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. 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