Women Wrote: Glikl in Context

It was written of a certain Jewish woman in seventeenth-century Germany that she:

was a pious, extremely lively woman, very knowledgeable in business matters. Indeed, she ran the entire household, traveling regularly to the fair in [Kiel] with merchandise, that is, she did not take much merchandise with her—people made do with little in those days. She was a good speaker, and all who saw her admired her. The ladies of the [Holstein] nobility favored her greatly. ^{1 1} Glikl, Glikl: Memoirs 1691-1719, ed. Chava Turniansky, trans. Sarah P. Friedman (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2019), 74. For the original Yiddish text with facing Hebrew translation: Gliḳl: zikhronot, 1691-1719, trans. and ed. Chava Turniansky (Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar and Merkaz Dinur, 2006), 62, 64.

Of those familiar with early Yiddish, or the history of Jews in early modern Europe, many might suppose this woman must be Glikl bas Judah Leib, known since the late nineteenth century as Glückel of Hameln (1645-1724). ^{2 2} The definitive edition is Chava Turniansky’s critical edition and Hebrew translation (above), and the English translation by Sarah P. Friedman, based on that edition. More on the publication history below. One reviewer of Sara Friedman’s recent English translation of Glikl’s work, based on Chava Turniansky’s majestic edition of the classic of self-writing, moral instruction, bequest and memorial even wrote: “Let us now praise famous Jewish women: Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, Leah, and . . . Glikl!” ^{3 3} Robert D. King, “The Groundbreaking Memoirs of Glikl of Hamel,” Mosaic (February 4, 2020). https://mosaicmagazine.com/obs.... The pious wife knowledgeable in business matters described above, however, is not Glikl. She is Esther (d. 1683), wife of Yehudah Leib Hildesheim (d. 1663), and Glikl is the narrator. ^{4 4} Esther is mentioned by Eduard Duckesz, Zur Geschichte und Genealogie der ersten Familien der hochdeutschen Israeliten-Geminden in Hamburg-Altona (Hamburg: M. Lessmann, 1915), 45-46. https://www.nli.org.il/en/book.... In other words, as Turniansky has already pointed out, Glikl knew many women like herself: women involved in business, managing complex financial matters, writing documents and engaging in negotiations, raising children and managing extensive households. ^{5 5} Chava Turniansky, “Glikl Has a Story for Everything: Translator and Expert Prof. Chava Turniansky Reflects,” Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project, https://www.yiddishbookcenter.... (Yiddish with English subtitles), minute 1:22; Chava Turniansky, “The Image of the Woman in the Memoirs of Glikl Hamel,” in Eros, Eirusin, Ve-Isurin, ed. I. Gafni and I. Bartal (Jerusalem, 1998), 189 [in Hebrew]. Also: Moshe Rosman, “The Early Modern European ‘Jewish Woman,’” Journal of Ukranian Studies 33-34 (2008): 407-16. On the one hand, she has left us one of the few surviving book-length works of self-writing by any Jew—male or female—in the medieval or early modern period. ^{6 6} On Jewish self-writing, see, e.g.: Rachel L. Greenblatt, To Tell Their Children: Jewish Communal Memory in Early Modern Prague (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), 83-116; Marcus Moseley, Being for Myself Alone: Origins of Jewish Autobiography (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006); Jeffrey H. Chajes, “Accounting for the Self: Preliminary Generic-Historical Reflections on Early Modern Jewish Egodocuments,” Jewish Quarterly Review 95, no. 1 (2005): 1–15; Mark R. Cohen, ed., The Autobiography of a Seventeenth-Century Venetian Rabbi: Leon Modena’s Life of Judah (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988); Debra Kaplan, “The Self in Social Context: Asher Ha-Levi of Reichshofen’s Sefer Zikhronot,” Jewish Quarterly Review 97, no. 2 (2007): 210–36; Alexander