ABSTRACT
This article offers a preliminary investigation of apparently anonymous women, both servants and enslaved, who lived in Sephardic Jewish households in the late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Venetian ghetto (est. 1516). Despite the harsh conditions imposed on Jews, the ghetto became socially, culturally, religiously, and ethnically one of the most fluid enclaves of the early modern world that sometimes upheld and sometimes ignored the rules regarding socioreligious separation. A variety of sources allow us to analyse the lives of these women through the prisms of intrasocial relations, emotions, and affections; race, gender, and religious interchange; and seduction, illicit sex, and sexual abuse, taking into account also the impact of rabbinical attitudes. In the early modern Venetian Jewish household, issues of class, purity, essence, and intersectionality could at times be crossed and at times regulated, internally, by Jewish communities and Jewish law and, externally, by Church, state, and civic normative institutions.
