eventually escapes and leaves his country again. After more travels and adventures, he joins the Sephardim and becomes one of them, known as Abraham Pelengrino (“The Convert” or “Wanderer”), first in the Hamburg Sephardi community and finally in Amsterdam, where he ends his days in 1659. This case illustrates, rather well, the vulnerable position in which young males were put when they were sent to fend for themselves, many miles away from their families, in order to learn a trade, and in some cases never to return to their homes.

Adolescents, as a source of trouble, are frequently mentioned in the Hamburg communal registers. Some arrived alone in the Port of Hamburg, originally coming from Iberia. These adolescents were rejected by the communal leaders for fear of the troubles they brought with them. The entries are short and no one seems to have contested their rejection. In 1668 a son of Moseh Zacuto, “an undesirable youngster (rapaz), arrived mischievous and agitated”¹⁵⁷ in the community to stay with his grandmother, and the Mahamad ordered her to send the youngster back to his father. On another occasion, it came to the attention of the Mahamad that a group of Portuguese youngsters, who had arrived on their own in Hamburg, were found eating “hares and pigeons” (non-Kosher food) they had asked others to cook for them. The Mahamad ordered them to leave Hamburg.158 There was also some mention, in the communal registers, of troubled youngsters (moços revoltosos) who were sent to jail for a period of two to four weeks.¹⁵⁹

Although outright abuse of youths is not evident in any of the documents I have encountered from the Amsterdam Sephardi community, I have found evidence of what I call “benign neglect” or a lack of sensitivity to the emotional and social needs of youth. For example, when Hakham Joseph Salom, in 1619, was given a contract to serve as hazzan (cantor) and rubbi (the term used to refer to a teacher) for ten years, the Mahamad of the Bet Yaacob congregation included a clause committing Salom’s sons to take turns serving the community without a salary: “Joseph Salom . . . is obligated to provide monthly the service of one of his sons, the one the Lords of the Mahamad will consider more appropriate, without expecting any increase of salary [for his sons’ service].”¹⁶⁰ Incidentally, several years later, in 1626, one of Joseph Salom’s sons, Salom ben Yossef, was hired as teacher of the Bet Israel congregation. Several reasons were given for his being offered the position: “being a ‘good Jew,’ [physically] strong for the job, and feared and respected by the youngsters.”¹⁶¹

In Amsterdam, serving an apprenticeship was a common way of learning a trade, such as becoming a tailor (in Portuguese, alfaiate), which sometimes took about three years,¹⁶² or becoming a diamond cutter (lapidario), a trade that gave jobs to many Sephardim, or a barber. Even New Christian youths from Portugal were sent to Amsterdam to serve as apprentices. Apprenticeship was formalized with a written contract in which the father paid the master to train his son. The master, on his part, was obligated to lodge, feed, and clothe the youth. Quite often, problems resulted; for example, when a young male made the decision to marry before the end of his apprenticeship.¹⁶³

As we have demonstrated in the introduction to this volume, in 1648 in Amsterdam, a group of males founded the society Aby Jetomim (Hebrew for “Father of Orphans”), which took under its care the education of male orphans and arranged apprenticeship contracts between them and either Christian Dutch or, more often, Sephardi masters. The study of this institution gives us the opportunity to observe how the Western Sephardim viewed the needs of adolescents based on both Iberian as well as Jewish cultural influences. From Judaism the most obvious influence is that orphans were not placed as apprentices until they reached religious majority at thirteen years of age. Orphans provided services to the confraternity. When members passed away, orphans accompanied the procession from the home to the canal-boat and to the Bet Haim cemetery, situated within the village of Ouderkerk, along the river Amstel and a few miles south of Amsterdam, for burial. In this, the confraternity appears to be more similar to contemporary Iberian guild-confraternities than Jewish institutions. Orphans were provided with clothing from the confraternity, not very different from clothing worn by adults and influenced by Iberian contemporary fashions. A number of entries in the Aby Jetomim registers refer to discipline of orphans. In some cases children were expelled from the confraternity before the three allotted years because of behavior problems, described as: naughty (travieso), incapable of subjugation (por nao se sujeitar), because he was out of control (desosegado) in talking to the administrators, and even for being evil (velhaco).164 The view of adolescence among the Western Sephardim differs from our concept today, but it was clearly distinct from childhood on one side and adulthood on the other.¹⁶⁵

The last source about apprentices that we note is one included in a manuscript written in the form of an ethical will by Isaac de Matatia Aboab (1631–1707), a well-known member of the Amsterdam community who we met previously in this chapter. The will was formulated originally to “indoctrinate his nephews and later [commended] to his sons for a life of virtue.”¹⁶⁶ One section of the manuscript was addressed to fathers, advising them how to select professions for their male sons.¹⁶⁷ A father who has many sons but not a great deal of wealth and no way to find an occupation for all (at home) was advised to direct some of his sons to letters (that is, to intellectual professions) and others to commerce. There was advice that sons who are to become merchants should be sent away (fora do lugar) for training to a merchant’s firm at the age of about sixteen and for a period of five to six years. The document then addressed the youths with a list of practical advice (aduertencias)—first for their service to merchant masters, and then for when they set up their own business firms. The advice included how to behave in order to be trusted by their masters (suffer patiently), and how to advance in the various stages of apprenticeship (first learn bookkeeping for several months, then learn to write business letters, and finally witness sales and purchases of properties).¹⁶⁸ This document, which originated in Antwerp—where the practice of Judaism was not permitted, and which also refers to En gland and Amsterdam—confirms some of the topics discussed in this chapter.