Marx, “A Seventeenth-Century Autobiography: A Picture of Jewish Life in Bohemia and Moravia. From a Manuscript in the Jewish Theological Seminary,” The Jewish Quarterly Review 8, no. 3 (January 1918): 269-304. Her writing is thus sui generis. Skillfully crafted, it draws a long narrative arc and weaves stories artfully. On the other hand, Glikl’s manuscript did not self-generate ex nihilo. Rather, her prose emerges as extraordinary in a context in which many women of her socio-economic class also wrote texts, with a variety of audiences in mind. ^{7 7} For sources, see: Rachel Elior, “Chapter 29: Women Writers in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries in Yiddish-Speaking Ashkenazi Society,” in The Unknown History of Jewish Women Through the Ages: On Learning and Illiteracy: On Slavery and Liberty, trans. Shmuel Sermoneta-Gertal (Berlin and Jerusalem: de Gruyter and Magnes Press, 2023), 657-66, https://doi.org/10.1515/978311.... In the pages that follow, I compare Glikl’s writing to much shorter texts by two female contemporaries, in search of shared literary territory on the one hand and the unique creative impulse on the other. This double-sided approach constitutes an attempt to cast aside contemporary lenses in order to more fully and accurately assess the variety of women’s roles in early modern Ashkenaz. In broad strokes, both women considered here shared Glikl’s favorable socioeconomic status and central European location. Rivkah bas Avraham, wife of Chaim Sinzheim, left an ethical will for her children. ^{8 8} Joseph Bloch, “Le testament d’une femme juive au au commencement du XVIIIe siècle,” Revue des études juives 90 (April-June 1931): 146-160, www.persee.fr/doc/rjuiv_0484-8616_1931_num_90_180_5704. A partial English translation was published as “Rebecca Halfon: Testament (Manheim),” in The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization: Volume Five, The Early Modern Era, 1500-1750, ed. Yosef Kaplan (New Haven and Lucern: Yale University Press and the Posen Foundation, 2023), 160-61. Beila bas Yaakov Perlhefter, wife of Baer Eibeschutz (known from the time of his marriage as Baer Perlhefter), wrote an introduction to a book her husband wrote at—by her own account—her urging, framed as a memorial to seven children of theirs who had passed away. ^{9 9} Beer Perlhefter and Bella Perlhefter, Be’er Sheva: An Edition of a Seventeenth Century Yiddish Encyclopedia, ed. Nathanael Riemer, trans. Sigrid Senkbeil (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2011); Nathanael Riemer, Zwischen Tradition und Häresie: “Beer Sheva” - eine Enzyklopädie des jüdischen Wissens der Frühen Neuzeit (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010); Elisheva Carlebach, “Bella Perlhefter,” Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women, June 23, 202, https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/a...; Nathanael Riemer, “Zwischen christlichen Hebraisten und Sabbatianern – der Lebensweg von R. Beer und Bila Perlhefter,” Aschkenas 14, no. 1 (2004): 163-201. A reading of Glikl alongside Rivkah focuses on matters of form. It reveals, through the use of a specific genre, the participation of Ashkenazi women in a culture concerned with planning family trajectories beyond a single generation, that they should remember her, their foremother, as they go forward and prosper. ^{10 10} Natalie Zemon Davis, “Ghosts, Kin, and Progeny: Some Features of Family Life in Early Modern France,” Daedalus 106, no. 2 (1977): 87–114. Reading Glikl alongside Beila, we focus instead on shared content. These women, like the men in their communities, used traditional Jewish text to frame the familial stories they told and to draw values from them and about them. At the same time, turning our attention back to matters of form, the comparison of Glikl and Beila highlights at least part of what is, indeed, unique about Glikl.

