Moneylending Before Court – Jewish Moneylending and (Christian) Courts in Late Medieval Austria

This study examined tolerance for depression among Jewish and Protestant men and women in the United Kingdom. A measure of tolerance for depression was developed, which examined willingness to admit to and seek help for depression. More specifically, the items in the measure (developed from extended interviews) covered empathy towards sufferers, potential virtues of the illness, hopes for treatment, seeing the illness as 'normal', and telling other people about it. Existing evidence suggested that tolerance for depression might be greater amongst Jews compared with Protestants, and women compared with men. Also, Jewish men were expected to be more tolerant than Protestant men, whereas Protestant and Jewish women were not expected to differ from each other. It was found that tolerance for depression was greater amongst Jews than Protestants, and this is consistent with the elevated levels of depression amongst Jewish men as compared with Protestant men. However, findings relating to gender were mixed and were not always consistent with our expectations. The findings suggest that there may be some cultural variations in willingness to admit to and seek help for depression, and this may be worth examining in other cultural-religious groups. Individual variations in tolerance for depression may be clinically significant.

Lung cancer rates in Israel are lower than in Western countries, not explainable by smoking habits. Because of the different relations of squamous cell carcinoma and adenocarcinoma to smoking it was of interest to study the histologic distribution in Israel. A total of 7,871 histologically confirmed lung cancer cases were studied in the period 1962-1982. Squamous cell carcinoma was the leading tumor type in Jewish men and adenocarcinoma in Jewish women. Rates of both adenocarcinoma and squamous cell carcinoma increased throughout the period in both Jewish men and women, but the increase in adenocarcinoma was more pronounced in the last study period than that in squamous cell carcinoma. In 1977-1982 the rate ratio of squamous cell carcinoma to adenocarcinoma among Jewish men was 1.7. In Arab men it was 2.9, and in Jewish women 0.57. The Kreyberg I/II ratio among Jewish men was about 2.7 with no clear trend throughout the study period, and among Arab men this gradually decreased from 8.1 to 3.5. Jewish women had a constant Kreyberg I/II ratio of about 1 through the whole study period, but the ratio in Arab women was significantly higher than 1, with a mean overall ratio of 3.2. Jews and Arabs in Israel are different from each other in their patterns of lung cancer histology and are different to some extent from other populations in the Western world.

Cyber intimate partner violence (CIPV) is a multidimensional phenomenon which encompasses online forms of psychological aggression, sexual aggression, and stalking-like behaviors. The study’s aims were to examine CIPV rates and to determine whether there were differences according to gender and culture. The study was conducted among a representative sample of 894 young-adult Jewish and Arab men and women in Israel. Results showed that about 20% of the sample perpetrated some type of CIPV, a lower rate than that which has been found among this sample’s international counterparts. In addition, cyberstalking was the type used most prevalently, with men using a greater number of CIPV behaviors than did women. Furthermore, Arab men used a greater number of CIPV behaviors than did Arab women, Jewish men, or Jewish women. Jewish women and Arab men used the highest number of aggressive behaviors in the context of cyberstalking. Our analysis indicates that Arab men would be more likely than the other subgroups in this study to perpetrate CIPV behaviors. As such, it is essential that we focus on groups most likely to perpetrate these behaviors, in accordance with culture and gender, and on raising awareness of CIPV in general and cyberstalking via educational/preventive programs.

