Last month, when I posted about my readers dismay at the Talmudic rabbis’ attitude towards slavery, I mentioned that the average woman in Talmudic times was not much better off than a slave. I speculated that a maidservant might even prefer living in a wealthy household like Rav Hisda’s rather than marrying a poor man. A reader asked me to elaborate, so here goes.
A Mishna in Tractate Ketubot [59b] details the tasks a wife does for her husband: grind grain, bake bread, launder, cook, nurse their child, make his bed, and work with wool [i.e. spin or weave]. However if she brings maidservants as her dowry, her tasks devolve to them, to the point where a wife with four female slaves may sit in a chair all day. Clearly the poor wife with no maidservants must do all these chores herself, in addition to providing a sexual outlet for her husband and caring for their children. If there wasn’t enough food, her husband and sons got their share first.
A slave in a rich household would likely perform one specific job, like making bread, doing laundry, cooking meals, or caring for children. Though she would be sexually available to the master and his sons, and perhaps to the male slaves, she would be well fed, clothed, and housed.
Both wives and female slaves were typically acquired for the first time just before their twelfth birthday, when they became subject to taxes. Each was acquired by payment to her father – a minimum of a dinar for a maidservant but only a minimum of a perutah, the smallest Babylonian coin, for a wife. There was no way either woman could leave her husband/master while he lived; he had to free them with a get, or in the slave’s case, he could sell her or give to her someone else. At least the wife was freed by her husband’s death, if she lived so long.
More on characters, this post on choosing names for them. My two series take place in Jewish communities of 11th-century France and 3rd-century Babylonia. My main characters are historical figures, assuming you call the Talmud historical, so I had no choice about their names. But I like to be as authentic as possible for the others, which means major research, since Jewish names may or may not mirror names in the general population. In addition, I couldn’t just choose biblical names since, like today, some were common and some not. For example, David has been one of the most popular names for Jewish boys in America for 100 years, but it was rarely used in Rashi’s and Talmudic times.
Finding authentic names for women was even more difficult, as they aren't mentioned in historical records/documents as often as men. I hit gold for Rashi's Daughters in the Jewish Museum in Paris, where they have tombstone records going back 1000 years. Luckily the one place women are equal to men in in the cemetery, so I found lots of good choices there. For Rav Hisda's Daughter," I culled men's names from the Talmud itself, but for of women I ran into a huge stroke of luck with Babylonia Incantation bowls. These date from 4th-6th century and the clients' names on them always include the person's mother's name.
Lastly, to avoid confusion, I had to choose names that didn't look too much like other characters' names. I was also confronted with more than one historical character with the same name [a situation common in medieval England as well]. So I ended up creating nicknames or variant spellings, i.e. Yosef and Joseph, Samuel and Shmuel, Salaman and Shlomo.
Readers often ask if my characters are based on anyone I know, and if so, who? Those in Rav Hisda’s Daughter are completely from my imagination, but I did use friends and family, and myself, as templates when writing Rashi's Daughters. For example, Rashi is based on a college professor I knew, who shall remain anonymous. However, I learned that as a young man, Rashi had to leave his German yeshiva and return, very reluctantly, to run his family's vineyard in France. During his youth these had been managed by his widowed mother. Obviously she was no longer capable of this, but none of Rashi's writings said why.
At the time, my own mother was declining with Alzheimer's so I decided to make her the model for Rashi's mother Leah. Everything Leah did in the novel was based on similar behavior by my mother. It also gave me a way to work through my feelings about my mom's continuing deterioration. The scene in the wine cellar where Joheved and Miriam find Leah’s account ledger, which contains some personal notes as well, Joheved reads some of Leah’s writings aloud. Leah’s complaints about being taxed on her land in addition to her wine came straight from a responsa by the beit din in Troyes. The next part, about her fear as she realizes that her mind and memories are dimming, was lifted verbatim from my mother’s diary – which my sister and I found when we were cleaning out her house after moving her to assisted living. It was her final entry.
To whet your appetite for all the silliness to come this weekend as we celebrate Purim, here is a cute article on the Talmud Blog.