A long-standing scholarly truism holds that it is impossible to study the lives of European Jewish women during the early modern period (c.1500 – 1800) because we lack the textual evidence necessary for such a task. Some scholars have even argued that the available textual evidence indicates that women exerted little influence on the early modern European communities in which they lived and that their lives remained static throughout early modernity. These included small rural communities and large urban communities in places such as Amsterdam, Prague, and Copenhagen.
Debrah Kaplan and Elisheva Carlebach reject this picture. In A Woman is Responsible for Everything: Jewish Women in Early Modern Europe, they argue that Jewish women influenced every facet of life in the early modern period, from the domestic to the economic to the religious. The organization of Jewish communities into kehillot,formal tax-collecting entities with strict, enforceable communal regulations, necessitated meticulous record-keeping. An abundance of textual materials including letters, communal registers, court documents, personal copies of books with marginalia, and Christian sources that document Jewish practices were created in the early modern period — especially with the advent of print technology — and have survived to the present. A wealth of material has been hiding in plain sight.
A Woman is Responsible is organized thematically. One chapter explores how women formed “pious societies” for the purposes of maintaining ritual baths and burying the deal. As many women were literate, they not only consumed books in several genres, from Yiddish manuals for domestic tasks and Yiddish prayers called tekhines, but also commissioned them. Another chapter discusses the role of marriage in society: from its cost that kept some women unmarried, to the household expectations of women, to adultery. Extant sources give us insight into the lives of women of different social classes including women who lived on the outskirts of society and “fell outside the protective security of the favored class of householders.” These women were at considerable risk of experiencing sexual violence. Indeed, communal records testify to both sexual violence against women and regular assaults against men. These extant sources show just how precarious life was for early modern Jews of all stripes.
Wills composed by women in which the author offers economic, religious, and moral guidance are rich sources for examining their public and private lives. Many of the authors of wills are known to us by name, such as Rebecca from Manheim who died in 1713 and requested that her will be copied seven times for her children and read annually. Rebecca exhorted her children to attend synagogue and to “live together without strife with one another.”
Kaplan and Carlebach’s arguments would have been even sharper if the authors had explained more directly how their interventions trouble or overturn settled scholarly notions about early modern Jewish women. Readers unfamiliar with that body of scholarship would, then, better appreciate the significance of this book.
The characterizations “pathbreaking” and “field-changing” should be reserved only for scholarly contributions that reorient how a topic is studied. A Woman is Responsible for Everything merits such acclaim. Going forward, scholars of early modern European Judaism will be unable to ignore the lives of many women due to a perceived paucity of source material about them or claim that they were of peripheral importance in their communities. Although scholarship cannot resurrect the dead, reconstructing the lives of those who have passed is the next best thing; Kaplan and Carlebach have done just that for early modern Jewish women.
Brian Hillman is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Towson University.