Jewish Girls, Gender, and Sport at the Chicago Hebrew Institute: Athletic Identity in Jewish and Cultural Spaces Linda J. Borish (bio) Introduction The development of physical exercise and sport for Jewish girls at the Chicago Hebrew Institute (CHI), founded in 1903 to serve Jewish immigrants, expanded sporting opportunities for Jewish girls. Located on Chicago’s lower West Side, and a forerunner of the Jewish Community Center (JCC), CHI promoted the moral, physical, religious, and civic welfare of Jewish immigrants and residents. The institute combined physical and spiritual training in its Americanization programs for Jewish girls. In its early years, the CHI instituted a program of physical education and paid particular attention to the need for physical culture for Jewish boys and girls. This paper explores how gender and ethnicity shaped sport for Jewish girls at the CHI in the early twentieth century.1 Proponents of Jewish girls playing basketball, engaging in swimming, and running track and field, and Jewish girls themselves, acted as agents of change to gain access to cultural spaces and sports instructors. Using archival records, annual reports, scrapbooks, the American and Jewish press, and material culture sources, this essay examines the significance of Jewish girls at CHI in sport in gender and ethnic contexts. Gender, Jewish girls, and sport have received little attention from scholars in American Jewish history, women’s and sport history, and gender history. The research that has been done in gender, ethnicity, and sport indicates the important place of Jewish girls and women in American Jewish history and sport history.2 In the study of American sport and ethnicity, historians must include Jewish women’s experiences. As sport historian Jennifer Hargreaves has written, “There is a tendency for generalizations to be made about all women in sports from examples of white women,” and these stereotypically refer to white, Western, bourgeois women.3 In fact, studies of sport and Jews typically focus on the male gender and how American Jewish men participated in certain sports to demonstrate masculinity and to challenge the stereotype of the weak, frail, non-athletic Jew portrayed [End Page 149] in accounts of white middle-class Protestant viewpoints in the Progressive Era. As scholar Alan Klein asserted, “Popular cultural conceptions of Jews have them about as far removed from the sporting soma-type as one can imagine.” In terms of gender, “the historical tendency to bifurcate genders (masculine as contrasted with feminine) and to assign a range of traits to each has . . . led to placing Jewish men in the feminine camp.”4 In his study, Klein thus discusses Jewish men: “I show that in the U.S., Jews used sport as a vehicle for assimilation and in certain sports put up impressive numbers. The first half of the twentieth century had Jews performing at an elite level in boxing and basketball.” This refers certainly to “Jewish men” who “made names for themselves”; Klein remarks that “the continuation of perceptions of them as weak and unfit serves as a sober reminder that prejudice is immune to rational argument.”5 Moreover, in such publications as Jews and the Sporting Life: Studies in Contemporary Jewry, An Annual (2008), almost all the articles focus on Jewish men in sport. Editor Ezra Mendelsohn commented, “For the young American Jewish community . . . interest and participation in local sports activities was a hallmark of acculturation, and the heroics of Jewish sportsmen a source of ethnic pride on the part of a people often derided for its lack of physicality for its ‘softness’ and its ‘femininity.’”6 The emphasis in scholarly works typically spotlights the male gender in Jewish sport history. Historian Steven Riess explains, “Sport was regarded as almost inherently a male sphere, inappropriate for Victorian women, and the contemporary press described nearly all sports as manly.” Manliness and sport identity went hand in hand so that middle-class men developed their physical and spiritual self in building character and building their bodies. Riess states, “Sport boomed as a middle-class recreation in the late nineteenth century and contributed significantly to the redefinition of middle-class manliness.”7 However, Jewish women, as well as men, strove to participate in a range of sports as part of gaining access...

BackgroundEstimates of lifetime cancer risk are commonly used in the clinical setting and in health-care evaluations. These measures are based on lifetime cancer risk estimates and may create an unrealistically frightening perception of cancer risk for an individual. We suggest using two new measures of cancer risk to complement the cancer lifetime risk measure, namely estimates of cancer risk from birth to a specific age or from a specific age to life expectancy.MethodsWe calculated risks using incidence density data from the Israel National Cancer Registry of 2013, applying a well-known formula for calculating risk, for a follow-up time. The joint disease-free survival probability is calculated for several age intervals, and hence the risk (i.e. 1–survival) for the intervals.ResultsThe risk of cancer to age 80 in Jewish men and women, respectively, ranged from about 0.336 and 0.329 at age 0, to 0.279 and 0.237 at age 60. The risk of cancer from birth up to an age in Jewish men and women, respectively, ranged from 0 and 0 at birth to 0.088 and 0.129 at age 60. The risk of cancer to age 80 in Arab men and women, respectively, ranged from 0.298 and 0.235 at age 0 to 0.249 and 0.161 at age 60. The risk of cancer from birth up to an age in Arab men and women, respectively, ranged from 0 and 0 at age 0 to 0.074 and 0.095 at age 60. In Jewish and Arab women, breast cancer risk to age 80 decreased from about 0.127 in Jewish women at age 40 to 0.079 at age 60 and from 0.080 to 0.043 in Arab women; the risk from birth up to a specific age ranged between 0 and 0.056, and 0 and 0.040, respectively.ConclusionThe two proposed new estimates convey important additional information to patients and physicians. These estimates are considerably lower than the frequently quoted 33% lifetime cancer risk and are more relevant to patients and physicians. Similarly, breast cancer risk estimates up to or from a specific age differ considerably from the frequently quoted lifetime risk estimates of 1 in 8 women.