The Seigniorial Household

The third part of Menasseh’s Thesovro, the Seigniorial domain, deals with ownership within the household and consists of three subdivisions: (1) slaves, (2) household animals, and (3) trees and other material possessions.169 The introduction categorizing possessions is paraphrased from Aristotle’s Politics, where the classical author says that men’s possessions can be reduced to two types: animate and inanimate. Animate possessions are then subdivided by Aristotle into rational beings, such as male and female slaves, and irrational, such as birds and beasts. Inanimate possessions are of three types: fields, houses, and movables. Aristotle differentiates between domestic and non-domestic slaves, and he recommends a mild treatment of domestic slaves.¹⁷⁰ Menasseh discusses only domestic slaves but alludes to Aristotle’s view on the treatment of slaves and, in fact, asserts the right to own them and treat them with harshness:

Even though a master has the right to treat slaves with harshness [says Menasseh], it is an act of charity to treat them well by word and deed; because if, as a master, a man is not obligated to respect his slaves, as a man [the master] is expected to treat them humanly.¹⁷¹

Although no ill treatment of slaves is advocated and charitable treatment is expected, this section is troublesome from our twenty-first-century perspective. The fact that Menasseh has to reach out to non-Jewish classical texts (many centuries old) to find a way to justify the possession of human beings is rather problematic. After paraphrasing Aristotle, the chapter deals with the biblical commandment to circumcise slaves owned by Jews and their offspring. As stated in Gen. 17:27, Menasseh quotes, “[all the people born] in his [Abraham’s] household and purchased for money . . . were circumcised,”¹⁷² and if the master of the house does not circumcise his slave, the senate (meaning the Mahamad) will circumcise him. Although Menasseh does not extensively discuss the topic of circumcising slaves, more contemporary studies demonstrate that in seventeenth-century Amsterdam very few black slaves were circumcised, and in Livorno slaves were often rented, instead of purchased, to avoid the high cost of purchasing them, and/or to circumvent other halakhic responsibilities toward the possession of slaves.¹⁷³

The section dedicated to animals includes the biblical commandment of letting the mother bird go before taking the eggs from the nest (Deut. 22:6); explaining the difference between such birds and domestic ones such as pigeons, ducks, and chickens;¹⁷⁴ the commandment to redeem the first issue of a male donkey (Ex. 13:13–14); the laws specifying the unblemished state of the offerings (Lev. 22–17 and Deut. 15:22); and the laws of the Omer (Lev. 24:14–15).

Under inanimate possessions, Menasseh includes the laws regarding trees in the Holy Land (Lev. 13:23); the prohibition of mixing seeds, trees, and vines (Lev. 19:19); sowing vineyards (Deut. 22:9); and differentiating between the laws that apply only to the Holy Land and those outside of it (Lev. 19:9).175

In the Thesovro, the section dedicated to Aristotle’s view of household movables includes the laws on the mezuzah (Deut. 6:9 and 11:21) and of shaatnes, or the prohibition of mixing wool and linen (Lev. 19 and Deut. 22). In so doing, Menasseh offers interesting information on contemporary fabrics.¹⁷⁶ He also includes the “moral commandment,” as he calls it, to return a found object to its rightful owner (Deut. 22:1–4), which was customarily announced in the synagogue.¹⁷⁷

This study has surveyed the Western Sephardi household with the main focus on children and their families in the seventeenth century in the Hamburg, Amsterdam, and Livorno communities. It has demonstrated that young children, from the time of birth, were deeply cared for in Western Sephardi families. The ex-New Christians who returned to Judaism in these communities were able to appreciate the moral and ethical values of rabbinic Judaism (for example, its respect for human life), as well as other contemporary values derived from the Catholic Iberian background—as seen in the importance of the religious rituals of childhood, for example, and the importance they attached to schooling and education. They saw no contradiction between their desires to reconstruct their collective Jewish identity and to preserve non-Jewish values, if they considered the latter values, in essence, at a higher level than traditional rabbinic ones. But it has also demonstrated that they preserved an Iberian view of social organization, family life, and customs that was extremely hierarchical. This hierarchy is mostly evident in the structure of their households, in order to preserve, above all, their desired social and economic ways of life. In the Western Sephardi household, the father continued to enjoy the absolute power of patria potestad, just as his Iberian Catholic father counterpart. This power, combined with the paternalism characteristic of rabbinic Judaism, gave him the means to control the lives of all other members of the household: wife; children until the age of twenty-five; servants until they got married, and at times beyond; and slaves, who, more often than not, remained part of the household patrimony from one generation to the next. Although it could be argued that the head of the household probably was compassionate, treated everyone well, and most, if not all, of his dependents may have felt content with their lot, it could also be argued that such extreme power in the hands of so few individuals resulted in silencing the voices of many other individuals.

