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from Part Five - Jewish Society
THE Jewish family in the Crown of Aragon had much in common with the Jewish family elsewhere in the medieval world. Its foundations lay in Jewish jurisprudence and tradition, and its formal institution or dissolution was based on the laws and customs prevalent throughout the Jewish world. At the same time it was deeply influenced by local conditions and trends in Christian society. Furthermore, the geographical position of the Crown of Aragon set the Jewish family there at a junction between Franco-German Jewry and the Jews of Islam, where divergent concepts of and approaches to family life clashed and merged.
COURTSHIP
Conflicting attitudes to courtship and relations between men and women can be easily discerned. These relations were neither as austere as is implied in the idealized descriptions of the moral standards which can be found in some Hebrew sources, nor as lax as is implied in some wedding songs sung in Catalonia. R. Shelomo ben Adret's statement that in his communities ‘Jewish girls are modest and do not break the fence by choosing their husbands without their fathers’ consent’ is certainly a sweeping generalization, as we shall see later. Despite the moral and religious restrictions, young men and women were not entirely separated and individual contact led to courtship, and courtship often to marriage.
The fraudulent means frequently employed by men to force young women into marriage indicate that there were no insurmountable barriers between young men and women. Rabbis reacted strongly against men who did not hesitate to abuse the halakhah and adopt various improper tactics to marry the woman they desired. It was sufficient for an unscrupulous and deceitful man to ask the woman to try a ring on her finger and say the wedding formula before two witnesses to trap her into a marriage she did not contemplate. Many girls who did not respond to flirtations were victims of tricks that complicated their lives and delayed their marriage to the man of their choice until the issue was settled. Violent men used force and terror to gain the woman they wanted if their attempts to seduce failed.
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