Little has been written on the role of gender in Jewish philanthropy,\nand there is even less empirical research on gender differences between\nJewish men and women, or between Jews and non-Jews by gender. This\nstudy examines Jewish philanthropy by type of giving and gender. Specifically,\nwe examine the differing amounts given to charity (both religious\nand secular) across eight groups, controlling for other factors that\nmay affect philanthropic giving. These included four groups of married\ncouples: those consisting of two Jewish spouses, of a Jewish man and a\nnon-Jewish woman, of a non-Jewish man and a Jewish woman, and of\ntwo non-Jewish spouses; and four groups of singles: Jewish men, Jewish\nwomen, non-Jewish men and non-Jewish women. Using three waves of\ndata from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), we used regression\nmethods to examine the differences among the groups. Results\nindicated that the probability of giving and the amount given among\nJewish women married to non-Jewish men are significantly less than\namong all other groups.

Generations of excellent scholarship concerning the social and economic lives of Jewish communities in late medieval Provence have relied upon notarial contracts to illustrate and analyze financial, seasonal, and demographic aspects of Jewish moneylending. Historians have paid less attention to how Jews influenced the practices of Christian notaries themselves. This article examines the practices of notaries favored by Jewish moneylenders. By focusing on nearly ten thousand contracts recorded in sixty registers composed by late fourteenth-century notaries in Apt, a market town and episcopal see in central Provence, this article argues that notaries created sophisticated information management devices to meet the distinctive needs of Jewish moneylenders. Jews were not simply passive users of notaries, but rather they were actors in the evolution of late medieval notarial practice and legal technologies.

Federation Men:The Masculine World of New York Jewish Philanthropy, 1880–1945 Beth S. Wenger (bio) Philanthropy, which one early twentieth-century social worker identified as a reflection of the Jewish “group will to live,” has served as a cornerstone of Jewish communal life since its inception.1 At least through the mid-twentieth century, the impetus to care for Jews in need bound the American Jewish community together in ways that nothing else could. Philanthropy did not erase intra-ethnic tensions, but it transcended class and religious divisions to a greater extent than any other communal enterprise. As historian Oscar Handlin once remarked, “philanthropy was important not only for what it actually accomplished,” but for how “it engaged [Jews] in communal endeavors.”2 Because charitable efforts stood at the center of Jewish communal life and because the giving of money reflects a dynamic process of social relations, philanthropy provides a critical vantage point for understanding the changing gendered norms and practices within American Jewish culture.3 From the late-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century, far-reaching changes in the scope and function of Jewish philanthropy along with alterations in gendered norms and expectations reconfigured Jewish philanthropic organizations in ways that markedly transformed the roles of men and women. Because the responsibilities and ascribed gender characteristics associated with charity and philanthropy shifted over the course of these years—and then not even so simply or in any sort of linear fashion—it is possible to identify in the arena of philanthropy a space where ideal norms of behavior for Jewish men and Jewish women were in constant flux. This essay focuses primarily on the Federation for the Support of Jewish Philanthropic Societies of New York City and traces [End Page 377] its particular evolution as rooted fundamentally in a male-centered and highly masculinized model of charitable distribution that came to characterize organized Jewish philanthropy in the first half of the twentieth century. More broadly, an examination of the changing landscape of Jewish charitable associations reveals the ways that philanthropy enabled Jewish women and men to fulfill the expectations of an ever-changing gendered order in distinct ways. For Jewish women, the increasingly scientific and bureaucratic organization of Jewish philanthropy robbed them of some autonomy and required a renegotiation though not an eradication of their roles as benevolent nurturers in Jewish communal life. For an emerging generation of middle-class Jewish men, philanthropy provided an opportunity to demonstrate social respectability and communal dedication that enhanced their reputation and status in America’s growing business and market economy. The organization and practice of Jewish philanthropy at the turn of the twentieth century reflected not only the shifting expectations and behaviors of men and women but also the highly gendered modes of rhetoric and power within the Jewish community. Masculinizing Jewish philanthropy extended beyond realignments in the roles of women and men and involved new rationales, structures, and priorities for fund-raising and disbursement of monies that were deeply embedded in the idioms of American manhood. The emerging gendered order of Jewish philanthropy transcended the binaries of public vs. private and men vs. women. In an era that witnessed growing charitable needs and greater revenue requirements as well as the rise of corporate culture, Jews, like other Americans, designed and articulated their philanthropic efforts in increasingly masculine terms. Jewish charity in the United States has a long history that predates the creation of Jewish federations. Until the mid-nineteenth century, synagogues—and the organizations and benevolent societies associated with them—took responsibility for meeting the charitable needs of the Jewish community. Only as immigration increased in the mid-to-late nineteenth century did congregations realize that they could not handle the demands of the poor by themselves, and began reaching across congregational lines to form everything from Jewish hospitals to orphan asylums to organizations that gave matzah to the poor on Passover.4 Beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing furiously into the twentieth, American Jewish philanthropy underwent sweeping [End Page 378] changes. Men had always participated in charitable endeavors, and indeed they led many of the most important organizations such as B’nai B’rith. But by the nineteenth...

