She’elot u-teshuvot yeshanot (Old Responsa): On Marital Deception

Before the Passover festival, the woman approached me with a sickly face and said to me, “I fear that there is something wrong with my stomach, as the area around the chest is constantly pushing and pressing against me. What should I do?” I told her that she must present a urine sample, and I indeed examined her urine sample on the following day, by means of which I observed that her sinews and limbs were blocked. I then asked her if she has had a period and she replied in the negative.

I was living in her father’s house. There I saw her on several occasions engaging in loose behavior. He said, “One young man was clapping and dancing in the winter-house, and then I observed that young man holding this woman and kissing her. And a few times this young man came at night and kissed her, and sometimes he stole up to her room, and she got up and went down to him at night, they did this until her father went to lie down, and then they went down together.” He also testified that she would open a window for that man, so that he could sneak into her house. He also attested that he could hear them conversing in her room, up in the attic, with the door closed. He further testified that together she went with her mother several times to the house of the organ maker and sugar maker and they came home drunk from drinking wine and the woman praised these non-Jews, [and he testified further] that she gave him presents. He also testified that she had a drink made to bring on her period, and he said that he himself tasted the drink. And he testified that the Jewish woman who made that drink told him that the woman did not want to pay her for that drink. The Jewish woman also told him that she [i.e., the woman in question] went with her mother and with So-and-So to a witch to do something to her, but, God forbid, I did not want to do that same thing and go with them. This is all his testimony.

I often went with that young man to So-and-So’s house, because he had a relative in his house, and drank with that woman and played dice and danced and saw this young man caressing and kissing that woman while dancing. And we asked him whether he saw that she was hugging and kissing him, and he responded, “I did not pay proper attention to it, I was playing on the board [some kind of gambling, board game].” This is all his testimony. He also testified: I saw that woman drinking nonkosher wine with the organist [organ maker] in the house of So-and-So. This is all his testimony.