“I Too Speak the Words of God”: A Jewish Learned Woman Faces an Early Modern Rabbinic Court

Abstract: This essay delves into a collection of previously overlooked seventeenth-century Hebrew letters from Italy, exchanged between Rica (Rivkah) Clava (Katzigin), a Jewish woman, and her husband, Shlomo Yo@hanan, addressed to Rabbi Yosef Ravenna of Alessandria. These letters document a financial dispute between the couple, revealing diverse interpretations of business documents and halakhic sources, alongside instances of spousal mockery and marital tension. They provide a rare case of confident articulation of halakhic matters by an educated Jewish Italian woman communicating in Hebrew. In these exchanges, the complexity of economic partnership within marriage and the potential for erudition among Jewish women are explored, shedding light on early modern perceptions of woman’s agency and on attempts by male counterparts to stifle their voices. Against the backdrop of existing scholarship on Jewish Italy and early modern women, the essay emphasizes the significance of these letters in understanding the social and intellectual position of Jewish women in early modern Italy, the challenges they faced, and the different rhetorical paths they could take to cope with them.