Probing the Hidden Jew:
Scholar Renée Levine Melammed Specializes
in Stories about Exceptional Sephardi and Oriental
Women in the Shadow of the Inquisition
Grace
B. McMillan
Sometime
around Purim, Aldonza Nuñez got a severe case of
butterfingers. Plates and bowls seemed to drop from her
hands. Evidently a woman of sufficient means, she would
send a servant to the potter to get new vessels. But she
didn't eat from the unused dishes immediately. She set them
aside until, around Pessah, she had a whole new set.
It was Nuñez's creative
way of making sure that she and her family would have a
kosher-for-Pessah kitchen, or as close an approximation
as she could manage. Nuñez had to be innovative because
she was a crypto-Jew (a baptized Jew secretly observing
Judaism) in Toledo, Spain, at the end of the 15th and beginning
of the 16th century.
Her Jewish identity was
hidden from even those who worked in her home, or so she
thought. It was, in part, the testimony of her servants
that convinced the Spanish Inquisition to condemn her to
death in 1500. The transcripts from her trial record that,
"She ate from new vessels and bowls and broke the old ones.
She does all these things as the Jewish women do."
And for that, she was killed.
This story is just one
of the scores of lives that Renée Levine Melammed
has discovered in her research on women in the medieval
and early modern period in the Iberian Peninsula.
Currently Assistant Dean
and Director of Women's Studies at the Schechter Institute
of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem, Melammed has spent the past
20 years reading Inquisition documents, texts from the Cairo
Geniza, and any other sources that could provide her with
pieces of early Sephardi and Oriental Jewish history.
Her work has focused on
the preservation of Jewish identity in the crypto-Jewish
world, and in particular on the role women have played in
that heroic struggle. "Some of the early scholars of the
Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition said that the role of
the women was extremely important [in preserving Jewish
identity]. After 1492, there were no Jewish institutions
[in Spain], so the traditional roles for the men were not
there," Melammed says, explaining why her scholarship developed
within the field.
As with most historians,
Melammed works with a combination of sources that represent
normative societal trends and ones that are original, teaching
us about particular individuals (and perhaps suggesting
something about human possibilities). From some particular
cases, she comes to understand more general realities.
For instance, in a text
from the Cairo Geniza, Melammed points to an instance in
which a man, who has a wife in Damascus, wanted a government
job in Cairo. Among the terms for his job, however, was
the condition that he must have a wife to return to every
night, i.e. a second wife in Cairo. He could only take a
second wife, however, if his first wife back in Damascus
agreed.
"There are ketubot [marriage
contracts] with fantastic conditions in them," Melammed
says. "But we can learn a lot about situations in family
life from these geniza documents. Most ketubot had
a clause stating that the first wife has to approve if her
husband wants to take a second wife."
While understanding these
sometimes surprising societal realities can be very interesting,
the most fascinating stories are about outstanding women
who were exceptional human beings. Melammed talks about
the head of a yeshiva in 17th century Kurdistan, a woman
named Asenath. "Her father was rosh yeshiva, and
he didn't have a son, so he trained her accordingly. When
she married his top pupil, the father made it a condition
of the marriage that she would do no housework, and she
would continue studying.
"She ran the yeshiva while
her husband was alive, and continued to run it when he died.
Rabbis wrote to her and addressed her as a talmid haham
[learned scholar]. There were no issues of her having
to teach from behind a curtain or having to pretend she
was other than she was," Melammed says. While some women
are struggling today to get Torah educations equal to men's
as well as recognition for the quality of their learning,
Asenath is a unique historical figure whose existence suggests
that our society might be able to learn from history.
Melammed's treasure trove
of historical characters comes, in part, from hard-won language
skills: Many of the texts she works with are written in
medieval Spanish, medieval Hebrew, Ladino, and Judeo-Arabic.
Her academic path has been a long one. She earned her Ph.D.
from Brandeis in 1982. Melammed then taught at Ben-Gurion
University for seven years in the 1980s. She returned to
the US for several years and received numerous prestigious
research fellowships at institutions including the Annenberg
Research Institute in Philadelphia and Harvard Divinity
School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1995, she returned
to Israel, and has been teaching at the Schechter Institute
for the past six years.
At Schechter, Melammed
teaches text-centered courses on women and Jewish history,
focusing on Sephardic society. Some of her work even includes
the Greek community during World War II and the contemporary
Portuguese crypto-Jewish community. She also advises the
43 master's students concentrating on women's studies.
"I have my two worlds of
teaching , which I try to connect. As I get
older, I seem to be bringing articles and books Išve written
to the classroom, probably because I cannot find other material
pertaining to my needs," Melammed says.
Her award-winning book,
Heretics or Daughters of Israel?, traces
the first one hundred years of Inquisition activities, beginning
in 1481, and the story of women in Castile, who, forced
to convert to Christianity, nevertheless preserved a
distinct ethnic and, in some cases, religious identity through
practice of home-centered rituals.
Her next book is on the
question of identity in conversion history. I deal with
it from 1391 until today. What happens when you are a Christian,
but you have some connection to your [Jewish] heritage,
or if you don't but society tells you that you do? Then
you leave your homeland or your birthplace, and you have
to make a decision about your identity in your new environment.
How do you make that decision?" Melammed asks.
The full complexity of
Aldonza Nuñez's identity may never be clear, but
Melammed has done much to help explain the unlucky woman's
social and religious realities, showing that, in their own
way, Nuñez's butterfingers were kosher.
