Video: Rachel Salomons and the World of Jewish Midwives in Early Modern Europe

Full transcript:

SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.

SPEAKER 2: Rachel Salomons and the World of Jewish Midwives in Early Modern Europe. March 22, 2023.

CATHERINE BREKUS: Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome. It is wonderful to see you and to be here for this talk in the Women's Studies and Religion program. So it's my pleasure this afternoon to introduce Jordan Katz, who is Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, as well as being a visiting Professor this year at Harvard Divinity School in the WSRP Program.

Professor Katz is a historian of early modern Jewry with a focus on Jewish cultural history, history of medicine, and women in gender in the 17th and 18th centuries. She's the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including a postdoctoral fellowship from Yale. Professor Katz is currently working on a project entitled delivering knowledge, midwives, and the making of Jewish culture in early modern Europe, which argues that Jewish midwives played critical roles in early modern European Jewish communities, acting simultaneously as extensions of communal authority, as municipal employees-- employers, no employees-- and as agents of burgeoning medical bureaucracies. The title of her talk today is Rachel Salomon and the World of Jewish Midwives in early Modern Europe.

[APPLAUSE]

JORDAN KATZ: Thank you so much for that introduction. And as you'll see today, my talk is really kind of touching on a lot of the things I'm working on for my larger book project. And so I hope to show you just a little bit of that today. What you see in front of you here is a decorative title page of a leather bound manuscript that's now housed in the Bibliotheque Nationale et Universitaire, the University Library in Strasbourg, France.

It's written entirely in Yiddish. And in addition to displaying its title right here, Sefer Hanashim, which means the book of women, this page twice proclaims the name of its owner and commissioner at the top. And you can see it here. Rosa the midwife is also written in Yiddish and at the top. Rosa the daughter of Chaim HaLevi. So she's naming her lineage there.

Now, this particular title page refers to a certain component of the manuscript, a midwifery treatise translated from Dutch to Yiddish in 1709 by a Jewish scribe in Amsterdam where Rosa lived. Below the title, you see a lot of material here, the scribe wrote the following reason for translating this text to Yiddish.

And he wrote, Rosa, daughter of Chaim HaLevi, of blessed memory, the midwife, has allowed it to be transcribed as she wishes to read it many times. With this, she will learn it by heart so that she will not need to observe any other midwife.

Now, I'll come back to this text in a little while. But I first wanted to tell you a little bit about what is in this manuscript that you see in front of you, what else is in it. So in addition to this translation, the manuscript compendium contains a few other very interesting things.

The largest component of the manuscript compendium is delivery records kept by Rosa and the midwives who came after her. And then there are regulations for midwives from the city of Amsterdam, again, translated from Dutch into Yiddish for this particular woman. And finally, there are several pages of remedies, which speak to midwives' engagement in the broader medical culture of the day.

So I want to-- today, what I want to do is use this manuscript as a sort of guidepost or springboard to spend my time taking you through some different aspects of this rich world of Jewish midwives in early modern Europe. So let's start out with these regulations that are translated from Dutch to Yiddish.

And what you see here is the original Dutch regulations, just a little snippet of it, translated-- put forth in 1703. And then the corresponding translation in Yiddish. Those who can make out Hebrew characters might be able to see where there's the correspondence. But you'll have to take my word that it really is a word for word translation here.

So why were these translated? And what was the historical context surrounding the production of these regulations? In the wake of the Thirty Years' War in Europe, which was ended in 1648, a ravaged Europe awoke to really a decimated population. Combat, disease, famine. These had all torn across the continent, leaving some regions with a population decline of almost 40% to 50%.

As cities and towns across northern and central Europe began to reckon with this really severe devastation, they placed a new emphasis on population growth through large scale bureaucratic changes intended to regulate health care, and more specifically, to regulate childbirth. And so one outcome of this new emphasis was a reorganization and a reform of systems of midwifery, education, and practice.

Now, beginning at this time, after the Thirty Years' War in the mid 17th century, town councils and local medical organizations in what was called the Dutch Republic, so the modern day Netherlands, commenced this process of defining and regulating the work of the midwife. And this process really fit into a larger trend of trying to organize a lot of aspects of civic life.

So a trained midwife's ability to secure safe childbirth, and along with that an increased population was now perceived as a municipal responsibility. And by the late 17th century, many Dutch cities, especially Amsterdam as the largest of them, established new administrative and organizational mechanisms to improve health care and public hygiene. And midwifery was really part of this trend. It fit right into this larger aim.

So faced with this de-population and high rates of infant mortality, the Amsterdam Medical College, called in Dutch, or in Latin, really, the Collegium Medicum, established in 1636, began in the 1660s-- so just 30 years after its establishment-- to regulate and supervise the practice of midwifery.

This led to the distinct kind of consolidation of a group of midwives who were called town or municipal midwives. In Dutch, [DUTCH] the city midwives. These women were authorized by local councils to deliver poor-- deliver children of poor women residing within the confines of the town. And beginning in 1668, this medical college required all prospective midwives to pass through its ranks in order to gain licensure and admission to the profession.

And the criteria for enrollment in the medical college included citizenship, marital status-- someone one had to be married or widowed-- good reputation, an ability to read and write, and practical experience attending deliveries. You typically had to have attended 16 births at minimum within the first two years of training.

