DECEMBER 9 • 2021 | 47

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 Women’s 
History in Rabbinic Literature.
” Ilan begins 
with the observation that the classic rabbin-
ic texts are prescriptive, rather than descrip-
tive: 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 infor-
mation “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 observa-
tions 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 
men’s reading, Rosman shows, praise obe-
dient 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 lan-
guage. A learned woman in the 18th centu-
ry, 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 com-
munal 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 stu-
dents 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 school-
girls 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 ado-
lescence 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 Women’s 
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 prom-
inent 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 Women’s History from 
Antiquity to the Present. 

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