’
wear male adornments...”
refers us to the laws of Purim . There®” Isserles comments:“Concerning the wearing of masks on Purim when men wear women’s clothing and women wear men’s
clothing there is no prohibition in the matter because there is no intent. It is joy in general.” It is the opposite of the comment of Rabbi Eliezer of Metz quoted above. His authority comes from a responsum of Rabbi Juda Mintz of Padua:
“Concerning the matter of wearing masks which are customarily worn by young men and women; old and young on Purim ...(I bring) evidence from my observation in this matter of the great and pious of the world among whom I grew up. They saw their sons and daughters, their brides and grooms, dressing in masks and exchanging garments from man’s garment to a woman's and the reverse. If, God forbid, there had been head shaking at sin, that they would have laughed and not reproved. How much more so if they had evidence of a prohibition in the matter. They agreed that there was complete permission and that there was not in the matter of this kind of dressing even the hint of sin.
Mintz goes on to show that this interpretation of the law grows out of the history of the interpretation of the various acts the rabbis have forbidden. All of them in one way or another have been limited by the customs of the place, and here he brings empirical evidence from his own experience. Would the pious scholars of his youth have stood idly by when the law was being transgressed? From this we know that at Purim and at weddings it was customary to dress up, and therefore it is permitted.
Padua was a dependency of Venice . Venice had tolerance for Jews ....” during the long centuries of the history of the Jews in Venice no solitary instance of a popular attack upon them is on record.”* The Jews of Venice were at home in their society and participated fully in its social and cultural life. Jews danced, attended feasts, gambled and played, banqueted with rich meals, wore the highest fashions. This was true for much of Italy . This situation had existed since the fourteenth century and came into its broadest expression in the time of the Renaissance.*’ They were at one with their environment. Women had greater freedom, which they expressed on the one hand by the luxury of their lives and on the other by their intellectual lives. It was in the Italian communities that the sumptuary laws came into their