Plenary III: Faiths

Abstract: Religious Marginalization and Personal Empowerment: Accounting for Jewish Women's Piety
in Early Modern Central Europe

Presented by: Judith R. Baskin, Judaic Studies, University at Albany, State University of New York

At the beginning of the early modern period the religious leaders of Central European Jewry, a ghettoized and oppressed minority, were staunchly conservative in their commitment to the traditions of the past. Rabbinic opinion agreed that education for girls should be informal and home-based and that women best displayed piety by enabling and encouraging the men of their households to fulfil religious obligations. Significant learning in this community was confined to an elite group of male scholars, fiercely protective of their prerogatives and opposed to any dissemination of sacred texts and commentary in the vernacular. This paper argued that it was the appearance of printed books in the Jewish vernacular languages of Judaeo-German and Yiddish beginning in the sixteenth century that made aspects of the Jewish literary and liturgical heritage accessible both to unlearned men and to women. Glikl of Hameln is one seventeenth century Jewish woman whose broad reading in vernacular Jewish books, relatively privileged circumstances, far reaching business activities, and inherent motivation and talent allowed her to write about the events of her life in the language of everyday, interwoven with traditional piety. As such, she is an example of how access to written sources, even in the vernacular, empowered some early modern Jewish women to transcend their marginalization in Judaism's "official" tradition and to discover ways to enhance and express their own spirituality through reading and writing.