Notes

The original research for this chapter was partially funded by a grant from the Maurice Amado Foundation. I wish to acknowledge appreciation for the grant.

1. Menasseh ben Israel, Thesovro dos dinim ultima parte na qual se co[m]tem todos os preceitos, ritos e cerimonias q[ue] tocao a hua perfeyta economica (Amsterdam: Ioseph be[n] Israel, 5407 [1647]). Two years earlier, in 1645, Menasseh had published the first volume: Menasseh ben Israel Thesovro dos dinim que o povo de Israel he obrigado saber e observar (Amsterdam: Eliahu Aboab, 5405 [1645]). It is subdivided into four books. Because I will be quoting from either of the two volumes of the Thesovro, for the purpose of clarity, I will indicate the year, 1645 or 1647.

2. Thesovro, 1647, 83. Menasseh also says here that he was in the process of writing the Thesovro in Latin.

3. Ibid. This dedication, without pagination, follows the dedication to the brothers Abraham and Ishac Israel Pereira. Menasseh may be alluding to another work (Leone da Modena, Historia de Riti Hebraici [Venice: n.p., 1638]) and to the contemporary growing Yiddish literature addressed to women, such as the Tsenerene, a collection of Yiddish homilies on the weekly Bible reading (published in 1600), and the various collections of tkhines or supplicatory prayers written for Ashkenazi women, sometimes by women themselves. If this is so (and the evidence seems to support my idea), it is an interesting piece of information on the impact that Ashkenazi Jewry had on the Western Sephardim. See the study by Chava Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs: Listening to the Prayers of Early Modern Jewish Women (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), 6–8. See also Tirtsah Levie Bernfeld, “Mujeres judías hispano-portuguesas en el entorno holandés de Amsterdam en el siglo XVII,” in Familia, religión y negocio. El sefardismo en las relaciones entre el mundo ibérico y los Países Bajos en la Edad Moderna, ed. Jaime Contreras et al (Madrid: Fundación Carlos de Amberes, 2002), 149–150, where she also quotes Menasseh.

4. Thesovro, 1647, “Dedication” to women, no pagination.

5. In addition to the Thesovro by Menasseh, I have found only three other sources where women are addressed in Spanish or Portuguese. Yona b. Abraham Girondi, Sendero de vidas, trans. Yosef Shalom (Amsterdam, n.p., 1627); David Pardo, Compendio de dinim que todo Israel debe saber y observar (Amsterdam: n.p., 5449 [1689]); Abraham Vaez, Arbol de vidas en el qual se contienen los dinim mas necesarios que debe observar todo Israel (Amsterdam: n.p., 5452 [1692]).

6. Thesovro, 1647, 22, when Menasseh discusses the ideal age at marriage.

7. See the study by Moses I. Finley, The Ancient Economy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), 17–18. Oeconomics comprised several ancient texts; among them the works by the Athenian Xenophon, (Oikonomikos), as well as works by Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero.

8. Francisco Manuel de Melo, Carta de Guia de Casados (Lisboa: Oficina Craesbeckiana, 1651). (I have used the recent edition by Daniel Neto Rocha, edição semidiplomática [Coimbra: Universidad de Coimbra, Centro de Estudos de Lingüística Aplicada, 2007]). According to Melo, prior to its publication, it had circulated in manuscript form and had been criticized as being against women’s freedom; see the preface to readers [CGVIr].

9. See the study by Ángel Rodríguez Sánchez, “El poder familiar: la patria potestad en el Antiguo Régimen,” Chronica Nova (Granada), 18 (1990): 365–380. I have used the reprinted online version in Tiempos Modernos. Revista Electrónica de Historia Moderna 3, n. 6 (2002) http://tiemposmodernos.rediris.es. Accessed November, 4, 2007.

10. James Casey, Family and Community in Early Modern Spain. The Citizens of Granada, 1570–1739 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 39.

11. Thesovro, 1647, 1–137. In this study I will not deal extensively with the part addressed to women.

12. Ibid., 138–179.

13. Ibid., 180–210.

14. See the manuscript HS 48E32, in Amsterdam’s Ets Haim Library, “Ramelhete de flores, juntados e dispostos por ao H.H.R. Selomo de Oliveira a pedimento de seu afeiçoado amigo Ishack de Matitya Aboab” (Amsterdam, 5457 [1687]), 41. At the end of the manuscript, as his source, Oliveira gives the book Vision deleytable. There is a contemporary translation from the Italian into Spanish that may have been Oliveira’s source: Libro intitvlado uision deleytable y sumario de todas las sciencias, traducido de italiano en español por Francisco de Caceres (Amsterdam: David de Crasto Tartaz, 1663).

15. See Aboab’s introduction to the book by David Pardo Compendio de dinim (mentioned above).

16. See the study by Kaplan, “Familia, matrimonio y sociedad. Los casamientos clandestinos en la Diáspora Sefaradí Occidental (siglos XVII–XVIII),” in Spacio, tiempo y forma, VI, 6: Historia Moderna (1993): 129–154, 136–137.

17. See the document published by Cecil Roth in his study “Immanuel Aboab’s Proselytization of the Marranos,” JQR 23 (1932): 121–162; 135 and 146.

