МАТРИМОНИАЛЬНЫЕ ОТНОШЕНИЯ В СЕФАРДСКОЙ ЕВРЕЙСКОЙ ОБЩИНЕ РАННЕГО НОВОГО ВРЕМЕНИ

Abstract

At first sight it may seem that family relationships lie just in the sphere of private life and historical sources which describe them may tell us little about the organization of Jewish community or about the interaction between the Jewish community and local non-Jewish authorities. However, the term ‘matrimonial relationships’ has a wide range of aspects. This work is an attempt to illuminate some of them. The article is dedicated to matrimonial relationships in the Jewish community of Avignon in the second half of the sixteenth century. It is made like a case-study and based on the scandal which happened at that time in the Jewish community of Avignon which was then a part of French holdings of the Pope, that’s to say the French part of the Papal States, and thus was controlled directly by the pope. The scandal is connected to the name of Bondion Crescas — a man who decided to marry the daughter of a woman with whom he passed the ceremony of halitzah several years ago. The intention brought about the opposition of the traditional rabbinate, that’s to say the majority of rabbis of Italy and Palestine as the conflict didn’t remain local one and rapidly became a subject of long disputes between different parties within the Jewish world. The study is based on hand-written documents, that’s to say on the Hebrew manuscript from D. Ginzburg’s Collection which has’t been decoded and studied before and is preserved in the Department of manuscripts of the Russian State Library. The process reveals three main issues. The first one is the Halakhic legality of marital intercourse between a man and the daughter of his haluzah (a woman with whom he must have got married a levirate marriage but released her). The second one is the social image of Avignon community in the 16th century, and the last one is the question about the boundaries of rabbinical jurisdiction in traditional Jewish society.