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Podcast: New Books in Israel Studies
Episode: Rachel Elior, "The Unknown History of Jewish Women Through the Ages: On Learning and Illiteracy, On Slavery and Liberty" (de Gruyter, 2023)
Description: Rachel Elior's book The Unknown History of Jewish Women: On Learning and Illiteracy, On Slavery and Liberty (de Gruyter, 2023) is a comprehensive study on the history of Jewish women, which discusses their absence from the Jewish Hebrew library of the "People of the Book" and interprets their social condition in relation to their imposed ignorance and exclusion from public literacy. The book begins with a chapter on communal education for Jewish boys, which was compulsory and free of charge for the first ten years in all traditional Jewish communities. The discussion continues with the striking absence of any c...