Elisheva Carlebach & Debra Kaplan: The Unknown History of Women in Jewish Life

Transcripts are produced by Sofer.ai and lightly edited—please excuse any imperfections.

David Bashevkin: Hi friends and welcome to the 18Forty Podcast where each month we explore different topics balancing modern sensibilities with traditional sensitivities to give you new approaches to timeless Jewish ideas. I’m your host David Bashevkin and today we are exploring the role of women. Very exciting. This podcast is part of a larger exploration of those big juicy Jewish ideas so be sure to check out 18forty.org where you can also find videos, articles, recommended readings, and weekly emails.

A while back an old friend of mine, Malka Svey, sent me an article that was somewhat subversive but also quite powerful and it was an article that was written by Cynthia Ozick, the famed writer who wrote an article in Lilith magazine, I don’t know if this magazine even still exists, which was really for Jewish women, I believe, and she has a long article entitled “Notes Towards Finding the Right Question”. Now I hardly agree with everything that’s written in this article but I still think about it to this day and find it especially powerful the way she laments with a great deal of frustration at times just her contemporary experience of being a woman in the Jewish world. And on one of them she has a list of points and in her fourth point she talks about on not being a Jew in the synagogue. And this is what she writes.

She kind of includes a piece of evidence. She says, item, in the world at large I call myself and am called a Jew. But when on the Sabbath I sit among women in my traditional shul and the rabbi speaks the word Jew, I can be sure he is not referring to me. For him, Jew means male Jew.

When the rabbi speaks of women he uses the expression, a translation from a tender Yiddish phrase, Jewish daughter, probably referring to Bnot Yisrael. He means it tenderly. Jew speaks for itself. Jewish daughter does not.

A Jewish daughter is someone whose identity is linked to and defined by another’s role. Jew defines a person seen in light of a culture. Daughter defines a relationship that is above all biological. Jew signifies adult responsibility.

Daughter evokes immaturity and a dependent and subordinate connection. When my rabbi says a Jew is called to the Torah, he never means me or any other living Jewish woman. My own synagogue is the only place in the world where I, a middle-aged adult, am defined exclusively by my being the female child of my parents. My own synagogue is the only place in the world where I am not named Jew.

Again, this is from an article by Cynthia Ozick, she should live and be well, she’s currently 97 years old I believe. Whether or not you have experienced this or you agree with her conception, it is something that I have thought about a lot because I undoubtedly have been guilty of this. In many communities, though it varies from community to community, the exact differences in gender roles between men and women in Jewish life, but undoubtedly I have spoken or I think many people have been in shul and they hear a rabbi talking about what Jews are obligated to do and they’re talking about an obligation that only male Jews may do in that community whether it’s tzitzit or tefillin and I am obviously talking with awareness of the fact that not every community operates under such strict gender lines. It is most notable within the Orthodox community that there are much stricter and pronounced gender differences that does not exist to the same extent in the non-Orthodox world, but I think regardless of what community anyone lives in there is no question that there are cultural differences broadly speaking in the way that men and women operate in a Jewish context.I’m more than happy to have divisive conversations from time to time but I thought it was really important particularly on 18Forty where we were thinking about contemporary Jewish life, contemporary Yiddishkeit, and really I know for many people roles of gender are probably the most significant roles that vary from community to community. It is probably still like a third rail issue for many and that is why I think stepping out of the contemporary polemics and kind of taking a larger bird’s eye view of how exactly did women operate in that early modern European space is something that is both historically instructive and more importantly without pointing in a specific direction I think gives everyone regardless of what community they may find themselves in genuinely inspiring ideas of how we can reimagine not just women roles but the role of gender in general in the Jewish world which is not to erase differences but to ensure that everyone sees both the responsibility and the opportunities within those very real differences. So without getting into the nitty gritty modern day questions that we can tackle in a different episode and a different podcast questions of women’s ritual role, questions of women’s rabbinic ordination, things that we’ve seen in the press and things where there have been very serious disagreement and debate within the Jewish world and from Jewish community to Jewish community I thought it was if not more instructive to not begin with the polemics but almost to take a bird’s eye view and step out from our contemporary frame and really explore where this world of modernity originates and that is why I am so excited for our interview with two people I am proud to call teachers, two people who have instructed and guided my own scholarship, my own studies, and really in a much more personal way have impacted my own conception of what it means to be a Jew in the modern world. I am so excited to introduce the authors of a new book from Princeton University Press, A Woman is Responsible for Everything: Jewish Women in Early Modern Europe.

Here is our conversation with Professors Debra Kaplan and Elisheva Carlebach. So I wanted to begin, your book which I think is absolutely crucial for just the mainstream—this is not just for academics though obviously the academic scholarly community has quite a bit to benefit from your book—but your recently published book from Princeton University Press is entitled A Woman is Responsible for Everything: Jewish Women in Early Modern Europe and I kind of wanted to begin with a very broad general question which is at what point did you realize there was such a need for this book? We have so many books on Jewish history, we have so many books on both the men and women of Jewish history. I am curious what was the foundational need that you were responding to that you decided to

Elisheva Carlebach: Let me take that by saying that both of us came up through very eminent programs in Jewish history, Professor Kaplan at Penn and myself Columbia, and we both studied with really great figures in the field, and both of us were told many times when we wanted to study Jewish women in the period that we were looking at that it couldn’t be done because there wasn’t enough material, there were no sources, and each of us worked on different projects but discovered that there was a lot of material that scholars really didn’t know about. So eventually we decided to team up and make it the focus of our joint effort.

Debra Kaplan: I would add that many years ago at Queens College, we decided to teach a course together and for that course on Jewish women we began translating primary sources and over the years as we worked on our project we sat in archives side-by-side often working on parallel projects and sometimes later on this project and wherever we looked we always found material. There’s no file I think that we looked at where we did not find mention of a Jewish woman and this was very exciting to us and flew in the face of what we had been told.

David Bashevkin: I’m so intrigued even in the creative process before we get into the actual content of the book, but in the creative process the decision to literally author a book together, I also teach at the university and group projects usually end up in disaster when you have collaborative efforts, now neither of you are in undergraduate programs as students, you are both teaching that level so you’re obviously quite a bit more mature and focused but I’m wondering in the decision to jointly author this book rather than have one person and then you could thank the other in the foreword, you could thank somebody in the back. Why did you decide to actually co-author the book together?

Elisheva Carlebach: We each had different microscopic areas of expertise, we had each immersed ourselves for all kinds of other projects in Jewish communities of different kinds that were all part of a larger fabric of Western European, mostly German Jewish but not exclusively and we thought that we had complementary strengths and we had worked together years before at Queens College.

So we knew that we were working with somebody we could trust that shared the same interest, that shared the same knowledge of the sources, the archival sources and the same excitement for uncovering these amazing voices from the past.

Debra Kaplan: And I would add to that we worked together on this over the course of many years, we looked together at many different archives including at some point online sources especially during the pandemic when libraries weren’t available, but not only as I said we sat in the archives, we worked together across an ocean during a horrible war, we really I think together were able to get through much more material not because only one of us read it but because there was a joy in discovery when we sat together and read through these materials and anyone who has the book and looks through the bibliography at just the number of manuscripts and archives that we went through can appreciate I think how much more enjoyable it was to find these treasures together and I think it’s a much richer book for that.

David Bashevkin: And there really are treasures and I want to just introduce to our listeners aside from the fact that the writing of the book is so welcoming, it’s not written in kind of a dense academic jargon, it’s a very inviting book in the writing style but even people who have never kind of gotten through an entire academic work, I don’t even like calling it an academic work because it’s a work about the interiority of Jewish life and a slice of real Jewish experience, but aside from that I want to mention up top what really is absolutely remarkable you’re talking about materials is the pictures that are contained in the book which I want to talk quite a bit about, I wouldn’t call it exactly a picture book, but the pictures are genuinely remarkable but before we get to the actual content I’m curious if you can reflect on why you think this area of Jewish history was so sorely lacking of scholarship. It seems almost shocking to me that in 2024 such a major area, Jewish women in early modern Europe, have not been exhausted with volumes and volumes of work.

