Women in transmission

In classical Jewish historiography, long dominated by the study of rabbinic texts, responsa, and communal chronicles, the voice of women often remains absent from the official written sources. The archive speaks of men: of decisors, of copyists, of community leaders. Yet behind this apparent silence unfolds an essential activity of transmission, without which the continuity of the Jewish people would have been unthinkable. Transmission — masorah, from the Hebrew verb limsor, "to hand over, to entrust" — cannot be reduced to the scholarly chain described at the beginning of the tractate Avot of the Mishna, which conveys the Torah from Moses to Joshua, then to the Elders and the Prophets. It is also embodied in the home, in the mother tongue, in the ritual gesture, in the lullaby and the whispered prayer.

This Great Book situates itself deliberately at the intersection of Memory and History, according to the distinction made classic by the historian Pierre Nora. Where the archive falls silent, testimony and transmitted memory reclaim their place. The aim is to restore the role of women as guardians of family memory, as scholars at times, as poetesses and authors of vernacular prayers, and as agents of oral tradition, from biblical antiquity to our own day, across the whole of the land of Israel and the diasporas. This journey draws upon rabbinic sources, documents from the Cairo Genizah, collections of tkhines in Yiddish, personal memoirs, and the contribution of contemporary women's history.

The Hebrew Bible places transmission, from the very beginning, under the sign of a shared transmission. The matriarchs — Sarah, Rebecca, Leah, and Rachel — are not mere companions to the patriarchs: they decisively shape the destiny of the lineage. Rebecca, in the Genesis narrative, deliberately arranges the transmission of the blessing to Jacob rather than to Esau, thus becoming the active agent of genealogical choice [Genesis 27; Encyclopaedia Judaica, art. "Rebekah"].

Other figures embody the transmission of memory and of the law. Miriam, sister of Moses and Aaron, is designated as a prophetess and leads the women in the Song of the Sea after the crossing [Exodus 15:20-21]. Deborah, judge and prophetess, delivers her word beneath a palm tree where the people come to be judged, and her song ranks among the oldest poetic texts of the Bible [Judges 4-5]. Huldah, the prophetess consulted under King Josiah at the discovery of the "book of the Law," plays a decisive role in authenticating a foundational text, and thus in its transmission [II Kings 22; Encyclopaedia Judaica, art. "Huldah"].

The rabbinic tradition itself recognizes a canon of prophetesses. The Babylonian Talmud, in tractate Megillah, enumerates seven women prophetesses: Sarah, Miriam, Deborah, Hannah, Abigail, Huldah, and Esther [Babylonian Talmud, Megillah 14a]. Hannah, mother of Samuel, whose silent prayer at the sanctuary of Shiloh serves as a model for the Jewish Amidah prayer, illustrates how a women's practice could become a normative paradigm for the entire community [I Samuel 1-2; Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 31a].

A singular legal feature grants women a central role in the transmission of Jewish identity: the principle of matrilineality. According to rabbinic halakha, a child born to a Jewish mother is Jewish, regardless of paternal ancestry. This principle is derived by the Mishna and the Talmud from verses concerning mixed unions, notably in the tractate Kiddoushin, which establishes that the status of the child follows that of the mother in cases where the union is not valid between the two parties [Mishna Kiddoushin 3, 12; Babylonian Talmud, Kiddoushin 68b].

Historians debate the antiquity of this principle. Some, like Shaye J. D. Cohen in his work on the origins of matrilineality, argue that the rule only fully takes hold in the Tannaitic period, and not in the Bible, where filiation appears at first to be patrilineal [according to S. J. D. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness]. Whatever this genealogy may be, the result is lasting: the mother becomes, in law, the vector of belonging. This legal centrality is matched by a practical centrality, for it is in the home, a traditionally feminine space, that the rhythms of the calendar, kashrut, and the observance of Shabbat are transmitted.

Although formal study of the Torah was largely reserved for men, certain women crossed this threshold and left their mark on scholarly memory. The most famous remains Beruria, wife of Rabbi Meïr, in the Tannaitic period. The Talmud credits her with a profound knowledge of tradition and several halakhic and exegetical interventions, making her an exceptional figure of female erudition [Babylonian Talmud, Pessahim 62b; Encyclopaedia Judaica, art. "Beruryah"].

In the Middle Ages, the documents of the Cairo Genizah — this repository of manuscripts studied masterfully by S. D. Goitein — reveal literate women, merchants, sometimes copyists or teachers, whose economic and cultural activity is attested by letters and contracts [according to S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society]. Tradition also reports the case of daughters of scholars who transmitted their fathers' learning: it is thus mentioned that Rachi's daughter, in eleventh-century Troyes, was versed in the knowledge of texts, and certain responsa are sometimes associated with her in tradition, though this is not established with full documentary certainty [according to the tradition reported by various historians of medieval Ashkenazi Judaism].

