Marriage Before the Bench: Divorce Law and Litigation Strategies in Thirteenth-Century Ashkenaz

Scholars regularly refer to independently operating Jewish courts as prime evidence of Jewish autonomy and self-rule in medieval Christian Europe. Yet few have focused on the largely anonymous individuals who populated these forums, despite the vital role that litigants played in fueling the judicial system. This article joins a growing body of research devoted to a bottom-up examination of the institutions of law and justice in premodern Europe, highlighting the activities of those who made use of the courts rather than the structures that authorized them. Specifically, it considers a divorce suit adjudicated in the mid-thirteenth century by the rabbinic court of Rabbi Hezkiah b. Jacob of Magdeburg as a lens onto the legal knowledge of lay litigants, their expectations of the judicial system, and the litigation strategies they developed. The reactions of R. Hezkiah and his colleagues to these tactics demonstrate that litigation in the Jewish courts not only reflected current legal trends but could also affect them.     

Captivity, conversion, and communal identity: sexual angst and religious crisis in Frankfurt, 1241

Following the violent destruction of Frankfurt’s Jewish community in May 1241, leading rabbinic figures debated the marital status of a young woman who had been captured and forcibly converted by local Christians. A series of legal responsa authored by R. Yitzhak Or Zaru’a and his contemporaries provides a window into the conflict, reflecting the German Jewish community’s struggle to redefine its boundaries in response to escalating physical and theological pressure. Working with talmudic archetypes yet accounting for medieval realities, some authorities searched desperately for leniencies, whereas others rejected legal loopholes and ruled with excessive stringency. The highly rhetorical language, conflicting narratives, and divergent interpretations that characterize these halakhic discussions render the texts fertile ground for considering the relationship between sexual angst and religious crisis. This study will examine the possibility of using the legalistic treatment of women, particularly in the sensitive areas of physical violation and personal status, as a measuring rod of communal identification.     

Jewish Courts in Medieval England

Basing their conclusions on Latin documents, historians have painted the Jewish courts of medieval England as limited and haphazard affairs, their jurisdiction limited mostly to family law. They have also assumed that rabbinic courts ceased their activity in England after 1242. Hebrew rabbinic sources from the same period—some of which have never been published—provide more detailed information. These sources describe several professional courts staffed by learned scholars and adjudicating a range of legal issues. These courts existed throughout the thirteenth century—until the Expulsion of 1290—and included some of the leading rabbis in medieval England: Benjamin of Cambridge, Moses of London, and Moses’s son Elijah Menahem. The London court of Rabbi Elijah Menahem in particular possessed significant powers and utilized Elijah’s royal connections to enforce its rulings. Besides correcting the scholarly perception of rabbinic courts in medieval England, this article demonstrates how crucially important rabbinic texts and responsa are for historians as a source alongside other types of medieval documentation.     

Mobility and marriage in two medieval Jewish societies

A significant characteristic of pre-modern Jewish life in both the Muslim and Christian realms is geographic mobility. There has been little specific scholarly work on Jewish women and geographic mobility but the available primary sources show that women traveled frequently and for a variety of reasons. This essay focuses on women’s mobility and particularly their migrations due to marriage in both Muslim and Christian milieus. It poses questions about how medieval Jewish communities balanced values of family propinquity versus economic interests. Marriage contracts and letters from the Cairo Genizah demonstrate that marriages over significant distances to cement mercantile or intellectual alliances were not uncommon. Genizah writings also reveal that indigent women were frequent travelers, seeking runaway husbands and financial support. Rabbinic responsa literature of the tenth to thirteenth centuries from France and Germany shows that Jewish women’s mobility in Ashkenaz, both for marriage and for business, was generally within a more limited region. In this society, families tended to move as a group and women often preferred migrating with their parents rather than remaining with a husband. The far more frequent long distance marriages among Jewish women in the Muslim world reflect a more developed system of far-flung scholarly contacts and economic alliances. Similarly, the much larger Jewish population in Islamic realms also meant that there were more women from elite families and more indigent abandoned wives, the two groups particularly likely to travel due to marital prospects and marital woes.     

