Court Testimony: A Woman’s Request for Divorce (Lucena, Spain)

This Hebrew court record, preserved in a collection of documents from the Jewish court in Lucena, Spain, contains a woman’s request for a divorce. While the outcome was not recorded, the events leading up to the court case are provided in some detail. According to Jewish law, the wife could not initiate divorce proceedings herself. In some communities in the medieval period, however, she could refuse to perform certain household responsibilities and appeal to the court to grant her a divorce. If the court accepted her request, she would lose some of the money due to her in the ketubah but would keep her dowry. The numbers indicate the lines of the text as they appear in the manuscript.