18. For the concept of the “casa” or household in Spain, see the study by Francisco Chacón Jiménez, “La familia en España: una historia por hacer,” in La familia en la España mediterránea (siglos XV–XIX), ed. James Casey and Chacón Jiménez et al. (Barcelona: Editorial Crítica, 1987), 13–35; 25–27.

19. For the presence of African slaves among the Western Sephardim, see Jonathan Schorsch, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 55 and ff.; slaves were used mainly for domestic work. For servants in Amsterdam, see Levie Bernfeld, 144–145. For slaves and servants in Livorno, see Cristina Galasso, “‘Solo il loro servigio si brama, sia fedel, accurate, sincer.’ Il servizio domestico nella comunità ebraica di Livorno (secoli XVII–XVIII),” in Società e Storia, 97 (2002): 457–474. For Ashkenazi servants in the Hamburg Sephardi community, see Michael Studemund-Halévy, “Senhores versus criados da Naçao: Portugueses, asquenasíes y tudescos en el Hamburgo del siglo XVII,” Sefarad 60, 2 (2000): 349–367. For Spanish families, see Casey, 24. For converso families in Spain and Portugal and their servants, see Bernardo López Belinchón, Honra, libertad y hacienda (Hombres de negocios y judíos sefardíes) (Alcalá de Henares, Madrid: Eurolex, 2001), 252.

20. Galasso, “Solo il loro servigio . . . ,” 460.

21. We will discuss apprentices later under the section on “Adolescence.”

22. For the presence of merchants traveling back and forth from Iberia to Amsterdam, see Herman Prins Salomon, “The Case of Luis Vaz Pimentel: Revelations of Early Jewish Life in Rotterdam from the Portuguese Inquisition Archives,” SR 31 (1997): 7–30.

23. Thesovro, 1647, 10. In Carta de Guia de Casados [CG8r], three possible types of marriages are given: “Marriage of God, marriage of the devil, and marriage of death.”

24. Ibid., 11.

25. Ibid., 13. In Carta de Guia de Casados [CG7r], almost identical advice is given. Rodríguez Sánchez, in his study of the 1799 Catholic catechism that is mentioned earlier, includes a list of eleven conditions for a good marriage, some of them coinciding with those given by Menasseh; see Rodríguez, no. 2.

26. Thesovro, 1647, 13.

27. Ibid., 15–16.

28. Ibid., 17.

29. See Yosef Kaplan, “Moral Panic in the Eighteenth-Century Sephardi Community of Amsterdam: The Threat of Eros,” in Dutch Jewry: Its History and Secular Culture (1500–2000), ed. Jonathan Israel and Reinier Salverda (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 103–123; 113.

30. Thesovro, 1647, 24–25.

31. Ibid., 25–26.

32. In 1614 David Abenatar Melo married his daughter Branca (14 years old) to his brother-in-law Ruy Gomes, age 22. See Herman Prins Salomon, Portrait of a New Christian. Fernão Alvares Melo (1569–1632) (Paris: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 1982), 135.

33. See the study by Jona Schellekens, “Determinants of Age at First Marriage among Jews in Amsterdam, 1625–1724,” Journal of Family History, 24 (1999): 148–163; 151. In the family genealogies that I will refer to later, it is also rather common to find records of celibate persons, both men and women.

34. Thesovro, 1647, 13. Isaac de Pinto, who I will discuss later, reports that when he married he went to live to the house of his father-in-law; see Herman Prins Salomon, “The ‘De Pinto’ Manuscript. A 17th Century Marrano Family,” SR 9 (1975): 1–62; 41.

35. See Thesovro,1647, 82, based on Gen. 29:14 and Is. 58:7.

36. Thesovro, 1645, 34. The need for the father to sleep with his children could occur while the wife was niddah, or menstruating, and, according to Jewish law, not allowed to share the bed with her husband.

37. Thesovro, 1647, 65–71.

38. Ibid., 67.

39. Ibid., 68.

40. Ibid., 72–77.

41. This case has been documented in the study by M. Garel, “La première carte de Terre Sainte en Hébreu” (Amsterdam, 1620/21), SR 21 (1987): 131–139; the original documents have been translated into English by Odette Vlessing. There is also an entry in The Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. 7, ed. Isidore Singer (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1954), 398; under “Justo (Zaddik), Jacob ben Abraham.”

42. See for example, Thesovro, 1647, 68.

43. Ibid., 72.

44. See Thesovro, 1647, 116.

45. See Julia R. Lieberman, “Sermons and the Construct of a Jewish Identity: The Hamburg Community in the 1620s,” JQR, 10 (2003): 49–72; 51. In Rotterdam in 1646, the synagogue was the attic of the home of David Namias, alias Joao Veiga, as reported by Isaac de Pinto; see Salomon, “The ‘De Pinto’ Manuscript,” 40.

46. Thesovro, 1647, 138–179.

47. Thesovro, 1647, 138. On Galen’s medical understanding of the brain, see Julius Rocca, Galen on the Brain: Anatomical Knowledge and Physiological Speculation in the Second Century A.D. (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 17–21 and No. 2, 17. In Carta de Guia de Casados [CG46v–47r], the same metaphor is used, although to refer to the relationship between the master of the house and female domestic servants.

