Co-publication with Magnes Press.
The Unknown History of Jewish Women—On Learning and Illiteracy: On Slavery and Liberty is a comprehensive study on the history of Jewish women, which discusses their absence from the Jewish Hebrew library of the "People of the Book" and interprets their social condition in relation to their imposed ignorance and exclusion from public literacy.
The book begins with a chapter on communal education for Jewish boys, which was compulsory and free of charge for the first ten years in all traditional Jewish communities. The discussion continues with the striking absence of any communal Jewish education for girls until the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and the implications of this fact for twentieth-century immigration to Israel (1949-1959)
The following chapters discuss the social, cultural and legal contexts of this reality of female illiteracy in the Jewish community—a community that placed a supreme value on male education. The discussion focuses on the patriarchal order and the postulations, rules, norms, sanctions and mythologies that, in antiquity and the Middle Ages, laid the religious foundations of this discriminatory reality.
Author(s): Rachel Elior, Shmuel Sermoneta-Gertel
Publisher: De Gruyter
Year: 2023
Language: English
Pages: 807
City: Oldenburg
Acknowledgements
Contents
Notes on the Translation
Chapter 1 A Community of Memory
Chapter 2 Communal Education in Traditional World
Chapter 3 Marriage in Patriarchal Society
Chapter 4 Patriarchy and Education
Chapter 5 Exclusive Authority over Knowledge
Chapter 6 On the Right to Literacy and Equality
Chapter 7 On the Connection between Ignorance and Enslavement: The Different Faces of Liberty
Chapter 8 ‘And He Shall Rule Over You’
Chapter 9 Myths that Constitute and Create Consciousness
Chapter 10 Jewish Law and Gender Difference
Chapter 11 The Sin of Eve and the Punishment of Her Daughters: ‘He has made you to rule over her spirit so that she may walk according to your pleasure’
Chapter 12 Woman as ‘Other’: From the Menacing Lilith of Myth to the Real Woman Burnt as a Witch
Chapter 13 The Patriarchal Order
Chapter 14 A Woman’s Duties to Her Husband and His Right to Beat Her, since ‘She is under His Authority’
Chapter 15 Status: The Place Where Women May not Stand
Chapter 16 Erasure from Memory
Chapter 17 Exclusive Authority over Knowledge and Control of Literacy in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
Chapter 18 The Beginning of the Revolution: New Thoughts on Relations between Men and Women
Chapter 19 The Beginnings of Jewish Feminism and its General Feminist Context
Chapter 20 Equal Rights for Women
Chapter 21 The Beginnings of Women’s Education
Chapter 22 History: Looking at the Past and the Present
Chapter 23 Testimonies about Women Writers and Women’s Writings in the Jewish Library
Chapter 24 Women and Death in Antiquity and Late Antiquity
Chapter 25 Women in the First Millennium
Chapter 26 Women in the First Half of the Second Millennium in the East and West
Chapter 27 Women Copyists, Printers and Scholars
Chapter 28 Women in the Early Modern Era
Chapter 29 Women Writers in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries in Yiddish-Speaking Ashkenazi Society
Chapter 30 Jewish Women in the Muslim World in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Chapter 31 Women in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century: The Beginning of the Struggle for Independence and Equality
Chapter 32 ‘To Create a New World’
Chapter 33 On History, Literature, and Gender
Conclusion
Chronology
Bibliography
Index
