Hiding in Plain Sight

It was Yom Kippur afternoon, and Rivkah Tiktiner must have been hungry. She was spending the holiest day of the year as a houseguest in Ruthenia, in today’s western Ukraine. As the fast wore on, Tiktiner saw a Jewish woman telling her Christian maid to heat the oven and stuff chickens for the coming break-fast. When Tiktiner rebuked her, the woman replied, “This is how I’ve seen it done, and this is how I’ve always done it.” Tiktiner, an educated and urbane woman from Prague, included this sorry tale of halakhic illiteracy in her Meneket Rivkah (Rebecca’s Nursemaid), a religious manual full of piety, rules, and manners that was the first published Yiddish book written by a woman (it appeared shortly after her death in 1609). As Tiktiner exhorted, it was crucial for her readers to become proper ba’alot bayit (female Jewish householders), because “a woman is responsible for everything: for her husband, for her children, and for her servants.”

This evocative line supplies historians Debra Kaplan and Elisheva Carlebach with the title of their groundbreaking new work of social history, though as Kaplan and Carlebach observe, Tiktiner “greatly understated the case.” Even beyond their households, Jewish women were “central to the functioning of Jewish communities.” And yet, the contributions of Jewish women have been largely invisible, even in recent works of Jewish history. Defying this bias, Kaplan and Carlebach set out to present “a dimension in Jewish women’s history that historians believed could not be written.” Focusing on the Yiddish-speaking Jews of Western and Central Europe between 1500 and 1800, they have succeeded superlatively.

Of course, the genders were as unequal in traditional Jewish societies as they were in the Christian and Islamic societies that surrounded them. Most prominent Jewish communal leaders were men, just as most premodern Jewish texts were written by and for men. But does this inequity mean that the lives and words of premodern Jewish women cannot be reconstructed? Kaplan and Carlebach argue that it does not:

The entire class of ba’alot bayit emerges as a highly visible group from the pages of our sources, enabling us to trace for the first time a detailed picture of their economic, communal, familial, and spiritual lives. We have uncovered the roles of thousands of women who appear in the records but whom historians have mostly ignored.

Although they draw on writings by Jewish women, like Meneket Rivkah, their standout source is the pinkas, the handwritten logbook that Jewish communities maintained over decades and sometimes centuries. These records, which kept track of political, administrative, and religious affairs in episodic Hebrew and Yiddish entries, have long been the essential archival sources for the social history of European Jewry. And as Kaplan and Carlebach reveal, “It is rare to find a page in these logbooks that does not mention a woman.” To put it differently, early modern Jewish women were hiding in plain sight:

The installments in which men and women paid their taxes, the donations they pledged, and the petitions of individual community members, from maidservants to mistresses, are all preserved in detail. Women appeared before lay leaders and local courts of justice and tenaciously fought for their interests; the pinkasim tell of their familial disputes, economic enterprises, and living arrangements.

Kaplan and Carlebach build their history on the foundation of pinkasim. But they also retrieve details about Jewish women’s lives from countless other textual sources: personal notebooks, rabbinic responsa, printed pamphlets, private notes, and handwritten letters. They also illustrate their case with vibrant images and everyday artifacts, from cooking pots to coffee cups. What emerges is a stunning group portrait of Western Ashkenazi women—the rich and the poor, the pious and the impious, the young and the old.

The kahal or kehilla of early modern Europe was not a premodern shul board, a Jewish community center, or even a local federation. Instead, it was the Jewish corporation formally delegated by the non-Jewish authorities to represent and, to a significant extent, govern local Jews:

The lay leaders set internal communal policy, collected taxes and charity, and interfaced with the Christian authorities. It was they who hired religious and communal functionaries, such as rabbis, cantors, and scribes, who were often not official members of the community.

Yet male Jewish community members, the married householders known as ba’alei bayit, were not the only members of the kehilla. Kaplan and Carlebach document a parallel group of ba’alot bayit, or female householders. These Jewish women took an active role in communal affairs, and their lives turn out to be surprisingly well documented.

Interestingly, Kaplan and Carlebach link the proliferation of written records within the Western Ashkenazi communities to new standards of recordkeeping. In early modern Europe, the kehilla not only had to collect taxes and enforce edicts; it also had to preserve the kinds of data which local and imperial officials might demand. In major cities like Prague, Metz, and Frankfurt, as well as in smaller towns, professional Jewish scribes kept track of communal regulations or takkanot, businesscontracts and court proceedings, taxes and fines, divorces and wills, and vital statistics. As European states expanded and refined their bureaucracies, the Jewish ancestors of the famously meticulous yekkes took to keeping careful accounts.