48. Thesovro, 1647, 139.

49. See Thesovro, 1645, 92, and ff., where the education of male children is discussed under “Tratado do estudo da Divina Ley.”

50. See the manuscript EH 48 E32, “Tratado sobre medecina que fez o Doutor Zacuto para seu filho levar consigo quandose foy para o Brazil. Disposto e copeado por hordem de Ishac de Matatia Aboab. Escrito por Benjamin Godines” (Amsterdam: 5450 [1690]), 109.

51. See Daniel Levi de Barrios, Metros Nobles (Amsterdam: n.p., 1689), 110–111, Epistolas 13 and 14; “Al Coronel don Nicolas de Oliver y Fullana, en el nacimiento de su hijo y muerte de su esposa Doña Juana . . . porque en el mar del parto que navega, / tu tierna esposa nada, y tu hijo boga. / O que pesar! O que plazer te agrega! / viendo que en Finis Terra ella se ahoga; / y el de Buena esperanza al Cabo llega.”

52. Thesovro, 1645, 261.

53. Ibid., 261. A woman giving birth taking precedence over the sabbath is already determined in the Gemara, masekhet Shabbat.

54. See SAA PA 334, No. 13, 31. I thank Tirtsah Levie Bernfeld for providing me with this information.

55. Thesovro, 1645, 262.

56. See Salomon, “The ‘De Pinto’ Manuscript,” 44 and 61. I have searched for Rachel’s birth date but without success; her husband, age 23, refers to her as of “such tender age” (de tao terna edade); they had been married for less than a year.

57. Thesovro, 1645, 262.

58. See the manuscript in the Ets Haim Library, HS 48 E27, “Liuro da nota de ydade,” by Isaac Matatia Aboab, started on February 1676; 11. The manuscript was studied and partially published by I.S. Revah, “Pour l’histoire des Nouveaux-Chretiens Portugais. La relacion généalogique d’I. De M. Aboab,” Boletim Internacional de Bibliografia Luso-Brasileira, 2 (1961): 276–312.

59. See the manuscript at the Hamburg University Library, No. 170 Levy 72, titled “Orden de vispera de Roshodes y el selihoth que es cuarenta dias antes del dia de las perdonãcas,” Amsterdam, VM.CCC.LXXXVI. An interesting way of writing the date following the Jewish calendar [5386] but given in Roman numerals; it corresponds to the civil year 1626.

60. The custom among converso families in Spain has been studied by Renée Levine Melamed, “Noticias sobre los ritos de los nacimientos y de la pureza de las judeoconversas castellanas del siglo XVI,” El Olivo, XII: 29–30 (1989): 235–243.

61. Elliott Horowitz, “The Eve of the Circumcision: A Chapter in the History of Jewish Nightlife,” Journal of Social History, 23 (1989): 45–69.

62. Renzo Toaff, La nazione ebrea a Livorno e a Pisa (1591–1700) (Firenze: Leo S. Olschki, 1990), 298–299.

63. Thesovro, 1647, 149.

64. See the manuscript “Livro da Vniao Geral da Naçao,” Hamburg Municipal Archives (from now on, “LVG”), 178–179.

65. Thesovro, 1647, 140–152.

66. Ibid., 141.

67. Ibid., 145.

68. Ibid., 141.

69. See “Liuro da nota de ydade,” 11.

70. See the manuscript EH47 B4 (11) at the Ets Haim Library, “Genealogical work on the Belmonte and da Fonseca families from 1599 until 1728 by Jacob Belmonte and Abraham and Jacob da Fonseca, 18th century” (from now on, “Belmonte and Fonseca genealogy”), 23–24 and ff.; parts of the manuscript are included in the study by Richard J.H. Gottheil, The Belmont-Belmonte Family. A Record of Four Hundred Years. Put Together from the Original Documents in the Archives and Libraries of Spain, Portugal, Holland and Germany as well as from Private Sources (New York: Private Printing, 1917).

71. See the study by Lawrence A. Hoffman, Covenant of Blood: Circumcision and Gender in Rabbinic Judaism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 193–198. In Ashkenazi communities, and probably in Spain, the mother was present at the circumcision at least until the eleventh century. Then circumcision was moved to the synagogue and only slowly returned to the home in the Early Modern Period.

72. Thesovro, 1647, 141, 143.

73. I have used the edition: Bernard Picart, Les cérémonies et coutoumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde, ed. Abbé Banier and Abbé le Mascrier (Paris: Rollin Fils, 1741), 182–187.

74. See LVG, 21 for the first discussion of the matter.

75. Ibid., 153, when the Mahamad discussed the matter again and the monetary penalty was added; in the photocopy I was provided with, the amount of the penalty is unclear (50 marks?). It applied not only to circumcisions but also to weddings.

76. Benjamin Godines, Orden de bendiciones. Y las ocaziones en que se deven dezir con muchas adiciones a las precedentes impreciones, y por major dispuestas (Amsterdam: Albertus Magnus, 5447 [1687]), 181. I have used the copy at the Asher Library, Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, Chicago.

77. See Herman Prins Salomon and Isaac S.D. Sassoon, Uriel da Costa Examination of Pharisaic Traditions (Leiden: Brill, 1993), 83.