Competing Perspectives on Legal Decision Making in Early Modern Ashkenaz

The respective roles of jurists and judges in the decision-making process offers a valuable perspective on judicial practice and the delivery of justice in early modern Ashkenazic communities. This essay is concerned with differences in the approaches of poseqim (jurists) and dayanim (judges); it suggests that these distinctions were reflections of the institutional settings in which they worked, the size of their communities, and regional factors. Data unearthed from communal records and rabbinic responsa offer important evidence of disparities between the offices of early modern dayanim and poseqim, their distinct personae, and their respective views of how judicial rulings are decided. Moreover, these differences were related to the slow transition to fixed rabbinic-communal courts in western and central Europe that was a product of forces peculiar to the resettlement of Jews in the west, the deliberate development of communal traditions, and the role of the enlightened absolutist state. The impact of the growing recourse to non-Jewish courts, especially as it evinced differences between eastern and western/central European history and culture, was also a factor. Clearly, regional forces influenced the distinct legal efforts and perspectives of judges and jurists, as did the discrete functions they were assigned, their particular training, and the institutional standing of rabbinic courts. These differences became more glaring in the two centuries prior to the collapse of the ancien régime, as structural changes in western Ashkenazic communities contributed to a new Jewish legal culture.     

Family, Community, and Motherhood: Caring for Fatherless Children in the Jewish Community of Thirteenth-Century Perpignan

This article investigates the guardianship of fatherless children (orphans) in one of the most important Jewish communities of the thirteenth-century realms of Aragon, the aljama of the town of Perpignan. After reviewing some ideals of Solomon ben Abraham ibn Adret of Barcelona, as expressed in his responsa, the article focuses on documents of practice. This documentary basis includes royal charters, Latin wills of Jewish testators, and 148 unedited transactions generated by eighteen panels of guardians between 1266 and 1286, described in an analytical table at the end of the article. The practical evidence reveals that guardians usually served as a group, panels comprised close relatives of the wards and men who were distinguished in their community through official service. Case studies expose the dynamics within these panels and establish that the orphans' widowed mother usually acted as the group's leader. A comparison with her Christian counterpart places the rights and responsibilities of the Jewish widowed mother guardian into relief. Although not autonomous, Jewish widowed guardians were highly effective caretakers of their fatherless children. The idealized view of the Jewish widow held by her medieval contemporaries as helpless and in need of special care from the men of her community enabled already capable widows to benefit from the financial aid of community leaders who otherwise might not have been so keen to foster these women's legal and financial agency.     

When the Arrow Came before the Trolley: Jewish Aspects of the Trolley Problem

In 2014 Bruers and Breckman addressed a series of subsidiary questions arising from the trolley problem and their answers. In this article I describe ancient and precedent treatments of some of these issues over thousands of years as found in Jewish literature and the original solutions that have been proposed throughout history by Jewish philosophers and legal scholars. I address questions that have been posed to Jewish halakhic authorities when two obligations clash — whether one may save the lives of many at the cost of killing an individual — and discuss whether this is permitted in order to save lives or forbidden owing to the prohibition of murder. I also present new problems that have been introduced into the halakhic and philosophical discussions around the trolley problem in Jewish literature.     

Divine simplicity

According to a doctrine widely held by most medieval philosophers and theologians, whether in the Muslim or Christian world, there are no metaphysical distinctions in God whatsoever. As a result of the compendious theorizing that has been done on this issue, the doctrine, usually called the doctrine of divine simplicity, has been bestowed a prominent status in both Islamic and Christian philosophical theology. In Islamic philosophy some well-known philosophers, such as Ibn Sina (980–1037) and Mulla Sadra (1571–1640), developed this doctrine through a metaphysical approach. In this paper, considering the historical order, I shall first concentrate on Ibn Sina’s view. Then I shall turn to the theory of divine simplicity of Thomas Aquinas (1225?–1274), as the most developed and comprehensive version of the medieval theories in Christian world. Finally, I will return to Islamic philosophy and explore the more complicated and mature account of the doctrine as it was introduced by Mulla Sadra according to his own philosophical principles.     

