ABSTRACT
This chapter conducts fieldwork among Oriental Jewish women in Jerusalem. The Oriental women of Jerusalem, like all human beings, five out their fives among people with whom they are connected in webs of relationship—of love, concern, and care. The chapter describes a domestication process in which people who profess their allegiance to a religious tradition to personalise the rituals, institutions and theology of the wider system in order to safeguard health, happiness and security of people with whom they are linked in relationships of caring and interdependence. It suggests that women's moral decisions exemplify the domestic mode, men's the nondomestic. The chapter also suggests that the domestication process identified has already been hinted at, albeit in a diffuse and often ambiguous manner. It traces the thread that organises the women's religious world—the paradigm through which they interpret. Pregnancy and childbirth are believed to have both practical and supernatural aspects, and elderly oriental women have special knowledge of both fields.