In the Sephardic world, women of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance exercised considerable influence. Doña Gracia Nasi (Beatriz de Luna, sixteenth century), from a family of Portuguese conversos, organized networks of mutual aid to help Marranos escape the Inquisition and was a patron of Jewish letters, having works published and supporting communities [Encyclopaedia Judaica, art. "Nasi, Gracia"]. Her figure embodies transmission through the material and cultural protection of persecuted communities.

One of the domains where women's voices found their most direct expression is that of the tkhines (singular tkhine), supplicatory prayers composed in Yiddish, the vernacular language of Ashkenazi Jews, as opposed to the liturgical Hebrew reserved for synagogue worship. These prayers, which developed particularly from the seventeenth century onward in Central and Eastern Europe, accompanied women through the key moments of existence: the lighting of the Shabbat candles, pregnancy and childbirth, visits to the cemetery, the separation of the hallah [according to Chava Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs].

Some of these prayers were composed by women themselves. The best known is Sarah bas Tovim, a presumed eighteenth-century author to whom collections such as the Shloyshe She'orim (« The Three Gates ») are attributed, works that became extremely popular [according to Ch. Weissler, Voices of the Matriarchs]. Earlier, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Rivka bat Meïr Tiktiner is said to have been one of the first women to publish a work in Yiddish, the Meneket Rivka, a moral treatise addressed in particular to mothers [according to studies in the history of Yiddish literature]. These texts constitute a veritable archive of feminine spirituality, in which the invocation of the matriarchs as intercessors weaves a bond between living women and the founding figures.

Alongside the written word, oral transmission played a major role. Yiddish, the mother tongue (mame-loshn, literally « language of the mother »), carried in its very name this function of transmission by women: lullabies, tales, proverbs, and songs accompanied childhood and fixed a collective memory beyond scholarly channels.

Family memory, passed down from generation to generation, owes much to women. Its most emblematic figure is Glikl of Hameln (circa 1646–1724), a Jewish merchant from northern Germany, whose memoirs written in Yiddish constitute one of the most precious testimonies on the daily, economic, and religious life of Ashkenazi Jews in the modern era [Encyclopaedia Judaica, art. « Glückel of Hameln »]. Written first for her children, with an explicitly educational and memorial intent, these memoirs perfectly illustrate transmission through family narrative: in them, Glikl interweaves her personal history, moral considerations, and tales meant to instruct her descendants [according to the critical editions of Glikl's memoirs].

This memorial function of women takes on particular acuity in periods of catastrophe. After the Shoah, it was frequently female survivors who transmitted, through oral testimony, the memory of the departed and of the engulfed worlds of Eastern Europe. Where the archives were destroyed, memory carried and spoken—gathered notably through vast testimony campaigns—made it possible to reconstruct genealogies, customs, and names. This dimension fully justifies the place of the theme at the intersection of Memory and History, the one supplementing the other when written sources are lacking.

The contemporary era sees women gaining access to roles of transmission that had until then been largely closed to them. In early twentieth-century Germany, Regina Jonas obtained rabbinic ordination in 1935, becoming the first known woman to receive the title of rabbi; she served in ministry, notably among the deportees, before being murdered at Auschwitz in 1944 [Encyclopaedia Judaica, art. « Jonas, Regina »]. Her trajectory, long forgotten and then rediscovered by women historians, has become a symbol.

In the second half of the twentieth century, the ordination of women developed within the liberal and conservative movements of Judaism, particularly in the United States, where Sally Priesand was ordained as a Reform rabbi in 1972 [according to the history of American Reform Judaism]. At the same time, the Orthodox world experienced a considerable expansion of women's study of texts, with the proliferation of institutions of higher learning (midrashot, seminaries) where women study the Talmud and halakha at an advanced level. Scholars such as Nehama Leibowitz, whose Torah study sheets shaped generations of teachers in Israel and the diaspora, profoundly renewed the pedagogy of transmission [according to the works devoted to N. Leibowitz].

This evolution extends—by making it visible and institutional—a function of transmission that women had assumed for centuries within the domestic and vernacular sphere. The passage from silent transmission to recognized transmission constitutes one of the great movements of contemporary Jewish history.

At the close of this journey, from the biblical matriarchs to contemporary women rabbis, a continuity emerges: across the ages, women have been decisive agents of Jewish transmission. This transmission has taken many paths — the law of descent through matrilineality, the erudition of exceptional figures such as Beruria or Doña Gracia, the vernacular prayer of the tkhines, the mother tongue and the family memory embodied by Glikl de Hameln, and finally contemporary access to formal study and ordination. While the official archive has often remained silent about them, transmitted memory, testimony, and vernacular sources allow us to restore their contribution. The history of women in transmission is therefore not a secondary chapter of Jewish history: it constitutes one of its deepest threads, the one that has linked, from home to home and from generation to generation, the founding past to the future.