DOCUMENTS
M.A. Friedman, Jewish Marriage in Palestine, A Cairo Geniza Study,
Tel -Aviv and New York: Tel-Aviv University and The Jewish Theological Seminary
of America, 1980-81, 2 vols., Pp. xxiv, 492, xiii, 517 + 30 plates. - It
is a pleasure to welcome the appearance of these two volumes, which originated
in Professor Friedman's doctoral thesis. Volume II alone, an edition of
sixty-seven manuscripts and fragments under the title The Ketubba
Texts, greatly enriches the primary source material available to historians
of Jewish law. Each document is described, transcribed, translated and annotated,
with frequent reference not only to talmudic parallels, but also to modern
scholarly literature commenting thereon. Photographs of many of the texts
are also provided. The volume has a lavish apparatus: a word index, manuscript
index, source index, and name and subject index (marred only, in my copy,
by the binding of four pages of this last upside-down). Additionally, Professor
Friedman has provided, in volume I (The Ketubba Traditions of
Eretz Israel), an invaluable study of the documents, dealing with historical,
linguistic, social and legal aspects. The legal topics considered include
clauses affirming the volition of the parties (especially the groom) to
enter into the contract (a clause absent from Babylonian formularies), the
obligations of husband and wife, the time of writing the marriage contract,
mohar and dowry, provisions for divorce, ransom and succession, and the
concluding formulae and signatures of the document. Many points of detail
receive elaborate treatment. While each of them is of independent interest
to legal historians, they add up to a distinct Palestinian tradition of
the marriage contract, in which, as Professor Friedman remarks, the position
of women "appears to be more advanced in some respects than one would
have imagined." These volumes went to press before the appearance of
volume III of Professor Goitein's A Mediterranean Society ("The
Family"), but the two are complementary (Goitein supervised Friedman's
research). The current generation is privileged to have access to this new
material, and fortunate in the service that has been rendered by its editors.
(B.S.J.)
J.-Ph. Lévy, "Sur trois textes bibliques concernant des
actes écrits", Mélanges à la mémoire
de Marcel-Henri Prévost (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1982), 23-48. - This article discusses three biblical texts which concern
written legal acts. The author provides a substantial study of Jeremiah
32, considering the writing material, the role of Jeremiah in writing it,
the sealing, and the relationship of the procedure to the form of Doppelurkunde,
the witnesses, and the deposit of the document. More briefly, he considers
the written documents to which reference is made in the Book of Tobit, and
the parable of the steward in Luke 16: 1-8. (B.S.J.)
Gershon Weiss, "A Testimony from the Cairo Geniza Documents:
Son-in-law - Mother-in-law Relations", JQR 68.2
(1977), 99-103. - From one fragment, T-S C2, f.17, Gerson Weiss indicates
that the year 875 marks the year when shetarot were issued. From
another piece, from the 15th cent., T-S Box G I, f.52, a deposition for
litigation, with Judeo-Spanish phrases, Weiss draws an analogy which may
explain the introduction of Judea-Arabic into Jewish legal practice (i.e.,
that the issues could be most unambiguously stated in the vernacular). (M.F.)
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