From Venice to Sanctity

We know more about Rivka Chefetz than about the vast majority of eighteenth-century women, but we probably still know less than we would like. She was a Jewish woman from Venice, born about 1750 into a well-respected family. Her father, Yora Hefetz, descended from a line of scholars and rabbis, and his parents may have planned to train him as a rabbi - his given name, Yora, means “teacher.” As an adult Hefetz pere chose instead to go into the textile business, opening a shop for the manufacture of prayer shawls, a commodity bridging the secular and sacred worlds. More likely than not, Rivka and her female relatives took part in the family's business: textile production usually employed both men’s and women’s labor. Certainly Rivka became an accomplished embroiderer and seamstress, for in the year 5536 (1776 of the Common Era) she gifted to her synagogue a meil, or Torah mantle, that she had made herself and signed with her name.

Chefetz Torah Mantle, Nahon Museum of Italian Jewish Art, via museums,gov.il

The mantle, currently in the collection of the Nahon Museum, is made of rich green silk cut from old, out-of-fashion clothing. (Curators have dated the material to the 1730s.) Chefetz decorated the mantle with a pattern of red and gold flowers, their threads interwoven with the silk in a technique called spolinato, and signed it with her name and the date. Scholars observe that neither the artist’s use of recycled cloth nor her signature make her work unusual. Early-modern Jewish women often converted old fabric into sacred coverings, like meils and ark covers. The subsequent ritual use of the textiles transformed what was once secular and past its prime into something timeless and sacred. Venetian Jews called this process ha’ala bakudesh, or “rising into sanctity.” More than one woman who sewed and embroidered these ritual covers signed their names, underscoring the necessary and important role women played in contemporary Jewish religious life – particularly in Venice, a city where gentile and Jewish women played a central role in the urban economy and often owned substantial property.

Venice Ghetto, May 2018. Photo by the author.

Sources: Matt Goldish, “Some Trends in Temple Studies,” in The Temple of Jerusalem, from Moses to the Messiah, ed. Stephen Fine (Brill, 2011), 303-27, esp. 319; Howard Adelman, “Jewish Women and Family Life,” in Robert Davis and Benjamin Ravid, ed., The Jews of Venice (Johns Hopkins, 2001), 143-65.