H-Net Online: Jewish Q&A, Early Modern Sephardic Responsa

Because Zionists and Islamophobes are busily rewriting the history of minorities within the Islamic world, both texts like Matt Godish' study Jewish Questions: Responsa on Sephardic Life in the Early Modern Period and also critical reviews of such works like that of Matthias Lehman below are quite important to understanding the historical background to the conflict over Palestine as well as to creating a sense of the magnitude of Zionist disinformatsia.

Matt Goldish. Jewish Questions: Responsa on Sephardic Life in the Early Modern Period. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. lxiii + 180 pp. $60.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-691-12264-9; $22.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-691-12265-6.

Reviewed by Matthias Lehmann (Indiana University)
Published on H-German (June, 2009)
Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher

Responsa for the Diaspora

Sometime in the mid-sixteenth century, Simeon, a Jew from India, roamed the cities of the Ottoman Balkans in order to track down Jewish men from his homeland who had abandoned their wives in order to secure writs of divorce from them so that the women would be free or remarry according to the stipulations of Jewish law. Three months later, one of those Indian husbands, Levi, declared that he was in reality not called Levi at all, and that Simeon had first intoxicated him with wine and then tricked him into signing a divorce using the name of Levi, thus setting free a married woman he had never known. In response to this accusation Simeon claimed that he had surprised Levi when he stole money from another Jew and threatened to expose him, which had apparently caused Levi to take revenge and, in turn, accuse Simeon of arranging a fraudulent divorce.

This is one of the intriguing cases from the early modern Sephardic diaspora collected in Matt Goldish's Jewish Questions. Goldish presents forty-three such rabbinic responsa in a lucid English translation, arranged thematically in five different parts and accompanied by brief introductory comments. Responsa--legal opinions that rabbis wrote in response to a problem of Jewish law posed to them--have long constituted an important source for the writing of Jewish social and cultural history. Often, as Goldish points out, rather than the resolutions, it is the questions posed that prove to be of most interest to the modern historian. Though typically edited and redacted, they preserve the details of cases that speak to everyday problems encountered by Jews in past centuries and provide information that would otherwise never have come down to us. Many of these cases, like the one cited above, involve the problem of abandoned wives, or "grass widows" (agunot, in Hebrew) who cannot remarry because the fate of their husbands cannot be established with certainty, or because the husband refuses to grant a divorce. The study of responsa literature opens a window on the daily lives of Jews in the past and they provide some insight into the experiences of ordinary men and women beyond the literate elites who typically dominate the historical record.

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