Sources like the pinkasim were normally written by Jewish men, but they preserve information about the entire Jewish community. Kaplan and Carlebach are attuned to the colorful and sometimes revealing moments that leap off their pages, like this brief but dramatic entry in the pinkas of Hamburg about a salacious rumor spreading among local Jews in 1732:

Hear ye, holy congregation, we hereby notify in the name of leaders of the community: that since a vile rumor has circulated about two kosher elderly women, Sara, wife of R. Hayim Metz and Fegilche wife of Judah Schalt Setzer, and they were suspected of, heaven forbid, being makhshefot [witches]. . . . We let it be known that the rumors are lies upon lies. . . . From this day forward, it may not be mentioned. . . . “For there is no magic in Jacob” [Num. 23:23], and if anyone is found . . . spreading such talk about these women, they will be punished with execrations and fines as libelers.

In defending Sara and Fegilche’s reputations, were the male lay leaders of Hamburg motivated by communal good will? Were they anxious that rumors of witchcraft might upset local Christians? Of course, violent witch trials were a tragic feature of early modern Europe that could also inflame anti-Jewish sentiments.

We should also recall that there was, in fact, “much magic in Jacob” in early modern Hamburg and elsewhere. Jewish (and other) people often turned to magical practices for protection, healing, and power. Hundreds of magical manuscripts and pamphlets have survived from Ashkenazi communities. Some prescriptions and objects, such as amulets for safe childbirth or rituals against the archdemoness Lilith, were particularly relevant to the lives and problems of Jewish women. In other words, Sara and Fegilche might have been witches; certainly some Jewish women were.

Kaplan and Carlebach are less focused on such spooky matters, but they are keenly interested in revealing how Western Ashkenazi women functioned within the normative Jewish community. Their book contemplates women’s ordinary lives and pious inner worlds, their “bodies and souls.”

A Woman Is Responsible for Everything traces how Jewish girls matured into women, married husbands and furnished homes, gave birth with the help of midwives, treated and survived various ailments, worked as businesswomen, prayed, supported the poor, and buried their dead.

In several chapters, Kaplan and Carlebach reconstruct the “material culture” of early modern Jewish women and their household responsibilities. “Books of laundry” suggested effective cleaning methods and were used to keep track of items sent out for washing. In one complex case from Frankfurt, they analyze a probate inventory to tell the story of Gutle, widow of Bendit Schammes, who claimed a set of silver items: cutlery, candlesticks, goblets, saltshakers, a ladle, a ring. The list also mentions some silver ritual objects: a spicebox for havdala, a charoset dish, and a saltwater dish for the Passover Seder. “Without the meticulous recordkeeping mandated by the community and carried out by the head of the rabbinical court,” the authors remind us, “such detail would be lost to us.”

And so, we learn how Western Ashkenazi women measured out the proper ratio of eggs to flour when baking challah, how they carried their cholent in individually marked pots to communal ovens, and how they prepared kugeland other festive foods for special occasions. “In Worms, the sandeket, the baby’s godmother, would hand out cookies to the other women. For a circumcision on Passover, when cookies were forbidden, the sandeket handed out almonds.” None of this is surprising, and yet the accumulation of everyday details is delicious.

Alongside such material realities, religious rituals “shaped the rhythm of women’s lives; they also created spaces and opportunities for them to gather and socialize.” Consider how the women’s section—literally on the sidelines of the male-centric synagogue—became a place of female self-expression. Kaplan and Carlebach spotlight a set of extraordinary women, including a “gabbete” (the feminine form of gabbai, orsynagogue officer) who oversaw the women’s section and charity collection and a “firzogerin” or “zogerke”who informally lead prayers. In a eulogy for Faigel Oppenheim of Frankfurt, her mourners were reminded that she “went early and stayed late at the house of prayer . . . and knew how to sing sweet melodies to praise the Lord God, and she prayed with devotion.” These prayers extended beyond formal liturgy to informal devotions, many written by women. Building on Chava Weissler’s pioneering research into tkhines, Kaplan and Carlebach describe an entire genre of Yiddish pamphlets that contain songs for festive occasions. Rivkah Tiktiner, for example, wrote a popular tune, or lid,for Simchat Torah.

As in life, so in death. Burial societies, too, were separated by gender, with men’s and women’s societies tending to the purification of bodies in parallel and the women sewing the burial shrouds for both men and women. In eighteenth-century Prague, the men’s burial society protested after entrepreneurial Jewish women had started sewing extra shrouds to raise money for their society. Kaplan and Carlebach trace the shroud controversy over decades, “revealing the tensions that simmered beneath a harmonious façade.” Ultimately, the men’s society won, but the whole affair provides “a window into the women’s devotion, pious labor, and dedication to raising charitable funds.”