How do each of you understand why this area has not gotten the previous scholarly attention that it deserves? I mean surely we know there is a component of gender in Jewish life and Jewish studies, I can understand why in perhaps certain circles there would not be a fixation on specifically Jewish women, but I’m curious why do you think in the academy in the world of Jewish studies where there is really so much emphasis on digging through all of the minutiae. of Jewish history, why do you think this remains such an understudied subject for so long?

Elisheva Carlebach: I think if you look at the trajectory of academic Jewish studies, it was always focused on what I would call intellectual history, rabbinic history. There was a certain bias toward, and rightfully so, toward recovering the great ideas, the great commentaries, the great philosophers. There was always a sense of first we have to get to the most important texts, which were very little focused on daily life and they were not focused on ordinary people.

And even though that came into the academy probably by the 1960s or 70s, I don’t think it really trickled into Jewish academic life until later. So that’s one thing. And maybe Deborah wants to address the question of the kinds of skills that are necessary to engage these sources, which are by no means so easy to access.

Debra Kaplan: Absolutely.

When we were told there were no sources for this period, and we mentioned earlier that there was a tremendous variety of sources about women at this time, but a large portion of our material were communal records, what we call Pinkasim, which are communal logbooks. To give a sense of the materiality, we’re talking about hundreds of logbooks. They are handwritten. They’re in a mix of Hebrew and Yiddish.

They’re often written by more than one scribe, depending on the kind of logbook that you’re looking at. And it takes a long time to work through the language, to work through the content, to understand the communal institutions that are being referenced, to track them over time. You need a deep familiarity with various languages and concepts and the inner workings of the Jewish community as well as its relationship to the Christian authorities. So there’s a lot of background information about early modern Europe, about cities, about Jewish community, about Jewish life, and then tracking it all together just to get through these Pinkasim.

And that’s one of our genres. And each of us had experience working on different Pinkas for our other projects, so we brought with us that kind of approach and were able to add sources of other genres as well. But it’s a really laborious process to work through this material, even though as soon as you start doing that, you literally find women everywhere. And as soon as you start looking and asking those questions, you can find the answers.

But you do have to be willing to put in that hard work, which for us was a true joy, I have to say.

David Bashevkin: And it’s such an important distinction, whereas other scholarship, like let’s say you’re studying Maimonides or you’re studying the Talmud, so you may compare different texts or different presentations of that Talmud, but you’re not really getting to the lived experience of ordinary Jews within that time. And the body of work that you’re working on is so much more diffuse, so much more kind of informal in a way. It’s not really a manuscript necessarily.

I mean the Pinkasim, tell me a little bit about A, how are they preserved, what would you kind of talk about the modern parallel of a Pinkas? Would that be like the shul board meetings? Would that be like examining a WhatsApp group from your local synagogue sisterhood? What would be the contemporary equivalent of deriving information into the daily lives, not in the early modern period but in 2025, just to give people an understanding of what would it mean like to sift through Pinkasim of a local community?

Elisheva Carlebach: People used to think that they were only the minutes, the official minutes of the important elected leadership, and therefore they were dry and boring and didn’t contain any worthwhile material for the history of daily life. We discovered that that’s not the case. Yes, there’s a lot of dry material, some of which we also mined. Tax records are boring, but they could yield really interesting sociological and other information.

We found so many wonderful things just by looking at tax records and seeing Almanot or Rebitzins or some of the people who populate our book from just something like that. But there was far more.

David Bashevkin: And Almanah for our listeners is a widow. Somebody who is widowed and you would see the distributions to widows, how they were taken care of, how they continued to care for their family.

But please continue.

Elisheva Carlebach: Those are the kinds of records we had. I would argue that there is no real analogue to that in contemporary life because there is no real analogue to the type of community that we were looking at throughout the period that our book covers. What we were looking at is a Kehilla, community, which governed every aspect of Jewish life and it wasn’t voluntary.

with the Jewish community. There’s one for every smallish city and it has delegated authority by the local prince or whoever governs that territory and therefore the community controls every aspect of life including many aspects of what today we would call private life. There’s no way, maybe with AI we could someday come to something similar, but it was really almost a total picture, which is not something we could get because things have changed in many ways.

David Bashevkin: And your emphasis on the way Jewish communities had delegated state power in terms of a difference for sure in the diaspora in the United States, that is so unusual.

If we were to color the American Jewish experience, it’s all about separation of church and state and what so many people maybe miss or don’t fully appreciate is that much of, for sure in the early modern period and beforehand, much of Jewish life was really built on the foundation of state power. And that’s why you couldn’t just open up a shtiebel down the block. Professor Kaplan, did you want to add something?

Debra Kaplan: I think your comparison to America’s is really helpful for listeners because one of the distinctive features of our period, the early modern period from about 1500 to 1800, is that it is a period that witnesses the building of this more ramified Jewish community as a framework for Jewish life. And Professor Carlebach mentions already elections and tax collection.

This is a time of increased formalization. The leaders of the community are lay leaders, they’re not rabbis, and they really run every aspect of the community. And just to bring it back to the beginning of this conversation, there are so many officials. They have very specific roles.

And each one keeps his or her own logbook. And so we have different kinds of logbooks. We have the logbook of the tax collector and the logbook of the charity collector and the logbook of the shamash, the sexton. And we should talk about women.

We have logbooks of midwives. And individual people also kept their own pinkasim. So this is a culture of record-keeping and writing and that’s why we get this window into so many different aspects of daily life. And the question of governance of all kinds of issues: food and gatherings and public spaces and wedding attendance.

And this is something where you see all of the members of the community, not just the leaders, but also the ordinary people, and not just the male people, but also the women. And so these sources are teeming with information about daily life and therefore about women’s lives.

David Bashevkin: It’s so remarkable and to me, you may argue on analog how to bring it into contemporary times, to me it sounds almost the closest thing is if you got the rabbi and the president of the shul and maybe a couple shul members and got to log into all of the emails that they sent over a 10-year period. There’d be a lot of junk mail, there’d be a lot of things that you skim over, but you would be able to mine there what are the concerns, what are they dealing with.

I want to touch upon one thing and part of it is because I would be remiss if I did not mention that I had the distinct privilege in sitting in Professor Carlebach’s classroom. I believe the title of the course was Early Modern European History and it’s a class that stuck with me even though I don’t want anyone to rely on my memory or made-up quotes that I share from that course. Some of them are very colored and come through my own memory and experience. But I do believe I remember the first paper that was assigned in that course was a paper I believe by Michael Meyer on a concept called periodization.

Periodization is a fancy term for those who never had the privilege to study on an undergraduate or graduate level history is how we divide up different eras in time. And there is an amorphous period called early modern. It’s not quite modern and it’s not quite medieval. It’s this early modern period.

And aside from what you’ve shared in terms of the way communities stepped into their own independence and formalization and the processes of how communities were writing, can you maybe share a little bit more about why this specific focus on Jewish women in early modern Europe? Why not focus on Jewish women in the medieval period? Why not focus on Jewish women in the Talmudic period? Is that just a function of the sources being hard to find or is there something unique about the experience of women in this period that allowed for a unique synthesis or a unique window into the lives of these people?

Debra Kaplan: We could make a twofold argument and that’s what we do in the book. On the one hand, because of the abundance of sources and maybe we should take a little time later talking about just how many different kinds of sources… as we had available to us, women’s lives and experience become much more visible, and so we are able to trace them in ways that we couldn’t trace them for other periods, for the Talmudic period or even for the Middle Ages, which is right before our period. At the same time, we also argue that there were very specific changes within Jewish life and life more broadly in early modern Europe that actually brought change, not just visibility, but change to women’s experience.

You mentioned the kehillah, and this is a really foundational part of our book. Putting the kehillah at the center, as the framework in which Jewish life was lived, is part of what happens in the early modern period. It generates this record-keeping; that formalization brings the women to greater visibility. But there are also other things.