And the student midwives had to be older than 25 years to take the exam. They were not allowed to hang their professional sign boards outside of their establishment as midwives until they had cleared this hurdle. They were expected to have a sufficient grasp of the theoretical background of childbirth. And this was supplemented by a vigorous course of apprenticeship through which they would develop general knowledge, literacy, and practical experience.

Student midwives typically held apprenticeships with senior midwives for four years before completing their examinations and paying for licensure. And Jewish midwives were also required to follow this path, although they didn't always comply, and we'll see a little bit-- in a little bit an example of that.

So let's turn now back to Rosa. So almost a year and a half before she commissioned this translation of her midwifery treatise and these regulations, Rosa enrolled herself in the obstetrical faculty of Amsterdam's Medical College in order to pursue training to become a licensed midwife under her Dutch name, Rachel Salomons. And that's why the presentation is titled Rachel Salomons.

In Yiddish records, she refers to herself as Rosa, which was her Yiddish name. But for the remainder, I'll just use her Dutch name, since it's prevalent in all of these records. And you can see here, it's a little bit blurry, but this is where she registers herself as an apprentice midwife for 30 [INAUDIBLE], 30 coins, that's how much she pays.

And she registers as an apprentice to another Jewish midwife, named [? Leah ?] [? Sinacor, ?] who served as a mentor to several other aspiring Jewish midwives, operating in this same milieu contemporaneously. Now, Salomons herself was actually older than the average midwife. She was approaching 50 years of age at the time of her enrollment, and married at least twice by this time.

And she also recorded this milestone of her registration in the medical college in the same manuscript that contains her treatise. And you see here these lines that say 1708. So this is actually her own record of her inscription into the medical college, the same as you see here in the official records of the medical college.

Her path to midwifery licensure was not without its obstacles. So in the late summer of 1713, a few months before her first licensing examination, Rachel's second husband, whose name was Salomon [? Jacob ?] Levi, and that's probably where she took the last name Salomon from, appeared before the officers of the obstetrical faculty of the medical college seeking proof that his wife had registered as a midwife.

A week later, Rachel requested that she be listed in the college records by her maiden name, [? Hendrix, ?] since Salomon was her husband's name, and he had now left her. And following this, her estranged husband returned to the medical college seeking the same proof of his wife's registration as before. But this time, the officials refused this request.

So perhaps it's, based on-- I kind of conjecture, based on these records of marital tension, perhaps it's possible that Rachel pursued this path of midwifery in middle age as a means to exit an unhappy marriage, while also securing some kind of financial support for herself as a paid midwife.

In 1713, when she appeared before the faculty to complete her licensure examination, the officials discovered that she could not read the city's regulations for midwives, and therefore, could not be approved for licensure. Her lack of Dutch fluency was perhaps due to the fact that she was not a native of Amsterdam. She was a transplant from Germany who likely relocated upon marrying her first husband many years prior.

So she can't read these regulations. Literacy is a prerequisite for licensure. And two weeks later, what does she do? She returns with the translation of the regulations into what the administrators thought was a high German dialect. And they were satisfied with her competency and officially admitted her to the profession as a licensed midwife.

But what they had taken for high German was, in fact, Yiddish, and those are the regulations that are contained in her manuscript. And here, you see the actual kind of text that goes-- there's a number, one, two, three, four, really exactly following the Dutch regulations from 10 years prior.

Now, I have to pause here to just say and emphasize that we have, really, about this one midwife, we have a wealth of sources that makes it possible to reconstruct her experience in ways that are really difficult to do for other Jewish midwives individually. There were many, many women like her. She wasn't unique in some way. It just happens to be that we have a lot of sources about her.

But her experience was not unique. Many Jewish midwives pass through the ranks of local medical colleges, especially in Amsterdam, where Jews were allowed to do this from a very early date. From 1668, right when the medical college opened its doors to midwives for licensure, Jews were allowed to enter. That wasn't necessarily the case in other European cities.

But Rachel Salomons, these other Jewish midwives were also probably limited by their linguistic capabilities, since it wasn't uncommon at this time that Jewish women could read Yiddish but not read the local vernacular language. Despite individual Jewish midwives implementation of many of these standards, of going through the official channels, of pursuing apprenticeship and licensure, as in this example of Rachel Salomons, there were often tensions that arose between the leaders of a given Jewish community, who were charged with hiring Jewish midwives to care for the poor within the community, and municipal administrators.

And this was because, and this is part of what I try to show in my larger project, Jewish communities maintained a separate set of criteria for hiring midwives that did not always align with the requirements of the municipality. So as an example of that, let's look at the case of two other midwives in Amsterdam, two other Jewish midwives named [? Sarah ?] and [? Beli. ?]

So in July 1752, Sarah and her colleague [? Beli ?] were summoned to appear before the officers of the Amsterdam Medical College, and together, they were fined for delivering babies without official admission to the profession of midwifery. Now, this type of citation was fairly common. We see many, many instances throughout the early to mid 18th century of Amsterdam midwives, both Jewish and non-Jewish, who were fined for hanging their sign out, literally hanging their shingle out before they were licensed, before they had passed their exams.

And you see here, this is Sarah and this is [? Beli, ?] but they're actually in a much longer list of midwives. So that really illustrates that this is just kind of-- this isn't unique to Jews, and it's fairly standard that there's midwives who are practicing without licensure, and it's a problem that the municipality tries to wrestle with in general.

