A Letter to Chief Rabbi Raffael Natan Tedesco of Trieste

When Relle Luzzatto Morschene discovered that her husband had a venereal disease, she decided to divorce him and wished ultimately to marry her physician, Benedetto Frizzi. As a resident of Trieste, she was a subject of the Habsburg monarch, Joseph II, a man deeply affected by the Enlightenment quest for a more rational world of intellectual and religious tolerance. In secular society, Morschene thus had rights founded in natural law to protect her, and she was granted a civil divorce. Morschene’s legal problem was complicated, however, by halakhic stipulations that prevented Frizzi, a kohen, or member of the priestly class, from marrying a divorced woman. How this conflict proceeded was expressed, in part, by the letter she wrote to the chief rabbi of Trieste, a letter that might in fact have been penned by a legal expert but which she herself signed.