Cultures of the Jews by David Biale

Author:David Biale [Biale, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-48346-1
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-08-29T04:00:00+00:00

Megillat Esther (Purim scroll), Italy, ca. 1675. (Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York. Photo: Suzanne Kaufman)

Hanukkah lamp, Italy, sixteenth century. Bronze, cast. (The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Stieglitz Collection of Judaica 118/852)

In Sicily, however, the religious mores of the Jews, in both wine consumption and other matters, were far closer to those of the eastern Mediterranean than to those of their coreligionists in central and northern Italy. Indeed, in his letter from Jerusalem, Obadiah observed that “in all the communities” that he had visited on his way to Jerusalem “except for Italy, Jews are extremely careful to abstain from wine of the gentiles.”20 Yet in the Jewish communities of the eastern Mediterranean it had been widely customary, since the Middle Ages, for women to forgo ritual immersion in the halakhically prescribed manner (indoors in a mikveh, or outdoors in a river or the sea) in favor of the local bathhouse.21

The greater stringency with which married Jewish women in central and northern Italy performed their monthly immersions seems to have been related to their more casual approach to matters of modesty, reflected in Minz’s aforementioned decree regarding mixed bathing. Similarly, in one of his responsa, Minz attempted to convince the Jews of Treviso, whose wives had been practicing outdoor immersion, of the need to construct a proper ritual bath in a discreet location so that the women could purify themselves monthly “with proper care and without fear of harassment” from either Jews or gentiles. He was not the only Italian rabbi of his time who feared that women performing their monthly ablutions outdoors, albeit in the dark, might fail, after undressing, to inspect their bodies with the requisite care.22 But what is striking is that no one in northern Italy complained that women in small towns, where many Jewish loan-bankers and their families dwelt, were abstaining from monthly immersion under such challenging circumstances—as was evidently the case in Sicily at the time of Obadiah’s visit. One historian, in describing the Tuscan ladies of the early Renaissance, has written that they “did not worry … about the neighbors who watched through windows kept wide open.”23 These aristocratic women evidently had more in common with their Jewish countrywomen than they may have realized.

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