But this case is interesting to me because it goes further than the kind of average case. And eventually, seems to indict not only these two midwives, but the Jewish community writ large. So in October of the same year, [? Sarah ?] and [? Beli ?] appeared before officials and agreed to pay their fines, which the administrators agreed to reduce because the women claimed that they were very poor. They didn't have money to pay these fines.

And then the next month, [? Beli, ?] so one of the two midwives, submitted a request to the medical college stating that she wanted to undergo a formal examination to become licensed as a midwife. And although she had never enrolled as an apprentice, she cited her experience studying under her mother, whose role she had kind of stepped into after her death, and this is a quote from her request, "with great praise and delight from many women." Great praise and delight from many women.

Sarah and [? Beli ?] next complained to the city magistrates, disputing their fines, and asserting that they should be allowed to perform the duties of a midwife, quote, "freely and without hindrance." And it's clear to me from this language that these two Jewish midwives saw the medical college as an imposition on their right to practice, and on what they perceived as sort of a reputation based system that was honored in the Jewish community, right?

Saying I studied under my mother, even though I didn't do it under an apprenticeship. I'm qualified. Many women have praised me, et cetera, et cetera. So the Jewish communal leaders clearly had a different system of merit through which to vet these midwives, one that prioritized competency, lineage, and past successes, and did not seem to consider these two midwives practice to be problematic in any way. And I'll show that in a moment as well.

Half a year later-- so this case goes on, right? We're already a year into it. On January 23rd, 1753, what you see in front of you is a petition that was brought to the obstetrical faculty of the medical college by 30 licensed Christian midwives. And in addition to proposing improvements for these older regulations for the city, they lodged another complaint against these two women, Sarah and [? Beli, ?] who were still continuing to practice midwifery without having enrolled in the college.

The problem had now swelled from the ranks of the kind of medical college administration outward to the city's midwives, who wanted these two Jewish midwives to pay an additional fine for practicing without a license. And furthermore, and this is what you see outlined, they wanted a new regulation saying Jewish midwives should not assist or deliver any Christian women, subject to a fine of blank-- they didn't fill in the amount-- for those who are found to have done the contrary.

So here we have this instance of Jewish-Christian tension, and it's really one of the few that I've found documented around matters of birth in Amsterdam, although there were certainly more that went unrecorded. But nonetheless, I think it also suggests that Jewish midwives were probably attending to Christian women with some regularity, or at the very least, that this crossover was affecting the business of Christian midwives enough that they saw fit to bring this matter to the medical college to punish Sarah and [? Beli. ?]

These Christian midwives expressed their dislike of this double standard that required them to pay these fines while for illegal practice, while these Jewish midwives had never really been asked to pay the penalty. And in all likelihood, this was more of an economic kind of argument than one really concerned with standards, some kind of gatekeeping exercise to prevent Jewish midwives from encroaching upon their business.

But this petition goes up to the city-- to the city magistrates. And the city magistrates ruled that Jewish midwives have to follow all of these city rules. They have to pay their fines. But they aren't prohibited from delivering the children of Christian women.

This case, I think, shows the sorts of cross confessional interactions that could take place through encounters between midwives and their clientele. There's clear evidence that there's crossover between Jewish midwives and Christian clientele. And this is something that, I think, has not fully been explored by historians, who often, when they're looking for kind of cross confessional interactions in the period that I study, they frequently overlook these exchanges that take place in the domestic sphere, including in childbirth, and often focus on academic spaces or mercantile spaces where there was contact between Jews and Christian.

But those spaces typically include very few, if any women. So I think sources like this show us another axis that allows us to situate Jewish and Christian kind of interfaith history within this more multi-dimensional space, and it drives home the importance of really looking at this domestic setting for understanding Jewish engagement with non-Jewish clientele, and for understanding Jewish women's engagement with their larger surroundings.

And this case continues on and on. And in March of the same year-- so again, we're like a year and a half into the case by now-- the two kind of chief administrators of the Jewish community in Amsterdam write to the medical college on behalf of these two midwives who still haven't paid their fines.

And the administrators explain, again, that these two women are very poor. They don't have the money to pay for examination. And they urge the leaders of the medical college to allow these two women to take their exams at no cost, stating that these women are vital to their community, but they don't have the time to complete this apprenticeship. They don't have the money. And the officers of the college refuse.

What's interesting is that the Jewish communal leaders then approached the city magistrates about this with the same request, stating that they, and this is another quote, "prefer to have qualified rather than incompetent midwives," again asserting their confidence in the pedigree of the two midwives in question. And this request was refused and the women continued to practice without paying their fines.

But what you really see is that the Jewish community, the leaders of this community are not really interested in adhering to the standards of the municipality. They are considering these women competent because of their lineage and because of their kind of track record, essentially, not because of their examination or licensure.

Now, this wasn't entirely uncommon for Jews living in this context. An earlier case for example from 1712 concerns a midwife named [? Frutia ?] [? Yost, ?] who appeared before the Medical College with her mother. And her mother attested that despite never having been registered as a student, her daughter [? Frutia ?] had already delivered 16 children and was capable of passing the exam.

And this woman [? Frutia's ?] mother was also a midwife, so she likely apprenticed with her in a kind of informal setting. The following year, [? Frutia ?] [? Yost ?] and her mother corroborated this information by appearing before a notary-- and this is a notary record here-- together with 16 Jewish women, whose children [? Frutia, ?] the younger woman, had delivered.

