Research Associate Jordan Katz on How Jewish Women Shaped Community in Early Modern Europe

Dr. Jordan Katz is a historian of early modern Jewry, Visiting Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies and Judaism at Harvard Divinity School, and a Women’s Studies in Religion Program Research Associate for 2022–23.

Her year-long project at the WSRP, titled “Delivering Knowledge: Midwives and the Making of Jewish Culture in Early Modern Europe,” examines the dynamic role of the early modern European Jewish midwife, arguing that Jewish midwives played critical roles in early modern European Jewish communities, acting simultaneously as extensions of communal authority, as municipal employees, and as agents of burgeoning medical bureaucracies.

Katz is also Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, with a focus on Jewish cultural history, history of medicine, and women and gender in the seventeenth-and-eighteenth centuries.

She received her PhD in history from Columbia University and has been awarded fellowships from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, the Center for Jewish History, and the Leo Baeck Fellowship Programme.

Prior to coming to Harvard Divinity School, Katz was a postdoctoral associate in the Judaic Studies Program at Yale University. Her work has been published in Jewish Quarterly Review and Jewish Social Studies.

Below, Katz explains how her interests have led her to her current research in Jewish midwifery at HDS.

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History has been my main focus since my undergraduate days when I chose history as my major. As I studied, I became most interested in conducting concentrated research on one focused topic to find and explore the nitty gritty details to go deeper into the field. This led me to refine my historical lens onto Jewish history, my current field of interest.

My initial research as an undergrad was in Jewish communities in the Early Modern period, between roughly 1500 to 1800, and the question of Jewish communal autonomy—how Jewish communities developed their own structures for managing bureaucracy. In this same vein, I began looking into what kind of powers communities held and how they intersected with the broader municipal powers in given locales.

In my second year of graduate school, I began reading sources on Jewish communities while considering the place of Jewish women in these histories, and I stumbled upon sources about midwives. Putting these two interests together became the genesis of my current project.

When considering the roles that midwives played in the community, we can see more clearly how Jewish women shaped the structures of community and interactions between Jews and Christians, and between Jewish communal bureaucracies and municipal bureaucracies. In this way, seeing women in these roles became a lens into the larger questions that I was interested in.

In my research, I discuss how women and their gendered roles have been shaped by others. This helps us rethink the picture of history that we’ve been presented in the past. It is one of my great goals to put midwives on the map as people who were making real contributions to their communities and to the cities or towns that they lived in, in ways that were not ancillary, but in fact central to how things operated.

There's been such a long tradition in Jewish Studies scholarship of prioritizing men, especially religious leaders and rabbis, which raises the question of whether women did anything outside of the domestic sphere. In concentrating on midwifery and taking a critical eye toward this role, I have found this to be a central example showing that women were employed by communities. They were licensed, they were salaried, and they were highly trained and skilled. These findings really poke holes in the long narrative and tradition of prioritizing men in Jewish Studies scholarship—something that I feel strongly about.

In my experience, once I become attuned to something, I start finding it in more places and noticing the gaps in the way that scholarly sources have portrayed the past. Depictions of Jewish communal relations often leave out women, who were a major part of Jewish communities. By researching the records kept by midwives, I hope to highlight the roles they played within the constellation of the community.

I work with archival records such as manuscripts, rabbinic texts, printed books, and communal registers that detail happenings in Jewish communities. I also work with notarial documents that contain a lot of information about midwives’ testimonies.

Probably my favorite piece of archival documentation is Jewish midwives' own records of their deliveries, which is something new in the period that I study—we have nothing similar from the Middle Ages. It is so rare to have something written in women’s own voices that is not mediated through male scribes who are writing things down. These documents are written in their own hand and in their own voice, presenting us with a picture that's not filtered through the lens of male community leaders.

I've been working on this project for about 10 years now, and it's really exciting to have it still be such an energizing project. I've completed most of the research at this point and am now focusing on the writing as I consider how to present the materials in a way that is appealing to a wider audience. My plan is to finish a few more chapters with the documentation that I have and put together a proposal to submit to presses.

In addition to the research and writing portion of my time at HDS, I also taught a course last fall titled, “Jewish and Christian Childbirth in the Early Modern Period: A Comparative Perspective.” This was a chance for me and my students to see and think about the way in which childbirth can illuminate the kinds of interactions between women of different faiths—or women of different confessions, as we call them—in the Early Modern period that often go undetected because they're in the "domestic sphere." We saw how a shared desire for the pursuit of health and good outcomes of childbirth became a bridge that created connections between Jews and Christians that we may not have seen if we were just looking at an official level.

It has been a pleasure to teach graduate students here at HDS, who are so interested in the material that I'm presenting, and to see how our interests in the same topic diverge between historical and contemporary applications.

I hope that through my course and just being around at HDS I have been able to contribute something to students who are interested in Jewish history and Jewish studies. More specifically, I hope that through my research, teaching, and eventual book completion that I will contribute to the very little that we know about pre-modern women, and specifically, about Jewish women.

—Interview conducted and edited by Denise Penizzotto, HDS correspondent