The Fruit of Her Hands: Jewish and Christian Women’s Work in Medieval Catalan Cities by Sarah Ifft Decker (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Fruit of Her Hands: Jewish and Christian Women’s Work in Medieval Catalan Cities by Sarah Ifft Decker Renée Levine Melammed Sarah Ifft Decker. The Fruit of Her Hands: Jewish and Christian Women’s Work in Medieval Catalan Cities. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2022. 233 pp. Sarah Ifft Decker aims to challenge various assumptions about women’s history as well as about the communities in which they lived, which she perceives to be ingrained in the consciousness of medieval Jewish historians. In order to achieve this goal, she decided to use an intersectional approach, to look at Jewish as well as Christian women residing in the same geographical locations. The focus of this study is on three medieval Catalan communities, namely, Barcelona, Girona, and Vic, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. They ranged in size, importance, and the nature of the opportunities available to women of each faith. Barcelona was a major economic, cultural, and political center, with serious trade and shipping activity; the Jewish population ranged between seven and eight thousand out of fifty thousand residents. Girona was a textile center more or less ruled by powerful bishops. There were perhaps five hundred Jewish residents among a population of eight to ten thousand. Lastly, the smallest of the three, Vic, also ruled by bishops along with powerful families, had a modest population of three thousand. Its Jewish community, numbering around one hundred, was not confined to a call, or Jewish quarter, unlike those of the other two cities. Ifft Decker combed through thousands of contracts in order to determine the level and type of activities Jewish and Christian women in these three locales engaged in that required such documentation. She clarifies the differences between the legal systems and how they impacted women’s economic activities and rights. Most of the documents found in notarial records are credit contracts. Ifft Decker presents an interesting perspective on the nature of notarial culture, a decidedly male-oriented institution that developed in the twelfth century when professional notaries replaced priests and monks. These notaries were, of course, Christian males, and using their services meant crossing gender boundaries that could also raise concerns about one’s reputation and level of adherence to social expectations of modesty, although Christian women might not have been as uncomfortable in their presence as Jewish women. This was a space dominated by men, an institution mainly for the use and benefit of elite and middle-class men. Thus, women in lower economic strata would not have felt comfortable there. In order to strengthen their position, women would often opt to have a male present who could guide and support them or to send an agent in their stead. On average, four men were present in the notary’s office, surely an uncomfortable environment for a woman arriving by herself. There were many economic activities that did not require a notary, such as those conducted between Jews or that did not deal with credit or real estate. Nevertheless, many interesting patterns appear in these documents, in particular concerning wealthier women. The situation of Christian women was more stable than that of their Jewish sisters, especially since the system granted them authority over landed wealth. These women were often found acting “alongside their [End Page 463] husbands as joint debtors, tenants, buyers and sellers of property and investors” (54). Jewish women who hoped to base their actions on local law and custom faced rabbinic opposition. For example, a woman whose husband was on the verge of bankruptcy might attempt to reclaim her dowry; she would be backed by the Christian court, but would be strongly discouraged by rabbinic leaders from going to Christian courts. Using Christian law clearly fed into their fear of acculturation. Ifft Decker attempts to confront some assumptions of various scholars on both the micro and macro levels, among them Diane Owen Hughes’s views on the effects of the dowry system. She shows that Christian women in the three cities she studied worked in the real estate market, as did those in northern European cities, and thus were spared the effects of the market decline that occurred in Italy. She also...