First, though, let us introduce Glikl, and set the stage with regard to writing by early modern Ashkenazi women, in which considerations of language, genre, and the history of book publication all play a role. Glikl reports that she began composing it during sleepless nights of grief and despair following the death of her husband of 30 years, Chaim:

My dear children, I began writing this, with God’s help, after the death of your pious father, since it afforded me some pleasure when the melancholy thoughts were upon me. I passed many sleepless nights in the throes of severe anxiety, for we were like sheep without a shepherd—as our faithful shepherd was no more, and I feared I would give way to melancholy thoughts, God forbid. So I would often rise in the night to spend the sleepless hours in this fashion. ^{11 11}Glikl, trans. Friedman, 43; in Yiddish, Glikl, ed. Turniansky, 10, 12.

Glikl, at that time, was in her mid-forties. She records genealogies of Chaim’s family and her own, and reports on the day-to-day workings of the business they built together, developing a small trade in gems into an international financial network. She weaves in stories, tales, and lessons for her children. On occasion, she tells of contemporary events involving people she knew, but which she could not possibly have witnessed personally. ^{12 12} For a discussion of Glikl’s use of tales interwoven in her text, see Natalie Zemon Davis, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives (Cambridge, MA Harvard University Press, 1995), 5-62. For her use of language as revealing the types of sources on which various passages relied, Turniansky, “Glikl Has a Story for Everything: Translator and Expert Prof. Chava Turniansky Reflects,” Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project, https://www.yiddishbookcenter.... (Yiddish with English subtitles); and, for these and many related issues, see Chava Turniansky, “Introduction” in Glikl, trans. Friedman, 1-38. A more detailed introduction appears in the Hebrew version, Gliḳl: zikhronot, 1691-1719, trans. and ed. Turniansky, numbered in Hebrew letters prior to the beginning of Arabic page numbering. Of fourteen children born to the couple, twelve survived to adulthood. At the time of Chaim’s death, the eldest four were married; the youngest but toddlers. The work was copied by children and grandchildren and kept in manuscript by Glikl’s descendants. A surviving manuscript features a decorative title page. In 1896, the Wissenschaft des Judentums scholar David Kaufmann published an edition of the work in its original old Yiddish. ^{13 13} David Kaufmann, ed., Die Memoiren der Glückel von Hameln, 1645-1719 (Frankfurt am Main: J. Kaufmann, 1896), also referred to by the title Zikhroynes. For the full transmission and translation history, see Turniansky, “Introduction,” in Glikl, trans. Friedman, 32-36, and a more detailed exposition in the Hebrew-Yiddish edition, Glikl, ed. Turniansky, מד-נז. Feminist activist Bertha Pappenheim, a distant relative of Glikl, translated it into modern German in 1910. ^{14 14} Bertha Pappenheim, Die Memoiren der Glückel von Hameln, geboren in Hamburg 1645, gestorben in Metz 19. September 1724 (Vienna: Verlag von Stefan Meyer und Wilhelm Pappenheim, 1910). See Matthew Johnson, “Off-Translation: Bertha Pappenheim’s Yiddish-German,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 68, no. 1 (2023): 52–71. Subsequent translations reworked the text to construct a linear autobiographical arc, losing, in the process, much of Glikl’s own distinct voice. ^{15 15} Matthew Johnson has explored what can be gained by examining these translations in their own historical contexts: “Glikl’s Circulation. Editing, Translating, and Value,” in Der Wert der literarischen Zirkulation = The Value of Literary Circulation, eds. Michael Gamper, Jutta Müller-Tamm, David Wachter, and Jasmin Wrobel (Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer, 2023), 291–309. Chava Turniansky’s 2006 critical edition and Hebrew translation restored the text to its original fullness and was the basis for the most recent English translation, by Sarah Friedman, which is now the definitive English edition. ^{16 16}Glikl, trans. Friedman.

Women, Language, and Literacy in Early Modern Ashkenaz

As Glikl’s work is frequently called on to provide evidence in a wide variety of historical topics related to the Jews of early modern central Europe, historians have questioned the validity of relying on such a unique, unrepresentative source as a book-length manuscript written by an extraordinary woman, even as they confess plainly to doing the same themselves. ^{17 17} E.g., Robert Liberles, “’She Sees that her Merchandise is Good, and Her Lamp is Not Extinguished at Nighttime’: Glikl’s Memoir as Historical Source,” Nashim 7 (2004): 11-27. Looking more closely at the ground from which Glikl’s writing grew can preserve her unique artistry while removing the unhelpful categorization of her as an “extraordinary woman.” As Turniansky writes, “It is reasonable to assume that other women of her station had a similar education and that among them were others who, like Glikl, put ink to paper to tell the story—or episodes—of their life; yet only Glikl’s work has reached us.” ^{18 18}Glikl, trans. Friedman, 22. Contemporary scholars’ equivocations, I would argue, stem in part from the understandable tendency, often implicit, to view Glikl’s text, retrospectively, as a predecessor of a modern literary form, autobiography, which it does not quite match. ^{19 19} Cf. Natalie Zemon Davis, “Fame and Secrecy: Leon Modena’s Life as an Early Modern Autobiography,” in The Autobiography of a Seventeenth-Century Venetian Rabbi: Leon Modena’s Life of Judah, trans. and ed. Mark R. Cohen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 50-70. Turning the tables to attempt to view it, instead, as building on earlier genres of writing, as a qualitatively extensive expansion of types of writing in which Jewish women were already engaged, will help us to place Glikl more firmly in her concrete historical context, and thus allow her to teach more about Jewish women of her time and place than she has sometimes been allowed to do.