There’s a rise of literacy due to the spread of printed material, and these kinds of changes in governance and also in literacy influenced women’s participation in Jewish communal life. So it’s an exciting time in general. It’s an exciting time that had implications for women as well. So they both become more visible and their lives were also changed by the very exciting developments in this time period.

David Bashevkin: Professor Carlebach, do you want to add on to that, or?

Elisheva Carlebach: Those two distinctions are critical. The rise of visibility of women in so many different types of sources distinguishes this period, but also certain developments that we were able, some of them very small but with very large ramifications, just a little bit more economic independence for women. Even within the Jewish legal system, certain changes in the way women’s marriage contracts and inheritances were formulated that allowed them to have greater economic agency, I would say. So we have a whole chapter on women’s economic lives and the kinds of professions they pursued, which we don’t think we could have done for an earlier period.

This is a period in which there are some new communities being founded in Europe after the depopulation of the Black Plague and many expulsions. So the Middle Ages is its own world in a certain sense, and it’s not as though one morning people wake up and say, “Oh, I’m early modern now, I’m not medieval.” Periodization is obviously something that we impose retroactively looking back, and we identify this period as the one in which we see a new growth of Jewish communities and new opportunities specifically for Jewish women within those communities. So it’s very intertwined, and we had an easily definable period that we felt was very important to let people know that there’s so much to be learned about these amazing lives.

Debra Kaplan: If I could add one thing, it would be the concluding sentence of our book, which I think really sums up what we have to say about this period, and I’ll read it: “The early modern period may very well have been the era in which Jewish women attained the greatest degree of Jewish literacy and communal agency until contemporary times.” And I think that’s a surprising and interesting conclusion of our book that’s drawn from these various sources we consulted.

And so we really do believe that this is a very important period in the lives of Jewish women more broadly.

David Bashevkin: I cannot agree more, and the fascination that I have with the book is actually in the style in which you tell the story, and you really do transmit it as a narrative. It’s not this like kind of dense source after source; you present the sources as stories. And I want to just emphasize once again how varied the sources are.

Obviously, you’re listening to this on audio, so I can’t really share with you the gorgeous pictures that are sprinkled throughout the book in several different sections—I mean, they really are genuinely gorgeous—but I’m curious, as you’re doing this, both of you have storied careers as historians and as academics, you have studied Jewish history, you did not come into it totally blind or ignorant of women or women’s role even within the early modern period. And I wonder, as a starting point, to kind of understand what we would call in the Yeshiva world the chiddush of the book, the wow, the oh my goodness: do either of you remember, and I assume you may have different answers to this question, any specific sources, whether it was something from a pinkas or a tax record or a painting or an illustration, where you almost like muttered verbally like, “Wow, I did not expect that, I did not anticipate seeing that”? I’m not saying you have to fall out of your chair—I mean, both of you are professionals also—but moments in the research process which, is it fair to say, was over a 10-year period? I mean, this really, you’ve been working on this for quite a number of years. Do you have any memories in the research process of sources you came across and you said, “Wow”?

Elisheva Carlebach: We had lots of shared moments of that but one of the early times that I thought to myself why didn’t anybody write a book about this person was when many years ago I don’t know if you remember this but I wrote a book about a Sefardic Chacham Rabbi Moshe Hagiz who lived in the shadow of the messianic movement of Shabbetai Zvi.

One of the people in his broader time period and actually one of the people he opposed was a man by the name of Baer Eibeschuetz who took on the last name of his wife’s family Perlhefter. He was a fascinating figure. There is writing about Baer Eibeschuetz’s Shabbetaian heretical thinking.

David Bashevkin: Is that Wolf Eibeschuetz or this is someone else?

Elisheva Carlebach: No Wolf Eibeschuetz was a son of Rabbi Jonathan Eibeschuetz and this is somebody completely different who probably came from the same city.

Sure okay. But in any case this Baer Eibeschuetz Perlhefter had a wife. I knew about her. I actually had found in a very old periodical from the 1940s references to letters that she had written and they were very interesting.

It took a few years for me to hear her voice and say like why are you only concerned about my husband when I myself was such an important person I had such a rich life I left such a rich literary legacy and absolutely nobody is attending to that. So to me that was a moment. But we had many shared moments.

Debra Kaplan: Absolutely and I would add that we had moments where we discovered women who’d be known in other sources such as Bella Perlhefter and moments where we found women who you would be surprised to locate them in any sources.

So I worked in a previous project on charity and the poor. You know you find poor women and you find poor men and you find donors who are women and donors who are men. But at one point we found a family three generations of a family that worked in what we call the Hekdesh which is a kind of Jewish communal hospice. It’s both a hospital and a lodging for foreign travelers and many poor people are in the Hekdesh.

So I worked pretty extensively on them and we found three generations of women who were involved in working in the Hekdesh. Now these are women who tend to the poor but they are poor themselves. So there was a woman named Malka. She was the widow of the man who worked in the Hekdesh.

She took on the Hekdesh. She kept the records in the Hekdesh and when people died inventoried their belongings and was responsible for that before the various authorities. This was in Vienna and we find records of her daughter and also of her granddaughter who had actually tried to convert to Christianity and we found records of her sister who was not well and was extremely poor and so Malka took care of her sister Bella. And I stress the names because they’re not just amorphous people.

We’re able to piece together their lives and the fact that we could find poor Jewish women and information about the belongings that they had and the work that they did was really really exciting and thrilling. And we found the names of hundreds if not thousands of women and were able through working together different kinds of sources to piece together details of their lives. And sometimes when we could find somebody and say wow we found her here here she appears over there also she’s on this tombstone and she’s also in this will and she’s also in this Pinkas and look here she is in a court case and all of a sudden there was a person. And I think that work referencing different sources enabled us to see glimpses into people’s lives that was just unbelievable.

David Bashevkin: It’s really really incredible. One area that I’m very curious about is whether or not women understood something different is happening and understanding that something is changing as Professor Carlebach says nobody gets up out of bed one morning and says hey I’m now early modern you know like it’s not a voice from heaven that comes down and tells you you’re in a different period but I’m curious if you discovered reading in between the lines an awareness of women that something is changing something is different than what it was in previous generations we have opportunities that are different or was it just so organic and kind of the water and the environment that people lived in that people weren’t really commenting on the specific changes that women’s place in Jewish society may have been undergoing.

Elisheva Carlebach: So that’s a really good question and one that I don’t think we really address that much in the book because I don’t think that there were all that many overt statements. But think about this the title of our book is actually the English translation of a Yiddish line Alts is af ir gelegt everything is on the woman or a woman is responsible for everything which comes from a book that was printed I think in 1607 for the first time written by a woman named Rivka Tiktiner who who was the first woman, first Jewish woman to the best of my knowledge ever to have a full work of her own printed.

Wow. Interestingly Bella Perlhefter, who was also the editor and introducer of a massive work of Jewish thought, also prepared her work for print, but it was never printed. There are many times when we found two women in Prague who put together narratives of the founding of the city of Prague, but they’re really elaborate fairy tales in a certain way. But there’s an absolute sense when you talk about women and the era of print, because it is new in this period, a sense of entering an unexplored continent, we’re doing something completely unprecedented.

Less so, I think, for many traditional roles that women played, maybe in different ways with less consciousness that the period that they’re doing this in, in some ways departs from its predecessors. So, in certain types of professions and in certain kinds of legal wrangling for their right in courts, you can see a sense that women are pushing in a new direction, but it’s muted and there’s no real open sense of a break or a rupture with the past yet.

David Bashevkin: I appreciate that.

Debra Kaplan: The print, because it was new and recognized as new, was recognized as new for women by both women and men.