78. Thesovro, 1647, 145.

79. Ibid., 145–146.

80. Picart, 182, explains the role of women, if the circumcision took place in the synagogue: “While waiting for the godmother at the synagogue, [the attendants] sang. The godmother, carrying the newborn in her arms and followed by other women, stopped at the synagogue’s door, where the baby was taken by the godfather and all the attendants shouted ‘baruch aba’ [blessed be he who comes]” (translation into English is my own).

81. See Sebastián de Covarrubias Horozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (1611; repr Barcelona: S.A. Horta, 1943), 340, under “comadre” (midwife): “Llámanse comadres las que acompañan la criatura y la reciben de mano del padrino quando la sacan de la pila,” and crosslisted with “madrina” (godmother), 778.

82. The parashah emphasis on vengeance toward non-Jews has no doubt contributed to the disappearance of this custom in more modern times.

83. See Belmonte and Fonseca genealogy, 32.

84. Ibid., 32.

85. Ibid., 23.

86. See LVG, 177.

87. Godines, Orden de bendiciones, 181, “A las fadas de la hija.”

88. Belmonte and Fonseca genealogy, 18.

89. Ibid., 9.

90. Ibid., 24.

91. See the Livorno Haskamot from 1655, in Toaff, 564, haskama 37, and n. 15.

92. See Hoffman, 160.

93. Ibid., 179.

94. Thesovro, 1647, 153.

95. Compendio de dinim que todo Israel deve saber y observar. Compuesto por estilo fasil y breve (Amsterdam, n.p., 5449 [1689]), 282. Although published in Amsterdam, the book was written in London and for the London Sephardi Community.

96. Thesovro, 1647, 153–160.

97. Belmonte and Fonseca genealogy, 32.

98. Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 538. Schama has documented swaddling among the Dutch in the seventeenth century. Also see the contemporary Gluckel, Memoirs of Gluckel of Hameln, trans. Marvin Lowenthal (New York: Schocken Books, 1977), 139, Gluckel refers to the [un]swaddling of her firstborn son.

99. See Toaff, 626.

100. Thesovro, 1647, 79–80. For the concept of a foundling, and his status as both a “doubtful” mamzer and a “doubtful” gentile, see Menachem Elon, ed., The Principles of Jewish Law (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House, 1975), 437.

101. See Daniel M. Swetschinski, The Portuguese Jews of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam (London: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2000), 217–218.

102. Summaries of affidavits on the case are given in SR, 1969 (No. 197 and notes); 1972 (No. 660–661).

103. See Salomon, Portrait of a New Christian, 135–138, and summaries of affidavits in SR (1976): 97 (No. 883); (1974), 301 (No. 844, and No. 29); 304–305 (No. 855).

104. Even back then, men were aware of the fact that girls of such a young age were not adults. See, for example, Thesovro, 1647, 24, where Menasseh suggests age thirteen for girls to marry, but adding, also, that parents need to keep them under their care at home, as at this age one cannot expect readiness to govern the household.

105. SR (1979): 234 (No. 1568 and No. 45).

106. LVG, 170 and 171.

107. LVG, 23.

108. Entered under “mamzer” in The Principles of Jewish Law, 435.

109. Lydia Hagoort, “Persons of a Restless Disposition: Conflicts between the Jewish Merchants Lopo Ramires and Manuel Dias Henriques and the Parnassim of the Portuguese Nation about the Inheritance of Rebecca Naar,” SR 32 (1998): 155–172.

110. In addition to the study by Hagoort, see also Leo Fuks, “Litigation among Amsterdam Sephardim in the Seventeenth Century,” 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), 65–80. This study includes a partial translation into English, the responsum from the Venetian rabbi Isaac Luzzatto, in 1650, but makes no mention of the case from the perspective of the child. For the responsum on Abraham, the child, I have used the Portuguese manuscript, MS. 164, housed at the Klau Library, Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. See also Swetschinski, 239.

111. On breastfeeding, see the study by Valerie Fildes, Wet Nursing: A History from Antiquity to the Present (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1988).

112. Thesovro, 1647, 123–124, “Da mulher viuva,” where Menasseh speaks about widows and the waiting period before remarrying.

113. See “The ‘De Pinto’ Manuscript,” 44, “So I returned home and left my son there with his wet-nurse to be cared for under the supervision of my mother.”

114. Thesovro, 1647, 262. If a premature child was born on Shabbat, with neither hair nor nails, it was considered as dead, and the mother was to either breastfeed or feed the baby by hand.

115. For a recent edition of Penso’s sermon, see Julia R. Lieberman, “Un sermone sull’educazione ebraica alla fine del seicento,” Rassegna Mensile di Israel, 65 (1999): 73–119. See also, Lieberman, “Between Tradition and Modernity: The Sephardim of Livorno,” in The Most Ancient of Minorities: The Jews of Italy, ed. Stanislao G. Pugliese (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 67–76.

