An Ottoman Sephardi Trousseau

Abstract

Abstract:This essay highlights the nineteenth-century trousseau list of an Ottoman Sephardi bride named Rosha Ben Gabbay. Recorded in a mix of Ladino, Turkish, and Hebrew and preserved in the archives of the Jewish community of Izmir, the ashugar lists the numerous garments, textiles, and furnishings that the bride would bring to her new home. Though rooted in the patriarchal economics of an Ottoman Jewish marriage market that continuously regarded women as sources of material and financial capital, the ashugar also reflects the tacit expectation that brides like Ben Gabbay bear a new form of cultural capital demanded by the modern age, namely the savvy negotiation of life a la turka and life a la franka. In navigating this perceived opposition that pervaded nineteenth-century Ottoman life, brides like Rosha Ben Gabbay were important mediators of modernity in the eastern Sephardi diaspora.