And these women swore that [? Frutia ?] had performed a competent delivery, and that she was skillful enough to assume the role of a licensed midwife. And all of the women who testified signed this attestation. Most signed their names in Yiddish. Some simply made an X. I don't really know of any other document from this period with so many signatures of Jewish women in Yiddish. It's really amazing.

These cases, right, of Sarah, [? Beli, ?] and of [? Frutia ?] were perhaps exceptional. Many Jewish midwives, like Rachel Salomons, did follow city protocol. They paid their fees. They completed their examinations. Some like Rachel, even determined enough to pay this fee and complete her examination that she had these regulations translated from Dutch to Yiddish.

But I think that Sarah and [? Beli, ?] in particular, show that Jewish communal leaders held these external authority structures at arm's length, and in assessing midwives' qualifications operated according to really a different standard and a different system of merit than the local medical bureaucracy. And I should add that this case is documented entirely in municipal records, not in Jewish communal records, which we have a lot of from this period.

This could indicate a sort of lack of emphasis that the community placed on these kinds of interactions with municipal authorities during this period. But I think it's more likely that it illustrates that even though individual midwives may have taken this formal licensing procedure process seriously, this was not a metric by which the community judged its midwives.

And this was true until the late 18th century. And that only then do Jewish communal records begin to note among the qualifications of a prospective midwife that they're looking to hire that she had completed her examination in the medical college. Prior to this, the community did not adopt these standards.

Let's return to Rachel Salomons' manuscript for a second. So another large component of this manuscript, in fact, it's the most voluminous component, is focused on delivery records kept by Salomons and other midwives who came after her. And what I try to show in my work more broadly is that these midwifery records, of Jewish midwives, were also influenced by larger bureaucratic efforts to maintain local population records. And they offer some of the first examples of Jewish vital records in this period.

As the 18th century progressed, many burgeoning municipalities required their local Jewish communities to record populations and keep track of births as an effort, as part of an effort to maintain centralized legally admissible data about inhabitants. And although there's little evidence that midwives in this context ever shared their notebooks with Jewish communal leaders, these records were sort of adjacent to the kind of Jewish communal authorities which govern many of the kind of inner workings of Jewish affairs, and had their own employees and salaried and resolve disputes in this period.

By recording these names of their clientele, midwives documented the growth of their communities, keeping track of lineage population and illegitimate births as well. And so they really became, in this very act of recording their work, and here I'm paraphrasing Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's work on Martha Ballard. They became keepers of vital records, and sort of chroniclers of the history of their towns.

So let's take a little look at Rachel Salomons' records. So the earliest entry, as I said before, in her register she records herself as a pupil in the Medical College in Amsterdam. And this wasn't an uncommon practice of early modern midwives, who typically recorded professional milestones including examinations and swearing in dates.

In terms of the rest of her records, before I kind of get into them, I just want to say a few words about the particular geography of Amsterdam, because it really plays a significant role in her context in early modern Jewish life within the city. So here, you see a map of Amsterdam, an early map. It's not what it looks like now.

There were no legal restrictions on where Jews could live. But they typically sort of lived in this quarter, and more broadly, within this larger catchment area. They congregated in this area, which was basically added to the city after a 1593 extension project, since they had arrived after the project's completion.

The neighborhood [INAUDIBLE], which you see here, was one of the main areas of this new section. And prior to the arrival of Jews in the city, it was primarily composed of timber yards and warehouses. And so it was kind of gritty, and poor Ashkenazic Jews, who had come from German lands and from Eastern Europe, tended to settle in this area, in these sort of timber framed houses that line these inner streets and alleyways of the corridors.

And more affluent Jews who had come from Portugal, from the Spanish and Portuguese expulsion, they had been in this setting much longer, and they resided in the brick homes on open boulevards typically reserved for more prominent members of the community. These additional islands that you see up here, [? Allenburg, ?] [? Marcon, ?] and [? Rothenberg, ?] were also added as the city expanded. And Jews also settled their dwelling in the overcrowded houses that lined these streets.

When Rachel Salomons and her Amsterdam colleagues recorded births, they really seemed to be very attuned. They frequently made reference to these neighborhoods, conveying a sense of Amsterdam's urban geography. And what you see here is a map that I've made. It's a little hard to see on here, but if anyone's interested I can show it to you later.

What you see here is I've mapped all the births that have some geographical information on them on a historical map of Amsterdam. And it's very interesting to see where they take place. This is kind of the main Jewish quarter over here. And she frequently makes reference to a child delivered to Anna at [? Altenberg. ?] Someone else delivered in [? Flumberg. ?] So really referencing this neighborhood geography that I just kind of laid out for you.

And at times entries are even more specific, referring to particular streets in the neighborhood. So for example, she says in 1729, [? Meyer's ?] daughter is delivered on an alley in [? Flumburg ?] called [INAUDIBLE]. Another child is born in the [INAUDIBLE].

So the majority of births seem to have taken place in this area that's considered part of the Jewish neighborhood or right outside of it. There's a few that you see, right, so you can see a little bit. Sorry, the [? color ?] is hard.