Dialogue and the City,circa 1400: Pero Ferruz and the Rabbis of Alcalá

Within the problematics of history and representation, the court comes to the fore in various types of late medieval writings: chronicles, ambassadorial reports, decrees as well as literature in various genres. Yet how to read these texts is a question that affects the reconstruction of Jewish history of the period. Here an attempt is made to develop a way of reading such texts though examining an apparently minor poem by Pero Ferruz in the Cancionero de Baena. This poem, it is argued, reveals the items of interest in courtly dialogue: synagogues, Jewish privileges, legal status, theological discrepancies, but also consensus. The coherence of the text is constructed by appeal to the subject of the city and its rise in the late Middle Ages.     

Role‐Induced Bias in Court: An Experimental Analysis

Criminal procedure is organized as a tournament with predefined roles. We show that assuming the role of a defense counsel or a prosecutor leads to role‐induced bias even if participants are asked to predict a court ruling after they have ceased to act in that role and if they expect a substantial financial incentive for being accurate. The bias is not removed either if participants are instructed to predict the court ruling in preparation of plea bargaining. In line with parallel constraint satisfaction models for legal decision making, findings indicate that role‐induced bias is driven by coherence effects, that is, systematic information distortions in support of the favored option. This is mainly achieved by downplaying the importance of conflicting evidence. These distortions seem to stabilize interpretations, and people do not correct for this bias. Implications for legal procedure are briefly discussed. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Judaean Embassies and Cases before Roman Emperors, AD 44-66

In the two decades before the First Jewish war, litigants ordiplomats from the province of Judaea had recourse to Romanemperors on a number of occasions. In some cases the mattersat issue involved objections against actions of Roman prefectsof Judaea. Evidence about the outcomes of the hearings and diplomaticencounters shows that the emperors Claudius and Nero usuallygave decisions in favour of the Jewish side, especially whenthe Jewish party was the Jerusalem priesthood. It is arguedthat it was a consistent policy of these emperors to be fairand more than fair to the Jerusalem priests in these years—tothe point of ruling against their own procurators on a numberof occasions. It is suggested, in view of this, that when thecase of Paul of Tarsus came before Caesar in the early sixties,the decision probably went in favour of Paul's accusers.     

The Ottoman approach to Christians and Christianity in sixteenth‐century Jerusalem

The Ottoman Empire was a Muslim state not only by definition; in many fields it actually implemented Islamic policies. In Ottoman Palestine these policies could be discerned from the early sixteenth century onwards, and they were applied particularly in Jerusalem. Laden with memories of religious conflicts, encompassing a Christian (as well as Jewish) population and their holy sites, it would hardly be surprising to find anti‐Christian acts and perhaps even policies in Jerusalem. The sixteenth‐century formative Ottoman years witnessed several anti‐Christian incidents: expulsion of the Franciscan monks from their convent on Mount Zion in 1551, Muslim attempts to legally seize parts of the Monastery of the Cross near Jerusalem from the Georgians in the early sixties, and during the same years similar threats to the Coptic Dayr al‐Khadr monastery in town. These incidents should not be construed as part of an overall policy, but should rather be seen as illustrations of pressures exerted on the Ottoman authorities by local Muslim zealots. Official policies of the Sultan, and in most cases his actual orders, sought to protect and uphold the Christian presence in Jerusalem. The expulsion from Mount Zion was an exception to the general rule, and even in that case the local authorities provided the Franciscans with an alternative building within the larger Christian complex.     

Reading Against the Grain,Readings of Substitution: Catholic Books as Inspiration for Judaism in Early Modern Iberia

Forced conversion produced a large number of converts, many or at least some of whom sought to continue to practice their former religion. For many crypto-Jews and crypto-Muslims, polemical literature was actually a source of knowledge about their old religion—sometimes the only source. It was not unusual for Iberian New Christians, lacking access to Jewish or Islamic books, to make use of Catholic works either to gather information about Judaism and Islam or to borrow from their expressions of spirituality and piety. In this essay I explore the unintended readings and reception of polemical works among converts, in particular the Christian books of piety and devotion that persons of converso origin read and used in their own writings. In the end most of these books were included by the Inquisition and Church censors in the Index of Forbidden Books, affecting in this way the perception of these orthodox books by Catholic Church authorities. On the one hand, I am interested in how a heterodox (or Jewish or Muslim) spirituality could be constructed using Catholic books; on the other hand, in how this phenomenon had an impact on orthodox Catholics. I argue that Catholic books were sometimes condemned to the Index simply because they were read by New Christians who the Inquisition considered to be judaizers or crypto-Muslims.