116. See Thesovro, 1647, 118.

117. See LVG, 344. See also other similar but less specific entries, 187, 208, and 362.

118. Ibid., 208, on 15 Sivan 5421 [1661]. What seems clear from this entry and the previous one is that fathers were in the habit of bringing boys and girls with them to the synagogue to say the prayer and name the girls and then they attempted to keep the children with them. By requiring the children to be able to chant the haftorah, the Mahamad made sure that this did not happen. Yosef Kaplan ([1993], 135) discussed the importance of the synagogue in the lives of the Western Sephardim, and proposed that “New Jews” gave the synagogue the same importance that the home had on the Iberian Peninsula, where the home was a “clandestine temple” in which conversos secretly practiced Judaism. Cristina Galasso, in her essay on the Livorno community (included in this volume), has demonstrated how the return to rabbinic or normative Judaism was experienced differently by men and women.

119. See Ariès, 121–127.

120. Ivan G. Marcus, The Jewish Life Cycle: Rites of Passage from Biblical to Modern Times (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), 84.

121. See Ivan G. Marcus, Rituals of Childhood: Jewish Acculturation in Medieval Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 119–121.

122. Ibid., 126–127.

123. Thesovro, 1645, 53.

124. Thesovro, 1645, 152.

125. Thesovro, 1647, 246.

126. Thesovro, 1645, 247.

127. Clearly a word-for-word translation from Hebrew.

128. See Abraham Cohen Pimentel, Questoens e discursos academicos, que compoz e recitou na ilustre academia Keter Thora (Hamburg: n.p., 5448 [1688]), Sermon 5, 194–195, and Sermon 6, 203–204. The term “bar mitzvah” was never used in either of the sermons.

129. Ibid., Sermon 5, 195.

130. Ibid., Sermon 6, 203–204. See also Picart, 186, who describes the bar mitzvah ceremony in very similar terms: “religious majority is declared in the presence of a minyan or quorum; the father explains in detail how he has replaced his son’s responsibility and declares himself free of his son’s sins; the witness accepts the father’s release and the father says a prayer.” (Translation into English is my own.)

131. See the manuscript EH48 E7, Ets Haim Library, “Sermao composto por o veneravel senhor H.H.R. Ishack Aboab para seu neto Yshack Aboab que darsou em Sabat a tarde no K[ahal] K[ados] de T[almud] [Tora] no dia em o qual emtrou no gremio dos observantes seus perseitos divinos . . . o dedica ao illustre senhor Yshack Aboab de Matatia,” Em Amsterdam, 5450 [1690]. The custom among the Western Sephardim of naming children for their living relatives, and the fact that they also often married close relatives with the same last names, makes it rather difficult to identify them; in any event, here three well-known individuals are identified as relatives of the bar-mitzvah boy: Rabbi Isaac Aboab da Fonseca is named as the boy’s grandfather; the sermon is dedicated to Isaac Aboab de Matatia (probably his paternal grandfather), and Abraham Aboab da Fonseca is identified as his uncle (seu tio).

132. Ibid., see page 9 (my own pagination, as the manuscript lacks it).

133. They were published together, Sermoens pregados na celebre esnoga de Amsterdam pellos estudiosos and Discretos mancebos Ishack and Selomoh . . . Louzada (Amsterdam: Moseh Dias, 5451 [1691]). Each sermon has its own individual pagination.

134. See first sermon, by Isaac, 4, and second sermon by Selomoh, 4.

135. See second sermon, 2.

136. Ets Haim Library manuscript EH48D41, “Sermao gratulatorio q resitey no K.Ks: do T.Tª de Amstm. Em 27 de menahem na parassa de Ree anohy, eauendo cumprido (em 21 d^o) minhan no ANNO: 5486 Que corresponde aaera vulgar 1727,” 2 (my own pagination). The derashah is mentioned in the introduction to the recent edition of his Memorias by the editors, see: eds. Lajb Fuks and Renate G. Fuks-Mansfeld, Memorias do estabelecimento e progresso dos judeos portuguezes e espanhoes nesta famosa citade de Amsterdam 1772 (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1975); however, the editors are wrong to ascribe the poem (or song) preceding the derashah to David Franco Mendes himself, as it is clearly stated that it was written by an older friend: “. . . un amigo suyo i mayor de sus genitores que es y sea Bto.”

137. See Sermones hechos sobre diferentes asuntos compuestos y predicados por el docto ingenio Ishac de Sola (Amsterdam: Moseh Diaz, 5464 [1704]), sermons five, 50–61, and six, 61–70. The exact dates when the sermons were delivered are not given.

138. See Ariès, 329–331.

139. Julia R. Lieberman, “Education among the Western Sephardim in the Seventeenth Century,” in Proceedings of the “Symposium on Poverty, Welfare and Religion: Family, Gender and Justice,” Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, May 18–20, 2007, ed. Jonathan Cohen (forthcoming).

140. Swetschinski, 88–89 and 284–285, has documented a general high level of literacy among Portuguese immigrants; based on the fact that some Portuguese, males and females, learned the Gothic (Dutch) script, he has concluded that some must have received a Dutch education. But the level of female literacy in Amsterdam later declined. Levie Bernfeld, 142–143 (see also her essay in this volume), has arrived at similar conclusions. Some of the women mentioned by Levie Bernfeld, Gracia Senior and the poets Isabel Enriques and Isabel Correa, were brought up (and supposedly educated) in Spain. For Gracia Senior and evidence of her residence in Madrid Spain before arriving to Amsterdam, see her last will, drawn on August 30,1673, SAA PA 334 no. 826.

