A Price Below Rubies: Jewish Women as Rebels and Radicals [Paperback]

Naomi Shepherd (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 15, 1998

Why, in the late nineteenth century, did Jewish woman suddenly march into the pages of radical history? A Price below Rubies introduces us to some of these memorable women - particularly, Anna Kuliscioff, Rosa Luxemburg, Esther Frumkin, Manya Shochat, Bertha Pappenheim, Rose Pesotta, and Emma Goldman - a few of them familiar, others less so but no less intriguing. Naomi Shepherd's collective biography of these seven women and others tells the story of a revolution that began at home, in communities whose limits stirred women to rebel. Each woman, whether feminist or unionist, Marxist scholar or Jewish Commissar, was a member of a distinct historical group. A Price below Rubies takes us into the middle-class Jewish families in Czarist Russia that produced populists and terrorists, Marxist teachers and theorists - and, in many cases, exiles and martyrs. We come to know the working-class women who swelled the ranks of the Jewish socialist movement, the Bund, and the women revolutionary Zionists who were indispensable members of the Palestinian agricultural collectives. In Western Europe, we meet the semi-assimilated Jews whose daughters would dominate pacifist movements in Hungary and Holland and would create a vigorous Jewish feminism in Germany. Among the masses emigrating from Eastern Europe in the 1880s, we find Jewish women who would become the most active European anarchists and American union organizers. The story of a world in upheaval, taking us from the 1870s through the 1930s, A Price below Rubies shows us Jewish radical women at once remarkable and representative, writing themselves into history - and out of the tradition that produced them.

Editorial Reviews

From Kirkus Reviews

Fastidiously researched explanation for the emergence of Jewish women as radicals. In most Jewish histories, women are a footnote. Shepherd (Teddy Kollek--Mayor of Jerusalem, 1988, etc.) remedies this in her often dramatic depiction of the lives of some prominent Jewish women radicals from 1870 on--Anna Kuliscioff, Rosa Luxemburg, Esther Frumkin, Manya Shochat, Bertha Pappenheim, Rose Pesotta, Emma Goldman, et al. Showing how Judaism was traditionally a complex legal and social system as well as a religion, the author explains that Jewish scholarly tradition excluded women from the lifelong male responsibility of studying the Talmud. Segregated in the synagogue, without ceremonies to celebrate their birth or their lives, women were given the family to govern. (The Talmud describes Jewish women as ``a nation apart, bound to the community by marriage.'') In the 16th century, a book called T'sena Ure'ena (Come Out and See) gave women a way to learn, domesticating the Bible with accessible language. But it took until the late 19th century for life to really change for Jewish women--when ``the [Russian] revolution awakened among Jewish girls from comfortably off families a burning desire for higher education and independence and this shook the very foundations of Jewish life, far more seriously than the educational development of the male intelligentsia.'' The women portrayed here led exceptional lives as political figures in the Russian Revolution; in Zionist history (Shochat helped found the kibbutz movement); in psychoanalysis; in the Bund (the Jewish Socialist movement); and in the American work force. What binds them is an elusive Jewish component in their character and politics, as well as a shared reaction to a traditional community whose limits may have produced their remarkable actions. A dense, credible, scholarly portrait of a missing piece of Jewish history. (Photographs) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 354 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (July 15, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674704118
• ISBN-13: 978-0674704114
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,151,115 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #90 in Books > Religion & Spirituality > Judaism > Women and Judaism

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