How to Educate Children and Improve Family Life in the Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Empire, according to Rabbi Samuel Benveniste

Abstract

ʾOrekh yamim (Length of days; Constantinople, 1560), a short book of guidelines on educating children and maintaining a religious and moral family life, was written by Rabbi Samuel Benveniste, who belonged to one of the communities of exiles from Spain in the sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire. This article analyzes the information that emerges from the guidebook on the state of education and family life in Jewish society of the time. Parents' great fear of child mortality and its effect on their educational conduct is prominent throughout the book, lending it its title. Although child mortality was equally prevalent in all parts of society, the article highlights the posttraumatic experience of Spanish exiles who lost many children in their travails, and suggests seeing the immense anxiety expressed in the essay against this background. In addition, Benveniste's admonitions concerning women's immorality, while characteristic of writings of his time, provide an interesting view of the social norms of his era: he depicts women's swearing by the lives of their children, their cursing, their wish to adorn themselves with jewelry, as well as the difficulties of their daily lives.