Can women be Jews? When the Jewish Theological Seminary, the seat of Conservative Judaism, decided to ordain women as rabbis, it faced a dilemma: all students (until then, all men) were expected to observe Jewish religious law, observing the Sabbath and holidays strictly, praying three times a day, wearing a head covering, and so forth. Should the new women students follow the Jewish laws incumbent upon men, but from which women are exempt? For example, men are required to put on phylacteries for weekday morning prayers, whereas women are not only exempt, but, according to some authorities, forbidden to wear phylacteries. Men are expected to wear a head covering (yarmulke), whereas women are not (though married women, in Orthodox custom, wear a scarf, hat, or even a wig). Men wear ritual fringes under their clothes every day, donning a prayer shawl with fringes for morning prayer, whereas women, again, are exempt or forbidden. The legal niceties aside, the question goes to the heart of Jewish identity: if the new women rabbinic students are required to follow the laws incumbent upon men, it implies that only men are real Jews and that pious Jewish women, who have been exempt from those laws, are somehow less than fully Jewish. Why does becoming a rabbi require both women and men to follow the role of Jewish religious men, even when it forces women to violate the laws regulating women’s piety? For a woman to be a Jew, the rabbinical ruling insinuates, means becoming a male Jew, and the question of ordaining women rabbis is really a question of whether Jewish women can become Jewish men. Why not encourage or at least permit male rabbis the same exemptions from religious observance that have defined Jewish women’s piety—allowing men to become women? At the same time, if the role of rabbi is to be opened to women, should not all aspects of Jewish religious life, especially those heretofore limited to men, be opened to women? The gender inequalities of Judaism that have been overcome as a consequence of modernity have brought women opportunities—such as rabbinical ordination—that were closed to them for two thousand years. At the same time, opening men’s privileges to women has reified Judaism according to the normative rules applied to men, rather than