Moreover, as long as we consider Glikl an “extraordinary” woman, we do not need to contend with the ways in which her writing upsets widely held conventional wisdom regarding male and female roles in early modern Ashkenazi Jewry—notions that may have more to do with central European norms in the nineteenth century than in the seventeenth. ^{20 20} Scholarly notation of the work’s “singular position” have been widespread, as in this phrase from Linda Ellen Feldman, “Converging Difference: Reflections on Marginalism, Postmodernism and the ‘Memoirs’ of Glückel von Hameln,” Daphnis: Zeitschrift für Mittlere Deutsche Literatur 22, no. 4 (1993): 669-70. On early modern Ashkenazi women: Debra Kaplan and Elisheva Carlebach, “Jewish Women in Early Modern Central Europe, 1500-1800,” in Jewish Women’s History from Antiquity to the Present, ed. Rebecca Lynn Winer and Federica Francesconi (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2021), 169-92; Moshe Rosman, “Jewish Women in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: From Facilitation to Participation,” in Jewish Women’s History, ed. Winer and Francesconi, 193-215; Moshe Rosman, “Lehiyot isha be-Folin-Lita be-reshit ha-et ha-hadasha,” in Kiyyum ve-shever: Yehudei Polin le-dorotehem, vol. 2, ed. Israel Bartal and Israel Gutman (Jerusalem: Merkaz Shazar, 1987), 415– 31; Yemima Chovav, ʻAlamot Ahevukha: Ḥaye Ha-Dat Ṿeha-Ruaḥ Shel Nashim Ba-Ḥevrah Ha-Ashkenazit Be-Reshit Ha-ʻet Ha-Ḥadashah (Yerushalayim: Merkaz Dinur and Carmel, 2009). As Marion Kaplan, among others, has detailed, the embourgeoisement of the developing German Jewish middle class occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, principally in the home. In the course of this process, domestic space was severed from the marketplace. ^{21 21} Marion A. Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family and Identity in Imperial Germany (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991, e.g., 4; Paula E. Hyman, Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History: The Roles and Representation of Women (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1995). A similar division emerged in the post-World War II American suburbs. In American Jewish popular culture, characters such as the mother in The Jazz Singer and Golde in Fiddler on the Roof likewise portray women whose sole functions are domestic in a manner that appears to exclude income-producing dimensions, despite their different, eastern European backgrounds. Such was the case even as their authors and audiences were well aware of both the ideal of a man as devoted to study and a woman as gaining merit through her support of her husband and sons in that endeavor and the economic realities of working women in the eastern European Pale of Settlement. In other words, the nineteenth-century bourgeois image of Jewish gender roles holds a certain influence.

Glikl’s society, in contrast, was characterized by a nearly complete overlap of these two spheres, the “domestic” and the “marketplace”: spatially, economically, and functionally. The family’s home served as the headquarters of their business, with little separation between the physical spaces of childrearing, cooking, gem-trading, and contract-writing. In this setting, a young man hired “to look after the children” later became a business partner. Glikl implies, though she does not clearly state, that while caring for the children, he began to learn the family’s business practices. ^{22 22}Glikl, trans. Friedman, 97: “Our first servant was Avraham Kantor of Hildesheim; at first we employed him to look after the children. A few years later he left us to engage in some commerce on his own” (emphasis added). Later, after he had married, “We gave him an advance and sent him to Copenhagen.” Women, including Glikl prior to widowhood, were more likely to stay home while men traveled to the fairs where many larger sales and financial transactions took place, but commercial affairs continued directly into the home. Nor does the marriage of Glikl and Chaim match the religious ideal of full-time Torah study. ^{23 23} Rosman, ”The Early Modern.” Chaim’s main occupation was to participate, with Glikl, in providing economically for their family. Just one of their sons was sent to yeshiva to learn full-time, and that ended disastrously.

A different distinction between female and male realms characterized Glikl’s daily life, a linguistic distinction. Like most Jewish societies throughout history this population was diglossic, meaning that it operated simultaneously in two internal languages, using each for its distinct realm. In the male space of public ritual, and in religious and intellectual writing, the sacred loshn koydesh (Hebrew with Aramaic elements characteristic of the Talmud and rabbinic writings that followed) was employed. Glikl’s society was also bilingual, using German for business and civic purposes outside the Jewish community. Much scholarship on early Yiddish literature presumes the “female” nature of its primary readership. And here is the heart of the notion that early Yiddish literature was primarily for women, and for men, who like women, were insufficiently educated for proper Torah Study.

