The Unknown History of Jewish Women Through the Ages

On Learning and Illiteracy: On Slavery and Liberty

Rachel Elior, Shmuel Sermoneta-Gertel

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9783111042770
• eBook ISBN: 9783111043913
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Jewish History
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• 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