If we look at the Tiktiner volume, the editor of that volume in his preface makes much of the fact that this was something that had never been seen before, a volume written by a woman, but he’s quick to really praise her and explain all of her credentials. And I think in general, in print, we see many forwards and colophons and prefaces of editors trying to market books to women, particularly in Yiddish. So that’s new because print is new, although we also have Yiddish manuscripts in the late 15th century that are addressed to women, so it’s not exactly new, but the newness of print is exciting. A lot of the newness is our own surprise as scholars and as readers and as people living now, having assumptions about the past, and maybe we as historians didn’t have all of those assumptions, but I think people have a certain view of what women’s lives were like.

And if you look at our sources, the early modern people are not surprised when they find a woman—I’ll give one example, there’s a woman from Frankfurt named Rachla Drach, she died in the early 18th century, she was a midwife and she worked on a burial society and she gave out medicine to the poor and she was involved in business and she did all kinds of things. And when the community thinks about her and memorializes her on the pages of the communal memorial book, in some sense, they’re not surprised. Not only because they know her, but because there were other women, we call them Ba’alot Bayit, female heads of household, who did things just like she did. And so maybe we’re surprised now to find these women, but part of what’s remarkable, I think, about our research is how normative women’s involvement in the community, even in an informal capacity, was to early modern men and women.

They would not be surprised reading our book. I don’t like to speak for them, but I think they would say yes, that women were of course involved in the functioning of the community, they were vital. And we’re bringing that, you said Chiddush, we’re bringing that innovation, but that’s a scholarly innovation. I don’t think that our men and women would have found it as surprising.

This was their reality.

David Bashevkin: Both of you are women who are scholars who have PhDs who are able to build and distinguish yourself through careers. My grandmother, who was born in 1917, she served as a Rebbetzin, she could not bensh in Hebrew. She did not know how to read Hebrew and she was never taught or given that education.

And I look at someone like a Bella Perlhefter who literally is writing, you want to call it a Sefer, she’s really putting things out there. It’s so remarkable their level of education. And nowadays when we see, let’s say I look at you and you are much more highly educated than any of the women I know although it’s not so unusual to find a woman with a PhD. The distinguishing factor is being able to go to university and get higher education.

In the early modern period, what are the factors that allow certain women to kind of rise above and be remembered in history through their writings, whether it’s a Bella Perlhefter or the more famous Glikl of Hameln? There are certain women who seemingly had a real command of writing, they had a real command, I would call it like all of rabbinic scholarship to varying degrees, but there was a real involvement in writing and in literature. And then I kind of fast forward to the early 1900s and you have people like my grandmother who they couldn’t even read Hebrew. The factor in my grandmother’s time leading to the modern time is probably involvement in educational institutions, were they given to you? In the early modern period, what do you look at as the factor that allowed some women to really excel and others— We don’t know but they’re kind of lost to history. They weren’t necessarily writing.

They didn’t necessarily know how to read or write Hebrew. What do you think were the primary factors? Was it economic? Was it parenting? Was it educational? Why do we see some women just rise ahead of the expectations at least, at least from my vantage point, and were able to really be involved in scholarship and writing while others weren’t?

Elisheva Carlebach: Why don’t we say there are several different things in play here. One is the exceptionality of certain voices. So even in the Middle Ages you have women whose voices are preserved.

What we found in the early modern period is that those who normally were not able to access literacy at all had a greater level of literacy. So I want to just say that this may not be true for all of Eastern Europe which we don’t look at, and we found very, very few educational institutions for girls or women while Jewish communities do have institutional arrangements, not necessarily a school, but a melamed, a schoolteacher who’s hired to teach young boys. Sometimes girls but not so often. So the things that primarily distinguished women who wrote are two things: one is class.

Richer families could afford to hire tutors for their children and very often educated both sons and daughters in both Jewish and non-Jewish languages and literature. Glikl of Hameln talks about her father actually mentions a cheder. I don’t know anything further about a cheder in Hamburg or anywhere that she was, but she also talks about a private tutoring. Bella Perlhefter was the daughter of a very well-born family.

Her father was known as a kazin, a leader of the community. So people who were well-to-do educated their daughters if possible. And the other category are the children of rabbis, rabbinical households.

Debra Kaplan: I’ll give an example from a rabbinic family.

We have the famous prominent rabbi Yair Chaim Bacharach from the 17th century, the author of the Chavat Yair, a series of responsa, and he names his book Chavat Yair after his grandmother Chava, and in the introduction to his book, which readers and listeners may have seen and ignored or passed over, he praises his grandmother who he said knew the Bible, the 24 books of the Bible, all the things that she knew, the Rashi commentary that she was familiar with. And he’s not the only one. We’ve found other rabbinic men praising the women of their families, their matriarchs and their grandmothers, and how much they knew. And we find some of these women in other sources as well, women who were involved in Jewish learning, who we found one or two teachers, and so we find that in the rabbinic households, and I think it might also be worth thinking about the fact that class and the kinds of family you came from impacted the literacy of the men as well.

Not every Jewish man is writing a work of great scholarship, even if he may read a work of great scholarship. So that’s a piece of this puzzle. I think part of what makes our period so exciting is how much literacy expanded, and a lot of that has to do with works in the vernacular and with prints, so any work that was printed in Yiddish was more accessible to less-learned men and to women. The famous phrase that’s used in one of the books is “women and men who are like women”, which refers to people who speak Yiddish, which is really everybody.

This is a period in which everything is being printed in Yiddish: stories as we mentioned, handbooks and manuals, and one of my favorite finds was a small handbook that we read about the laws of Jewish slaughter and how to prepare meat and to salt the meat and to prepare it, and it was dedicated to a daughter of a rabbinic family, her name was Musketa, and she was eight years old, and she helped the author organize the book for print. So again, it’s about family, but through the lens of Musketa who was maybe from an exceptional family, we can think about other young girls and women who would have read this book or have listened to this book if they couldn’t read because they were responsible for preparing the meat. And so literacy is not limited just to the kinds of texts you might imagine, but to every facet of ordinary life. And I think that’s part of what’s so exciting about the early modern period where the written word meets every aspect of daily life.

David Bashevkin: I want to come back and talk a little bit, and I know it seems almost too simplistic to ask such prestigious scholars about this, but I do want to come back to the pictures. And I wanted to ask really two questions: A, the cover image that you chose, it’s an engraving from the Skirball Cultural Center in LA. It’s this absolutely lovely picture where you see kind of people hanging out, a lot of men congregating, maybe in a square or courtyard, you could tell me more about it, and you see in one place there is a woman, very clearly, obviously very colorful, putting her hand on the keppie, on the head of a young girl. And I wanted to know number one, why did you choose specifically this picture? You have a lot of incredible pictures inside that I could imagine also would have served as fantastic covers.

Why this picture, and what do you hope your readers see within this image?

Elisheva Carlebach: We indeed struggled a lot about what to put on the cover, so I can’t tell you that this was even necessarily our first choice, but it turned out to be a good choice. But I want you to look at the cover again and look at what the woman is holding in her other hand.

David Bashevkin: Wow, it’s so interesting. I totally, it’s like a prayer book.

Elisheva Carlebach: She is carrying her siddur, and that is what we want readers to see. She was responsible for the child, she’s responsible for her own religiosity. She came to shul, she attended synagogue. So many of our women are praised in the memorial books for attending synagogue on a daily basis.

How many contemporary women or even men make it to shul every single day? Yet we found many, many women in different communities across Western Europe who are being praised for being in the synagogue morning and evening, Shabbat and chaggim, winter and summer, they’re always there. And we believe that having your own siddur, which the age of print finally allowed a much more democratic access to a siddur, because in the Middle Ages there was one in the whole Beit Knesset on parchment and that belonged to the cantor, it belonged to the person who led the services. If every woman has access to the words of the prayer service, that allows so much more participation. So one of the things we wanted to highlight is women are present there and there’s a reason for it.

And they are in many ways absolutely central to the functioning of the community, which is something we repeated multiple times as a leitmotif in our book.

