Edward Fram - Böcker

This volume makes available the 1585 edition of the Seder mitzvot hanashim, in Yiddish and English. The book was intended to teach Jewish women in sixteenth-century Poland the rules, rituals, and customs pertaining to the sexual life of couples within the context of marriage. Edward Fram sets the work in its bibliographical and historical contexts.

From a manuscript that was lost for more than half a century comes new information about one of the greatest Jewish communities of all time. The court diaries of Rabbi Hayyim Gundersheim (d. 1795), a member of the rabbinic court of late eighteenth-century Frankfurt, shed light on daily life in the Judengasse("Jewish lane"), home to over 3,000 people, including Meyer Amschel Rothschild, founder of the famous banking family. Familial quarrels, squabbles between neighbors, legal proceedings over business deals gone sour, real estate transactions, and other disputes brought before the rabbinic court offer a window onto the world of daily life in the Frankfurt Jewish community during the waning years of the city's ghetto. Rabbi Gundersheim's court diaries are more than just a prism through which to view daily life. A Window on Their World provides a transcription of over 200 cases that were brought before the rabbinic court between 1773 and 1794. Readers now have access to records that reveal not just the workings of the Jewish community but also the place of Jewish tradition in the culture. The transcription of each case in the original Hebrew is accompanied by an English language summary. Edward Fram has also prepared comprehensive indices of the names of all individuals mentioned in the court diaries as well as a glossary of non-Hebrew terms. Pertinent documents from the Frankfurt pinqas, or community record book, have also been provided in order to give readers a more complete picture. Fram's introduction to the diary includes a biographical background, an outline of Jewish legal autonomy in the early modern period, and a discussion of the importance of court documents as legal and historical sources. The volume is an indispensible source for anyone interested in European Jewish culture on the eve of the Enlightenment.

Jewish life in early modern Poland was characterized by an adherence to Jewish law (halakhah) that Polish Jewry had inherited from medieval Franco-German Jewry, and almost all aspects of Jewish activity, even the most personal of matters, fell within its purview. Jewish law remained constant throughout the ages in some areas, but in others rabbis were forced to reinterpret it in light of the complexities of contemporary life. Edward Fram draws upon the ordinances of Polish Jewry's political leadership, Polish legal records, and the responsa of some of the outstanding poseqim of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to show how Polish jurists responded to those complexities. His case studies, gleaned from a period of exceptional creativity in the annals of Polish Jewry, deal with weddings on the Sabbath, the rights of daughters to familial wealth, women in the marketplace, the personal reliability of those who dealt in the sale of kosher wine, competition among Jews for sources of livelihood obtained through leases (arendy), the transfer and payment of personal debts via bills payable to bearers (membrany), and personal insolvency. Concerned with the needs of the underprivileged as well as those of the marketplace, these rabbis struggled to maintain the integrity of Jewish communal life and to preserve the tradition they perceived to represent divine law. Particularly in commerce, failure to observe Jewish law or at least the independent direction taken by the lay leadership often became the basis for communal legislation and practice. Fram shows how the Polish community, at times consciously and at times unconsciously, transformed some of its traditional values until they may have been unrecognizable to Jews from an earlier age..

How did Jewish women in sixteenth-century Poland learn all the rules, rituals, and customs pertaining to the sexual life of couples within the context of marriage? As in other areas of ritual life that concerned the household, it would seem that the primary source for the education of Jewish women was other women. But rabbinic law dictates that Jewish women who experience uterine bleeding are prohibited from having physical contact of any kind with their husbands, and the intricate laws of niddah (enforced separation) spell out exactly when and under what circumstances physical marital relations, even simple touching, can be resumed. Particularly difficult issues could be addressed only by rabbis or other learned men, since women rarely, if ever, attained the level of rabbinic scholarship necessary to pare the details of these complicated laws. To educate both men and women, but particularly women, in a more systematic and impersonal manner, the young rabbi Benjamin Slonik (ca. 1550-after 1620), who later became one of the leading rabbinic authorities in eastern Europe, harnessed the relatively new technology of printing and published a how-to book for women in the Yiddish vernacular. Seder mitzvot hanashim (The Order of Women's Commandments) illuminates the history of Yiddish printing and public education. But it is also a rare remnant of a direct interface between a member of the rabbinic elite and the laity, especially women. Slonik's text also sheds light on the history of Jewish law, particularly the reception of the Shulhan Arukh, an important legal code that had just been published. This volume makes available the 1585 edition of the Seder mitzvot hanashim in Yiddish and English. Fram sets Slonik's work in its bibliographical and historical contexts, demonstrating its relationship with the Shulhan Arukh, exploring how rabbis opposed formal education for women, considering how upheavals accompanying geographic shifts in the Ashkenazic community help explain how the women's commandments texts came to be used in Poland, and offering a treasure trove of information on the place and roles of women in Polish-Jewish society. Fram thus creates a composite picture of how Slonik, along with other men of his time, perceived the main audience for his work and sought to connect it to contemporary texts.