Another communal institution for which Jewish women were largely responsible was the hekdesh, a combined hostel for travelers, hospice for the sick, and shelter for the homeless. The very existence of this multipurpose welfare institution is a striking example of how the ba‘alot bayit upheld mutual aid and tzedaka. But in practice, it often fell to poorer Jewish women to do the dirty work. Later in life, especially if they were widowed or childless, such women might themselves rely upon the hekdesh. As the authors note, “Gender formed the most significant dividing line between early modern people, but class came a close second.” Kaplan and Carlebach look beyond the ba’alot bayit and consider these poor Jews too—elderly spinsters, village dwellers, and Jewish maidservants. The maids rarely attained the status of the ba’alot bayit whom they served and often were victims of exploitation, harassment, and worse.

Some impoverished Jewish women even turned to theft. Kaplan and Carlebach describe Jewish women joining bands of Yiddish-speaking thieves who preyed on market towns and roamed the countryside. They tell a truly harrowing tale of a middle-aged woman named Rosina Carben from near Frankfurt. Her mother died when she was an infant, and she grew up in an atmosphere of poverty and abuse. Eventually, she joined a ring of Jewish thieves with her husband, Mendel. Mendel and their fifteen-year-old son, Isaac, were caught and interrogated. “Upon hearing the screams of her teenage son as he was tortured, Rosina was the first of the suspects to break and confess to what the court wanted to hear: a packet of stolen goods had passed through her home.”

Perhaps surprisingly, Kaplan and Carlebach have little to say about Jewish women who became religious outlaws, as in the case of enthusiastic believers in Sabbatai Zevi, the “mystical messiah” of the seventeenth century. Indeed, the good news of Sabbateanism spread rapidly among Western Ashkenazim. In July 1666, a schoolteacher from Prague published the lyrics of “A Beautiful New Song about the Messiah,” (ein schon neu Lied fun Moschiach) for “devout Jews, women and children, young lads and maidens—and even rabbis.” Of course, the hopes of the faithful were quickly dashed when the erstwhile messiah converted to Islam. As Kaplan and Carlebach note, the famous memoirist Glikl of Hameln compared this disappointment to a mother who suffers brutal birth pangs without delivering a viable child. Yet plenty of Jewish women did not consider the messianic movement to be stillborn. As Ada Rapoport-
 Albert showed, several Jewish women even served as charismatic prophets of Sabbatai Zevi or his transgressive successor Jacob Frank. 

For the most part, Kaplan and Carlebach tend to focus on the enduring rhythms of Jewish women’s social history, not its occasional disturbances.

Although most early modern Jewish women could pray and read in Yiddish, they had only limited access to formal religious education. Women did not learn in yeshivot, but some donated money to them. As Kaplan and Carlebach write, “financial support of Torah scholarship enabled women to uphold communal institutions, even those in which they could not personally study.”

But there were always exceptions. Daughters of wealthy or rabbinic families often learned a great deal. One scholarly Jewish woman was Havah, the granddaughter of Judah Loew, the Maharal of Prague, and the grandmother of the important halakhic authority Yair Hayyim Bachrach. Bachrach named his responsa Havot Yair in his grandmother’s honor, boasting of her Hebrew literacy and learning:

She had a Midrash rabbah without translation.
 . . . She . . . commented on mahzorim and selihot, as well as on Rashi’s commentary on the Bible and the twenty-four [biblical books] as well as the targumim (Aramaic biblical homiletical paraphrases) and external books. Several times when the rabbinic titans of the generation struggled [with the meaning], she came and extended her quill and excelled in writing in the clearest language.

Unfortunately, her intellectual labor on behalf of rabbinic titans remains invisible, and none of her own writing has survived. Then there was Mosquita, an eight-year-old student who so impressed her teacher, Yaakov, that he dedicated a Yiddish kashrut manual in her honor. Nevertheless, there is no way to know if Mosquita, as a child or an adult, ever wrote her own texts.

Still, some literary works by early modern Jewish women have reached us. The most famous such writer is Glikl of Hameln, but she was not alone. Rivkah Tiktiner was another, and Bella Perlhefter (also from Prague) corresponded in Hebrew with the Christian Hebraist Johann Christoph Wagenseil. Together with her husband, Ber Eybeschutz, Bella “conceived, wrote the introduction to, and likely coauthored the first encyclopedic work on Jewish thought in Yiddish.” She called it Be’er sheva (Seven wells). Poignantly, each of its seven chapters was “named for one of her children who did not live to adulthood.” Like Glikl’s memoir, Bella’s book was not published in her lifetime, but several manuscript copies have survived, which shows that it circulated and was read.

Beyond such exceptional works, Kaplan and Carlebach discuss other ways Jewish women related to, and cherished, books in the early years of print. As the Jewish bibliographer Abraham Meir Habermann observed many Jewish girls and women “worked in printshops, particularly as typesetters; their slender fingers made picking letters out of letterboxes easier.” And as more Jewish books—especially Yiddish ones—became available, the female Jewish literacy rate rose. Books of customs and morals, prayerbooks and countless chapbooks were marketed to Jewish women.

