In 1495, Germany’s Imperial Chamber Court (Reichskammergericht) was founded as the institution that oversaw the adoption of Roman law as Germany’s imperial civil law. In 1511, a Jewish woman named Elena, who sued her husband and his lover for violating Jewish law (halakha), became the first Jewish litigant before this new tribunal, opening the doors of the highest level of the imperial legal system to many Jews who would follow suit. Focusing on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this lecture will explore the experiences of Jewish women who traversed legal and religious boundaries to litigate before this supreme imperial court and other competing imperial courts. This talk will consider previously untapped court cases from this period as invaluable sources for illuminating the lives of these women, the ways in which they navigated Jewish, imperial, and local laws, and how their litigation helped fashion Jews’ legal standing in the eyes of imperial jurists.


Tamar Menashe is the Jay and Leslie Cohen assistant professor in Emory University’s history department and the Tam institute for Jewish Studies. Menashe’s work focuses on the intersections of the law with gender, culture, and Christian-Jewish relations, primarily in the German Lands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She holds a BA from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and MA, Mphil and PhD from Columbia University (2022). Her dissertation “The Imperial Supreme Court and Jews in Cross-Confessional Legal Cultures in Germany, 1495–1690” won the 2022 Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize for the best doctoral dissertation on a topic in German history written at a North American university. She is currently revising her dissertation for a publication as a book titled People of the Law: Jewish Litigation and Minority Belonging in Early Modern Germany. Prior to joining the Emory faculty in 2023, Menashe was a Fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She was the 2023 Preyer scholar of the American Society for Legal history and the 2023-2024 Gerald Westheimer Early Career Fellow at the Leo Baeck Institute New York-Berlin.