A Brief, Illustrated History of Women and the Jewish Book

While it is often assumed that the world of traditional Jewish learning and scholarship was the exclusive province of men, the historical record suggests something else. Beginning with a halakhic responsum (t’shuvah) addressed by Moses Maimonides to a man who tutored young Jewish women, Michelle Margolis provides a whirlwind survey of female authors, scribes, typesetters, publishers, and illustrators, accompanied by numerous images of the books and manuscripts themselves. She writes:

We have evidence of women making books in the amazing and heartbreaking elegy for Dulce of Worms (violently murdered, along with two daughters, in 1096), [composed] by her husband Eliezer (a/k/a the Rokeaḥ), [one of the great rabbis of his day. He wrote that:] “before she was killed, she would buy parchment to write books; her hands sewed the clothing of students and torn books; and she wove thread for the book (bindings).” The entire dirge, written in the form of Eyshet Ḥayil, [i.e., Proverbs 31:10-31], is more than worth a read.

Women and children often worked in the press as “zetseren” (typesetters). A woman or child’s smaller hands had much more dexterity with the tiny pieces of type. One of the most famous girls who worked in the press was Ella bat Moshe ben Avraham Avinu and her sister Gella. Ella started at a very young age (nine), but continued working in presses in Dessau, Halle, and Frankfurt. Thus, her name is found at the end of a the talmudic tractate of Niddah printed in Frankfurt am Main, 1697-99.

This and more can be found on the social-media website Twitter, at the link below. Margolis has also written a follow-up post here.

Read more at Twitter

More about: Books, Jewish history, Manuscripts, Women in Judaism

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF