The literacy and girls' education movement in the Jewish world

The formal education of Jewish girls, long limited compared to that of boys and largely confined to the domestic sphere, underwent a major transformation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the Sephardic and Eastern world, the network of schools of the Alliance israélite universelle, from 1860 onward, educated girls on a massive scale and contributed to a profound change in their social status and access to modern culture. In the Orthodox Ashkenazi world of Eastern Europe, Sarah Schenirer founded in Cracow in 1917 the first network of Beth Yaakov schools, designed to offer young girls a structured religious education in order to protect them from secularization; this movement, supported by rabbinical authorities, spread widely. In parallel, in secularized, Zionist, or Bundist circles, girls gained access to modern schools in Hebrew, Yiddish, or the national languages. These developments transformed the place of women in transmission and communal life, while giving rise to debates about the limits of women's religious study.

Sources & resources

• The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe ↗
• Encyclopaedia Judaica — 2e éd., Keter/Macmillan