Researcher of the Week

Sarah Ifft Decker, PhD

Assistant Professor
Department of History
Rhodes College, TN

“My research explores the intersections between gender and religious identity in the medieval Western Mediterranean. How did gender, socio-economic status, and the experience of belonging to a minority community shape the lives of medieval Jewish women? In my first book, The Fruit of Her Hands: Jewish and Christian Women’s Work in Medieval Catalan Cities (forthcoming from Pennsylvania State University Press), I employ notarial documentation alongside legal codes and Hebrew responsa literature to identify the labor options available to Jewish and Christian women in three Catalan cities—Barcelona, Girona, and Vic—between 1250 and 1350. One of the biggest surprises when I first began research for this project was that Jewish women appear to have played a far more circumscribed role than their Christian counterparts in most economic sectors. Women of both faiths worked in credit, real estate, artisanal production, and waged domestic labor to support themselves and ensure the solvency of their households. However, Jewish women maneuvered within a much more restrictive set of marriage and inheritance practices; Christian women confronted fewer challenges in their efforts to exercise control over family assets. Despite the cultural connections between Jews and Christians in Catalan cities, the two groups still used legal culture as a way of defining difference.

Moving forward, I continue to be deeply interested in how intersectional social histories rooted in archival research can deepen our understanding of Jewish communities. I have recently begun work on a new project, which explores how medieval Jews negotiated between Christian and Jewish legal culture in cases involving inheritance, marriage, and divorce. Although Jews were subject to the jurisdiction of their own community in these areas, some nevertheless chose to record their family arrangements in notarial contracts drawn up by Christian notaries—and rabbis defended their right to do so. The project will also consider how Jews’ use of the notaries changed after the massacres and mass conversions of 1391, when for the first time mixed Jewish-Christian families became common.

Thanks in large part to my experiences teaching Jewish history in the southern United States, I have also become increasingly interested in the social and cultural history of medieval anti-Judaism. I have also begun preliminary research on a project tracing the ways in which ideas about gender shaped anti-Jewish narratives in medieval Christian Europe, and how those narratives in turn reinforced intertwined religious and gender hierarchies.”


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Maya Soifer Irish (January 23, 2022). Researcher of the Week. medievalJewishStudiesNow! Retrieved November 10, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/rhj7


About Maya Soifer Irish

Dr. Maya Soifer Irish an Associate Professor of History at Rice University, whose research focuses on religious violence and toleration, and explores the legal, social, and economic situation of religious minorities in Iberian Christian societies. She is the author of many articles, including “Beyond convivencia: Critical Reflections on the Historiography of Interfaith Relations in Christian Spain.” Her first book, Jews and Christians in Medieval Castile: Tradition, Coexistence, and Change, explores the changes in Jewish-Christian relations in the kingdom of Castile between the 11th and 14th centuries. She is currently working on a new book, The Politics of Persecution in Medieval Spain: Toward the Anti-Jewish Riots of 1391. Between 2018 and 2021 she served as President of the American Academy of Research Historians of Medieval Spain (AARHMS).