All rooms are equipped with an overhead projector
Rooms C, D, E, F, G and H (H only on Saturday): slide projector (framed slides, carrousel. There are extra carrousels available to set up your presentation in advance)
Rooms C, D, M, N, O, U and Committee Room 2: beamer to connect your laptop. You have to bring you own laptop. (If you want to use your Apple notebook, please contact us, as it may be incompatible.)
Rooms C, T and U: VCR
Programme
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Marriage, Dowry, and Diaspora: Sephardic Merchant Families in Livorno (17th and 18th Centuries)
| To stress the importance of kinship relations in the formation, survival and success of stateless diasporas of the early modern period is a truism. But only by analyzing the specificity of kinship alliances in any given social group and historical context can we uncover the precise meaning of family and gender relations in the past, and explain the relationship between marriage and economic strategies. Marriage alliances among elite Sephardic merchant families were kin rather than geographically based. This paper will map the various networks within the Sephardic diaspora at large in order to show how affluent Sephardim of Livorno used kinship alliances to create and tighten specialized networks in the Mediterranean and Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (during a period and in a region that is generally left out by the predominant literature on the Sephardic trading diaspora, including the recent important synthesis by Jonathan Israel, Diasporas within a Diaspora, Brill, 2002). The paper will also examine the interrelated function of dowries, endogamy and levirate marriages in the formation and preservation of merchant capital among Sephardic merchant families. In so doing, it questions the common wisdom about the greater legal and social autonomy of Jewish women compared to Christian women of the time. Sephardic women in Livorno married with large monetary dowries, which the groom matched with a 50% dower (the equivalent in Jewish law to the donatio propter nuptias of Roman law or the Morgengaben of Germanic law). The function and impact of these larger dowries and dowers, however, need to be read in light of the larger kinship and economic strategies of extended, patriarchal merchant families. Because local civil law forbade creditors from claiming any portion of the dowry of a merchant who went bankrupt, large dowries and dowers provided greater security in case of bankruptcy and did not thus necessarily represent women’s greater financial autonomy. Women’s independence in the Sephardic diaspora was also limited by the continued practice of levirate marriages and endogamy. Both these practices were not prevalent, but existed in Livorno as well in the Atlantic capitals of the European Sephardic diaspora and need to be taken into consideration when speaking, as recent historical literature on so-called “port-Jews” has done, of the precocious and peculiar pattern of modernization followed by Western European Sephardim in contrast to the German Ashkenazim.
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