I should stay near the mic. But most of them are in this area. There are a few that are in the west of the city. And one sort of far out. So you can kind of see that while they're mostly in the neighborhood, she's also kind of traversing the city through this work as a midwife. This incorporation of urban geography into the records of Jewish midwives is probably kind of echoing what the delivery records that were submitted by municipal midwives to the medical college were also doing.

These also contain street names of where these births occurred. And this is something that is specific to Amsterdam. I have examined a lot of other records kept by Jewish midwives from other geographic contexts. They don't have this information of streets. So this is really showing that Jewish midwives are pulling from their immediate cultural surroundings to develop this new kind of language to bring into the Jewish sphere.

And it also shows us how these women are exploring. It allows us to explore the canals and the alleyways and streets of the city through their eyes and see the city and its Jews as the midwives saw them. At the same time, many of these records are guided by a sort of different cartography, not determined by top down city delineations, but rather, a personal sense of place.

So some records for example, say a child was born to so-and-so who lives behind so-and-so. That's not a geography that I can know where that is from my present day stance. Or the daughter of a woman who lived by the notary. Again, I have no idea where that is.

And so some scholars have called this a prepositional relationship with the urban environment. That's a phrase that Nicholas Eckstein kind of coined in a very interesting article. And what he posited was that individuals really at this time position themselves in micro-neighborhoods. That is, urban space that was defined relationally by buildings, people, features, and spaces that they knew first hand, rather than these kind of full scale cartographic features that we would associate with urban geography.

And so in this way, Jewish midwives like Rachel Salomons related to urban space through these geographic markers like streets, neighborhoods, but also through the city's social structures, marketplaces, and institutions. And the result of this was a spatial sensibility that was, on the one hand, kind of synchronized with cartographic language, and on the other, highly particular and individual.

Through their roles in maintaining and preserving these birth registers, midwives became integral producers of a certain type of Jewish scribal culture, recording these births, creating a new type of record that really has no clear precedent before this within Jewish communal life. And so in order to do that, in order to kind of conceive of a new genre, they are drawing heavily upon their civic environs and its bureaucratic norms when setting pen to paper.

This type of information, this kind of geographical information that we get from these kinds of records, also really emphasizes or speaks to the ability of midwives like Rachel Salomons to traverse socioeconomic and confessional or religious boundaries through their work. Jewish midwives, I argue, were boundary crossers. They interacted with various sectors of the local population in ways that were not typically afforded to other women at this time.

And looking at this spatially really illuminates a sort of multiethnic nature of the neighborhood in which they lived and worked, because we know that they were traversing different kind of socioeconomic class areas, by delivering babies to those living along the alleyways in these islands that I was talking about, as well as to more prominent individuals who lived on the broad boulevards, like the Breestraat.

So that-- everyone knows the Breestraat in Amsterdam. That's where Rembrandt's house is. So if you think of that's where Rembrandt lived, she's delivering babies to individuals who live on that street, as well as these tiny little alleyways with these timber framed houses.

Salomons records births to some prominent Jewish leaders, the rabbi, the cantor in the synagogue, in addition to really an array of peddlers and small merchants, manual laborers, both male and female, all kinds of people that you could meet in this street scene, in this early modern street scene. So we find a mattress maker, a silversmith, a female button maker. That's interesting.

Several shoemakers, hat makers, a wig maker, as well as coffee makers. One female coffee maker, actually. Chocolate workers, tobacco merchants, and purveyors of Delftware. So the Delft blue that everyone goes to the Netherlands and wants to buy, that appears here.

And many of these commodities, tobacco, chocolate, coffee were directly influenced by these new global trade routes, reflecting a sort of receptiveness of the Jewish community to the prevailing mercantile climate of the day. We also have children born to a clothing trader, a washerwoman, an apple seller, a baker of small cookies, and a milk farmer. In addition, a female farmer as well.

Moreover, the register makes note of several children delivered to several converts to Judaism, who typically remained less affluent than other members of this community. Two entries identify women as Black, suggesting that perhaps these individuals were of African descent, also possibly converts to Judaism. That this same midwife bore responsibility for delivering the children of poor converts, communal officials, petty bourgeois merchants, peddlers, and Portuguese Jews, who were much more affluent, all in the same register attests to her ability to cross these social and class boundaries within an urban landscape.

Her delivery register also includes the name of non-Jews alongside Jews. And here, again, kind of back to this thinking about the interactions between Jews and Christians in this period. So we have the names of individuals that are very clearly Christian patrons. They appear in baptismal records that I've checked from Amsterdam. So they're not Jewish.

We also have births that take place at the English church, for example. And this was likely someone who was an English Puritan who lived nearby in the Jewish neighborhood. There was an English kind of Puritan church that had been established there. Other entries convey that non-Jewish clients were very deeply embedded in Jewish circles.

The register often refers to a shiksa, which is now known as a kind of derogatory term, but doesn't seem to have that in this register. It's a term for a non-Jewish woman. Or a goy or a goya, so a non-Jewish man or woman who resided in a Jewish home. And these kind of terms also appear in the register.

Under the supervision of Jewish employers, these non-Jewish women who gave birth, they were integrated into Jewish households to the extent that a Jewish midwife was summoned for their births. And I think most illuminating is an entry from 1710, which for an individual with whom Rachel Salomons had a personal connection.

She refers to the Gentile woman who served her family by performing tasks that were forbidden to Jews on the Sabbath. She writes, "Sunday the tenth of Sivan." That's the name of a Jewish-- of a Hebrew month on the Hebrew calendar. "Sunday the tenth of Sivan, by our Shabbos goya, daughter." She's using our, right? This is a personal connection. This is the person who works in her household.