Yet, the very boundary lines between men’s ritual loshn koydesh and women’s secular, Yiddish spaces in Glikl’s time had their own character as boundary lines. I would suggest that it is possible that here too, our lenses are sometimes distorted by the firm lines, solid as the walls of an upper middle class home, that characterized the divisions between realms; the female home on the one hand and male workplace on the other, in the formative nineteenth-century and early twentieth centuries. There, men did not occupy themselves with children or household tasks; the married women who lived in those homes did not enter their husbands’ offices or places of business. The separation of realms in diglossic early modern Ashkenaz (defined here as Yiddish-speaking realms from approximately the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries) had its own, asymmetrical character. All Ashkenazi Jews—women and men, young and old, learned and ignorant, wealthy and poor—lived their daily lives, including oral discussion of the loshn koydesh texts at the center of Torah study, in Yiddish (taytsh or leshon ashkenaz). While women were excluded from or pushed to the edges of ritual Hebrew spaces—such as the main sanctuary of the synagogue and the yeshiva or beis midrash—their physical proximity to ritual spaces, where loshn koydesh prevailed, sometimes allowed them limited access. When family members were rabbis who taught, women sometimes heard lessons. Men, for their part, lived their lives in and moved more freely throughout the Yiddish-speaking areas, excluded only in specific instances such as childbirth, the women’s section of the synagogue, and the mikveh. ^{24 24} For example, while physically separated from men in the synagogue, they attended; Moshe Rosman has suggested their inclusion in the synagogue space increased in the early modern period vis-à-vis the medieval: Moshe Rosman, “Jewish Women in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth,” 202-3. While learned men’s Hebrew writing quoted only Hebrew sources, there is no more reason to think they never read the Yiddish literature available to them than there is to think that an Oxford don today never watches a Hollywood feature film. Thus, Shmuel Charney, who wrote an early, seminal article on women as readers of early Yiddish—though he recognized that women were the primary reading audience of this literature and built most of the work on that foundation—opened by stating that the accepted notion that Yiddish literature was originally a literature intended exclusively for women and unlearned men contained “a shtikel guzme” (a bit of an exaggeration). ^{25 25} Shmuel Niger, “Di Yidishe literatur un di lezerin,” in Bleter geshikhte fun der Yidisher literatur (New York: Congress for Jewish Culture, 1959), 37. Originally appeared in the journal Der pinkes, 1913, reprinted Vilne, 1919. דער אָנגענומענער מיינונג, אז די ליטעראטור אוף יידיש איז” אָנהייב געווען אַ ליטעראטור נאר פאַר ווייבער און עם⁻הארצים, שטעקט א שטיקל גוזמא.” Emphasis in the original. Niger was the pen name of Shmuel Charney. Scholarship on this point has developed substantially since Charney’s time, highlighting, among other things, the implied lack of masculinity inherent in a man who reads these Yiddish works, see esp. Chava Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs.

Gender & Genre, Print & Manuscript

Glikl, then, as opposed to the norms and images born in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, operated in a world where the domestic was commercial and the commercial domestic, where the language of literature outside of the learned-élite realm was the vernacular old Yiddish, where men and women read in this language, and where women, with increasing frequency, wrote in it as well. In none of these regards was she extraordinary. That distinction belongs instead to her talent in writing, the quality and quantity of the bequest she has left us. Turniansky points out that Glikl herself did not know exactly what to call her work, written primarily for her own descendants. She did not name her work or assign it a genre—calling it only “it,” “this,” or similar terms; she highlighted only what it was not, a “book of morals” (sefer mussar). ^{26 26} Turniansky, “Introduction,” in Glikl, trans. Friedman, 2.

This, as well as what I have already written and what I am about to write, comes from a deeply grieving heart following the death of my dearest husband, of blessed memory, who was our faithful shepherd; surely God, blessed be He, took him to Him because of our sins, for because of evil the righteous was taken away. I will not dwell on this at length here, since I intend, God willing, to leave all this for you in seven little books (bikhler), if God grants me life. ^{27 27}Glikl, trans. Friedman, 59.

