Debra Kaplan and Elisheva Carlebach, "A Woman Is Responsible for Everything: Jewish Women in Early Modern Europe" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Jan 29, 2026

Debra Kaplan, a historian of early modern Jewish communities and social welfare, and Elisheva Carlebach, a scholar of Jewish communal life and ritual, explore newly found archival treasures. They trace women's roles in kehillot, print culture and literacy, women-led societies and burial work, mikva'ot and midwifery, marginalized lives, household inventories, and comparisons with Christian counterparts.

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INSIGHT

Early Modern Sources Made Women Visible

The early modern period (c.1500–1800) produced abundant new sources that make Jewish women highly visible to historians.
Institutional growth, print, and rising literacy created records like takanot, printed vernacular books, and manuscripts that document women's lives.

INSIGHT

Print Expanded Women's Literacy And Voice

Print and cheaper paper spread books in vernaculars like Yiddish, increasing women's literacy and access to religious texts.
Women participated in print production and sometimes authored or brought books to press across this period.

INSIGHT

Takanot Reveal Gendered Social Order

Kehillot issued takanot (ordinances) and fines that generated detailed records about daily life and gendered behavior.
These regulations reveal how governance, morality, and social discipline shaped women's experiences.

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In small villages, bustling cities, and crowded ghettos across early modern Europe, Jewish women were increasingly active participants in the daily life of their communities, managing homes and professions, leading institutions and sororities, and crafting objects and texts of exquisite beauty. In their book, A Woman Is Responsible for Everything: Jewish Women in Early Modern Europe (Princeton UP, 2025), Debra Kaplan and Elisheva Carlebach marshal a dazzling array of previously untapped archival sources to tell the stories of these woman for the first time.
Kaplan and Carlebach focus their lens on the kehillah, a lively and thriving form of communal life that sustained European Jews for three centuries. They paint vibrant portraits of Jewish women of all walks of life, from those who wielded their wealth and influence in and out of their communities to the poorest maidservants and vagrants, from single and married women to the widowed and divorced. We follow them into their homes and learn about the possessions they valued and used, the books they read, and the writings they composed. Speaking to us in their own voices, these women reveal tremendous economic initiative in the rural marketplace and the princely court, and they express their profound spirituality in the home as well as the synagogue.
Beautifully illustrated, A Woman Is Responsible for Everything lifts the veil of silence that has obscured the lives of these women for too long, contributing a new chapter to the history of Jewish women and a new understanding of the Jewish past.

Interviewees: Debra Kaplan is the Samuel Braun Chair for the History of the Jews in Germany at Bar-Ilan University. Elisheva Carlebach is Salo Wittmayer Baron Professor of Jewish History, Culture, and Society, at Columbia University.

Host: Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at Hunter College, City University of New York, and the author of Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism (Temple University Press). Visit him online at ZalmanNewfield.com.

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