New WSU Book Offers Essays About the Role of Women in Jewish History Detroit Jewish News – The Jewish News

The field of history has its own history. Not long ago, historians took as their subjects kings and their wars. What great men accomplished became the subject of the history books; children, women and even most men appeared in history books as objects, acted upon by the true figures of history, the leaders. A few reigning queens and exceptional female leaders also counted as actors on the stage of history.

Historians, nearly all of them male, wrote that history. And then a group of historians, most of them female, focused on those great female leaders who deserved more attention.

A little later, historians became interested in the lives of the rest of us: The everyday life of ordinary families in historic times seemed as rich and important a study as the decisions of potentates. At the same time, gender studies seemed consequential. Historians wanted to understand how different societies attempted to regulate gender roles, and how individuals made history as they navigated their lives, conforming to or rebelling against the norms of their societies.

All of this set the stage for reconsidering the role of Jewish women in history. In 1991, Judith Baskin edited a vast survey of the topic, Jewish Women in Historical Perspective (Wayne State University Press; second edition 1998), covering the entire span from the biblical text through the most modern developments. Since that publication, the field of Jewish womens studies has mushroomed. Scholars have found new sources and new perspectives on old sources. Newly found materials from various locales and times overturn the assumption that no records exist of womens lives.

Now Frederica Francesconi, professor and head of Jewish studies at the State University of New York at Albany, and Rebecca-Lynn Winer, associate professor at Villanova University, have brought understanding of the history of Jewish women up to date, gathering essays by an impressive range of scholars in Jewish Womens History from Antiquity to the Present (Wayne State University Press, 2021).

In chronological order, each essay addresses Jewish women at the next period and in another geographic area. Together, the essays provide new insights into the lives of Jewish women throughout history. The essays form not a complete history of Jewish women but highlights from nearly all periods of that history.

In an opening essay, Rachel Adelman, associate professor of Hebrew Bible at Hebrew College in Boston, surveys approaches to the roles of women as presented in the Hebrew Bible. The legal material generally assumes a patriarchal society, but narratives often show women subverting male leadership. God appears as a king, husband, male lover, but also has a woman in mourning and as a mother who loves us as her children. Adelman quotes the late Tikva Frymer-Kensky (professor of Semitics at Wayne State University), who noted that stories of atrocities committed against women might serve as critiques of the social situations that they portray.

Tal Ilan (professor of Jewish Studies at the Freie University in Berlin and editor of volumes of a feminist commentary on the Talmud) considers Gender and Womens History in Rabbinic Literature. Ilan begins with the observation that the classic rabbinic texts are prescriptive, rather than descriptive: They describe how the rabbis believe that people should behave, rather than how people do behave. Composed by one group of men the rabbis for study by men, the texts deal with theoretical women as they properly relate to men. And yet, the texts do, from time to time, disclose information about real women and what they actually did.

After surveying texts about women throughout the Tosefta, Mishnah and both Talmudim, Ilan admits that the gender historian must be resourceful and look for evidence outside Rabbinic texts in the Greco-Roman world at large, at other sources reflecting Jewish society (such as inscriptions and papyri) and the observations of gender historians the world over.

Moshe Rosman (professor emeritus of Jewish History at Bar-Ilan University in Israel) reconstructs the history of Jewish women in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which lasted from 1569 until the end of the 18th century. Religious documents written by men intended for mens reading, Rosman shows, praise obedient women who enable their husbands to study Torah and who behave modestly. The texts praise women who manage their households well and who excel in business.

During this period, women become more involved in synagogue attendance, and a growing literature for women presents Jewish religious learning in the Yiddish language. A learned woman in the 18th century, Leah Horowitz, writes Yiddish prayers for women, prefaced by her Hebrew and Aramaic essays declaring that women must take responsibility for their own observance of commandments, including Torah study. Women in this period did operate a variety of businesses, as revealed in contracts, wills, court records, rabbinic decisions and communal legislation. Married Jewish women often worked in their husbands businesses; widows either sold their assets or continued the business.

A fascinating essay by Frances Malino (professor emerita of Jewish Studies at Wellsley College) considers the impact of the Alliance Israelite Universelle schools on girls across the Sephardic world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Young women from North Africa, the Ottoman Empire and across the Middle East acquired both a Jewish and a French education in these schools. Some of the outstanding students went to France to prepare to become teachers at the same schools. Many also became outspoken feminists (they used the word), advocating more challenging studies for their students. They sometimes defied the male administration of the program, insisting that girls must learn real history, not just moralizing stories.

More than one set of teachers ordered sewing machines, against the instructions of the administrators, so that their schoolgirls could run ateliers of French fashion, learning skills to support themselves and also raising funds for the schools. Jacques Bigart, secretary of the Alliance, maintained a correspondence with each of the dozens of women who taught in these schools (and with each of the men who taught in the boys schools). He kept the teachers deeply personal letters to him, which now give scholars an extraordinary insight into the lives of these brave women.

Natalia Aleksiun (professor of Modern Jewish History at Touro College Graduate School of Jewish Studies) presents Coming of Age During the Holocaust. She builds on diaries of adolescent girls, only some of whom survived, and memoires of their adolescence by survivors.

In the final essay in this collection, Sylvia Barack-Fishman (professor emerita of Contemporary Jewish Studies at Brandeis University) considers Choices and Challenges in American Jewish Womens Lives Today, including intermarriage, alternatives to marriage, opportunities for religious leadership by women in all Jewish movements and the inverse Jewish gender gap, in which men have become less prominent in many Jewish roles as women have become more prominent.

Anyone with an interest in Jewish history, gender studies or, indeed, the history of any place where Jews have lived, will find much of value in Jewish Womens History from Antiquity to the Present.

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New WSU Book Offers Essays About the Role of Women in Jewish History Detroit Jewish News - The Jewish News