Marriage Rituals Italian Style

Roni Weinstein, Marriage Rituals Italian Style, Brill Academic Publishers, 2003

Roni Weinstein, Ph.D. (1996) in Early Modern Jewish History, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, currently teaches at Tel-Aviv University. He has published on various aspects of Jewish-Italian cultural and social history: family life, education, sexuality, the ghetto, the youth culture, exorcism.

Marriage Rituals Italian Style: A Historical Anthropological Perspective on Early Modern Italian Jews is the first comprehensive attempt to present the wealth of primary documents relating to marriage rituals in Jewish Italian communities – responsa, private letters, court protocols, defamating books, love stories, material objects – and place them in historical context. The book traces the chronological course of different phases of marriage (matchmaking, betrothal, the wedding day), and also adopts a thematic perspective. Marriage rituals mirror key issues in local Jewish culture: family life, gender, the youth sub-culture, sexuality, the uses of property, and the honor ethos. Jewish marriage rituals in Italy are revealed as surprisingly similar to those of their Catholic neighbors, and undergo similar change process.