141. See the manuscript EH 49, B11, Saruco’s family genealogy, “Arvore de vidas e genealogia do muy docto e insigne HHR Israel Saruco,” The Hague, 1781, f 12. He tutored them for a total of eight years. Neither age nor other details are given.

142. Gluckel of Halmeln, 6, for example, received such an education.

143. Thesovro, 1645, 92–96.

144. Ibid., 92.

145. Ibid., 94.

146. Ibid., 94.

147. Thesovro, 1645, 93.

148. Ibid., 95–96.

149. Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost: England before the Industrial Age (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1965).

150. Ibid., 3.

151. On Murcia, see the study by Mª Rosario Caballero Carrillo and Pedro Miralles Martínez, “El Trabajo de la infancia y la juventud en la época del barroco. El caso de la seda murciana,” Scripta Nova. Revista Electrónica de Geografía y Ciencias Sociales, 6, 119 (12), August 2002. On Almería, see Antonio Muñoz Buendía, “La infancia robada. Niños esclavos, criados y aprendices en la Almería del Antiguo Régimen,” in Los marginados en el mundo medieval y moderno: Almería, 5 a 7 de noviembre de 1998, ed. Mª Desamparados Martínez San Pedro (Instituto de Estudios Almerienses, 2000), 65–78.

152. Fernando Montesinos, from Vila Flor, Portugal, was sent to Spain as soon as he turned sixteen, to peddle “threads and ribbons” for the family business, and he succeeded in having a business of his own. See López Belinchón, 37–38.

153. I used the manuscript kept at the Ets Haim Library, 42B2, “Viage entretenido de don Antonio de Contreras,” a recent study of the work is by Moisés Orfali, “Danielillo da Livorno: testo e contesto,” Zakhor, Rivista di Storia degli Ebrei d’Italia (Firenze: La Giuntina, I/1997): 207–220. Orfali used a different manuscript from the Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid.

154. Also kept at the Ets Haim Library, EH 49 A15. Pelengrino (wanderer or traveler) here also could mean “convert.” Menasseh also uses the term “peregrino” to refer to converts to Judaism, see Thesovro, 1647, 173.

155. He was to learn the trade of dyeing blue woolen fabric with the herb “pastel,” which grew in Ponta Delgada, and he was taken to England, where the dyeing took place. See the dictionary Tesoro de la lengua, 856, the entry “pastel”—“Yerba conocida de la qual usan los tintoreros para el color açul de las lanas.”

156. Ibid., 7.

157. LVG, 382–383.

158. Ibid., 101–102.

159. Ibid., 297.

160. See Termos de Talmud Torah e de Ets Haim 1616–1728, SAA PA 334, No. 1051, 6.

161. See Livro de Termos de Bet Israel, SAA PA 334, No. 10, 149.

162. See, for example, SR (1973): 270, No. 751, “Indentures of Apprenticeship for the Training to Become a ‘Kaffa’-Worker Concluded Between Duarte Saraiva and Nicolaes Godefroy.”

163. See SR (1985): 177, No. 2465, the dispute between Isaac Jédela and his master, diamond cutter, when Jédela wanted out of the contract.

164. See the “Register of the Aby Yetomim Society,” SAA PA 334, No. 1211, 4, 6. See also my forthcoming study, “Adolescence and the Period of Apprenticeship among the Western Sephardim in the Seventeenth Century” in El Prezente 4 (Moshe David Gaon Center for Ladino Culture: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, 2010).

165. Ariès, 268, claims this distinction did not happen until the eighteen century.

166. “Documentos para todo estado e ydade em particular para abituar bem os mosos desde sua moçidade a vertude. Feitos e juntados por osenhor meu pay osenhor Ishack de Matatia Aboab Primeyro para doctrinar seus sobrinhos e despois para exortar seus propios filos a vertude . . . Copiados por mi Matatia de Isaac Aboba. Em Amsterdam no anno de 5445 [1685].” From now on, “Documento.”

167. Marked as section 2 in the manuscript, 8–10; it appears to be from the period Isaac spent in Antwerp, 1653 to 1660, in the house of his uncle Lopo Ramires, as documented by Jonathan Israel, “Lopo Ramirez (David Curiel) and the Attempt to Establish a Sephardi Community in Antwerp in 1653–1654,” SR 28 (1994): 99–119.

168. “Documento,” 8, 9.

169. Thesovro, 1647, 180–210.

170. James E. C. Welldon, trans., Politics of Aristotle (London: Macmillan, [1883] 1932). See also the valuable study of the household in Aristotle’s works by D. Brendan Nagle, The Household as the Foundation of Aristotle’s Polis (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

171. Thesovro, 1647, 183.

172. Ibid., 180–181.

173. For Amsterdam, see Schorsch, 169 and ff. For Livorno, see Galasso, “Solo il loro servigio . . . ,” 458, 463.

174. Thesovro, 1647, 184–185.

175. Ibid., 192–195.

176. Ibid., 201–207.

177. Ibid., 207–209.