“And, indeed,” Turniansky concludes on this basis, “what Glikl was writing was so utterly different from anything published until then in Yiddish or Hebrew that it is not at all surprising she did not have a name for it.” ^{28 28} Turniansky, “Introduction” in Glikl, trans. Friedman, 19. Turniansky, in her Hebrew introduction, highlights in particular a European genre known as “personal chronicle,” כב. Some scholars have likewise expressed consternation regarding this difficulty of pinpointing the genre of Glikl’s writing. ^{29 29} For example, Chajes, “Accounting for the Self,” makes this point in regard to the Hebrew translation by A. Z. Rabinowitz. This difficulty in categorizing the work, the lack of a name for its genre, tells us much about our difficulty in locating early modern Ashkenazi women’s writing. Very little of it fits the genres with which we are familiar, which are based on recognized genres of Jewish men’s writing of the time, composed in Hebrew for religious use: biblical and Talmudic commentary, legal codes and responsa literature, homiletics, ethical literature, some liturgical works meant for local or regional use. Nor does it fit the genres prevalent in old Yiddish: epic and historical poetry, stories, translations of romance and other belles-lettres. These genres, though, are built from corpuses of writing by men.

Thus, Glikl highlighted, as Turniansky points out, only what the book was not, a “book of morals” (sefer mussar). ^{30 30}Glikl, trans. Freidman, 43; Glikl, ed. Turniansky, 12. This particular denial, I would suggest, is not a mark of false humility, but rather a factually accurate statement: sefer mussar did not mean a book including moral advice; it referred to a specific genre, whose outlines Glikl’s work does not fit overall, though in places she builds on much of the substance of sifrei mussar (plural, also sometimes called mussar bikher). We know of one woman who did write a book belonging to this genre, Rivke bas Meyer Tiktiner (d. 1605), the first known female author of a Yiddish book. Her Meynekes Rivke is a sefer mussar, directed specifically at women, instructing them in proper conduct, particularly in regard to their relationships with husbands, parents, parents-in-law, children, servants, and guests. ^{31 31} Frauke von Rohden, ed., Meneket Rivkah: A Manual of Wisdom and Piety for Jewish Women (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2008). Women were widely advised to read mussar books; Glikl recommends several to her children. No others, however, are known to have been written by women. Tiktiner also wrote in a second nameable Yiddish genre, a liturgical poem, a Simkhes-toyre lid, or song for Simchat Torah. Another festival song by a woman is known: Taube Pan wrote for Yom Kippur. These Yiddish poems are closely related to the only named genre in which several published compositions by women in early Yiddish are extant, namely that of the tkhines, prayers recited in Yiddish, whose best known female author is Sarah Leah bas Tovim, also known as Leah Horowitz. ^{32 32} Yael Leṿin, ed., Śimḥat Torah lid le-Rivḳah Ṭiḳṭiner (Jerusalem, 2005); Kathryn Hellerstein, A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish, 1586-1987 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014); Kathryn Hellerstein, “The Name in the Poem: Women Yiddish Poets,” Shofar 20, no. 3 (Spring 2002): 32-52; Chava Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs; Moshe Rosman, “Leah Horowitz’s Tkhine Imohos: A Proto-Feminist Demand to Increase Jewish Women’s Religious Capital,” Polin Studies in Polish Jewry 33, no. 1 (2021): 17-50. I have previously suggested that an anonymous Yiddish song about a 1713 plague in Prague might have been written by a woman. ^{33 33} Greenblatt, To Tell Their Children, 183-85; see also Chava Turniansky, “Yiddish Song as Historical Source Material,” in Jewish History: Essays in Honour of Chimen Abramsky, eds. Ada Rapoport-Albert and Steven J. Zipperstein (London: P. Halban, 1988), 189-98. On the plague: Joshua Teplitsky, “Heroes and Victims without Villains: Plague in Early Modern Prague,” Jewish Social Studies 26, no. 1 (2020): 67-76; Joshua Teplitsky, “Order in Crisis: Jewish Relief Workers during the Prague Plague of 1713,” Jewish Quarterly Review 111, no. 3 (2021): 362–73. This too, as a form of elegy, is loosely related to the other printed liturgical works.