David Bashevkin: I just want to mention one thing that you mentioned that was really striking and I think it unfortunately reflects poorly on the contemporary moment. I think one of the most horrifying Jewish scenes I have ever witnessed with my own two eyes, and I’m not going to say which synagogue it was, but I remember being in synagogue in a weekday where in a lot of synagogues, even sometimes on Shabbos, you will find that men sit within the women’s section. That happens unfortunately in a lot of synagogues because especially a woman coming to synagogue at six o’clock in the morning on a Wednesday in many communities is very unusual.

And I remember one time a woman came for shacharit in the morning prayers and there was like, I wouldn’t call it bedlam, but like a level below bedlam, everybody had to take their tefillin and their tallis and everything and grab their things and go out the other side. And I remember witnessing and watching people’s faces, they were frustrated. On their faces you could see, why do you have to come here? Why do you have to be here? And to know that historically it was actually the opposite was the case, that women were being praised for their attendance to shul, being encouraged, if you’re praising a woman for coming to shul daily, that means that is a practice that is encouraged and seen as a positive, is something just worth reflecting on in our synagogues when it can happen in different communities where on a Wednesday at 6 a.m. somebody comes in for whatever reason and it can be overflow, there is no women’s section at that point. So you mentioning that I think is really, really remarkable.

Debra Kaplan: I think it’s worth noting that the women’s section of the synagogue, which took on different forms, was an exclusively female place. The men did not pray in the women’s synagogues. Women were there in the mornings and in the evenings, and the section was organized and run by women. So for example, in Prague, we found female gabbetahs in Yiddish, in Hebrew it would be gabbayot, female officials who were responsible for the section and they were elected and appointed along with their male counterparts.

We find them in the pages of a synagogue pinkas, a synagogue logbook, and we have their names for several years. There were female charity collectors just as there were male charity collectors. Charity was often collected in the space of the synagogue and so there were men who collected the money donated by men and there were official female charity collectors who collected the money brought by women to synagogue, obviously not on Shabbat but during the weekdays, which tells us something about women’s weekday presence. And they were responsible for these actions.

We have women donating beautiful tapestries to the synagogue and even we had one woman who donated a sink to the women’s section. So I think we have to think of it as a vibrant space that it’s not just a place women go to as an annex. but it’s a place where women are present and have a certain kind of leadership role, a formal role, which is very much a part of how early modern life was organized with official people and logbook and tasks, but also in a very gendered way. There are places where men are in charge and there are places where women are in charge.

So, for example, the mikvah, the ritual bath, is another place where men don’t go at the hours where women are present and the person who is in charge of the records, of the immersion, of the money, is the woman who is in charge. And so I think it’s worth considering some of what we said earlier about communal organization and how much that impacted women as participants, and the synagogue is one excellent example of that.

David Bashevkin: Even that notion is just worth saying out loud without any specific program or suggestion or initiative, but the fact that the women’s section, the Ezrat Nashim of synagogues had a leadership role for just to kind of tend to the space and make sure it’s moving, it’s beautiful, it’s ensuring that everyone’s place within these communal spaces is being cared for and looked after. I absolutely love the reading and I’m sorry I didn’t notice it, it could be you write it explicitly in your book and I missed it, but I absolutely love the reading of this picture of that cover picture because I did kind of miss, I obviously saw it, but the siddur underneath her arms while she’s patting this child on the head.

I’m curious because it really is such an engaging part of the book. Do each of you have favorite images, illustrations that each of you uncovered because the book really is throughout, both in kind of glossy pages and throughout the book, you have these incredible images and pictures? Do each of you have a favorite image?

Debra Kaplan: I think I speak for both of us, but I will only speak for myself. I think we have so many favorite images that if you could only imagine how many images we did not get to include in this book, you would fall off your chair. The amount of pictures that we found depicting Jewish women could form its own beautiful book.

I want to just say the illustrations are not to make it accessible to six-year-olds although we would be very happy for six-year-olds to learn about Jewish women’s lives. I think it’s worth saying just for a moment, the visual sources are central to our argument and just like women are found in the written text, they’re also found in these images. So we found a lot of archival documentation about women in synagogue, but we also have here a beautiful image of women in synagogue. There’s an image that we have in color that I particularly love, it’s a little bit morbid, there’s a woman who’s mourning a loved one and it’s from a Seder Birkat Hamazon, a book of blessings, and she’s sitting on the floor with her beloved deceased in front of her with the blessing Baruch Dayan HaEmet, blessing God for his judgment even in these difficult times.

There’s something I think very emotional about that image, very real, that speaks to me, but I don’t think there’s any image in this book that I don’t completely love.

David Bashevkin: Professor Carlebach, could I push you for maybe a favorite?

Elisheva Carlebach: You could push me for one that I think says something else about the book and that we thought in many ways represented it and that’s the women on the glass tumbler. The women of the Chevra Kadisha in Prague, a whole series of women who are holding what might be packages of earth from Eretz Yisrael, we weren’t sure what they were holding. What was so compelling about that image, it’s the last color image in the book.

So that actually came off a glass. It was hand-painted because annually, the Chevra Kadisha in Prague commissioned a tumbler honoring the Chevra Kadisha, the burial society of the community.

David Bashevkin: A tumbler is a glass that you drink scotch out of.

Elisheva Carlebach: Right, exactly, a tumbler is a glass you drink scotch out of and that’s probably pretty much exactly what they did at their Chevra Seudah, which they had every right to do given the difficulty of the nature of their work, which was voluntary.

But what’s so interesting is if you look a little bit beyond the women towards the top, you’ll see that the glass, the tumbler, had two sides to it. On one side was the men’s chevra depicted and the women were on the other side. And if you go to the museum, the Jewish Museum of Prague today, you could see that tumbler. But you have to walk around to see the women.

And there was something symbolic about the way it was constructed, but the prominence that the women’s chevra was given here and the unity of the women, which we wrote about in the chapter on the Chevra Kadisha, women organized for all kinds of benevolent purposes: taking care of orphans, visiting the sick, clothing the poor, but also preparing the dead for burial. And this was very sacred work and very respected. Well, let me step back for a second and say that these kinds of voluntary societies are pretty new in this period. This is not to say that women didn’t always…

Always, men and women didn’t always prepare the dead for burial in the Jewish tradition. They did. They, since time immemorial, performed many of these acts, but they were not formal societies with a few exceptions in late medieval Spain maybe, until the early modern period.

David Bashevkin: If you’ll allow me to answer my own question, but it’s a little bit more of a joyful picture, but it’s one that I feel like we have to mention if I could make a poster out of it, I would, and that is you have this gorgeous plate which is a Rosh Chodesh plate where it says in Hebrew Rosh HaChodesh Hazeh, and the image is of three women, clearly upper class society women, Jewish women, and they seem to be playing poker.

It’s a card night. You could see the cards, and there’s something very sweet about the association which obviously exists in Halacha but has kind of fallen out in modern times. It still kind of exists in a whisper, but the connection of using Rosh Chodesh as a day for women, like a women’s celebration day, and you see, it seems that maybe they organized their poker night because this is the image of Rosh Chodesh. What do you think of? It’s a picture of three women playing very clearly with cards.

You could make out which cards they are. That image for me was like, wow, that is just fantastic and so, so lovely.

Debra Kaplan: It’s a wonderful image, and I want to use this opportunity to say that the image is interesting because it connects to our texts and to our arguments in certain ways, so it’s not just a beautiful image on its own, I agree with you, we may have fallen off our chairs when we saw that image. There are texts and bylaws of Jewish communities limiting gambling and playing with cards and playing with dice, and Rosh Chodesh, the first day of the month, is often a day where that kind of games of chance are permitted, so we see a connection between the written text and the image.

And also, this image is taken from again one of these miniature illuminated manuscripts which would have probably been gifted in this case to a woman. And I think it points again to the importance of the written word in women’s lives, that they had a small book of prayers that was just for a specific woman, commissioned with beautiful paintings that featured women, women preparing for the Mikvah, women playing cards, women mourning the dead, women lighting candles for Shabbat or holidays, women walking with a loved one in a beautiful garden, even women selling vegetables at a stand, and so the depictions of women in these different roles in a small book intended for a female reader, here of the upper class as you said, sort of underscores our arguments about the written word, the availability of texts, and the importance of the images as part of our work. And so that’s something that is really important to understand how to read even those color images which are in their own section alongside the text of the book because it’s part of the source material that we mined to write the book.

