Jewish Studies Program, Italian Studies Program, Historical Studies Program, and Gender and Sexuality Studies Program Present
Jewish Women and Their Communities in Early Modern Italy
Monday, April 10, 2023
Olin 201
5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Federica Francesconi (University at Albany, SUNY)
This lecture will explore Jewish women’s cultural survival in the early modern Italian ghettos through two case studies. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Venice, many Jewish women produced textiles in their own homes. They created an informal community of female artisans that challenged the anonymity of their underpaid work and even their invisibility in the religious domain. Additionally, in 1735 twenty-two well-to-do Jewish women in Modena established a confraternity for mutual aid to “all sick women, rich and poor, in the ghetto.” This body involved women of all classes as administrators, workers, and caregivers and offered “invisible” Jewish women a degree of agency without subverting existing Jewish social and legal structures. Both these “communities” created female spaces that were economic, social, and devotional resources and reconfigured women’s presence in ghettoized societies.Federica Francesconi is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Judaic Studies Program at the University at Albany, SUNY. Her book Invisible Enlighteners: The Jewish Merchants of Modena from the Renaissance to the Emancipation (UPenn Press, 2021), won the 2022 Marraro Prize from the American Historical Association and was a 2021 National Jewish Books Awards Finalist. She is the co-editor of Jewish Women’s History from Antiquity to the Present (Wayne State UP 2021), which was also a 2021 National Jewish Book Award Finalist.
For more information, call 845-758-7662, or e-mail [email protected].
Time: 5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Location: Olin 201