This weekly engagement of a woman who would kind of perform tasks that were not allowed to Jews on the Sabbath often facilitated close contact between employer and employee. And as women frequently assumed responsibility for the domestic upkeep of the household, the employment of a Shabbos goy or goya, someone who would perform these tasks, fell upon women more than men.

And so as a result of this gendered labor differential, male authored records don't really frequently mention these individuals. It's not so common. But as members of a female workforce, they come to life in midwives' registers, where they emerge as integral members of Jewish households, whose employers could be intimately involved, clearly, with aspects of their personal lives, summoning midwives from the Jewish community to attend to them.

These sorts of interfaith connections may have been-- likely were augmented in this relatively tolerant environment of Amsterdam. There was a large Jewish population and openness towards Jewish settlement there. But this kind of openness towards Jewish midwives was not limited to individuals in Amsterdam.

In France, for example, where midwifery was regulated by the Catholic Church and Protestant women were forbidden as a result from serving as midwives, Protestant women sometimes circumvented this problem by hiring Jewish midwives to serve at their births, since Jewish women were granted the right to practice midwifery. Christian midwives, too, were occasionally present at Jewish births as well, although this might have been less common.

The preservation of information about Christian and Jewish birth within this same register. It's all-- there's no kind of dividing line between these two contexts, these two communities. Calls into question, in my mind, some of these really deep seated ideas we have about Jewish society on this side and Gentile society on the other side.

Even though officials, administrators from both the Jewish community, the municipality, and from the church might have seen Jews and Christians as different, midwives experiences with and relations to their Gentile clientele didn't always echo this sentiment.

So I want to end off where I began. You already saw the title page, fortunately, of Rachel's manuscript and treatise behind it. Hopefully this will come back in a minute. Should I exit out and then try to open it again? No?

And so we've looked at the records. We've looked at the regulations piece of it. And so I want to look a little bit at this treatise that I began with. The treatise translated into Yiddish is entitled Sefer Hanashim, the Book of Women, and the work is a Yiddish treatise on reproduction, fertility, conception, basic gynecology, and childbirth translated from a Dutch treatise called, [SPEAKING DUTCH], A Short and Concise Treatise on Reproduction and Childbirth.

And this work which you see here, yay, was originally published in Amsterdam in 1680, and it was subsequently reprinted six times between 1681 and 1699. And I just want to add that these photos are actually ones I took myself at the Countway Library. So there's a Harvard connection, because there's not very many copies of this extremely obscure book that she used for her translation, but one of them is here in Boston, so that's kind of exciting.

To facilitate the production of this work, of Sefer Hanashim into Yiddish, Salomons enlisted a local scribe named [? Aaron ?] [? Emdin ?] and that is whose penmanship we see here, who is writing all these words here. He frames himself, actually, as the writer of this work. But we know that he's the translator.

And to the best of his knowledge, what's really exciting about this book is that this translation of this Dutch text is not just the only translation produced for a Jewish midwife during this time. As far as we know, it's the only translation produced specifically for a Jewish woman at this time. So it's really cool, really special.

Apart from this text, it's really hard for us to know what kinds of resources, both print and manuscript, Rachel Salomons possessed, or how she used them. Scholars have long noted that midwifery knowledge was really most commonly passed from teacher to student, and this was through experience that was orally passed down, that was unrecorded. And that makes it very difficult for historians like myself to unearth information from sources that were composed by midwives themselves.

But we know that by this time, by the early 18th century, European midwives were not limited to reading texts that were compiled for them by men. They could also compose their own works for popular consumption. Jewish women took part in this through producing, disseminating, and transmitting Yiddish works, because often they could not engage in local vernaculars, and that is probably why this was translated to Dutch-- from Dutch.

As we know, Rachael Salomons could not read Dutch, and so this was her way of engaging in this kind of circulation of book knowledge, as a commissioner of a translation. I think I'm running out of time, so I'm just going to skip a little bit about the role of the translator, because he's less interesting.

But I'll just say that translators were really integral in kind of disseminating this information to women, and especially Jewish women at this time. And we know from her case that this was certainly true here. Midwives like Rachel Salomons would have been almost entirely dependent on cultural mediators like this translator, [? Aaron ?] [? Emdin, ?] to access this textual knowledge, and therefore participate in a broader civic and medical culture, even with limited linguistic capabilities.

And there's so much that I could say about this book and its embeddedness within a larger project of translation and communication of scientific knowledge in vernacular languages, so out of Latin at the time. But I want to focus, just at the very end, to how it likely operated for Salomons as a book of practice, and a work that displayed her qualifications to her clientele and as a reference that she could consult as necessary.

So as I said, this is an extremely obscure book. But why did she choose it? There's a few reasons, that they're sort of conjectural, but educated contextual conjectures. So first of all, this text was printed in Amsterdam. So it was likely more readily available than other works in circulation across Europe. You can also see my hand in this picture for scale, for size of this book, right?

My hand's not so large. So it's a very small size. And that, I think, renders it more accessible and portable to the average midwife. And this would have been especially true in light of the possibility that some scholars have raised, that as part of the apprenticeship relationship, a senior midwife might ask her trainee what books she had been reading concerning the subject of midwifery, and that the two would engage in active dialogue about what they had read. So a local work that's translated into Yiddish would have made a good conversation piece for this woman to discuss with her mentor.