MODERN JEWISH WOMEN'S DILEMMAS: GRACE AGUILAR'S BARGAINS

The story of Jewish women in the United States is one of impressive achievement. Despite their numerically small representation in the American population, they made major contributions to politics and culture, and their organizations were among the nation’s most influential women’s groups. Yet both as women and as Jews, they often confronted troubling inequities in religious and secular life and struggled to balance their multiple identities. Jewish women played vital roles in colonial and revolutionary America, managing their household economies and family life. Highly literate and with extensive social networks, they often engaged in commerce in the interconnected Atlantic world. Jewish women were the mainstays of religious observance, promoting religious worship and the construction of synagogues and schools. Intermarriage was infrequent, with Jewish men marrying out more frequently than women. In the early 19th century, some Jewish women attended the new female academies, becoming teachers, social reformers, and writers. They also founded and managed educational and philanthropic institutions, including the Female Hebrew Benevolent Society, the coeducational Hebrew Sunday School, orphan associations, and mutual aid groups, including the Independent Order of True Sisters, the first national Jewish women’s organization. Jewish women constituted roughly half of the Jewish immigrants who came to the United States from German-speaking European nations in the first half of the 19th century. They also constituted about half of the two and a half million Eastern European immigrants who arrived between 1880 and 1920. Upper- and middle-class Jewish women established sisterhoods, settlement houses, clubs, and schools to aid the new arrivals, inaugurating the first Jewish women’s movement. In 1909, laboring under exploitative conditions, Jewish women garment workers launched an eleven-week strike that transformed the labor movement. Highly represented in movements like socialism, anarchism, and communism, Jewish women also participated in campaigns for birth control and international peace. By the mid-20th century, a new generation assumed leadership at the National Council of Jewish Women, Hadassah, and other Jewish women’s groups. Involved in campaigns against immigration restriction, rescuing refugees from Nazism, and efforts to create a Jewish national homeland, they strengthened Jewish communities throughout the world. In the postwar decades, Jews migrated in significant numbers to the suburbs, where they were the mainstay of synagogue life and helped popularize new rituals like the bat mitzvah. Major leaders in the campaigns for civil rights, nuclear disarmament, and peace, in the 1960s and 1970s they helped launch second-wave feminism. Jewish women were prominent in both liberal and radical branches of the women’s liberation movement. As Jewish feminists, they challenged sexism within Jewish religious and community life and pressed for more egalitarian practices across the denominations. By the early 1970s, Jewish women began to serve as rabbis in the Reform and Reconstruction movements; the first Conservative woman rabbi was ordained in 1985. In the 21st century, Jewish women reflect a more culturally, religiously, and racially diverse population than before. Jewish women and men are increasingly likely to marry or partner with non-Jews, but to raise their children Jewishly. They are more than twice as likely as prior generations to identify with a race or ethnicity other than white. Asian American, Syrian American, and African American women rabbis have been among the most influential voices in their communities. The gay and lesbian synagogue movement, which began in the early 1970s, provided a locus for lesbians to explore their own religious identities. Jewish Women of Color, an expanding group, places itself at the intersection of racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism as it pursues an intersectional vision of social justice.

Using mortality data derived from tombstones in two Midwestern cemeteries, we compared the "widowhood effect" (decreased survival following the death of a spouse) among Jews and Catholics. Jewish men and women were both more likely to die sooner after the death of their spouses compared to Catholic men and women. Life table survival analysis indicated that the median number of years of survival following widowhood for Catholic and Jewish men were 7.7 years and 5.0 years, respectively (p < .01). For Catholic and Jewish women, it was 11.0 and 9.5 years, respectively (p < .01). Interpretations were offered in terms of Bowlby's attachment theory.

