1. Acknowledgement: I have the privilege to thank several institutions for financial assistance that allowed me to do the research on this project. I would like to thank the Lafer Center for Womenʼs and Gender Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem for a scholarship in 1997-1998 that enabled me to embark upon the initial stages of research. I am further indebted to the Hadassah International Research Institute on Jewish Women at Brandeis University (now the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute) for an additional grant in 2000, and to the Maurice Amado Foundation Research Fund in Sephardic Studies at UCLA for current funding in order to continue and expand the boundaries of this work.
2. On the social status of widows see Sandra Cavallo and Lyndan Warner (eds.), Widowhood in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (London: Longman, 1999); and particularly
3. Pamela Sharpe, "Survival Strategies and Stories: Poor Widows and Widowers in Early Industrial England," in ibid., pp, 220-239. On the status of widows in various Jewish societies, see, among others: Susan Sered, Women as Ritual Experts (New York-Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 106-114;
4. Ruth Lamdan, A Separate People: Jewish Women in Palestine, Syria and Egypt in the Sixteenth Century (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2000), pp. 196-201;
5. Renee Levine Melammed, "Sephardi Women in Medieval and Early Modern Periods," in J.R. Baskin (ed.), Jewish Women in Historical Perspective (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), pp. 122-126;