And an additional aspect that might have appealed to her in addition to the size was the inclusion of dozens of illustrations. This is just one example. Many of these illustrations were what is called birth figures, like what you see here, consisting of really disembodied wombs, containing a fetus in different positions, describing the possibilities of fetal presentation.

And there's amazing new work on these birth figures that has shown that, despite our uncertainty about how and whether midwives actually read these midwifery manuals, birth figures like this were used so widely and disseminated so widely that they must have had an impact on how midwives understood the pregnant body. Early midwifery works testified to the importance of birth figures to teach practice.

One earlier midwife, who explains in her memoir that she educated herself about midwifery through reading books and examining illustrations, really speaks to that point. She describes how she referred to engravings and books to understand positioning and complicated cases. And this kind of awareness of the function of illustrations as learning aids was undoubtedly shared by midwives like Salomons.

On top of their use as learning aids, there's some evidence that these kind of handbooks, these midwifery handbooks and their images would have regularly been brought into the birthing chamber, either by the midwife or by another attendant, perhaps a local literate woman who oversaw the community's births.

And in this regard, these handbooks and their accompanying birth figures served as a sort of visual certification of the midwives' skills. So it would have been a credential that Salomons could show to her to prospective clients or male heads of household as a mark of her qualification. Some writers discourage this practice, thinking that it allowed illiterate individuals to fancy themselves more knowledgeable than they actually were.

But it's easy to see how the copious images and figures present in this Dutch work, as well as its size, would have made it particularly alluring for a midwife like Rachel Salomons. For the midwife herself, these illustrations served a practical purpose. But for the pregnant woman and her family, they confirmed the expertise and the specialized knowledge of the midwife, offering reassurance in a time of uncertainty. And so this was one of the ways that likely that birth figures operated for Rachel Salomons, as she used her copy of this printed work in conjunction with the manuscript translation to certify her expertise in midwifery.

So wrapping up here, I promise. Having examined Rachel Salomons' manuscript as a lens onto the world of Jewish midwives, we've seen the way that this compendium served not only as a learning aid, but as a companion to guide her practical work, a place for her to refer to local regulations, to record deliveries, to scribble other notes. We have to also take into account the material conditions that allowed this manuscript to survive, almost by chance.

By a stroke of luck, it landed in these archives in Strasbourg. I still have not tracked down exactly how it arrived there, given that it started in Amsterdam. But it was likely part of a lot of the translator, [? Aaron ?] [? Emden's ?] works, since there's another one of his manuscripts that also resides there.

So it's through this connection to [? Emden ?] that the manuscript was preserved, making it possible to trace Rachel Salomons across numerous other archival sources, to see where she lived, worked, and studied, and to consider the place of this work, Sefer Hanashim, in her path towards licensure and professional standing as a midwife.

By examining her story, we can see how Salomons and other midwives like her could become agents of knowledge production in unexpected ways. And I'll stop there.

[APPLAUSE]

CATHERINE BREKUS: We have time for some questions. I will just bring the mic around to people so that everybody can hear.

AUDIENCE: Thank you very much for your very interesting presentation. My first question is, how did midwives acquire literacy? Because my knowledge of that period, literacy was for males and not females. How did they acquire literacy?

JORDAN KATZ: Yeah, so by the 18th century, most women could read in one language or another. As I said, though, many Jewish women, they acquired literacy through schooling and education, primary education. That was pretty standard by this time.

AUDIENCE: In the community?

JORDAN KATZ: Yes. But it would have been in Yiddish, right? And so that was the limitation that was often facing Jewish women who wanted to become midwives in this period. Not just in Amsterdam, KIN other places as well. That they lacked literacy in whatever the local vernacular was, while having literacy in Yiddish.

By the end of the 18th century, that really changes. We see examples of Jewish midwives who are toggling back and forth between Hebrew, Yiddish, Dutch, German, et cetera. And by the 19th century, that's really-- there's very few Jewish women who are not well versed in the local language there. But yeah, by this time, most women are able-- most women, Jewish and non-Jewish, are able to read in some language.

AUDIENCE: Do you have any sense of how these regulations and this kind of literacy and all of this practice was manifest in Eastern Europe?

JORDAN KATZ: That's a really good question. So I don't work on Eastern Europe, just because I don't have the Polish or Russian languages to be able to really do the kind of work with municipal records that I'm able to do for Northern and Western Europe. It was fairly similar, from what I know.

There is actually a very interesting article that will be coming out soon about a very early 19th century midwife in, I think, in Lithuania. And also, really clearly, how the education was clearly embedded in the medical college by that time, although it's a later date. So we would expect that more.

But one of the things I'll say on that is that there's no kind of writ large picture of how licensure and education happen among midwives, among Jewish midwives more specifically at this time. It's extremely local. And so that's why when I started this project, I wasn't focused on Amsterdam, but I happened to find these sources that led me down the rabbit hole.

But it's really just one example of something larger, in that we have to really dig down into the records of a specific place to be able to know what the contours were of Jewish-Christian relations in this context, of education and licensure, because it's extremely different. There's no kind of broad centralized like state apparatus. It's much more city and town driven at the time.