Kaplan and Carlebach highlight ordinary forms of Jewish women’s writing too, including financial documents by businesswomen, such as a certain Sarel, who ran a courier service for letters and money orders between Prague and Vienna. Often, such writing survives on solitary scraps of paper. For instance, on a single leaf from 1775, a woman named Mindele recorded her affairs as the proprietor of a sort of inn for travelers and beggars in Darmstadt. She writes that “three Jerusalemites drank coffee at my [establishment], and one slept here for two nights.” The Jerusalemites were traveling collectors, raising money for their fellow Jews of the Holy Land. In this fragmentary note, we get a glimpse not only of a Jewish businesswoman at work but of the global connections that tied Jews together in the late eighteenth century.

A Woman Is Responsible for Everything also assembles a dazzling collection of images of Jewish women, from rudimentary scribbles in the margins of manuscripts, to woodcuts and engravings from printed books, and to painted portraits and art objects. For Kaplan and Carlebach, images are not just imaginative aids; they are visual texts that must be read closely and deciphered creatively. Indeed, the wealth of images included in the book often shows as much as its rich chapters can tell. In this way, the authors highlight a decorative glass tumbler celebrating the activities of those combative Prague burial societies. Drawings of the male associates are prominently displayed, but, as the historians note in their caption, images of “the women remain hidden” on the reverse side of the tumbler “unless one seeks them out.” From now on, it should be impossible to write about early modern Jewish history without seeking out Jewish women.

How does A Woman Is Responsible for Everything revise the grand narratives of Jewish history? Kaplan and Carlebach refuse to pigeonhole the early modern period either as a dim vestige of late medieval darkness or a flickering premonition of modern enlightenment. Instead, they insist that the period be understood on its own terms. Their most radical version of this claim, at least regarding the lives of Jewish women, comes in their conclusion:

Our work has convinced us that the historical trajectory of Jewish women has been mischaracterized and misunderstood. Their narrative has been swept up in a teleological arc of modernity and Jewish history that does not accurately pertain to them. . . . The prevailing narrative ignores three centuries of creative and participatory roles for women within the Jewish community. . . . 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.

This builds upon a fundamental insight of the great twentieth-century historian Salo Baron (for whom, incidentally, Carlebach’s chair at Columbia is named). Baron noted that Jewish emancipation entailed the demise of the kehilla. In other words, individual Jews gained citizenship at the expense of a shared communal life. Kaplan and Carlebach add a new layer to this claim: Entry into Western European modernity offered considerably less to Jewish women than to Jewish men. In the immediate aftermath of Emancipation, many Jewish women were left adrift, bereft of their robust involvement in the kehilla while largely excluded from the male-dominated European public sphere.

Jewish women’s history, Kaplan and Carlebach show, isn’t a story of linear progress from medieval oppression to modern liberation. Thus, their book is not only about the position of Jewish women within Western Ashkenazi society; it is a cautionary tale about narratives of modern progress. Their remarks on Tiktiner exemplify their sensitivity and sympathy with people of the past:

In an age when men were thought to have “ruled” over idealized households like small heads of state, Rivkah articulated her woman’s truth: Jewish men were often on the road for long periods, and even if they lived at home, they often spent most of their days outside the house, for religious services, economic transactions, and civic engagement. Women were the true axes around which the household members rotated. For Rivkah, this was both a religious and practical matter. By placing women at the center of the family, she viewed them as the pivot around which God’s will unfolded in this world.

Unlike Meneket Rivkah, A Woman Is Responsible for Everything is not a pious book, nor is it nostalgic. What Kaplan and Carlebach show is that Jewish women were an inextricable part of the broader religious and social history of premodern Jewish mentalities and lifeways.

Like all great works of history, Kaplan and Carlebach’s book invites a whole new set of questions. For one, how did Western Ashkenazi society change over the early modern period? Kaplan and Carlebach’s work tracks stable patterns over three centuries of Jewish women’s history. But, as they know, these centuries were never static. For example, they note that restrictions on women, often justified by norms of modesty, increased over the eighteenth century. Still, the shifts in Jewish women’s lives between 1500 and 1800 await further elaboration. One also wonders how the experiences of Western Ashkenazi women compared with those of their Western Sephardi neighbors in cities like Amsterdam, their Eastern Ashkenazi counterparts in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, or Jewish women in the Ottoman Empire and beyond.

In a way, A Woman Is Responsible for Everything is like a pinkas, one of the Jewish communal logbooks on which it is so imaginatively based. Each page contains lost stories and exquisite miniatures, arranged with intuitive genius and authored by more than one hand. And like a pinkas, it mirrors the experiences and dynamics of a complex community, with its messy incidents, shared commitments, and distinct voices.