There has been no shortage, over the centuries, of rabbinic literature grappling with questions of Jewish law on marriage and divorce, but the 16th century has been especially generous in this respect. The spectacular story of Tamar bat Joseph Tamari, a Jewish heiress in 16th-century Venice, and the feckless adventurer who betrothed her, captivated the Jewish world in its own day and is still eagerly discussed by historians in our own time. That controversy produced no less than four collections of documents published at the height of the scandal in 1566, one on each side of the issue and two by the fiancé errant himself.
Now a manuscript housed in the Hebraic Section of the Library of Congress offers us another case of a 16th-century betrothal gone wrong, this time from the island of Crete. This is a manuscript of 72 leaves, written in several different hands on thick, high-quality paper and bearing the signatures of several well-known rabbis from the 16th century, among them Moses ibn Alashkar and Elijah ben Elkanah Capsali, the latter also the author of important Hebrew chronicles on Venice and the Ottoman Empire.
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