AUDIENCE: Thank you. Thank you so much for your presentation. You shared about the record keeping and recording of vitals. I'm curious, especially my assumption is that the infant mortality rate as well as the maternal mortality rate was quite-- a lot higher than now. What else have you discovered in the record keeping in terms of, I don't know, expressions of grief, or expressions of joy, right? What are the dimensions about the outcomes of the births?

JORDAN KATZ: Really interesting question. So I'll just say for Jewish midwives, one of the things that is so frustrating for me as a scholar is that there's much-- these records are much more terse. Like when we compare them with Martha Ballard, so Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's A Midwife's Tale, her records have so much more information about plague in the town, and traversing rivers to get to in this and and this birth, et cetera.

My midwives-- I call them mine now-- they don't make really any details aside from the births that they attend, except for this one where she writes that she was inscribed in the college. What we do get, so along this topic of infant mortality or maternal mortality, I'm only working with three Jewish midwives registers from this period. That's all the ones we have so far.

And none of them mention any woman who died in childbirth. Now, we know that that's not a display of reality, right? But it leads me to think that their records are doing something different. They're not kind of making a personal recording of this woman, my friend died, or anything like that. I think that these records serve a different purpose, and that's one of the things I've been trying to work out.

Some of them record stillborn children. Some of them do not. One interesting thing that I've also uncovered is children, not in this register but in one of the German ones that I work with, who were given to foster families, children who were born out of wedlock. So often, the mother is kind of flagged as-- there's a term that's used in Hebrew, it's zonah. Which literally translates to harlot in the biblical sense.

But what they really mean is a woman who becomes pregnant, an unmarried woman who becomes pregnant. And often, in those cases, her child is given to some kind of foster system, and I'm still kind of teasing out what that means and what and how that happens. But that's one of the really-- I think, that's to me, one of the most interesting things that I've learned, that these records just have so much in them that really changes our understanding of the way these Jewish communities functioned.

That's a great example. Like this is not something that we really find in other communal records from the period. So there are ways of unearthing different dynamics, I think.

AUDIENCE: So if I can ask a question.

JORDAN KATZ: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: This was just such a wonderful talk. Thank you so much. The research is really extraordinary.

JORDAN KATZ: Thank you.

AUDIENCE: So I loved seeing the records that you're actually mining for this material. I'm wondering if you might speculate a bit about why you think that some Christian women wanted to use Jewish midwives? This is clearly upsetting to Christian midwives. I can imagine it might be about maybe they're less expensive.

But I'm actually wondering whether there may have been different assumptions in Jewish and Christian communities about what to do in a case where a mother might be in distress, and save the mother or child.

JORDAN KATZ: Yeah. So what you're really getting at is not so much the Netherlands context that I was talking about today, because that's more Calvinist, but in Catholic contexts, right? So that seems to be the reason why the very brief line that I put in here about Protestant women trying to circumvent Catholic midwives by hiring Jewish midwives, that would be the reason is that in a time of-- in a crisis situation, they might prioritize the mother.

In addition to that, Catholic midwives, in areas where Catholicism was dominant, were required to baptize children if they were, sort of the last baptismal font. If a child was-- they thought the child was going to die. And so if you're Protestant and you don't want a Catholic midwife to baptize your child, it makes much more sense to go to a Jewish midwife.

So there's actually a lot there. Not so much in this Netherlands context, but more in the context of the Catholic counter-reformation that really puts midwives at the front lines of this war against Protestantism through baptizing infants. Apart from that context, I think that one of the kind of scholarly threads that I've been thinking about a lot in relation to this kind of question of cross confessional interactions is the medievalist historian Monica Green has sort of coined this term, agents of health, thinking about women who practice medicine.

And one of the things that she's really written about a lot, and put in my mind, is that health care, or the provision the provision of health care and successful health care and childbirth within that might be a space for cross confessional interactions where people have shared priorities, right? And especially in childbirth, women have shared priorities of having a safe and successful delivery.

And so she sort of has posited that childbirth or women's health issues might be something to really look at for more overlap between Jews and Christians and Muslims in that context than we can see in other places. So thinking about health care as a priority I think is really something that changes the picture of the kinds of interactions that we have.

And we can, I mean, we can imagine that from our own lives. We're seeking the best care, not necessarily the one that aligns with our other priorities and interests in that space. I hope that answers the little bit of it. But more to say on that.

AUDIENCE: Do they have any rules [INAUDIBLE]?

JORDAN KATZ: So they're not, in terms of the kind of stuff that I was talking about today, in terms of regulation and communal hiring of midwives and et cetera, rabbis really don't appear in any of these kinds of sources that I presented today? Where they do appear is-- and where midwives appear alongside of them is halachic, so Jewish legal questions about women's bodies.

There they appear-- that's a part of my project but it's just not one that I touched on today. There they really appear as people who are engaging with the medical knowledge of midwives in order to resolve legal religious Jewish legal questions, halachic questions, that have to do with how women's bodies function in the domain of, most specifically, ritual purity.

So that is sort of where they come into this picture. But it's really not at all in this Jewish communal or municipal space that I was talking about today.

CATHERINE BREKUS: OK. Well, thank you so much--

JORDAN KATZ: Thank you.

CATHERINE BREKUS: --for the talk.

[APPLAUSE]

SPEAKER: Sponsor, Women's Studies in Religion Program.

SPEAKER: Copyright 2023, The President and Fellows of Harvard College.