Contesting ketubas, negotiating nuptials: Sephardic women and colonial law in eighteenth-century Suriname

Abstract

This article examines Portuguese-Jewish women’s engagement with the Dutch colonial authorities in eighteenth-century Suriname. It offers a historical context for Suriname’s Sephardic community and its unique set of privileges, in conjunction with an elaboration of Dutch (colonial) law on marriage and the property rights of Jewish women. Next, the judicial practice is explored, showing how Jewish women, and predominantly widows, made active use of colonial institutions to assert their rights and interests, and how women and girls of marriageable age occupied a complex position of considerable socio-economic influence paired with a convergence of legal and familial constraints.