Gender, Legal Systems, and Social Reintegration in Early Modern Italy

This paper explores the changes of attitudes toward illicit sexual relations within the early modern Jewish societies that occurred in Italy between the late sixteenth and the middle of the eighteenth century, with a specific focus on young Jewish, Muslim, and Black maidservants. It analyzes how Italian Jewish leadership, both lay and rabbinical, acted in regard to the vicissitudes of young women who faced seduction, sexual exploitation, and pregnancy under the Jewish roof. This analysis uses archival sources from both Jewish courts and civic magistracies in the cities of Venice, Livorno, Mantua, and Modena as well as rabbinical responsa. In Italy rabbis and Jewish leaders forged their governmental skills through a complex dialogue with Jewish identity as it emerged in regard to the above mentioned cases of illegitimate pregnancy. At the turn of the seventeenth century the number of such cases made public was so numerous that they constituted a threat to the social balance of Italian Jewish communities. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, rabbis and Jewish lay leaders from the city of Modena were able to contain destabilizing behaviors within the society, and reintegrate women who would otherwise have been tragically lost by obliging their seducers to marry them or support them as well as their illegitimate children. In the mid-eighteenth century their progressive responsa were adopted by all Italian Jewish communities.