‘My precious books and instruments’: Jewish divorce strategies and self-fashioning in medieval Catalonia

The divorce case between David Bonjorn and Esther Caravita, which took place in Girona and Perpignan in 1337, is extraordinarily well documented. Hebrew and Latin documents shed light on the stages of the controversy, the wide range of personalities involved in the case and, most notably, the strategies mobilised by the two sides in their attempt to uphold or invalidate the divorce. The ways in which personal strengths and weaknesses were utilised in this legal battle enrich recent scholarly discussions about legal strategy in medieval Europe.     

Between two cities: Jewish women and exogamous marriage in medieval Catalonia

In the marriage strategies of medieval Catalan Jews, the economic security of women came second to the economic goals of families. Exogamous marriages – marriages between the Jewish communities of two different cities – exacerbated the vulnerability of Jewish wives, widows and divorcées, due in large part to restrictions on women’s travel. Women who moved in order to marry experienced greater difficulty in managing financial resources and lost access to kinship networks. When women married men from other cities, at best they found themselves unable to take advantage of the connections created by their marriages. At worst, they risked financial loss if their husbands absconded to other cities with their dowries. Five case studies drawn from thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Catalan notarial registers reveal some of the ways in which exogamous marriages disadvantaged Jewish women. The extreme case of exogamy delineates the boundaries of possibility for Jewish women in the medieval Western Mediterranean.