It would be a mistake, however, to think that a text had to be printed for Glikl to have been familiar with it. Well into the age of print, many texts continued to circulate in manuscript. ^{34 34} E.g., the classic work of Margaret J. M. Ezell, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999) and for Jewish yeshiva students in early modern Europe: Elchanan Reiner, “A Biography of an Agent of Culture: Eleazar Altschul of Prague and His Literary Activity,” in Schöpferische Momente des europäischen Judentums in der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Michael Graetz (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 2000), 229-47. She wrote business documents and undoubtedly read them herself. Much early modern self-writing grew out of business ledgers, though we lack surviving examples from Jewish business families. She was well aware of ethical wills, as detailed below. Print had, though, played an important role in another sense: the spread of print and the market logic it dictated meant that books—which once belonged wholly to the realm of loshn koydesh—increasingly appeared in the vernacular Yiddish. ^{35 35} Greenblatt, To Tell Their Children, 168-83. It is likely that in the context of this increasing body of published work for women, market forces encouraged them to see themselves as readers, and then also as writers. There were also women involved in print, and women widely known as learned. ^{36 36} Jennifer Breger, “The Role of Jewish Women in Hebrew Printing,” Antiquarian Bookman (March 29, 1993): 1320–1329. An origin tale of Prague’s Jewish community “brought to press” by two women around the turn of the eighteenth century suggested that a woman might have far greater, life-saving practical intelligence than a man. ^{37 37} Greenblatt, To Tell Their Children, 137-39, 168-72. It also seems almost certain that the works known to have survived would be a distinct minority of those written. Women expressed their knowledge, and their tradition-inflected moral outlooks, in gifts of inscribed ceremonial objects, in lives lived and recorded by others, as on gravestones.

We turn, then, to two examples of women’s writings that share important characteristics with Glikl’s. As mentioned above, in the first case, the commonality lies in the realm of form: the ethical will. In the second case, Glikl and a female contemporary shared important content, based on a biblical source. ^{38 38} I would like to write a more complete comparison at another opportunity. See also: Nathanael Riemer, “Some Parallels of Stories in Glikls of Hameln Zikhronynes,” PaRDeS: Zeitschrift der Vereinigung für Jüdische Studien 14 (2008): 125-48. https://publishup.uni-potsdam..... (They share more than that, but a full comparison will wait for another opportunity.) These examples simultaneously provide a glimpse into the ways in which Glikl was within the bounds of the “ordinary” woman of her time and place, and a glimpse into the way in which she was, indeed, extraordinary.

Rivkah Sinzheim and Ethical Wills

One layer of Glikl’s work fits that of an ethical will. Like a mussar bukh, an ethical will—often appearing as a part of the document that spells out disposition of assets—provides moral instruction to one’s children. ^{39 39} The classic collection of Jewish ethical wills, originally published in 1926, is Israel Abrahams, ed. Hebrew Ethical Wills, 2 volumes, expanded and with a new introduction by Lawrence Fine (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2006); and see: Avriel Bar-Levav, “’When I Was Alive’: Jewish Ethical Wills as Egodocuments,” in Egodocuments and History: Autobiographical Writing in Its Social Context Since the Middle Ages, ed. Rudolf Dekker (Hilversum: Verloren Publishers, 2002), 45-59. Glikl’s work supplies that, along with the bequest of a fount of knowledge of family history, implying, along the way, the ethical value of that history as well. ^{40 40} Turniansky views the first of Glikl’s seven books as closely related to the genre of ethical wills, and notes Glikl’s own mention of the famous Horowitz family ethical will, Yesh Nohalin. Turniansky, “Introduction” in Glikl, trans. Friedman, 4-8. Glikl’s work is included in the updated edition of Abrahams, Hebrew Ethical Wills, ed. Israel Abrahams (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2006). On medieval women’s wills: Jewish Women’s Wills: A Collaborative Premodern Collection, https://jewishwomenswills.omek.... Much of her first book, the shortest, reads very much as an ethical will:

I ask this of you, dear children: have patience. God, blessed be He, has inflicted punishment upon you—accept it all with forbearance, and do not cease praying; perhaps He will have mercy. . . . My dear children, be good and honest; serve God our Lord with all your heart in good times as well as in bad, God forbid. . . .So what is there to be sorrowful for? Only for letting a day go by without observing the commandments, and certainly one should be sorrowful for committing transgressions, for we human beings were created for the sole purpose of serving God, observing his commandments, and fulfilling what is written in our holy Torah: “For thereby you shall have life and long endure.” ^{41 41}Glikl, trans. Friedman, 50-51; Glikl, ed. Turniansky, 28, 30.

