A fascinating look at how the marginal status of Jewish women fashioned their role as agents of modernization in nineteenth-century Eastern European Jewish society.

In this groundbreaking volume, Iris Parush opens up the previously unexamined world of literate Jewish women and their role in the cultural modernization of Eastern European Jewish society. The author’s deceptively simple thesis: Jewish women, marginalized and neglected by rabbinical authorities who regarded men as the bearers of religious learning, were free to read secular literature in German, Yiddish, Polish, and Russian. As a result, these “reading women” became key conduits for Haskalah (Enlightenment) ideas and ideals within the Jewish community. Parush dramatically challenges and revamps both scholarly and popular notions of Jewish life and learning in nineteenthcentury Eastern Europe. Her book is a welcome introduction to many long-ignored facets of modern Jewish cultural history.

Cross-listed in the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry Series

Iris Parush teaches Hebrew literature at Ben Gurion University of the Negev. Her current scholarly writing explores the cultural, social, and ideological resonances of Haskalah literature and the impact of national ideology on the formation of the modern Hebrew literary canon. The Hebrew edition of Reading Jewish Women won the prestigious Zalman Shazar Prize for Jewish History.

“An extraordinarily rich and unusual window into the society of Jewish women in the nineteenth-century. With fascinating details about girls’ secular and Jewish education and revealing extracts from memoirs and novels, Parush underlines the crucial role of women in spreading the spirit of the Enlightenment and modernization throughout East European Jewish society.”
–Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance Journal