David Bashevkin: In many contemporary Orthodox communities, and I’m sure in many non-Orthodox communities, questions of the role of women can often be very fraught conversations and can even be somewhat adversarial.

If you walk in many deeply committed Orthodox communities, women play a very different role. It’s not backward, but a very different role, I’m talking about in the United States in a Yeshiva community, than is maybe depicted in some ways in the book. I’m curious how you understand when and why the question of women’s role within Jewish society and daily Jewish life became, the word is maybe, an adversarial component, a component of are they asking for too much of a leadership role, and kind of calibrating conversations that have gone on to this very day but have certainly colored much of the last hundred years when discussing, if someone were to write a book on Jewish women in the modern century, definitely that would come up on some of the battles over what is the appropriate role. And much of your book I didn’t see that same type of adversarialness, concern, where is this leading, what are you going to want for next, if we give you an inch, you’re going to take a foot, and much of the discourse that I think colors a lot of contemporary conversations and the experience of many women growing up, not in all communities, but in some communities.

And I’m curious how you understand the contemporary discourse and narrative around women in the Jewish community and when it kind of changed to become what many see or experience now as like an issue, and how we got from the contemporary state from this almost like utopian world that you described, not to say that everyone’s lives were easy or perfect, but certainly seemed to be much more clearly defined within the community and without so much of the hand-wringing that you see quite often today in all sorts of Jewish communities.

Debra Kaplan: I don’t know how much I would like to comment on contemporary Jewish life, which I am not an expert on from an academic perspective. perspective. I think we could talk a little bit about why we ended our book where we ended it, because we talked about a very specific period in Jewish history, the early modern period, and we ended our book at around 1800 because of a very important change that affected all Jews, men and women.

Beginning in the 19th century, the kehillah, this purposeful Jewish organization that we’ve been describing, was dismantled in the areas we studied, in Western and Central Europe, as a result of emancipation. So we ended the book there, because the kehillah was really very much the center of our book, and that way of life that we described did not exist anymore in the same ways. Everything after that that Jews do is voluntary. And so that changed a lot of different things for men and for women and just the entire structure of Jewish life.

And from there there’s a lot of scholarship that one could read about women in the 19th century and the 20th century, and there were many changes. And I think things are very different in different locations. But for us, the period that we studied, which begins in some ways with this explosion of the Jewish community and its bureaucracy and the rise of print, really ends at the beginning of the 19th century. And I guess if I could say one more thing and then turn it over to Professor Carlebach, I think it’s really important to understand that the world that we described in our book is a very deeply gendered world.

In some sense, the comparison today is when we’re in a very different kind of time where ideas about the roles of men and women in various societies is different. In the early modern Europe more broadly, for both Jews and Catholics and Protestants, it was very clear what women’s roles were and what men’s roles were. And while there were struggles about some of this, especially in Catholic and Protestant societies, and wonderful work has been done on that, I think we should see what we found about Jewish women’s functioning within the community within that gendered framework. So women were in charge in places where men were not, and women had particular roles.

There’s a reason we see a Jewish woman who’s a midwife because a man would not have been present at delivery. And so I don’t want the listeners to misunderstand what it is that we wrote about, which was a deeply, deeply gendered world in which women played a very active part. And I think that’s not really as surprising as it sounds, but the entire world is different and so much changed in the period between the end of our book and today that I wouldn’t feel qualified to opine in that way.

David Bashevkin: The part that I kind of missed and I didn’t see is what’s called colloquially nowadays is the pushback.

Sometimes when women assert a new, especially in a religious community, there will be all sorts of kinds of pushback. Is that really appropriate for you? Is that really the right space? Not all communities deal with this, but certainly over the last 100 years, there is that sort of trying to find the right space. And I guess that voice or that kind of pushback I didn’t really see emphasized in the book. And I’m curious, are you arguing or saying that’s because it was so organized top-down institutionally that everything was kind of preorganized, everybody had their spot or that role? Why didn’t we see pushback in the roles of women in that early modern period or that concern of what is this going to lead to?

Debra Kaplan: I don’t think you see that exact concern, but you do see some what you’re calling pushback, I don’t know if that’s the phrase that I would use.

I’ll give a very small example of charity collectors. There were women who also, I mentioned before, official charity collectors, there were other women who collected charity in the women’s synagogue, in Metz and in Halberstadt. And some of the male lay leaders were upset about this and sought to set rules for who could collect and when they could collect and how they could collect. Or there were both male and female processions to the communal cemetery before certain holidays, and there was an attempt to say to women, either don’t go or go at a different time.

Now our period in this conversation, it sounds like a very static period from 1500 to 1800, there were also changes over time within this period. So what I just described is from the 18th century, and those are changes we see in the 18th century. So there’s a lot of nuance I think in some of what we presented. It’s hard to really get at all the details that are in the book, but it’s hard to maybe get at all the details in a podcast format, but there certainly is change and there’s sometimes attempts to really define what is the appropriate space for women.

But again, there are places in which women are very, very present, and that was expected within the community. And maybe Professor Carlebach wants to bring other examples from our book?

Elisheva Carlebach: Yes, we had a lot of examples of what I would call local tension. Speaking about charity collectors, we had an amazing story in which the women in Jerusalem write to the women in Western Ashkenaz, asking the women to take up separate charity collections for the Holy Land, because they said the money that the men collect goes only to the men of Jerusalem, which means that widows and women who are on their own were not getting any of those funds. And so they say officials in the female community in Jerusalem.

This is one small example of what I would call a pushback against a male-dominated charity collection. We have cases in which a midwife was challenged by the lay leaders of her community to divulge certain private things that she didn’t want to divulge and they said, “Oh yeah? You don’t want to tell us? We’re firing you as the midwife for our community.” Well three days later she’s delivering other babies and she’s back on the roster because you can’t have a community without midwives, otherwise women and children would die. We have sumptuary laws in which you see an attempt to keep women away from certain celebrations in the synagogue like the Brit, or to limit their number at various parties and the women push back and the men retreat from their positions. We have cases of contested divorces in which there’s male versus female but I would say overall every single one of these examples is in a way an exception that proves a rule and the rule was that there is a community as Professor Kaplan said with well-defined roles, they are defined by gender and since this is very well accepted throughout the regular world beyond the Jewish community, that wasn’t really in question.

One could dig even deeper maybe and think about the foundations of pre-modern life and what are some of the innovations in technology, in medicine, in maternal health that allowed contemporary women to challenge that status quo but those things really did not affect the world we were looking at. And there’s a real acknowledgment that the work of women was absolutely essential, it was core to the functioning of the Kehilla.

Debra Kaplan: One of the most exciting sources we found was from bylaws in the burial society of Prague and the burial society was a place where we saw men and women often working together, women had the roles of sewing the shrouds because that was women’s work, sewing was women’s work, and women were responsible for purifying the bodies of deceased women for modesty reasons whereas the men purified the bodies of the men and they were the gravediggers, you don’t have women digging graves and you don’t really have men sewing shrouds. And in most communities we saw a lot of cooperation in Berlin and in Mainz and in Rensburg, a small town, and we even see some communities where the men and the women of the burial society, because it was a very prestigious society, people really wanted to participate in the burial society despite the hard work, some of the times they were married to one another which leads to a lot of questions about how they managed their nighttime and daytime activities because it’s sort of a round-the-clock job.

But in Prague we have an example where the men were enraged by the women’s success in raising funds and in procuring shrouds and they made shrouds in advance and they were really entrepreneurial in many ways and in one instance the male burial society leaders had a sort of coup and they really threw out the female burial society leaders and instituted a new slate of female leaders. They also tried to take over the shroud business, the women still sewed but the men said we will be in charge of the selling and we’ll make them as we need them. And what was really interesting was if you keep going forward in time, the men are facing the same problems the women were and were completely overwhelmed by the number of dead and the difficulty of getting the shrouds ready. And so there’s a sort of irony in all of this but this story is to underscore what Professor Carlebach said, that’s a very local tension.

It’s something that we saw in Prague, it is something that we did not see elsewhere. And so this book brings together material from Metz in the west to Prague in the east, from Copenhagen in the north to northern Italy in the south, this sort of western and central Ashkenazi-Yiddish speaking area. And there are important local differences in different cities, rural versus urban, and so we bring together a narrative but the differences in how these different places functioned is also really, really important.

David Bashevkin: One question that I had really for both of you but specifically for Professor Carlebach, your earlier work on Rav Moshe and I know I’m pronouncing his last name, it’s not Hagiz. Hagiz, yeah.

Your book is called The Pursuit of Heresy, it’s a phenomenal book, really, really fascinating about the drama that was unfolding during the messianic controversy of Sabbatai Zevi. But there was a lot of scholarship, particularly I’m thinking of the book by Ada Rapoport-Albert entitled Women and the Messianic Heresy of Sabbatai Zevi where she talks about that women were so involved, whether it was getting ecstatic experiences or having prophecy. They were so involved in the Messianic movement of Shabtai Tzvi and all of the aftermath that she seems to make an argument that much of the gender divides that we now associate with the Chassidic world were actually a reaction, a correction, a countermeasure, a reaction to the egalitarian spirit of the Sabbatean movement. And I’m curious if either of you saw, and you may deal with this explicitly in your book, and I’m sorry if I missed it, if either of you saw any corrections or any way in which that egalitarian spirit of the Sabbatean movement either led to women having to reassert what the proper role was or a reorganization, or coming back to the word, the clumsy word I used, you know, that pushback or overcorrection.

Did you see that the messianic fervor surrounding Shabtai Tzvi could be traced or seen of having a marked impact on the role of women in that early modern period?

Elisheva Carlebach: So we have an actual eyewitness testimony to the Shabtai Tzvi excitement in Western Europe. Only one actual eyewitness testimony in the first person was written by a woman, as far as I know, in all the sources we have, and that woman was Glückel of Hameln, who wrote about what it was like to be in a community where people began to sell their homes, stock up on dried food, and make preparations to sail to the Holy Land because the messiah was there. What’s so interesting about Glückel‘s testimony is where it comes in her narrative. Glückel writes that she had a beautiful little daughter, Matle, who became ill and who passed away.

And she’s writing this decades later and she says, you know, I never got over the loss of that child. The idea of the promise of a young beautiful little girl that was then cut off was such a disappointment and so great a hurt we never forgot it. And then she talks about the failed messiah, Shabtai Tzvi. She said we had such high hopes that this was finally the coming of the mashiach, and then it turned out to be such a bitter disappointment for us.

David Bashevkin: And she literally uses imagery and language comparing it to a failed delivery.

Elisheva Carlebach: Exactly. The term Chevlei Mashiach, the labor pangs that precede the Messiah, there’s a lot of overlapping vocabulary. But there’s no sense in her writing whatsoever that this was about to overturn the existing social order.

And I think a lot of the testimonies in the late Professor Rappoport-Albert’s book come from a little bit later period, not completely. The wives of Shabtai Tzvi were very interesting personalities, but for the most part, that sense of overturning gender roles actually comes with the Frankist movement. And that’s much later and in Poland, and we’re already dealing with a kind of enlightenment or treatment in which libertinism is one radical strand of enlightenment. And I think that’s where you mostly find the sense that gender roles will be completely overturned or erased.

David Bashevkin: My final question, which I assume is going to be your least favorite question, Professor Carlebach, I sat in your classroom for some time and I know anything that even gets near the universe of autobiographical reflections is not something that you gravitate towards. And I assume, I don’t know if Professor Kaplan has quite the same sensitivities, but I’ll phrase the question in a way that it doesn’t necessarily have to reflect on your own personal experience. But at the very least in the contemporary moment, people are going to be reading this book in the modern time and surely they’re going to be thinking about the current way in which women operate within our community. Are there any specific ideas, roles, practices that you chanced upon in your research that reflecting on this contemporary moment you think, you know what, maybe we should bring that back.

That was a really good idea and there was a lot that really helped women with that and it’s a shame that it fell into disuse for whatever reason? And kind of in the reverse, are there anything that you read that you were like, thank God, that is no longer the practice for women?

Debra Kaplan: I think it’s important to say that our book is not a book of advocacy for anything. It’s a book of history. We want it to be accessible to a lot of people because we think that telling this other half of Jewish history is really important. We find it inspiring.

We hope that the voices and stories of Jewish women will inspire others in various communities to appreciate the contributions of Jewish women. roles for women.

David Bashevkin: Absolutely if you’ll allow me a very gentle extraordinary gentle I’m going to try to rephrase it and see if I can get a more targeted response but your book is one hundred percent it is not an activist book it has no suggestions no comments on anything nowadays I’m talking personally you’re both Jewish women living in 2024 were there any moments in your research where you chanced upon a practice that has fallen into disuse that maybe you had a sense of longing for or a deep sense of appreciation for a practice a custom that has fallen into disuse that even on a personal level as a scholar but also as a Jewish woman living in 2024 it evokes a smile I’m not saying you set up a conference and we’re going to bring people in say this is the solution to all of but something on an individual level where it caught your eye and you said it’s a shame that we don’t do that anymore or wouldn’t it be so lovely if we brought that back?

Elisheva Carlebach: As you’re speaking I’m thinking about the practice of women writing ethical wills leaving your descendants an account of what was most important to you in your life and this could be for both men and women of course but we found so many such type of wills that don’t only distribute material possessions that goes without saying but also tell their children these are the most important values be good people fear God walk in his ways and sometimes with very very explicit instructions about how they felt the future generations in their family should be raised I think that’s a wonderful practice and I would love to see everyone revive it so that their descendants and offspring could do the same we found entire volumes of wills again many of them ethical wills and one other small thing I would say is that in the period we look at nobody questioned the value of what I would call domestic labor or in the domestic sphere the fact that people were able to raise children and to keep homes that were welcoming and warm they were able to maintain all the rituals and the holidays and the festivities we found women’s Yiddish recipe books cookbooks we have a picture of one in which it tells you whether the recipe was dairy or meat and whether it needed to be baked or it needed to be cooked in Yiddish women were keeping notes of the way in which they managed their households because this was central to Jewish life and today there seems to be without getting into the super contemporary discourse over traditional wives and so forth in the political sphere but for a very long time there was a real discounting of that kind of work as not really being important and I think without being preachy because women do have so many more challenges and so many of them have to work far from the home and it is impossible to have the kind of life that people lived hundreds of years ago but the sense that whatever they do in that sphere it’s valuable it’s central it’s important not to be discounted for anything else

David Bashevkin: I say we bring back Rosh Chodesh poker night Rosh Chodesh poker night I think is my takeaway if you were asking me what should we bring I absolutely love it I cannot thank you enough you’ve been so incredibly generous with your time I always wrap up my interviews with more rapid fire questions they’re all voluntary so you could plead the fifth on any of them I would love a book recommendation specifically related to this topic obviously you blazed a new trail in the understanding of women but somebody who wants to learn more about this subject is now looking for another book after this wow this was so lovely so amazing maybe a different period a different time but something else of this flavor we love book recommendations could each of you recommend another book that kind of has this focus and subtext about the role of women in Jewish life?

Elisheva Carlebach: Two medieval titles come to mind one by Eve Krakowski and one by Elisheva Baumgarten. Elisheva Baumgarten’s Mothers and Children is a classic in the field and the first to really highlight the role of Jewish women in the Christian world and Eve Krakowski wrote an absolutely pathbreaking Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt based on Cairo Genizah material a really amazing work of scholarship and wonderful to read.

David Bashevkin: Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt fascinating Professor Kaplan do you want that to count for your recommendation or do you have.

