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.