Historical suspense with the scope of Gone with the Wind set in The Girl with a Pearl Earring's world, the Golden Age of Holland

 

Please visit the website for historical background and sources: 

www.theposthumouswife.com.

1666--A young Jewish woman flees the Inquisition to "the New Jerusalem," Amsterdam, where half the Christians are preparing for the Second Coming, and half the Jews are making plans to follow a self-proclaimed Messiah to the Holy Land to usher in the End of Days. Her father arranges her marriage to a much older man, who is lost at sea in a shipwreck less than six months later. If she can't perform a miracle to recover his body from the Baltic Sea or find a witness to his death, under rabbinical law she will forever be nothing but an abandoned wife--forbidden from remarrying, not even to give the child she's carrying a father.

 Click here to see Rembrandt's "The Jewish Bride," the inspiration for this novel of love, death, and the radical idea that a woman's worth might be greater than the amount of her dowry.

The Rijksmuseum's description of this painting as "mysterious" is both apt and misleading. The title is not Rembrandt's, but it seems to me that it is appropriate. A 17th century bride and groom might legitimately have sealed their betrothal with intercourse before the wedding, so the bride depicted in the painting could be pregnant. I disagree that the man's hand is on the woman's breast; it looks to me as if he is feeling the first stir of life from his child in the womb.

 Click here to visit Amsterdam's Jewish Historical Museum's collection. This early 18th century engraving shows a gentleman offering his right shoe to a lady. This is a chalitsa shoe, a gift from a widow's brother-in-law, indicating that he will accept the shame of failing to marry her in his brother's place. In Biblical times, when Jews were polygamous, a dead man's brother was obliged to marry his widowed sister-in-law. The converse was also true--that the childless widow was obliged to marry into her deceased husband's family. The chalitsa shoe was a sign that the head of the family was freeing the widow to remarry outside the family.