106 SHOFAR Fall 1995 Vol. 14, No.1 JEWISHNESS AND GENDER: RETHINKING SOCIAL SCIENTIFIC CONSTRUCTIONS by Riv-Ellen Prell Riv-Ellen Prell, an anthropologist, is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University ofMinnesota. She is the author of Prayer and Community: Tbe Havurah in AmericanJudaism (Detroit: Wayne State University Press) and Fighting to Become Americans: Jewish Women and Men in Conflict in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, forthcoming) Over the course of this centuryJews have thought of themselves, and been thought of, as a race, religion, culture and ethnic group. Each category has been embedded within American society's conceptions of cultural differences, and within the conceptions that its leaders and scholars advocated as they addressed these differences. Since World War Two, Jewish historians and social scientists have settled upon an understanding ofJews as American ethnics who share a religion, although Jews are bound to one another by more than shared religious doctrine. These scholars have studiedJewish economic mobility, marriage patterns, and the maintenance of cultural uniqueness. Studies in the last twenty years have been more likely to compareJews with other ethnic groups to understand varying strategies for Americanizing.1 However, none of these categories IThomas Kessner, The Golden Door: Italian aruijewish ImmigrantMobility in New York City, 1880-1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Joel Perlmann, Ethnic Differeru::es: Schooling arui Social Structure Among the Irish, Italians, jews, arui Blacks in an American City, 1880-1935 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Andrew Heinze, Adapting to Aburuiaru::e: jewish Immigrant Mass Culture arui the Search for American Iderltity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); Judith Smith, Family Connections: A History ofItaliarl aruiJewish Immigrant Lives in Provideru::e Rhode Islarui 1900-1940 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1985); and Susan Glenn, Daughters ofthe Shtetl: Life arui Labor in the Immigrant Gerzeration (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). Rethinking Social Scientific Constructions 107 has attended to internal differentiation among Jews, most obviously by gender. None of these frameworks asks what American Jewish experience looks like if we think ofJews as men and women. None of these studies has explored in any depth what the category "Jewish" means to the people who identify themselves as such. Nor have most of these studies considered how self-definition as "Jewish" is integrated with other self-definitions , such as gender or nationality, although most have paid attention to social c1ass.2 Preceding and paralleling scholarly studies about American Jews are Jews' own innumerable ways of expressing perceptions of themselves. These expressions, in striking contrast to scholarship, pay close attention to differences between Jewish men and women and attribute blame and virtue very systematically to each.3 Indeed, all dimensions of Jewish culture-music, film, theater, and literature-not only include men and women, but make relationships between men and women central.4 In these works, Jewish culture is dynamic. The conflicts and relationships between Jewish men and Jewish women change over time, and change in response to a variety of factors, including their economic positions. Fundamental definitions of Jewish manhood and womanhood, and of parents and children, shift dramatically from decade to decade, from urban settings to suburban ones, and from one sort of definition of Jewish religious practice to another. In contrast, those who study Jews as an ethnic group assume that its members constitute a single "interest group." They see internal stratification , whether by class or gender, as less compelling than Jews' difference 2More recent studies have dealt with gender, although they assume that "Jewishness" does not require investigation; it is simply group membership. For examples, see Glenn, Daughters; Heinze, Adapting; and Smith, Family Connections. ~In her work on emancipation in the nineteenth and early twentieth century in the U.S. and Europe, Paula Hyman discusses why women are portrayed first as parochial, and then as irresponsible in the handling of their children's Jewish educations. See her Gender and Emaru:ipation (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995). 'Phyllis Chock calls for an anthropology of ethnicity in the United States which locates "scholarly discourses on ethnicity in their relationship with indigenous discourse." See her "The Landscape ofEnchantment: Redaction in a Theory ofEthnicity," CulturalAnthropology 4 (1989): 163. 108 SHOFAR Fall 1995 Vol. 14, NdDIi...

The contribution of Viennese Jews to the cultural milieu of the Austrian capital at the fin de siècle is undisputed. Jewish women and men contributed to the social artistic, economic and philosophical centrality of Viennese culture. But what did Jewish urban, middle-class men wear and in what ways was it significant. This article examines the sartorial habits of two Viennese cultural and literary icons, Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) and Peter Altenberg (1859–1919), and considers how men’s fashions in Vienna during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries both facilitated and negated the assimilatory aspirations of the city’s middle-class Jewish population. A comparison of visual and literary accounts of Jewish acculturation and assimilation will offer a further understanding of the manifestation of visual ‘Jewishness’ and the heterogeneous Jewish identities present in Vienna during the period.

This chapter discusses the question: What does the absence of circumcision from Jewish women tell us about Jewish men? It argues that Jewish men need to be circumcised in order to remedy some defect which inheres in Jewish men; Jewish women do not need to be circumcised because this defect does not inhere in them. The purpose of circumcision is to weaken the male organ, in order to minimize lust and diminish sexual pleasure. Using interpretation of Maimonides' view of circumcision, the chapter argues that circumcision is not primarily a sign of the covenant between God and Israel, and that the absence of this sign from women says nothing about their place in the covenantal relationship between God and Israel. Rather, Maimonides says that the purpose of circumcision is to reduce lust. It reduces male potency; if maleness is defined as sexual vigor, circumcision is an act of unmanning.