Glikl’s Jewish Sisterhood: Women, Wills, and Writing in Early Modern Europe

• In Event: Gender and Questions of Agency

Abstract

Recently, Brandeis University Press released a long-awaited new English translation by Sara Friedman of Glikl’s Memoirs, based on Chava Turniansky's Hebrew, a unique, book-length life story, genealogy, ethical will by Glikl bas Judah Leib, wife of Haim of Hameln, a woman of means, business acumen, and strong opinions who lived most of her life in Hamburg, where she was born 1645, and died in Metz in 1724. Glikl’s work has rightly been lauded as unique: it is among the very first full-length autobiographical works by any Jew, male or female, and there is certainly nothing comparable of its scope by any Jewish woman prior to the nineteenth century. And yet, Glikl was not entirely unique. Women of her social class read, wrote, and published—in the vernacular Yiddish and occasionally in Hebrew, the language of religious and intellectual discourse in their society.
One such voice belonged to Beila bat Yaakov Perlhefter. Beila’s Hebrew- and Yiddish-language correspondence with her husband, Sabbatean Issachar Ber Perlhefter (he adopted his family names from hers) and the Hebrew pupil at whose court her served, Johann Wagenseil, has been translated by Elisheva Carlebach. She also wrote an introduction to a book jointly authored by her husband, SEFER BE'ER SHEVA. This work, running just several pages in manuscript, shares certain themes and literary motifs with Glikl’s much longer work, while lacking its literary polish. Another voice speaks to us obliquely, from within Glikl’s own pages.

In this talk, I will introduce a these women, and a few more, enabling us to consider the meanings of their voices, of the erasure of those voices, and of their recovery.

Author

• Rachel Greenblatt, Brandeis University