     

A CRITIQUE OF ISLAMIC ARGUMENTS ON HUMAN CLONING

Sunnism constitutes eighty percent of the Islamic world. The most academic and renowned religious seminary in the Sunni world is Al-Azhar University in Egypt, and it is from here that most verdicts on novel issues such as human cloning are decreed and disseminated throughout the Islamic and non-Islamic worlds. The perspective of this seminary and of other significant Sunni jurisprudential councils and figures are alluded to throughout this essay. I lay out the method of legal derivation employed by the Sunni clergy and scholars and then illustrate how they have arrived at their prohibition on human cloning. I demonstrate weaknesses of methodology employed by the major Sunni Muftis within the domain of jurisprudence.     

RELIGIOUS LITERALISM AND SCIENCE‐RELATED ISSUES IN CONTEMPORARY ISLAM

The complex relations between Islam and modern science have so far mostly been examined by thinkers at the conceptual level. The wider interaction of religious scholars and preachers with the general public on science issues is an unexplored area that is worthy of examination, for it often is characterized by a literalistic approach. I first briefly review literalism in its various forms. The classical Islamic jurisprudential school of Zahirism, widely regarded as bearing the flag of juristic literalism, is also briefly presented. I then address specific science‐related issues currently being discussed in literalistic ways by many religious scholars and preachers in their general‐public discourse. I focus on the practical case of the determination of crescent‐based Islamic months and holy occasions, the conceptual issue of evolution (biological and human), and the rule for the consumption of meat by slaughter of animals. In the last part of the essay I propose a constructive alternative to the literalistic mode: the Maqasidi (objectives‐based) approach. This rather old method has seen some revival lately, mainly among Islamic jurists concerned with solving the new issues of modern times, especially for Muslims living in the West, but this approach has not yet been applied to science‐related issues. I present the main ideas of this method and show their relevance and usefulness to science‐related topics.     

Division of the Dowry on the Death of the Daughter: An Instance in the Negotiation of Laws and Jewish Customs in Early Modern Tuscany

Tuscan notarial acts permit the exploration of the often elusive relationship of Jewish practice, Jewish law and the corresponding laws of the state. One issue in early modern Italian Jewish marriage negotiations was the eventual disposition of the dowry of a childless wife who predeceased her husband. Jewish law on the succession of the childless woman was complicated by traditional or regional customs and communal ordinances. Moreover, in sixteenth-century Tuscany there was no official code, court or arbiter of Jewish law. Nonetheless, Christian notaries who wrote pre-nuptial stipulations or pacts for Jews worked with the assumption that Jews were allowed to live according to their own law. This essay argues that individual Jews used to advantage the state's assumption that they could follow Jewish law (despite the absence of any universally-acknowledged or applicable law on this specific subject) by employing notaries to write contracts in disregard of both local statutes and well-known Jewish customs. In the second part of this essay I locate the stipulations in the Jewish marriage system and suggest that the process of negotiation over the fate of the dowry was integrally related to the system's emphasis – in contrast to that of contemporary Christians – on universal marriage and procreation.     

Voices of Outreach: The Construction of Identity and Maintenance of Social Ties Among Chabad-Lubavitch Emissaries

Fundamentalists typically avoid influences from the outside world and form intense social bonds with members of their own group. Yet, active fundamentalists must create relationships with the objects of their missionary action, the Other. In this article I address the connections between the cultural practice of missionary work and the formation and maintenance of social ties among ultra-Orthodox Jewish missionaries belonging to the fundamentalist Hasidic sect Chabad-Lubavitch. These missionaries attempt to bring Jews to the beliefs and practices of Chabad by hosting Jews at Sabbath meals. This missionary act is an utterance that "speaks" with multiple voices, indexing the missionaries as both friendly members of their local Jewish community and ideal Lubavitchers. Through these meals, the missionaries engage not only the local Jews but also other Lubavitchers in dialogue, constructing a community that transcends face-to-face interaction.