Debra Kaplan: I think it’s a fabulous book they’re both fabulous books I will sign on to that with great pleasure.

David Bashevkin: my next question if somebody gave you a great deal of money and allowed you to take a sabbatical with no responsibilities whatsoever and go back to the academy to get a PhD in a different field, what do you think the subject and title of your dissertation would be? What would you want to go back and study?

Debra Kaplan: Well, I do still love early modern history, but I might really be interested in studying again sciences or medicine, something that I think is a very important field and very different from what I do.

David Bashevkin: Professor Carlebach?

Elisheva Carlebach: Something in art history, the whole visual angle and using visual sources, material sources, non-textual sources, something that came to me later in my career and something that I wish I had had more training and appreciation in.

David Bashevkin: My final question, which something tells me at least one of you is going to skip, I’m always curious about people’s sleep schedules. What time do you go to sleep at night and what time do you wake up in the morning?

Debra Kaplan: I sleep very little. I go to sleep very, very late and I wake up very, very early. In some ways, like an early modern woman who is up all night running around and then up in the morning, there’s something that I can identify with when I read those passages.

David Bashevkin: Thank you both so much for joining us today. You’ve been so incredibly gracious with your time. The book, once again, published by Princeton University, don’t get scared just because a university publishes it. It doesn’t mean you need a PhD to read it.

It really is so inviting, the language, the narrative, the way that you bring the sources alive as a story, I found so eye-opening. The title of the book is called A Woman Is Responsible for Everything: Jewish Women in Early Modern Europe. Thank you so much to Professors Deborah Kaplan and Elisheva Carlebach. It was such a privilege and pleasure speaking with both of you today.

Elisheva Carlebach: Thank you. Thank you so much for having us. We really appreciate the chance to spread the word about our work.

David Bashevkin: There is a conversation that I was not a part of but I heard about afterwards that took place in the OU with very senior Rosh Yeshiva, with very serious communal leaders and with heads of the Orthodox Union.

And you would think if you had a gathering of senior Jewish leaders with one of the most major Jewish organizations in the world, like what would be number one on their agenda? What would you put on their agenda? And what I found so fascinating is that number one on the agenda was thinking proactively even more about opportunities for religious growth and religious engagement for women within our community, and in this case at a OU meeting it was talking about specifically women within the Orthodox community. I remember when I first heard this, I was like shocked. I’m like, number one on the agenda? Like of all things? That’s really what they spoke about with all of these senior major leaders? And somebody explained it to me. They said, you have to think and understand how much of a revolution has taken place in the last thirty-some odd years when it comes to men’s programming and engagement, whether it is all of the movement around Daf Yomi or pushes for men, adult men, married men to go out and increase their Torah learning, to have a night seder, which means going out during the week and learning in a Beit Midrash for an hour or two.

There’s been so much planning and so many resources and strategy that has been dedicated to engaging men in lifelong learning, and that is definitely a hallmark and one of the great successes of the Orthodox community. And while there are many robust programs for women’s learning and women’s education, et cetera, et cetera, well into adulthood, if you were being honest and you look at it in plain sight, the level of resources, strategy, and eyeballs, in terms of just communal thought and communal investment, there is really no comparison between the communal infrastructure we have dedicated for lifelong Jewish engagement for men and the infrastructure that we have invested and dedicated communally for lifelong Jewish engagement for women. Now you might be like me and say, I don’t think any institution has any of the answers for any of these questions. I am not known to be a great institutionalist, but I think just highlighting the fact that it was number one on the agenda tells us something about this moment, of the strategies and the allowances that we’ve kind of given to think about what does it mean to be an engaged adult Jewish man and trying to figure out do we have a vision for what it means to be an engaged Jewish woman? What does that look like? What are the pipelines and the programs that can actually have this? In my opinion, and this is something that I’ve shared with philanthropists, so much of the philanthropic investment has gone to basically increase the supply, to have more programs for higher learning for women, to have more places where women can continue their education past high school, past college, to have a deeper engagement with Jew- competent and engaging female educators.

What that doesn’t really address is the demand. Is there a demand for higher level female education in our community, in any community? How do you shape demand? How do you make sure that a 16 year old, 11th grader in high school, a Jewish woman, how do you ensure that their exposure to Jewish life and Jewish learning can actually transform realistically into adulthood? We have pipelines, and I’m not saying it doesn’t exist for women, but the clarity and the investment that we’ve made in these pipelines for men, I don’t think that you can even compare them or say them in the same breath of what we’ve done for women. It has not been adequate in my opinion, and it has led to not just a problem in supply, which there is a lot of philanthropic attention on, programs for higher learning, which are absolutely wonderful. I think a lot of this issue is demand.

I look at it in my own life, in my own neighborhood. Is this what people want? Is this what they are hungry for? How do you influence communal demand? It’s much easier—it’s not super easy, but in comparison, it’s much easier to orchestrate and to kind of shape organizational supply. You find the handful of people, whether or not we need more educators, or more doctors, or more lawyers, or more gym coaches, whatever it is, and you find those people and we make the pathway for their expertise in that area a little bit more easier, make it financially more accessible, etc., etc. But that does not necessarily mean or translate—let’s take Jewish scholarship off the table. Imagine what we’re trying to change is lifelong gym membership or lifelong exercise.

You can deal with the supply, which is setting up gyms, setting up more gym teachers, and giving them more access and training and different ways that they can teach people to stay in shape, etc., etc. That will not necessarily translate into communal demand. People may still not want to go and you’ll just have a lot of unemployed gym teachers. The analogy that I am making is the way that we think about women in the contemporary space. I think we give a lot of attention to the supply, which is the leadership, which are the educators, and we do not pay nearly enough attention to how we orchestrate demand.

And I actually think 18Forty plays a very serious role in this. I think part of what we are trying to do is actually not just shape supply. I’m not producing any scholars or leaders. But what we are trying to do is to shape demand, to explain to people why this is actually important and why this is actually something that you would want.

We try to shape demand with Yiddishkeit most generally. We try to shape demand with specific issues that we’ve spoken about in the past, whether or not that’s connecting to the Jewish people, whether or not that’s our relationship with materialism, whether or not that’s just a vision for the Jewish family and the importance of family staying together, like we do each year before Pesach in our series on intergenerational divergence. It doesn’t matter really what the issue is, but so much of what we’re trying to do, and what I am now posing as a general question, is how do you orchestrate demand beyond getting somebody onto a podcast or media that has kind of mass appeal, which I think is a big part of it. What are the other ways that we can shape communal demand to ensure that we are a Jewish community for everyone regardless of gender? That the same way that we think about pipelines for lifelong Jewish learning for men, we have some vision or pipeline for what it looks like, what does it mean for lifelong Jewish engagement for women.

And this brings me back to the conclusion of the Cynthia Ozick article, which I think ends on a very beautiful note, even though much of the article is quite frustrated, and understandably so. But she ends as follows. To do this is necessary. But it is not necessary for the sake of a more harmonious social order.

It is least of all necessary for the sake of modern times, which she uses a quote for. It is not necessary for the sake of women. It is not even necessary for the sake of the Jewish people. It is necessary for the sake of Torah, to preserve and strengthen Torah itself.

And that I would sign on for, though I do think it is necessary for the sake of the Jewish people, to understand and to build those pipelines, those programs that engage, that orchestrate not just the supply of having women who are giving fantastic classes and shiurim or whatever it is, but to actually increase the demand, to reimagine, to have a vision for what lifelong Jewish engagement looks like both for men and for women, is absolutely necessary, not under the guise of modernity and not because this is what we need for modern times or make sure that we get along, but we’re doing this for Klal Yisrael, for Amcha Yisrael, for the Jewish people, and to end off with that quote from Cynthia Ozick: it is necessary for the sake of Torah to preserve and strengthen Torah itself. Strengthen Torah itself. So thank you so much for listening. This episode, like so many of our episodes, was edited by our incredible friend Denah Emerson.

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