Crucially, as Glikl knows other businesswomen, she also knows of other women’s wills. She writes of a deceased acquaintance, related to herself through marriage:

It is well known what an important man this Rabbi Modl Dayan was, and his pious wife Pessele—surely there’s been no one like her in the world since the matriarchs Sarah, Rivka, Rachel and Leah. Truly no woman could hold a candle to her when it comes to piety and righteousness, especially as she was a woman of valor and ran the business. … They both passed away in Berlin, prosperous and well respected. It was astonishing to read her will; I will write nothing about it. Anyone wishing to read her will can still find it at her children’s; surely they never threw it away. ^{42 42}Glikl, trans. Friedman, 176-77; Glikl, ed. Turniansky, 313, 315.

Not only does Glikl know other women like herself, she knows other women like herself who have written documents—wills—for their children, wills they expect to be carefully preserved and available to people from outside the immediate family circle as well. In fact, Glikl herself has read this distant relative’s will. We do not know whether Pessele’s will included instructions for disposition of property; however, if it did, it clearly included much more than that. Glikl likewise does not tell her reader whether the contents of the will or its literary style make it worthy of seeking out; one could suppose it might well have displayed both. Nor does she relate with certainty the language of Pessele’s will, though I would take the absence of noting it as an indication it was likely a mostly Yiddish text, with possible smatterings of Hebrew quotations, as is the case with regard to Glikl’s own writing. The little we do know based on this passage, however, provides an overlooked window into one aspect of how Glikl might well have viewed her own manuscript. Though she wrote primarily for her children, whom she expected—and perhaps entreatingly instructed through this passage—to preserve it carefully, Glikl also expected that her seven “little books” could be viewable by a wider audience, by friends and relations who might hear of it by word of mouth. The biting double-sidedness of the last few lines cries out. Is Glikl confident Pessele’s children have kept her will, or fearful lest they have not? Does Glikl here issue a mildly passive-aggressive plea to her own children to preserve carefully these seven books? Whatever the case, this insight into Glikl’s own view of her potential reading audience is significant. Among Christians in early modern Europe as well, familial manuscript writings were sometimes read by others, outside the immediate family circle, who heard of them and requested access. ^{43 43} Davis, “Ghosts, Kin, and Progeny”; Davis, “Fame and Secrecy: Leon Modena’s Life as an Early Modern Autobiography,” History and Theory 27, no. 4 (December 1988): 103.

The passage about Pessele, however, provides no information regarding what specifically her will might actually have contained, nor what literary form it might have taken. Indulging some degree of conjecture, we can gather more information about how a well-to-do Jewish woman’s will could have looked based on a similar document. This is the will of a contemporary of Glikl, Rivkah bas Avraham Halfon, wife of Chaim Sintzheim, of Mannheim, Germany, published in the original Yiddish and in partial French translation in the Revue des études juives in 1931. ^{44 44} Bloch, “Le testament.” I am not aware of scholarship on Rivkah’s ancestry or background prior to her marriage. Rivkah and her family belonged to the rabbinic and economic elite of their time. They were active throughout central Europe including Metz, Worms, and Vienna. Her son Yitzhak—who copied her will from an earlier manuscript and attested to reciting it annually on the date of his mother’s death, as per her instructions within the document—was the father of Joseph David Sinzheim, rabbi of Strasbourg and a key participant in Napoleon’s Assembly of Notables and Grand Sanhedrin. ^{45 45} E.g. Simon Schwarzfuchs, Napoleon, the Jews, and the Sanhedrin (London; Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979); Moshe Catane and Yehoshua Horowitz, “Sinzheim, Joseph David ben Isaac” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, ed. Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik, 2nd ed., vol. 18 (New York: Macmillan Reference, 2007), 641-642. For additional examples of instructions regarding the annual—or even weekly—rereading of the ethical will by descendants, see Abrahams, Hebrew Ethical Wills, and for the weekly practice, page 228. Her daughter Blümle donated a silver-embroidered Torah mantle. ^{46 46} Vivian B. Mann and Richard I. Cohen, eds. From the Court Jews to the Rothschilds: Art, Patronage, and Power 1600-1800 (New York, Munich: Prestel, 1996),234 (cat. no. 247) and 29 (illustration). Available online at the Jewish Museum, https://thejewishmuseum.org/co....

Like Glikl’s work, the surviving text of Rivkah’s will, transcribed by her son, was framed with a decorative title page. ^{47 47} Rebecca Halfon, Testament (Manheim, 1713). From the collections of Alliance Israelite Universelle (Paris), Ms. 423. “Ktiv” Project, The National Library of Israel. https://www.nli.org.il/en/manu....